I studied this exact kind of stuff (well, very obsolete versions of it) in grad school, early 1990's. A class presentation that I gave once made the point that the three main surgical instruments used in joint-replacement surgeries were:
A saw. A drill. A hammer.
And these surgeries are violent.
This injectable bone idea, while not brand new, is very interesting, and I have to appreciate that a non-exothermic hardening process is a significant part of that. Some polymers used as fixatives in implants, like (very possibly obsolete) poly-methyl methacrylate, are *very* exothermic as they set, and extreme care has to be taken to use only the minimal required amount; picture a thicker-than-necessary glob of the stuff sitting in an unevenly-drilled femur as the shaft of a hip replacement is put into place, and that glob heating up as it sets, weakening or destroying the bone, and at least (I'd imagine) causing incomprehensible pain.
So, this non-exothermic stuff is way cool.
The biodegradable aspect (calling to mind poly-lactic acid artery/vein grafts, which degrade into plain ol' lactic acid, which the body knows how to deal with) is a serious bonus.
I've read some interesting arguments lately that challenge the definition of "supernatural," at least as used in talking about other phenomena that science doesn't have its hands around. These arguments go something like, if something exists, it is natural, even if it is not yet understandable in terms of our scientific principles/knowledge as they are now. I suppose this could apply to deities, or at least think it's more likely that, if any such thing does exist, we've just been holding some very incorrect (this is a vast, vast understatement, in my personal estimation) ideas of what they are like.
I do think that it's going a little far to say science (or some human endeavor) can't even in principle prove the existence of such; I think science (or some other human endeavor, however you'd choose to name it) could very well *demonstrate* the existence of a god, simply by finding a way to talk reliably, reproducibly, directly to said god, and gaining some useful knowledge directly from the source. Ain't happened yet, but that's not to say it's necessarily impossible in principle. It certainly might involve having to revise our understanding of how reality works, to figure out where our definition of "natural" isn't complete.
Not that I think it's bloody likely, and I do agree that science has more strictly useful things to work on, but I do think it's worth some small set of scientists and philosophers to keep mulling, even if mostly for recreation.
My first thought was that this hypothesis doesn't "provide[s] a natural explanation for the anthropic principle," so much as provide a natural explanation obviating the anthropic principle (part of that being, don't make teleological assumptions where not needed).
On the other hand, being a cynic, I have occasionally subscribed to the misanthropic principle - that the universe was made the way it is just to make us miserable.
I'm really split on this idea. As I've blathered on about elsehwere in this thread, RW discs use a metal alloy layer that undergoes a reversible crystalline/amorphous phase change when written. Comparing that to an organic dye layer that's irreversibly burned when written - I just don't have enough of a sense of the material properties involved to intuit an educated guess about which is more stable (and I'm an MSME with grad-level materials science cred, though 15 years obsolete by now). Most annoyingly, I've never seen a real good quantitative study that compared these factors.
Actually, just the disc itself is pretty close to black - I'm pretty sure the actual writeable dye layer is the same as any other CD-R, probably a phthalocyanine, just not really visible to the human eye behind the dark plastic. As far as I know, those black discs were almost exclusively for use in tricking some game systems into letting you use an "archival copy" with the black bottom plastic layer serving as a security/DRM check kind of thing: if you had sneakily made a copy of an original game disc on a regular blue/green/whatever disc (really, just a clear disc with the blue/green reflective layer behind the dye), the game machine would say, "Not so fast, bub," and not play it.
Not being a gamer, I've only ever received a couple black discs burned as audio CDs; the black-looking plastic layer is still transparent in the spectrum used by a read laser, so they work just fine in audio players, as long as all other formatting and everything is correct.
You're getting a couple different processes confused - writable-once and re-writable media are two very different things.
ReWritable discs ONLY (CD-RW, DVD+/-RW), use a layer of a metal alloy that undergoes a reversible phase change (crystalline/amorphous) when written (heated and cooled by different amounts at different rates). This phase change produces a very small change in reflectivity, to allow reading.
Recordable (CD-R, DVD-R, DVD+R) media have an organic dye layer that is burned irreversibly. The change in reflectivity produced when lasering that dye layer against a reflective layer is a greater change than with phase-change alloys.
Both Recordable and ReWritable CD media are also hampered by a very thin top protective layer. Microwave a coastered CD-R for a few seconds till it flashes and flakes, and see just how thin and fragile this layer is.
DVD-R/RW media is much more robust - the recordable layer is sandwiched in between two plastic layers, so I'd expect the lifespan of recorded DVDs - even based on the exact same dye - to be considerably longer than recorded CDs.
The question of whether Recordable or ReWritable media has a longer life span is one I haven't seen explored very well at all (though, and I think this was your main point), glass-mastered/stamped CD- and DVD-ROM media certainly do last longer than either.
One odd but explicable trend in Recordable media aging is that the shelf-life of a dics once written is longer than that of a blank disc. Don't get too enthused about stocking up on cheap CD-Rs or DVD-/+Rs at a sale - if you leave them sitting on a shelf too long before burning them, they will go unreliable.
My own experience as a high-rate hobbyist tells me a lot of the same things - I order TY media (white-coated, printable DVD-Rs) only, and actually have a Plextor 716SA and a later model (800, maybe).
I noticed, though, a few days ago while spec'ing out some new parts for a new machine, that I can hardly find Plextor drives anywhere any more, and their own website doesn't seem to have anything newer than their first BD drive. On top of that, the few vendros I found that had *any* Plextor drives in stock, only had one or two models. Has something happened to Plextor? I got a little annoyed when that 800 (or whatever) model DVD burner shipped with frickin' Roxio software instead of PlexTools, then found out they'd sorta released PlexTools into the wild for free,... have they started outsourcing their hardware? Stoppped manufacturing drives altogether? Or am I just looking in all the wrong places?
Re:blah the emporer has his new clothes on again.
on
The Walking House
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Another pretty-close-to-ditto. I've had Seagates die, WDs die, and I've had (more) Maxtors die, BUT, it's mostly because I mistreat the drives badly, running them bare, sitting upended on my desktop, outside the computer they're connected into, sometimes with and sometimes without additional cooling. They get hot, they get ESD, they get dusty,... and they occasionally die. The big difference (since I have all data backed up on DVD-R anyway) is that the Seagates are still under warranty and I get the hardware replaced for the cost of shipping. The Maxtors are just paperweights.
(At work, I have some responsibility over ~300 workstations, and "dead Maxtor drive" has become a running joke. We can't wait till we've replaced all of them with Seagates or Samsungs.)
Incidentally, having just acquired my first-ever Samsung AND Hitachi drives (other than the original Hitachis in ThinkPad laptops,...), and having just started restoring data from numerous smaller drives that have been sitting offline, powered down, in a cabinet for up to three years or so, I'm finding very weird *read* problems from one particular Maxtor drive, i.e., I copy a bunch of files off it onto the new drive, a Hitachi 1TB, verify the data set, find about 1% corrupt files that don't match their MD5, recopy the same files from the Maxtor again, and *most* of the recopied files are fine. What the hell? File copying from other source drives worked A-100%-OK-spiffy, just that one bad source.
I hear, though, that even when it's filled to full 1.5TB capacity, it contains only 250GB of actual information, what with all the repeating itself and random $maverick insertions, you betcha.
This isn't surprising at all - especially as relates to the surprisingly slow sales of the hybrids. I've said all along that if any car company made a hybrid that LOOKED like, say, a BMW Z3, or even a Miata - something *sporty* rather than dweeby or bland (and not even "angry") - a lot of people who wouldn't otherwise give them a second glance would all the sudden take interest.
Bingo - see also, the entire basis for "the bible code." Now, if you determine what the codec is in advance, and predict where the copyright notice would be found based on some other liturgical reason, and then find it exactly where you predicted, THEN I'd be a bit more impressed.
> You mean like classifying everyone into 2 main political groups?;)
Pretty much. Reality is a continuum, and there are living examples at every point along the continuum. Politics forces those points to be aggregated into a small number of ill-fitting clumps. Those of us cats out nearer one end of the continuum don't like to feel we're being herded and tend to stick together less than those nearer the other end, but unfortunately, that weakens the clout the organizations nearer our end of the continuum.
People on the left are more likely to take the pragmatic stance of *shrug* 'well, to each their own, as long as it's not hurting anyone.'
The more consider recent studies showing the single most significant difference between 'conservative' and 'liberal' mindsets being, specifically, *tolerance for ambiguity,* [coupled with 'tendency to assimilate new data' as contrasted to a tendency to make the same snap answers based on old data]) the more I see this mechanism at work all over the place. Those with the conservative mindsets are more likely to over-simplify and force every question into a very rudimentary, black-and-white dichotomy (often false or very contrived or, to someone looking in from the outside, patently ridiculous), and those with liberal mindsets, well, just don't to that nearly as often or to as great a degree.
And exactly why the Mark Twain award is so fitting for George - Twain has long been for me the model for precise usage of language - and Carlin was a modern example.
I'm sad to see him gnoe - one less funny (and wise) fucker in the world.
I do, among other things, support for a large (three digits) number of XP Pro workstations. With every patch that's come out lately (since about last October or so), I have to keep an eye out for some obscure security setting tightening down and hosing some obscure routine in some crappy vendor application.
Most useful/effective fix: Select C:\Windows and/or C:\Program Files\[Crappy vendor app program directory], get Properties | Security, create a new "Everyone" entry, and grant Everyone "Full Control" privileges.
*sigh*
Yes, stoopid, epically so, but sometimes that's the only sure-fire way to get that crappy vendor app to work again.
Agreed! Mod parent up!
I've gone out of my way to use knife switches in my (rather) few (extremely) little electronics-hobbyist projects. Nothin' like 'em for both that Frankenstein's laboratory vibe AND for actually being able to see the air gap in the circuit and the occasional little spark when something really wants to come alive.
Slashdot Mirror
You're probably not far off.
I studied this exact kind of stuff (well, very obsolete versions of it) in grad school, early 1990's. A class presentation that I gave once made the point that the three main surgical instruments used in joint-replacement surgeries were:
A saw.
A drill.
A hammer.
And these surgeries are violent.
This injectable bone idea, while not brand new, is very interesting, and I have to appreciate that a non-exothermic hardening process is a significant part of that. Some polymers used as fixatives in implants, like (very possibly obsolete) poly-methyl methacrylate, are *very* exothermic as they set, and extreme care has to be taken to use only the minimal required amount; picture a thicker-than-necessary glob of the stuff sitting in an unevenly-drilled femur as the shaft of a hip replacement is put into place, and that glob heating up as it sets, weakening or destroying the bone, and at least (I'd imagine) causing incomprehensible pain.
So, this non-exothermic stuff is way cool.
The biodegradable aspect (calling to mind poly-lactic acid artery/vein grafts, which degrade into plain ol' lactic acid, which the body knows how to deal with) is a serious bonus.
I've read some interesting arguments lately that challenge the definition of "supernatural," at least as used in talking about other phenomena that science doesn't have its hands around. These arguments go something like, if something exists, it is natural, even if it is not yet understandable in terms of our scientific principles/knowledge as they are now. I suppose this could apply to deities, or at least think it's more likely that, if any such thing does exist, we've just been holding some very incorrect (this is a vast, vast understatement, in my personal estimation) ideas of what they are like.
I do think that it's going a little far to say science (or some human endeavor) can't even in principle prove the existence of such; I think science (or some other human endeavor, however you'd choose to name it) could very well *demonstrate* the existence of a god, simply by finding a way to talk reliably, reproducibly, directly to said god, and gaining some useful knowledge directly from the source. Ain't happened yet, but that's not to say it's necessarily impossible in principle. It certainly might involve having to revise our understanding of how reality works, to figure out where our definition of "natural" isn't complete.
Not that I think it's bloody likely, and I do agree that science has more strictly useful things to work on, but I do think it's worth some small set of scientists and philosophers to keep mulling, even if mostly for recreation.
Exactly.
My first thought was that this hypothesis doesn't "provide[s] a natural explanation for the anthropic principle," so much as provide a natural explanation obviating the anthropic principle (part of that being, don't make teleological assumptions where not needed).
On the other hand, being a cynic, I have occasionally subscribed to the misanthropic principle - that the universe was made the way it is just to make us miserable.
I'm really split on this idea. As I've blathered on about elsehwere in this thread, RW discs use a metal alloy layer that undergoes a reversible crystalline/amorphous phase change when written. Comparing that to an organic dye layer that's irreversibly burned when written - I just don't have enough of a sense of the material properties involved to intuit an educated guess about which is more stable (and I'm an MSME with grad-level materials science cred, though 15 years obsolete by now). Most annoyingly, I've never seen a real good quantitative study that compared these factors.
Actually, just the disc itself is pretty close to black - I'm pretty sure the actual writeable dye layer is the same as any other CD-R, probably a phthalocyanine, just not really visible to the human eye behind the dark plastic. As far as I know, those black discs were almost exclusively for use in tricking some game systems into letting you use an "archival copy" with the black bottom plastic layer serving as a security/DRM check kind of thing: if you had sneakily made a copy of an original game disc on a regular blue/green/whatever disc (really, just a clear disc with the blue/green reflective layer behind the dye), the game machine would say, "Not so fast, bub," and not play it.
Not being a gamer, I've only ever received a couple black discs burned as audio CDs; the black-looking plastic layer is still transparent in the spectrum used by a read laser, so they work just fine in audio players, as long as all other formatting and everything is correct.
You're getting a couple different processes confused - writable-once and re-writable media are two very different things.
ReWritable discs ONLY (CD-RW, DVD+/-RW), use a layer of a metal alloy that undergoes a reversible phase change (crystalline/amorphous) when written (heated and cooled by different amounts at different rates). This phase change produces a very small change in reflectivity, to allow reading.
Recordable (CD-R, DVD-R, DVD+R) media have an organic dye layer that is burned irreversibly. The change in reflectivity produced when lasering that dye layer against a reflective layer is a greater change than with phase-change alloys.
Both Recordable and ReWritable CD media are also hampered by a very thin top protective layer. Microwave a coastered CD-R for a few seconds till it flashes and flakes, and see just how thin and fragile this layer is.
DVD-R/RW media is much more robust - the recordable layer is sandwiched in between two plastic layers, so I'd expect the lifespan of recorded DVDs - even based on the exact same dye - to be considerably longer than recorded CDs.
The question of whether Recordable or ReWritable media has a longer life span is one I haven't seen explored very well at all (though, and I think this was your main point), glass-mastered/stamped CD- and DVD-ROM media certainly do last longer than either.
One odd but explicable trend in Recordable media aging is that the shelf-life of a dics once written is longer than that of a blank disc. Don't get too enthused about stocking up on cheap CD-Rs or DVD-/+Rs at a sale - if you leave them sitting on a shelf too long before burning them, they will go unreliable.
My own experience as a high-rate hobbyist tells me a lot of the same things - I order TY media (white-coated, printable DVD-Rs) only, and actually have a Plextor 716SA and a later model (800, maybe). I noticed, though, a few days ago while spec'ing out some new parts for a new machine, that I can hardly find Plextor drives anywhere any more, and their own website doesn't seem to have anything newer than their first BD drive. On top of that, the few vendros I found that had *any* Plextor drives in stock, only had one or two models. Has something happened to Plextor? I got a little annoyed when that 800 (or whatever) model DVD burner shipped with frickin' Roxio software instead of PlexTools, then found out they'd sorta released PlexTools into the wild for free,... have they started outsourcing their hardware? Stoppped manufacturing drives altogether? Or am I just looking in all the wrong places?
There goes the neighborhood.
Another pretty-close-to-ditto. I've had Seagates die, WDs die, and I've had (more) Maxtors die, BUT, it's mostly because I mistreat the drives badly, running them bare, sitting upended on my desktop, outside the computer they're connected into, sometimes with and sometimes without additional cooling. They get hot, they get ESD, they get dusty,... and they occasionally die. The big difference (since I have all data backed up on DVD-R anyway) is that the Seagates are still under warranty and I get the hardware replaced for the cost of shipping. The Maxtors are just paperweights.
(At work, I have some responsibility over ~300 workstations, and "dead Maxtor drive" has become a running joke. We can't wait till we've replaced all of them with Seagates or Samsungs.)
Incidentally, having just acquired my first-ever Samsung AND Hitachi drives (other than the original Hitachis in ThinkPad laptops,...), and having just started restoring data from numerous smaller drives that have been sitting offline, powered down, in a cabinet for up to three years or so, I'm finding very weird *read* problems from one particular Maxtor drive, i.e., I copy a bunch of files off it onto the new drive, a Hitachi 1TB, verify the data set, find about 1% corrupt files that don't match their MD5, recopy the same files from the Maxtor again, and *most* of the recopied files are fine. What the hell? File copying from other source drives worked A-100%-OK-spiffy, just that one bad source.
... I was waiting for that.
I hear, though, that even when it's filled to full 1.5TB capacity, it contains only 250GB of actual information, what with all the repeating itself and random $maverick insertions, you betcha.
This isn't surprising at all - especially as relates to the surprisingly slow sales of the hybrids. I've said all along that if any car company made a hybrid that LOOKED like, say, a BMW Z3, or even a Miata - something *sporty* rather than dweeby or bland (and not even "angry") - a lot of people who wouldn't otherwise give them a second glance would all the sudden take interest.
Half-asteroid?
.... anyone yet in this thread make the obligatory comment,.....
"Imagine a Beowulf cluster of Eva Longorias!!!!1!!!eleventy!!!"
There. I feel a little stupider now, but it had to be done.
Bingo - see also, the entire basis for "the bible code." Now, if you determine what the codec is in advance, and predict where the copyright notice would be found based on some other liturgical reason, and then find it exactly where you predicted, THEN I'd be a bit more impressed.
My favorite of that ilk:
A priest, a clown and a six-foot tall talking rabbit walk into a bar. The bartender goes, "What is this, some kind of a joke?"
> You mean like classifying everyone into 2 main political groups? ;)
Pretty much. Reality is a continuum, and there are living examples at every point along the continuum. Politics forces those points to be aggregated into a small number of ill-fitting clumps. Those of us cats out nearer one end of the continuum don't like to feel we're being herded and tend to stick together less than those nearer the other end, but unfortunately, that weakens the clout the organizations nearer our end of the continuum.
People on the left are more likely to take the pragmatic stance of *shrug* 'well, to each their own, as long as it's not hurting anyone.' The more consider recent studies showing the single most significant difference between 'conservative' and 'liberal' mindsets being, specifically, *tolerance for ambiguity,* [coupled with 'tendency to assimilate new data' as contrasted to a tendency to make the same snap answers based on old data]) the more I see this mechanism at work all over the place. Those with the conservative mindsets are more likely to over-simplify and force every question into a very rudimentary, black-and-white dichotomy (often false or very contrived or, to someone looking in from the outside, patently ridiculous), and those with liberal mindsets, well, just don't to that nearly as often or to as great a degree.
And exactly why the Mark Twain award is so fitting for George - Twain has long been for me the model for precise usage of language - and Carlin was a modern example.
I'm sad to see him gnoe - one less funny (and wise) fucker in the world.
Does that include the parking lot space?
I hear Toyota and Chevrolet are working on a joint venture to exploit this - the Toyolet.
It has a few new features:
* Dual-position memory seat - down for women drivers, up for the guys.
* Along with the dome light, a little fan.
* The sun-roof glass is that wavy or clouded kind you can't really see anything through.
* To improve the mileage, just put a brick in the tank.
I'm from semi-rural Indiana, and would love to see a scan of this, as well.
I do, among other things, support for a large (three digits) number of XP Pro workstations. With every patch that's come out lately (since about last October or so), I have to keep an eye out for some obscure security setting tightening down and hosing some obscure routine in some crappy vendor application.
Most useful/effective fix: Select C:\Windows and/or C:\Program Files\[Crappy vendor app program directory], get Properties | Security, create a new "Everyone" entry, and grant Everyone "Full Control" privileges.
*sigh*
Yes, stoopid, epically so, but sometimes that's the only sure-fire way to get that crappy vendor app to work again.
I was thinking,.... hmmm, dedicated box to run uTorrent sharing Linux distros,... Sure, let 'em watch.
What's that?
Oh, you wanted "Being ABUSED by a Nobel prize winner." That's room 12-A.
Agreed! Mod parent up! I've gone out of my way to use knife switches in my (rather) few (extremely) little electronics-hobbyist projects. Nothin' like 'em for both that Frankenstein's laboratory vibe AND for actually being able to see the air gap in the circuit and the occasional little spark when something really wants to come alive.