>1. A one-time exposure to a high-wattage transmission tower is qualitatively different from chronic exposure to EM fields.
Right, by a huge factor, in favor of high fields causing 10^9 times more damage. There are darn few places where weaker influences cause biggger effects. I can't think of one.
>2. Your 500,000 watt figure for radio stations is on the absolute high end (afaik only WBCT-FM is allowed that figure under certain circumstances) but valid; your.0000001 watt figure is definitely not. Cell phones, for instance, are around the 1 watt range (http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-6602_7-5020357-1.htm l?tag=nav has various SARs, which is decently close to raw wattage numbers)
The original article was talking abotu "dirty power" as a source of EM fields. 0.0000001 watts is a pretty good ballpark guess on the "dirty power" that could get coupled to the human body, even if you wrapped yourself with a 500ft extension cord plugged into an outlet next to an arcwelder.
3. Intensity varies inversely with the square of the distance. This quickly minimizes exposure from transmission towers but does little for chronic EM exposure in a home.
My father worked in an office building literally in the shadow of several 100,000 watt TV transmitter antennas. The local high school is across the street from the same antennas.
At home we lived for decades under a mile away from a 50,000 watt AM station antenna. Globally, there's at least three billion people living within inches of dirty power, radio stations, and cell phones. No noticeable awful patches of gargling deaths reported yet. In fact life expectancy is going UP all around the globe.
>These hypothesized negative reactions to EM fields are statistical. Consider that it took quite a long while to gather enough evidence to prove that smoking is quite unhealthy.
Er, no. I think the smoking reports go back to about 1912 or so. Mark Twain writes about the dammnable habit circa 1850. You seem to think statistical is a bad thing. It's the only way to get at causes... wishful thinking isnt noticeably better.
4. At the neurological level, the voltage spikes from your nerves are 1,000's of times a bigger EM field than anything from outside your body. It's hard to imagine how a signal that's much weaker than your nerve impulses can have a noticeable effect.
Nobody knows how EM fields affect the body--
Er, it's been studied since the time of Senor Volta, about 250 years or so.
Sunlight's energy distribution (and, speaking to the point made in the article, lack of oscillation) is completely different than that of man-made EM fields.
Again you have a really hard job trying to explain a mechanism where sunlight, being 10^6 times more intense, AND 10^8 times more energetic PER PHOTON than "dirty power" or "cell phones", AND 10^3 times poorer at coupling to human tissue, how those influences can be 10^6, 10^8, or combined, 10^17 times weaker, and they can still cause problems that the 10^17 times stronger stimulus cannot.
I do this all the time.
I have a 23 megabyte tar file on my computer. Boss calls and says he needs it right away. I drag it to my USB flash memory drive. Copies over in a FLASH!
I rush to work, stumble in to the boss's office, plug in my memory stick, and voila! Windows had dragged a 1.2kb shortcut.lnk file instead of the 23 megabyte original. Much grumbling.
Now THATS's compression!
The cost of disk space versus the cost in computer time in finding all the matching substrings.
Disk space gets bigger a whole lot faster and easier than CPUs speed up, so even if this idea is economically feasible today, it can only get worse from here.
This scheme may work just swell with some data streams, but probably pathologically awful with others.
A good example: a billion empty records in a database might be compressed to a very few bytes. The system operator relaxes, and lets a log file fill up the rest of the disk. Then a bunch of database records need to be added, or the existing records need some sequential numbering added and guess what? There's no space for the new records, or to expand the existing ones. Argh.
Maybe cell phone users are of a particular demographic that is more prone to cancer:
For example, they're in a certain age group:: people under age X are less prone to brain cancer, so you automatically see a lot more of it in people with cell phones (above age XX).
Maybe it's tied to their economic group-- poor people are less likely to go to a doctor, so they're more likely to have a poor outcome if they do get cancer.
Or maybe healthy poeple say they're "too busy" to participate in a study.
or maybe cell-phone users are subject to more stress.
Or they're more likely to live in cities.
or more likely to not get medical checkups.
or any number of other diffrences.
Just because two things happen together doesnt imply A causes B. Maybe B causes A, or B is caused by C whcich by coincidence is tied to A.
If it were true you'd expect stronger fields to make a bigger effect than miniscule ones.
Therefore driving past a 500,000 watt radio or TV transmitting antenna should cause much much much greater symptoms than a 0.0000001 watt emissions from "dirty power". No such effect.
People that are exposed to high EM fields, such as airport workers, tower light replacers, cell site testers, plasma physicists, industrial RF welders, TV technicians, walkie-talkie testers, they should all be really sick. Like 100,000 time ssicker than the average Joe or Jane Doe. They're not.
At the neurological level, the voltage spikes from your nerves are 1,000's of times a bigger EM field than anything from outside your body. It's hard to imagine how a signal that's much weaker than your nerve impulses can have a noticeable effect.
EM fields includes light, particularly sunlight. Sunlight hits you with almost 1,000 watts per square meter, many powers of ten greater than any other EM field, and most people think sunlight feels *good*, not bad.
In a galaxy close nearby, not too long ago, I got a consulting gig at a BIG accounting firm. They wanted to learn about that new thing "the Web".
They wanted me to talk to the big guys. I was herded into the private elevator to the penthouse level. From there we went into your proverbial executive meeting room, with the marble tile, drapes, long oval mahogany table.
The big cheeses kinda listened to me, but not too closely. They asked some really dumb, impossible to answer questions, then I was nearly frog-marched out of there. The problem? I wasnt wearing a suit. I knew everything they wanted to learn, but I didnt look like what they associated with "competence".
They stiffed me on my fee until I threatened legal action.
Reducing the crew size goes against one of the main principles of warfare-- redundancy.
War is unpredictable. One has to be ready for anything, including the unpredictable. That's why every weapon system is big, heavy, clunky, and expensive. You want to have primary systems, secondary systems, and maybe backups for both. You don't want to have any single point of failure that can knock you out of action. Applies to machinery, and also to human organizations. You want to have lots of guys that spend most of their time doing make-work, like chipping paint, peeling potatoes, and washing the decks. When the baloon goes up, they'll likely be dragging the dead from their posts and taking their places.
That's one reason why there are so many crewmembers on an aircraft carrier.
>A Ridiculous Comment. Over the past few decades, we've boosted the efficiency of recepters an incredible amount, while simultaniously reducing the dish size on Satellite and space communications terminals. Take military Satellite communications Terminals (My Job) - we've gone from a 20' Antenna to a 6' with comparable data rates and greater reliability off the 6' dish in just the time I've been in (almost two years now).
I think the improvement you've seen is due to going to higher frequecies, lower noise preamplifiers, better modulation protocols, and better data compression. Dishes have always been very good reflectors, there's not much room for improvement left there.
Sure, use this better receptor. But this 3x improvement is a one-shot thing. After that you need a bigger lens or mirror. Probably a parabolic mirror as is already used to collect microwaves.
A ridiculous article. Even if they boosted the efficiency by a factor of three, without hurting any other specs, you could accomplish the same thing, or better, just by increasing the diameter of the light-collecting lens. To get three times the light in you just need to increase the diameter by the square root of three-- 1.63 something IIRC. Not a big deal. And lenses and mirrors can be increased in size almost indefinitely, while you can only increase the efficiency of the detector another 30-some percent, and it gets harder and harder to get every extra percentage.
Technology for helping nerves heal goes back to at least the 1950's... In one episode of MASH one surgeon suggests wrapping tantalum foil around nerves to help them heal.
And on the Hamster front, don't tell Richard Gere about this!
Try the math again. If the house was habitable it would be worth $260,000. But it's not, it's soaked through and through with rabbit piss and poop.
The only thing of value is the land, a small parcel worth around $10,000.
The demolition company estimated $32,000 to tear down the place and cart the pieces to a sanitary landfill.
So after you tear down the house, you're out $32,000 and you have left a lot worth $10,000. By my accounting, even if you sell the lot, you're still $22,000 in the hole.
If you drop $100K on something sight unseen, you deserve whatever you get.
Even a picture isnt enough-- there was a house in our neighborhood where the owner kept over 100 rabbits. With free run of the place. The house looked okay from the outside, maybe worth $260,000. But my friend the real-estate appraiser valued it at -$22000. That's how much it would cost to tear down the house, minus the value of the land.
To be precise, it consumes the electricity, but not the power. Power can be conveyed, transduced, transformed, dissipated, or converted, but never consumed.
Hate to be pedantic, but this pizza-box doesnt "consume" 1000 watts "of power". In many ways:
The sticker on the power supply may say "1000 watts", but that's an upper limit of what the power supply can do when maxed out. I suspect in typical setups the draw will be much lower. Opterons only draw about 80 watts, so a quad of them will only be about 300 watts. You're only going to max out with a lot of memory and many 10K RPM disks.
The unit doesnt "consume" the power, it gets mostly (99%) gets converted into heat.
Saying "1000 watts" is enough. No need to say "of power", the only meaning of watts is as a measure of power. I suppose we should be glad they didnt use one of the many wrong units, like watt-hours, or watts per hour.
That's a lot of watts in a 1U height! Do they suggest mounting it high on the rack so you can use it as a hair dryer?
Senor Mises is part of the "Austrian School" of economics, definitely a minority view.
As for the actual facts re printing money:
"37 million notes are produced in a day with a face value of approximately $696
million. 95% of the notes printed each year are used to replace notes already in
circulation."
The US Mint apparently adds about 34.8 million dollars in paper money each day. If they run 365 days a year, that's about $12 billion added each year.
The amount of cash in circulation is about $571 billion. So they're adding about 2% a year.
The US economy has been growing about 1.5 times that amount on average, so I don't see any runaway printing of US dollars, the opposite actually.
Raises every year went away around 1969 IIRC.
The reason employees are clamoring for raises is their cost of living goes up every year. During the last year my property taxes have gone up 22%, health care went up 30%, deductibles doubled, gas went way up. My salary hasnt gone up at all.
BTW the reason for inflation is not govt printing more dollars-- that's both irrelevant and inconsequential. You could do your business a favor by reading some basic book on macroeconomics.
HyperCard: People call: "I want that plug-in hyper card". Sorry Maam, it's not hardware, it's software. "Then why is it a card?". Card here refers to like a 3x5 file card. "So it's a recipe program". No, it's more of a free-form user-friendly database.
Adobe Illustrator '88: Funny, sales dropped off in 1989.
But the clear winner: Windows Live
So it's got something to do with Windows(R)? Nope. Nothing that I can see. It's a web server that can be called up by Mac's, Suns, Crays, etc... No windows in those.
Astrophysicists and space scientists don't necessarily know boo about life forms on Earth. I'd be more impressed if he got it published in "Microbiology".
Just doing a quick google image search turns up several microphotographs of pollen grains that look very similar to the pics in the paper.
I *see*--- there's stuff that if his claims are true, would be the biggest news since I don't know when. But it's been sitting around for FIVE YEARS and not confirmed by anybody else. And apparently he hasnt given samples to other scientists. And it hasnt appeared on the front page of the NYT.
One might surmise that the stuff is something more placid, like common earth dust, pollen, bee-poop, grasshopper-poop, or any number of other things of-this-Earth.
A real scientist would have gone out of his way to compare the funny stuff to various earth items, in a good-faith effort to identify the stuff. Not just do batch analyses of the constituent elements. There's 1000's of things that might have that mix of elements and NOT be from off-planetary sources.
Some carzy people think the Shuttle is like software-- it's not ready until it's ready. Not when the scheduler guys think it will be ready. Not when the prez would like to talk to the astronauts during a speech. It's ready when several thousand tiny itsy bitsy teensy tiny little things are all working just right. And nobody can predict when that will be. Sounds like NASA still doesn't get it.
>Rulers and tape measures can be used to measure other things, that lasers can't- like skew distances, or circumferences.
>Once you've got a scale in a digital image, you can measure curves to your heart's content in software, without distrurbing the crime scene.
Yes, please explain how you can get 3-D info out of a 2-D image of lines projected onto a 3-D surface. You'll get a Nobel proze in Math, and they don't even give one. THen explain how you can measure the circumference of a body given the same info. Another Nobel.
Slashdot Mirror
Right, by a huge factor, in favor of high fields causing 10^9 times more damage. There are darn few places where weaker influences cause biggger effects. I can't think of one.
>2. Your 500,000 watt figure for radio stations is on the absolute high end (afaik only WBCT-FM is allowed that figure under certain circumstances) but valid; your .0000001 watt figure is definitely not. Cell phones, for instance, are around the 1 watt range (http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-6602_7-5020357-1.htm l?tag=nav has various SARs, which is decently close to raw wattage numbers)
The original article was talking abotu "dirty power" as a source of EM fields. 0.0000001 watts is a pretty good ballpark guess on the "dirty power" that could get coupled to the human body, even if you wrapped yourself with a 500ft extension cord plugged into an outlet next to an arcwelder.
3. Intensity varies inversely with the square of the distance. This quickly minimizes exposure from transmission towers but does little for chronic EM exposure in a home.
My father worked in an office building literally in the shadow of several 100,000 watt TV transmitter antennas. The local high school is across the street from the same antennas. At home we lived for decades under a mile away from a 50,000 watt AM station antenna. Globally, there's at least three billion people living within inches of dirty power, radio stations, and cell phones. No noticeable awful patches of gargling deaths reported yet. In fact life expectancy is going UP all around the globe.
>These hypothesized negative reactions to EM fields are statistical. Consider that it took quite a long while to gather enough evidence to prove that smoking is quite unhealthy.
Er, no. I think the smoking reports go back to about 1912 or so. Mark Twain writes about the dammnable habit circa 1850. You seem to think statistical is a bad thing. It's the only way to get at causes... wishful thinking isnt noticeably better.
4. At the neurological level, the voltage spikes from your nerves are 1,000's of times a bigger EM field than anything from outside your body. It's hard to imagine how a signal that's much weaker than your nerve impulses can have a noticeable effect.
Nobody knows how EM fields affect the body--
Er, it's been studied since the time of Senor Volta, about 250 years or so.
Sunlight's energy distribution (and, speaking to the point made in the article, lack of oscillation) is completely different than that of man-made EM fields.
Again you have a really hard job trying to explain a mechanism where sunlight, being 10^6 times more intense, AND 10^8 times more energetic PER PHOTON than "dirty power" or "cell phones", AND 10^3 times poorer at coupling to human tissue, how those influences can be 10^6, 10^8, or combined, 10^17 times weaker, and they can still cause problems that the 10^17 times stronger stimulus cannot.
I do this all the time. I have a 23 megabyte tar file on my computer. Boss calls and says he needs it right away. I drag it to my USB flash memory drive. Copies over in a FLASH! I rush to work, stumble in to the boss's office, plug in my memory stick, and voila! Windows had dragged a 1.2kb shortcut .lnk file instead of the 23 megabyte original. Much grumbling.
Now THATS's compression!
Just because two things happen together doesnt imply A causes B. Maybe B causes A, or B is caused by C whcich by coincidence is tied to A.
The mind boggles....
- If it were true you'd expect stronger fields to make a bigger effect than miniscule ones.
- Therefore driving past a 500,000 watt radio or TV transmitting antenna should cause much much much greater symptoms than a 0.0000001 watt emissions from "dirty power". No such effect.
- People that are exposed to high EM fields, such as airport workers, tower light replacers, cell site testers, plasma physicists, industrial RF welders, TV technicians, walkie-talkie testers, they should all be really sick. Like 100,000 time ssicker than the average Joe or Jane Doe. They're not.
- At the neurological level, the voltage spikes from your nerves are 1,000's of times a bigger EM field than anything from outside your body. It's hard to imagine how a signal that's much weaker than your nerve impulses can have a noticeable effect.
- EM fields includes light, particularly sunlight. Sunlight hits you with almost 1,000 watts per square meter, many powers of ten greater than any other EM field, and most people think sunlight feels *good*, not bad.
Too many basic objections to this idea. Move on.The big cheeses kinda listened to me, but not too closely. They asked some really dumb, impossible to answer questions, then I was nearly frog-marched out of there. The problem? I wasnt wearing a suit. I knew everything they wanted to learn, but I didnt look like what they associated with "competence".
They stiffed me on my fee until I threatened legal action.
War is unpredictable. One has to be ready for anything, including the unpredictable. That's why every weapon system is big, heavy, clunky, and expensive. You want to have primary systems, secondary systems, and maybe backups for both. You don't want to have any single point of failure that can knock you out of action. Applies to machinery, and also to human organizations. You want to have lots of guys that spend most of their time doing make-work, like chipping paint, peeling potatoes, and washing the decks. When the baloon goes up, they'll likely be dragging the dead from their posts and taking their places.
That's one reason why there are so many crewmembers on an aircraft carrier.
The other reason is that there's room for them.
I think the improvement you've seen is due to going to higher frequecies, lower noise preamplifiers, better modulation protocols, and better data compression. Dishes have always been very good reflectors, there's not much room for improvement left there.
Sure, use this better receptor. But this 3x improvement is a one-shot thing. After that you need a bigger lens or mirror. Probably a parabolic mirror as is already used to collect microwaves.
A ridiculous article. Even if they boosted the efficiency by a factor of three, without hurting any other specs, you could accomplish the same thing, or better, just by increasing the diameter of the light-collecting lens. To get three times the light in you just need to increase the diameter by the square root of three-- 1.63 something IIRC. Not a big deal. And lenses and mirrors can be increased in size almost indefinitely, while you can only increase the efficiency of the detector another 30-some percent, and it gets harder and harder to get every extra percentage.
And on the Hamster front, don't tell Richard Gere about this!
The only thing of value is the land, a small parcel worth around $10,000.
The demolition company estimated $32,000 to tear down the place and cart the pieces to a sanitary landfill.
So after you tear down the house, you're out $32,000 and you have left a lot worth $10,000. By my accounting, even if you sell the lot, you're still $22,000 in the hole.
Even a picture isnt enough-- there was a house in our neighborhood where the owner kept over 100 rabbits. With free run of the place. The house looked okay from the outside, maybe worth $260,000. But my friend the real-estate appraiser valued it at -$22000. That's how much it would cost to tear down the house, minus the value of the land.
To be precise, it consumes the electricity, but not the power. Power can be conveyed, transduced, transformed, dissipated, or converted, but never consumed.
As for the actual facts re printing money: "37 million notes are produced in a day with a face value of approximately $696 million. 95% of the notes printed each year are used to replace notes already in circulation."
The US Mint apparently adds about 34.8 million dollars in paper money each day. If they run 365 days a year, that's about $12 billion added each year. The amount of cash in circulation is about $571 billion. So they're adding about 2% a year.
The US economy has been growing about 1.5 times that amount on average, so I don't see any runaway printing of US dollars, the opposite actually.
Raises every year went away around 1969 IIRC. The reason employees are clamoring for raises is their cost of living goes up every year. During the last year my property taxes have gone up 22%, health care went up 30%, deductibles doubled, gas went way up. My salary hasnt gone up at all. BTW the reason for inflation is not govt printing more dollars-- that's both irrelevant and inconsequential. You could do your business a favor by reading some basic book on macroeconomics.
But the clear winner: Windows Live
So it's got something to do with Windows(R)? Nope. Nothing that I can see. It's a web server that can be called up by Mac's, Suns, Crays, etc... No windows in those.
So the "Live" business it's:
IMHO The Worst Name Ever
Astrophysicists and space scientists don't necessarily know boo about life forms on Earth. I'd be more impressed if he got it published in "Microbiology".
Just doing a quick google image search turns up several microphotographs of pollen grains that look very similar to the pics in the paper.
One might surmise that the stuff is something more placid, like common earth dust, pollen, bee-poop, grasshopper-poop, or any number of other things of-this-Earth.
A real scientist would have gone out of his way to compare the funny stuff to various earth items, in a good-faith effort to identify the stuff. Not just do batch analyses of the constituent elements. There's 1000's of things that might have that mix of elements and NOT be from off-planetary sources.
You're not getting it-- the three codes are allowed during that fw minutes. So you can sneak in right after the validated guy.
Some carzy people think the Shuttle is like software-- it's not ready until it's ready. Not when the scheduler guys think it will be ready. Not when the prez would like to talk to the astronauts during a speech. It's ready when several thousand tiny itsy bitsy teensy tiny little things are all working just right. And nobody can predict when that will be. Sounds like NASA still doesn't get it.
>Rulers and tape measures can be used to measure other things, that lasers can't- like skew distances, or circumferences. >Once you've got a scale in a digital image, you can measure curves to your heart's content in software, without distrurbing the crime scene. Yes, please explain how you can get 3-D info out of a 2-D image of lines projected onto a 3-D surface. You'll get a Nobel proze in Math, and they don't even give one. THen explain how you can measure the circumference of a body given the same info. Another Nobel.