Some have attempted to compare Bush to Lincoln. True, both were in unpopular wars and both rather folksy. There remains an important difference. Lincoln was not ideologically driven and he was doing what was morally correct for ANY time period: ending a wrong justified by pseudoscientific means. Lincoln saw the problems with calling our nation free while slavery still existed. This was a moral and ethical dilemna. Lincoln dealt with this. While Lincoln is folksy, it is clear that his intelligence and thought capacity is higher than that of Bush. As far as I am concerned there is no comparison and history will see the George W. Bush Presidency as one of the worst administrations in the history of our country.
Important correction: Lincoln's interests were initially to preserve the Union, period. The original draft of the 13th Amendment, or what would have become the 13th Amendment, would have preserved slavery forever. Original text:
No amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give to Congress the power to abolish or interfere, within any State, with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of said State.
During Lincoln's first inaugural address, he expressed his support for the amendment. Southern slave owners objected because they not only wanted to continue to keep slaves, but also to expand the territory in which slavery was legal. Later, near the END of the Civil War / War Between the States, Lincoln had a change of heart and genuinely believed he was fighting a moral war against slavery, but that is NOT the reason the war began.
While slavery was a despicable institution, I believe that Lincoln in fact did a disservice to black Americans by abolishing it by force; Brazil was the last holdout for slavery, and Brazil still abolished slavery before 1900. If the American South had been left alone, slavery would have died out on its own, without the cost of millions of lives (disproportionately Confederate lives). But how was Abolition detrimental to US blacks? Because they bore the brunt of the resentment from Southerners during Reconstruction. If Abolition had resulted more organically, like the Civil Rights movement, I think blacks would have had more respect and less discrimination. The fact that abolition was imposed by a hostile (to the South) government, and that those from the winning side (the Union) profited so handsomely during Reconstruction, diluted any moral argument against slavery.
This is all completely speculative, of course. Would life have been better for blacks if slavery had ended 30 years later, in a different manner? Would the suffering of slaves during that 30 year period be justified by the gains of future generations of black Americans? No one can say for sure. Draw your own conclusions, but don't think Lincoln's motives were pure or that he ever intended to be a "Liberator."
I like the fact the NYT published the redacted article anyway. It clearly shows that what's blacked out was purposefully meant to change the MEANING of sections of text and not to cover up facts. It's a great "slap back" by the NYT to show what "redaction" is and why it's silly!!!
Along those lines, let me point you to one of the books that has most influenced my opinion of US foreign relations, and the CIA in general: The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence by Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks. They were former CIA employees who more or less blew the whistle on some of the despicable practices of the agency, to promote US business interests at the expense of thousands (maybe millions) of lives. The CIA tried to redact much of the book, and there was a court case which decided which pieces of info should be redacted, and which should not. The book has big white spaces where the redacted information was, and boldface text for info that the CIA requested to be redacted, but the courts disagreed. Very interesting.
Which is likely to cause you more trouble? Homeland Security being identify me wirelessly at a distance to they can yell at you "6079 Smith W. Yes, you! Bend lower, please!"
Just a comment--passports don't have addresses. They aren't like driver's licenses; you don't need to notify anyone and get a new passport when you move. This just reinforces your point.
Oh, and as someone who has been very interested in the John Gilmore case, I was pleased to read about someone who managed to fly without ID (though he had to submit to extra security checks), who actually got through security more quickly without his ID. From the article:
Harper told the identification checker he had no ID, and the attendant quickly wrote "No ID" with a red marker on his ticket and shunted him off to an extra screening line -- generously allowing him to bypass the longer queue of card-carrying passengers.
Actually I'm neither - and couldn't read your link. Pesky 404s anyway - but UHF RFID isn't what's being fielded here;-)
Did you try removing the extra slash at the end of the broken link? I don't know you, I don't know your credentials in the field of RFID, but you definitely lose some credibility by claiming you couldn't read the link. I'm sure even the dumbest script kiddie could have figured that out. Maybe the RFIDs in passports don't use UHF, but the AC's point is still valid: RFIDs can be read from several meters away.
Hydrogen is a non-starter, even with this technology. Why? Simple physics: it takes more energy to unbond water than you get back from burning the hydrogen and thusly re-bonding it back into water. Period, end of story. It's a little thing called the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Deal.
Hydrogen is a Really Bad Idea.
Nothing can contain it, storing it (as a supercold liquid) takes enormous amounts of energy, and, at root, it's got negative ER/EI. I don't care if it's in a portable form - IT'S NOT A SUSTAINABLE TECHNOLOGY. PERIOD.
I suggest bicycles.
Refuting your points, one-by-one:
1) Energy doesn't come from out of the ether; even oil comes from sunlight's energy, ultimately. All organic matter is fuel, and it took a lot more energy (from the sun) to produce that fuel than will be obtained from burning it. That would be the case even if extraction and separation were free, which is far from reality. It takes a LOT more energy to vaporize water into steam than is obtained from the mechanical energy in steam. Even a Carnot engine is less than 40% efficient. But guess what? That lack of efficiency doesn't matter when the heat is free, from geothermal to solar sources. Are you going to tell me geothermal is a "non-starter" because of the difference in energy input vs. output? Didn't think so.
2) I think you mean the First Law of Thermodynamics, conservation of energy. The Second Law simply states that the entropy of the universe will continue to increase.
3) Hydrogen need not be stored as cold liquid in a tank. The focus of hydrogen technology right now is matrices that can absorb hydrogen at one pressure / temperature, then release it with a pressure / temperature swing in a controllable fashion. Other ideas involve chemically releasing hydrogen (from ammonia, for example) as needed. No one said gaseous hydrogen was the be-all end-all.
4) Bicycles are great, but we should be riding those regardless of what fuel goes in the gas tank. It's also difficult to, say, move furniture with a bicycle.
Narcotic. Human lethal dose probably 120-250 mg. In addition to its analgesic action, morphine may cause gastric disturbance with nausea, vomiting and constipation. Large amounts may cause central nervous system depression, respiratory or cardiac collapse, coma and death.
Wow, you really didn't do your homework, did you?
Mea culpa re. the lethal dose (those numbers are too low for opiate tolerant people, btw), but morphine sulfate is just the salt form of the alkaloid; it has a different weight, but it's not really a different drug. Just like cocaine is the hydrochloride salt of the free base (the free base being crack). The free bases aren't usually very soluble (which is why crack is smoked instead of snorted). You're right, though, that the weight difference is important, because it would effect the lethal dose.
I do wonder why mice are so much more tolerant of morphine, with a lethal dose around ten times higher than for humans.
I find particularly disturbing that whenever a story like this is posted no one seems to care about the horrible experiments made on animals or ridicule those who do.
I don't think any scientific finding is worth it if we have to pay with such horror and cruelty for it. Can't we advance science another way? Even if we couldn't I'd rather live in an inconvenient world.
Whenever a story like this is posted, there's always someone like you who posts about how horrible medical researchers are and how they should be ridiculed. It's just that the rest of us are smart enough to ignore you or tell you to STFU. The world you want to live in doesn't have a long life expectancy, but I certainly won't mind if you seek out cruelty-free medical treatment.
Cosmetics testing has certainly been gratuitously cruel to animals (I'm thinking of "Night of the Mary Kay Commandos," from Bloom County back in the day) but you obviously have no clue what you're talking about regarding medical research. Sure, all life is precious--to some degree--but the people who ought to be ridiculed are the PETA jackasses who compare cooped chickens with Jews in concentration camps, not the medical researchers who have very strict standards about animal treatment.
Isa highly effective painkiller that works by blocking sodium channels. Not all pain killers work on the principle of endorphin release, and not all pain killers are addictive.
3 grams of morphine is about 100 times the maximum daily dose for a 70kg adult. The article even mentions that it was per kilo of body weight. Now that would be a huge dose. But nevertheless, it will be interesting to see if this actually makes it into anything useful for human use.
Where do you people come up with these bullshit numbers? Here is a table showing that 180 mg is not an uncommon dosage for morphine. Another site says that opioid-tolerant patients often need over 400 mg/day. 100 x 400 mg = 40 g. You're off by more than an order of magnitude.
That said, the dosages do sound quite high. I might have to check out the PNAS article when I get back to work to find out what the researchers really did. I noted in another comment that the LD50 for mice is only 600 mg/kg, meaning 3 g/kg is about 5X the lethal dose.
I understand they might be comparing relative potency, but comparing to THREE GRAMS of morphine is kinda excessive.
300 mg morphine will render just about any human being unconscious and apnoeic pretty quickly.
3000 mg will knock you out cold, stop you breathing, and drop your blood pressure precipitously, more or less instantaneously.
What the article actually said was
1 gram of opiorphin per kilogram of body weight achieved the same painkilling effect as 3 grams of morphine
Given the rats only weigh a few grams themselves, they were not given 3 grams of morphine.
Also, I have to call shenanigans on your claim that 3 grams of morphine will stop one's breathing. Did you just pull that number out of your ass? Here's some real info from the
MSDS for morphine sulfate, which says
For a lightweight human (say, 50 kg) and an LD50 of 300 mg/kg (being conservative) that means it would take 15 g of morphine to stop someone from breathing. That's 5 times more than you claim, meaning that 3 grams is probably closer to a therapeutic dose, not some coma-inducing overdose. However, the MSDS does make it seem that the mice were given what should have been lethal ODs. I can't access the PNAS article right now (abstract here) to verify what the researchers actually did.
In other news, I wonder why I haven't been hearing more about tetrodotoxin (from pufferfish) which is a highly effective pain killer in basically homeopathic doses. Maybe the small dose is the reason we haven't heard anything--hard to make a profit on microgram quantities of an easily obtained natural product.
Please stop assuming every authoritarian monkey butt on presidency is linked to the US. Think whatever you like about the Bush administration, but the US has *no* monopoly on being stupid,.
The poster was just 20 years late. It's reasonable (but not completely certain) to assume that the US government had something to do with the 1964 coup that overthrew socialist (and democratically elected) president João Goulart. But the military dicatorship ended in 1985, so the presidents after that can't be accurately called US puppets. That doesn't mean they weren't corrupt and incompetent, but were corrupt and incompetent for their own benefits (not those of the US).
Maybe it is socialism after all that's bad, because every socialist that ever lived started out with good intentions and ended up abolishing freedoms of "the common man", rather than "the filthy rich" they started out campaigning against.
You're starting to sound like a "noncompromising idealist" yourself, now. I'm not going to sing the praises of socialism, because I'm not a socialist, but have you ever considered that many socialist leaders never even had a chance to take away anyone's freedom? Three examples in Latin America: Guatemala, 1954; Chile, 1972; Nicaragua, 1980s. In all cases, democratically elected socialists were immediately attacked by CIA-led forces. Salvador Allende, in Chile, was murdered by CIA-controlled thugs, and we all know what a "great leader" his replacement, Pinochet, was. Guatemala had continuous civil war after socialist president Arbenz was deposed in much the same way. The Sandinista government had to divert all their energies from social programs and reform to fighting Reagan-funded Contras, who were at least as bad as the Sandinistas.
The US is right now engulfed in a fiasco in Iraq because their puppet dictator, Hussein, got a little out of control. Seems reminiscent of Noriega in Panama, but Panama is tiny. The US lost control of Iran in 1979, and that certainly hasn't gone well. Sure, there are many idiotic despots out there who have nothing to do with the US. But a great number of them have power because of US interference. Yeah, the US has a fabulous history of "democracy building."
From what I can tell zeolite is an approved food additive. But does it become something that's been entirely untested once you grind it up into nano-particles, and then coat it with some other undisclosed substance (presumably another food safe additive)?
"Zeolite" refers to a class of minerals, not a particular mineral. They are aluminosilicate molecular sieves, and they are naturally formed from volcanic ash (a.k.a. "nanorock"). If you've ever taken a chemistry class, you've probably seen these little zeolite beads that are used to keep solvents dry (the pores suck up any free water).
I'm guessing the company is using a special type of zeolite that selectively adsorbs free fatty acids, which are the species in fry oil that go rancid. Nothing too special, but enough to make everyone freak out about "dangerous nanoparticles."
The question is, do ordinary substances behave a lot differently when we grind them up into nano-particles?
No, the question is "Do zeolites have toxic effects when ground up very finely and consumed with french fries?" Based on the fact that they come from volcanic ash, and have no heavy metals or organic molecules in them, I'd venture "no." Keep in mind breathing volcanic ash is not good for your lungs; the dry ash turns into cement when in contact with water. But certain substances do have radically different properties on the nano-scale, such as quantum confinement of electrons. Also, any zeolites consumed would be incidental--if these are anything like any other zeolites I've seen, they'd remain in the fry oil, and no one would ever eat them.
i always use the konami code to find out who had friends when they were a kid. i personally say "up up down down left right left right B A select start" only because everytime i played contra it would be with my friends. i have noticed a few others do the same thing.
Yep. Select Start. Who played "Contra" by themselves? Too easy to die.
I heard a story on NPR perhaps a couple of years ago about a group of people who were creating brand new 78 rpm records of current music. The reason was for preservaton because a 78 RPM records is apparently extrememly easy to play even without much technology.
If you think that is old school, you should hear the They Might Be Giants song "I Can Hear You," recorded on a wax cylinder at Edison Laboratories. It's on their Factory Showroom album, and was recorded without using electricity.
It is legal for registered voters over 16 to vote. The only difference is that voting is voluntary for teenagers under 18 and mandatory for adults up to a certain age when it is voluntary again (I think it is 70 but I am not sure).
Thanks for the info. I was in Rio this summer, and was surprised when security guards helped a friend and me get into a private club (the Jockey Club), by telling them we were guests of one of the members. I'm relieved to hear the Brazilian electoral system does not have similarly lax security.
Even worse than jury duty, however, is the fact that poll duty is for three consecutive years.
You mean two consecutive elections, right? Since we have elections every 2 years... (I'm not contradicting you, just making your information clearer for the ones who doesn't know the Brazilian voting system).
Actually, I'm a bit unclear on the matter. My girlfriend and her brother manned the polling stations last October--perhaps a mayoral election, I'm not sure. But it was definitely last year, not two years ago. Then again, in Brazil the jeitinho dominates--I just found out that my girlfriend's brother managed to cast a vote in the last presidential election even though he was 17, and technically ineligible.
By the way, I'm really envious of the null vote system; Nevada has something similar, a NOTA (None Of The Above) option, but with no teeth, since NOTA cannot "win" an election. I have a feeling voter turnout would be higher in the US if we had the option to throw out all the crooked candidates instead of choosing the lesser evil.
Text from the Nevada law:
Does Nevada have a "None of These Candidates" or "None of the Above" option on the ballot?
Yes, NRS 293.269 requires that ballots for statewide offices, President, and Vice President permit a vote to express a choice of "None of These Candidates." However, only votes cast for named candidates are counted in determining the nomination or election to these offices.
According to the Portuguese
wikipedia page,
which actually cites Brazilian statutes, the null vote is not
the same as the blank ("white") vote. A blank vote doesn't count for anyone in particular.
It's the same as if the person hadn't voted, since all blank votes are tallied for
the winning candidate. The null vote, on the other hand, could actually win the election,
requiring a new election within 20-40 days. One thing I'd like to know is whether the blank votes can put one candidate over the edge, giving him a majority. Lula was less than 2% from getting a clean majority, so if 2% of the population voted blank, would that have avoided the need for a runoff?
Whether a null vote win requires all the previous candidates to drop out of the next race, I don't know. But it is definitely not the same as the blank vote.
By the way, it might be of interest to some/.ers that not only is voting in Brazil mandatory between the ages of 18 and 70 (if I remember correctly), but so is polling-station duty. It's like jury duty. Yesterday my girlfriend was the "president" of her local polling station in Rio. Looks like she'll be back there in a few weeks for the runoff. Even worse than jury duty, however, is the fact that poll duty is for three consecutive years.
Why would you do that when you could have clicked on the Wikipedia link?
The point was that a headline is supposed to be self-explanatory. It's supposed to tell me what the story is about, so I can decide if I want more info. When I have to do background research to figure out what the hell the headline / summary means, it's a bad summary. And just because fiber optic interest groups use the acronym doesn't mean it's commonly known. Even AJAX got an explanation in early/. stories, back before it was ubiquitous. Fiber-to-the-home shouldn't be an exception to that general stylistic rule.
With his executive decrees, disregard for the law and the constitution, secret prisons, use of torture, and his blatant lying to the American public, I think it's fair to say Herr Bush fits the definition of dictator.
Come on! Define FTTH before you use it twice in a writeup. It's bad enough trying to decipher ridiculous acronyms in the comments, but in the stories themselves? Bah.
Although I may have been successful in my deciphering, I believe FTTH is not a common acronym that most people (even on/.) have heard about. And no, I shouldn't have to chase a wikipedia link to figure it out. At least the submitter didn't use the much worse acronym FTTP, fiber to the premises (which I would have thought a misspelling of FTP).
I've never purchased anything from the iTunes store, but I have nearly 13,000 mp3s, which meant I had to wait awhile as iTunes analyzed every single freaking file for "gapless playback information." I suppose it was worth the wait. Oh, and I've used version 7.0 to rip several CDs with no problems, either. Still thrown off by the new location of the "import" button.
Actually, if you're going to be case-sensitive about it, the "k" should be lowercase. "Kilo" is an SI prefix, after all. Uppercase "K" is for Kelvin, not kilo.
The very fact that a human test is necessary indicates the possibility, however slighty, that a dangerous response is possible. From what I can tell from reading online, there was plenty of animal testing done, including exposing other primates to the substance, but it responded uniquely to human biology. (One possibility, apparantly, is that because the production of the drug involved human proteins, the safe dosage was much lower in humans. I have no idea if that actually makes any sense ^_^)
This was a monoclonal antibody--MAb--(meaning every molecule is essentially identical, because each has identical amino acid sequence) that was generated against a HUMAN immune-related protein (a particular region of CD28). It is possible to generate anti-rat antibodies in a mouse, so it doesn't take a huge leap of logic to guess that immune responses will be highly variable from one species to the next, even if they are all primates. Humans can't be infected with SIV (simian version of HIV), so obviously there are some important differences between human and simian biology. Even a priori, I could have told you injecting a humanized monoclonal antibody generated against a human immuno-protein would have a greater response in a human than in a monkey.
Volunteers in Phase I studies are taking risks by enrolling, but the pharma company really screwed this one up. Lupus and cancer are the two big risks for any sort of immuno-modulatory treatment. This is why pharma companies have shied away from genetic therapies, where genes are introduced via virii--the patients tend to die from cancer. Any humanized MAb is going to have risks of autoimmune disease or cancer, but especially one targeted to a cell-surface immune receptor. Campath-1H (generic name Alemtuzumab), for example, can be used to treat MS or a certain leukemia, but can cause Graves disease (autoimmune attack on the thyroid) and depletes T-cells. Raptiva (Efalizumab), a psoriasis MAb treatment, can cause autoimmune or immune-deficiency side-effects. Parexel was lucky that all six patients didn't die of anaphalactic shock within the hour, and they definitely should have injected one patient first, to rule out catastrophic side-effects such as what occurred.
Ah, NZ. I live in the US now but I hope to go to Brazil in three or four years, I want to study abroad for a year there. If I get a new Mac now it'll be about tyme for me to get a new one when I go and I noticed Apple didn't have an online store for Latin America, at least not from it's US website though it did have links for other regions around the world.
I just got back from a 3 week trip to Brazil, my first time in the country. Where do you want to study? I would highly recommend you get any electronic equipment in the US unless you want to pay a ridiculous amount. Being a wary American in a foreign land (Rio), I didn't feel like wearing my "mug-me" iPod earbuds in public, but I certainly saw plenty of Brazilians wearing them.
Slashdot Mirror
You might find this comment (by me) interesting. Just pointing it out because I'm a couple days late to this discussion.
Important correction: Lincoln's interests were initially to preserve the Union, period. The original draft of the 13th Amendment, or what would have become the 13th Amendment, would have preserved slavery forever. Original text:
No amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give to Congress the power to abolish or interfere, within any State, with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of said State.
During Lincoln's first inaugural address, he expressed his support for the amendment. Southern slave owners objected because they not only wanted to continue to keep slaves, but also to expand the territory in which slavery was legal. Later, near the END of the Civil War / War Between the States, Lincoln had a change of heart and genuinely believed he was fighting a moral war against slavery, but that is NOT the reason the war began.
While slavery was a despicable institution, I believe that Lincoln in fact did a disservice to black Americans by abolishing it by force; Brazil was the last holdout for slavery, and Brazil still abolished slavery before 1900. If the American South had been left alone, slavery would have died out on its own, without the cost of millions of lives (disproportionately Confederate lives). But how was Abolition detrimental to US blacks? Because they bore the brunt of the resentment from Southerners during Reconstruction. If Abolition had resulted more organically, like the Civil Rights movement, I think blacks would have had more respect and less discrimination. The fact that abolition was imposed by a hostile (to the South) government, and that those from the winning side (the Union) profited so handsomely during Reconstruction, diluted any moral argument against slavery.
This is all completely speculative, of course. Would life have been better for blacks if slavery had ended 30 years later, in a different manner? Would the suffering of slaves during that 30 year period be justified by the gains of future generations of black Americans? No one can say for sure. Draw your own conclusions, but don't think Lincoln's motives were pure or that he ever intended to be a "Liberator."
Along those lines, let me point you to one of the books that has most influenced my opinion of US foreign relations, and the CIA in general: The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence by Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks. They were former CIA employees who more or less blew the whistle on some of the despicable practices of the agency, to promote US business interests at the expense of thousands (maybe millions) of lives. The CIA tried to redact much of the book, and there was a court case which decided which pieces of info should be redacted, and which should not. The book has big white spaces where the redacted information was, and boldface text for info that the CIA requested to be redacted, but the courts disagreed. Very interesting.
Just a comment--passports don't have addresses. They aren't like driver's licenses; you don't need to notify anyone and get a new passport when you move. This just reinforces your point.
Oh, and as someone who has been very interested in the John Gilmore case, I was pleased to read about someone who managed to fly without ID (though he had to submit to extra security checks), who actually got through security more quickly without his ID. From the article:
Did you try removing the extra slash at the end of the broken link? I don't know you, I don't know your credentials in the field of RFID, but you definitely lose some credibility by claiming you couldn't read the link. I'm sure even the dumbest script kiddie could have figured that out. Maybe the RFIDs in passports don't use UHF, but the AC's point is still valid: RFIDs can be read from several meters away.
1) Energy doesn't come from out of the ether; even oil comes from sunlight's energy, ultimately. All organic matter is fuel, and it took a lot more energy (from the sun) to produce that fuel than will be obtained from burning it. That would be the case even if extraction and separation were free, which is far from reality. It takes a LOT more energy to vaporize water into steam than is obtained from the mechanical energy in steam. Even a Carnot engine is less than 40% efficient. But guess what? That lack of efficiency doesn't matter when the heat is free, from geothermal to solar sources. Are you going to tell me geothermal is a "non-starter" because of the difference in energy input vs. output? Didn't think so.
2) I think you mean the First Law of Thermodynamics, conservation of energy. The Second Law simply states that the entropy of the universe will continue to increase.
3) Hydrogen need not be stored as cold liquid in a tank. The focus of hydrogen technology right now is matrices that can absorb hydrogen at one pressure / temperature, then release it with a pressure / temperature swing in a controllable fashion. Other ideas involve chemically releasing hydrogen (from ammonia, for example) as needed. No one said gaseous hydrogen was the be-all end-all.
4) Bicycles are great, but we should be riding those regardless of what fuel goes in the gas tank. It's also difficult to, say, move furniture with a bicycle.
Wow, you really didn't do your homework, did you?
Mea culpa re. the lethal dose (those numbers are too low for opiate tolerant people, btw), but morphine sulfate is just the salt form of the alkaloid; it has a different weight, but it's not really a different drug. Just like cocaine is the hydrochloride salt of the free base (the free base being crack). The free bases aren't usually very soluble (which is why crack is smoked instead of snorted). You're right, though, that the weight difference is important, because it would effect the lethal dose.
I do wonder why mice are so much more tolerant of morphine, with a lethal dose around ten times higher than for humans.
I don't think any scientific finding is worth it if we have to pay with such horror and cruelty for it. Can't we advance science another way? Even if we couldn't I'd rather live in an inconvenient world.
Whenever a story like this is posted, there's always someone like you who posts about how horrible medical researchers are and how they should be ridiculed. It's just that the rest of us are smart enough to ignore you or tell you to STFU. The world you want to live in doesn't have a long life expectancy, but I certainly won't mind if you seek out cruelty-free medical treatment.
Cosmetics testing has certainly been gratuitously cruel to animals (I'm thinking of "Night of the Mary Kay Commandos," from Bloom County back in the day) but you obviously have no clue what you're talking about regarding medical research. Sure, all life is precious--to some degree--but the people who ought to be ridiculed are the PETA jackasses who compare cooped chickens with Jews in concentration camps, not the medical researchers who have very strict standards about animal treatment.
Is a highly effective painkiller that works by blocking sodium channels. Not all pain killers work on the principle of endorphin release, and not all pain killers are addictive.
That said, the dosages do sound quite high. I might have to check out the PNAS article when I get back to work to find out what the researchers really did. I noted in another comment that the LD50 for mice is only 600 mg/kg, meaning 3 g/kg is about 5X the lethal dose.
300 mg morphine will render just about any human being unconscious and apnoeic pretty quickly.
3000 mg will knock you out cold, stop you breathing, and drop your blood pressure precipitously, more or less instantaneously.
What the article actually said was
Given the rats only weigh a few grams themselves, they were not given 3 grams of morphine.Also, I have to call shenanigans on your claim that 3 grams of morphine will stop one's breathing. Did you just pull that number out of your ass? Here's some real info from the MSDS for morphine sulfate, which says
For a lightweight human (say, 50 kg) and an LD50 of 300 mg/kg (being conservative) that means it would take 15 g of morphine to stop someone from breathing. That's 5 times more than you claim, meaning that 3 grams is probably closer to a therapeutic dose, not some coma-inducing overdose. However, the MSDS does make it seem that the mice were given what should have been lethal ODs. I can't access the PNAS article right now (abstract here) to verify what the researchers actually did.In other news, I wonder why I haven't been hearing more about tetrodotoxin (from pufferfish) which is a highly effective pain killer in basically homeopathic doses. Maybe the small dose is the reason we haven't heard anything--hard to make a profit on microgram quantities of an easily obtained natural product.
The poster was just 20 years late. It's reasonable (but not completely certain) to assume that the US government had something to do with the 1964 coup that overthrew socialist (and democratically elected) president João Goulart. But the military dicatorship ended in 1985, so the presidents after that can't be accurately called US puppets. That doesn't mean they weren't corrupt and incompetent, but were corrupt and incompetent for their own benefits (not those of the US).
Maybe it is socialism after all that's bad, because every socialist that ever lived started out with good intentions and ended up abolishing freedoms of "the common man", rather than "the filthy rich" they started out campaigning against.
You're starting to sound like a "noncompromising idealist" yourself, now. I'm not going to sing the praises of socialism, because I'm not a socialist, but have you ever considered that many socialist leaders never even had a chance to take away anyone's freedom? Three examples in Latin America: Guatemala, 1954; Chile, 1972; Nicaragua, 1980s. In all cases, democratically elected socialists were immediately attacked by CIA-led forces. Salvador Allende, in Chile, was murdered by CIA-controlled thugs, and we all know what a "great leader" his replacement, Pinochet, was. Guatemala had continuous civil war after socialist president Arbenz was deposed in much the same way. The Sandinista government had to divert all their energies from social programs and reform to fighting Reagan-funded Contras, who were at least as bad as the Sandinistas.
The US is right now engulfed in a fiasco in Iraq because their puppet dictator, Hussein, got a little out of control. Seems reminiscent of Noriega in Panama, but Panama is tiny. The US lost control of Iran in 1979, and that certainly hasn't gone well. Sure, there are many idiotic despots out there who have nothing to do with the US. But a great number of them have power because of US interference. Yeah, the US has a fabulous history of "democracy building."
"Zeolite" refers to a class of minerals, not a particular mineral. They are aluminosilicate molecular sieves, and they are naturally formed from volcanic ash (a.k.a. "nanorock"). If you've ever taken a chemistry class, you've probably seen these little zeolite beads that are used to keep solvents dry (the pores suck up any free water).
I'm guessing the company is using a special type of zeolite that selectively adsorbs free fatty acids, which are the species in fry oil that go rancid. Nothing too special, but enough to make everyone freak out about "dangerous nanoparticles."
The question is, do ordinary substances behave a lot differently when we grind them up into nano-particles?
No, the question is "Do zeolites have toxic effects when ground up very finely and consumed with french fries?" Based on the fact that they come from volcanic ash, and have no heavy metals or organic molecules in them, I'd venture "no." Keep in mind breathing volcanic ash is not good for your lungs; the dry ash turns into cement when in contact with water. But certain substances do have radically different properties on the nano-scale, such as quantum confinement of electrons. Also, any zeolites consumed would be incidental--if these are anything like any other zeolites I've seen, they'd remain in the fry oil, and no one would ever eat them.
Yep. Select Start. Who played "Contra" by themselves? Too easy to die.
If you think that is old school, you should hear the They Might Be Giants song "I Can Hear You," recorded on a wax cylinder at Edison Laboratories. It's on their Factory Showroom album, and was recorded without using electricity.
Thanks for the info. I was in Rio this summer, and was surprised when security guards helped a friend and me get into a private club (the Jockey Club), by telling them we were guests of one of the members. I'm relieved to hear the Brazilian electoral system does not have similarly lax security.
By the way, I'm really envious of the null vote system; Nevada has something similar, a NOTA (None Of The Above) option, but with no teeth, since NOTA cannot "win" an election. I have a feeling voter turnout would be higher in the US if we had the option to throw out all the crooked candidates instead of choosing the lesser evil.
Text from the Nevada law:
Does Nevada have a "None of These Candidates" or "None of the Above" option on the ballot?
Yes, NRS 293.269 requires that ballots for statewide offices, President, and Vice President permit a vote to express a choice of "None of These Candidates." However, only votes cast for named candidates are counted in determining the nomination or election to these offices.
Whether a null vote win requires all the previous candidates to drop out of the next race, I don't know. But it is definitely not the same as the blank vote.
By the way, it might be of interest to some /.ers that not only is voting in Brazil mandatory between the ages of 18 and 70 (if I remember correctly), but so is polling-station duty. It's like jury duty. Yesterday my girlfriend was the "president" of her local polling station in Rio. Looks like she'll be back there in a few weeks for the runoff. Even worse than jury duty, however, is the fact that poll duty is for three consecutive years.
Why would you do that when you could have clicked on the Wikipedia link? The point was that a headline is supposed to be self-explanatory. It's supposed to tell me what the story is about, so I can decide if I want more info. When I have to do background research to figure out what the hell the headline / summary means, it's a bad summary. And just because fiber optic interest groups use the acronym doesn't mean it's commonly known. Even AJAX got an explanation in early /. stories, back before it was ubiquitous. Fiber-to-the-home shouldn't be an exception to that general stylistic rule.
That happened about six years ago.
With his executive decrees, disregard for the law and the constitution, secret prisons, use of torture, and his blatant lying to the American public, I think it's fair to say Herr Bush fits the definition of dictator.
Although I may have been successful in my deciphering, I believe FTTH is not a common acronym that most people (even on /.) have heard about. And no, I shouldn't have to chase a wikipedia link to figure it out. At least the submitter didn't use the much worse acronym FTTP, fiber to the premises (which I would have thought a misspelling of FTP).
I've never purchased anything from the iTunes store, but I have nearly 13,000 mp3s, which meant I had to wait awhile as iTunes analyzed every single freaking file for "gapless playback information." I suppose it was worth the wait. Oh, and I've used version 7.0 to rip several CDs with no problems, either. Still thrown off by the new location of the "import" button.
Actually, if you're going to be case-sensitive about it, the "k" should be lowercase. "Kilo" is an SI prefix, after all. Uppercase "K" is for Kelvin, not kilo.
Volunteers in Phase I studies are taking risks by enrolling, but the pharma company really screwed this one up. Lupus and cancer are the two big risks for any sort of immuno-modulatory treatment. This is why pharma companies have shied away from genetic therapies, where genes are introduced via virii--the patients tend to die from cancer. Any humanized MAb is going to have risks of autoimmune disease or cancer, but especially one targeted to a cell-surface immune receptor. Campath-1H (generic name Alemtuzumab), for example, can be used to treat MS or a certain leukemia, but can cause Graves disease (autoimmune attack on the thyroid) and depletes T-cells. Raptiva (Efalizumab), a psoriasis MAb treatment, can cause autoimmune or immune-deficiency side-effects. Parexel was lucky that all six patients didn't die of anaphalactic shock within the hour, and they definitely should have injected one patient first, to rule out catastrophic side-effects such as what occurred.