Scientists aren't taking into account that our Solar System actually orbits around another Solar System some call The Milky Way Galaxy and none have taken into consideration that passing nearby celeastial bodies as well as passing through regions of devious electromagnetic and other phenomenon would surely influence our Solar sun in ways that would pass said influence onto the planets in orbin including Earth.
There is just too much "new" to ever call any matter as predictable. I think the Geothermal activity is causing more global warming than anything in the atmosphere. Comparing another Planet like Mars to Earth is an example how Mar even with a dead core is much more habitable than Planet Earth because Earth has so-much sea water insulating the the hot core from scorching the surfact. Foremost, it's already a known fact that Planet Earth is experiencing Global Warming just like all the other planets whom are having much more detectable levels of erupting volcanoes so that is proof alone that there is some thing influencing the Solar System much more than Carbon output.
Scientists also don't take into account the number of times the Illuminati has met last year or the number of fanless DC-8's that have been seen climbing out of volcanos.
And nobody, but nobody has calculated the likely effects of the Flying Spaghetti Monster being fatally doused in Parmesan Cheese. That alone just has me totally flabbergasted.
Not only that, but it is a giant peer review process that has to make it's reports at least nominally politically palatable. That tends to skew their predictions towards the benign (the Himalaya-glacier-ending mistake notwithstanding).
Kinda scary, actually. Things are likely to be much worse than what the IPCC can get away with saying.
Cool. Everyone's aged 10 years so we can have a 29 year old Jewel Staite trying to pass herself off as Kailey. Imagine similar scenarios for all actors involved. Surely nobody will notice the 10 year seam.
Hell, if they can make Johnny Depp look like a chameleon, then ILM can make Jewel State look 20 years old again.
What's different here is that Ford is now shipping software to their customers, as opposed to having their customers go back to their favorite garage and have the mechanic plug the car into a magic computer, that often even he has only a faint clue of how it works. This is a significant paradigm shift. It means that Ford will be able to manage more frequent software releases, and maybe start thinking about changing whole features within the lifetime of the car, outside of regular "oh you need to have an inspection after 100 000km" kind of things. So that's cool.
Iranian tin foil hat: All the pretty little USB sticks in the mail. Let's plug it into the computer at work to see what happens. It's from Ford, what could possibly go wrong?/Iranian tin foil hat
It would be better having a standard USB charging port than anything that is installed in the car.
While I won't speak for Ford's lack of software prowess, you do realize that you practically get 'USB charging ports' as freebies in your breakfast cereal. I've got a half dozen of the little cigarette lighter plugs with a USB female port and either a red, blue or green LED (take your pick) power light. They come in practically everything with a USB cable these days.
Do cars still have cigarette lighter plugs these days?
The problem with the aftermarket stuff now is that it seems like, unlike back in the 90s, no one's using standard DIN-sized components any more, so it's nearly impossible to replace your radio or nav system without it looking like shit.
What are you ever about? Duct tape comes in all sorts of colors these days.
I seriously can't wait until all cars have at least a USB port so I can save/store/communicate things like radio stations, seat preferences, etc all just by uploading my own user config
You will not be invited to any Christmas parties this year.
Re:Yeah, we knew that already.
on
Of Mice and Cancer
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Actually, I thought he'd discovered something rather profound:
"I began to realize that the ‘control’ animals used for research studies throughout the world are couch potatoes," he tells me. It's been shown that mice living under standard laboratory conditions eat more and grow bigger than their country cousins. At the National Institute on Aging, as at every major research center, the animals are grouped in plastic cages the size of large shoeboxes, topped with a wire lid and a food hopper that's never empty of pellets. This form of husbandry, known as ad libitum feeding, is cheap and convenient since animal technicians need only check the hoppers from time to time to make sure they haven’t run dry. Without toys or exercise wheels to distract them, the mice are left with nothing to do but eat and sleep—and then eat some more.
(My emphasis)
The mice he had bred were perfect stand in for Americans. Contrary to the thesis in TFA, these critters are the perfect research subject.
Of course, the article then conflated the issue completely. But he's got a gold mine here.
No, what I meant was it hasn't been demonstrated that taking the 'full dose' is more successful, either in terms of treatment efficacy or decreased antibiotic resistance.
You're right, the compliance rate for taking the complete dose isn't terribly good. Which basically bolsters my point. People still get better, in spite of themselves.
For the vast majority of infections, the studies that determine dosing and length of treatment have either not been done or done so poorly that they're useless.
3) Yes. For instance, if we're confined to a 3-brane -- basically, a three-dimensional sheet that we and everything around us is trapped on -- and neutrinos are allowed to leak slightly from the brane then little kinks and ripples in the brane will let them take short-cuts through the other seven spatial dimensions. Gravity can do the same, but the idea is that neutrinos would be more tightly trapped to the brane, while gravitons can roam freely.
Actually I would argue that it's good that somebody(else) make this sort of major error. It's a common misconception so it needs to be brought up for discussion on a regular basis. I just hope to hell that Slashdotters understand computers better than they do biology.
Can I interest you in some very well insulated underwear?
This is one of the problems, people go to their doctor for anti-biotics for a cold or other Viral infection, and complain when the doctor (quite correctly) says it won't help...
The other issue is that people are given a course of anti-biotics (e.g. 3 weeks) and stop after 2 "because they are feeling better".. and so the remaining bacteria are the most resistant, and most likely to be treated by the same doctor with the same anti-biotic...
That's a popular theme but I would point out that it doesn't make a whole like of sense and has never been demonstrated to be true.
Firstly, antibiotics never kill all of the bacteria. You need an intact immune system to help. That's one of the big issues with AIDS and cancer patients. You need to kill off enough bugs to let the immune system get the upper hand. So there will always be survivors and so there will always be relatively resistant drugs. The absolute magnitude of the effect is open to conjecture.
Even if you do take all of your antibiotics, the treatment length for the vast majority of infections is perfectly arbitrary. We really don't know how long to appropriately treat.
Then there is the issue of resident bacteria. You simply cannot and should not clear the body of useful bacteria such as staphylococcus and E.coli. Remember, most of "you" is bacteria. The pathogenic (disease causing) strains have this annoying habit of transferring genetic data to other strains and even other species with quite a degree of alacrity. In fact, the concept of 'species' in bacteria is getting strained because of rampant horizontal gene transfer. So Mr. Antibiotic resistant organism can send little packets of DNA glee to all of his friends and relatives, even at low numbers.
And, of course, then there is the problem of antibiotics in animal feed, antibiotics in soap, antibiotics in bog-knows-what-all.
It's a good idea to complete your course of antibiotics, or at least discuss stopping early with your provider, but it is not nearly as cut and dried as that.
1. You're correct that just 'not finishing the prescription' isn't a big part of antibiotic resistance. It's complicated (sigh). And feed lot supplementation is a big, big problem however, it alone doesn't explain, for example, floroquinolone resistance (as such drugs aren't usually given to feedlot animals). So there are multiple issues in play which makes it virtually impossible to stop the process.
2. I suspect that the 'ideologically taken' physician is relatively rare (never say never in medicine). It is much more likely that the first physician did not see a clear reason for using antibiotics, the second doc already had the benefit of the first doc being 'wrong' and he/she did the obvious second thing - start the antibiotic. The rationale gets mistranslated or misunderstood by the patient - or simply was never explained in the first place. In that respect, the system did it right - try to avoid the antibiotic if at all possible, if not use it wisely. We're still missing quite a bit of basic clinical information on how to do this. Much of what we "know" comes from "learned wisdom" - things that have seemed correct and been deemed correct even if the intellectual underpinnings are pretty shaky. Question you assumptions!
Its already saved one life from the vaccine and the boy contracted the virus from his father. Link
Way to sensationalize. Maybe you should sign up as an editor.
Physicians stressed that the boy was not suffering from smallpox, but from the related vaccinia virus which is used to convey immunity to the much deadlier disease. They said the infection was a rare condition called eczema vaccinatum, which has not been reported since at least 1990, when the military ended a previous program of smallpox vaccination. Smallpox was declared eradicated in 1980....
Kahana said the boy had been treated with a potent antiviral drug, as well as with an anti vaccinia agent supplied by the Centers for Disease Control and the experimental drug ST-246, which was untried as a therapy in humans. She said the boy appeared to be improving this week.
He was given three drugs and might well have gotten better by himself. Even if your statement proved to be true, it's a bit of an expensive therapy for one life saved. (And eczema vaccinatum is pretty damned rare.)
All you did was take the money required to follow the regulation away from the company and on to the government. How is that less wasteful? Now the government employee has to figure out the rules, figure out the tech, monitor the company. You just hand wave and posit that the government would have less paperwork / bureaucracy to deal with than the company. You show no precedent or example.
You have absolutely no concept on how these rule sets get set up. Yes it's complicated. Yes it's expensive. That's because it's hard to do, it involves hundreds if not thousands of people and compromises, exceptions and all the messy parts of the real world.
You just want some The Spirit of the West to walk by, figure out the Chromium level in the water (and ignore historical data, upstream data and measurement issues), call in Chuck Norris and have the offending factory kicked into low Earth orbit.
That's fine, but the public isn't in much of position to determine if the records are good, bad or indifferent and doesn't have the power to shut down an unsafe situation. The state radiation physicist, OTOH, is empowered to keep the public safe and, presumably, knows enough of radiation physics to do so.
There are lots of useless weapons being bought by the pentagon, this isn't one of them. This is one of the few useful ones USAF has procured.
But I hope they have a backup guidance system, because sophisticated determined opponents can jam GPS guidance, at least over a few important targets. Like an Iranian nuclear complex....
The "backup guidance system" is gravity. It's big and heavy. A WW II Norden bombsight could land this thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Scientists aren't taking into account that our Solar System actually orbits around another Solar System some call The Milky Way Galaxy and none have taken into consideration that passing nearby celeastial bodies as well as passing through regions of devious electromagnetic and other phenomenon would surely influence our Solar sun in ways that would pass said influence onto the planets in orbin including Earth.
There is just too much "new" to ever call any matter as predictable. I think the Geothermal activity is causing more global warming than anything in the atmosphere. Comparing another Planet like Mars to Earth is an example how Mar even with a dead core is much more habitable than Planet Earth because Earth has so-much sea water insulating the the hot core from scorching the surfact. Foremost, it's already a known fact that Planet Earth is experiencing Global Warming just like all the other planets whom are having much more detectable levels of erupting volcanoes so that is proof alone that there is some thing influencing the Solar System much more than Carbon output.
Scientists also don't take into account the number of times the Illuminati has met last year or the number of fanless DC-8's that have been seen climbing out of volcanos.
And nobody, but nobody has calculated the likely effects of the Flying Spaghetti Monster being fatally doused in Parmesan Cheese. That alone just has me totally flabbergasted.
Science. It's not just for dinner anymore.
Not only that, but it is a giant peer review process that has to make it's reports at least nominally politically palatable. That tends to skew their predictions towards the benign (the Himalaya-glacier-ending mistake notwithstanding).
Kinda scary, actually. Things are likely to be much worse than what the IPCC can get away with saying.
Consider a Netflix DVD by mail subscription as a way to participate in a national distributed off-site backup system aimed at bypassing SOPA.
I sold my station wagon decades ago.
Oops. Jewel Staite. Sorry there.
Cool. Everyone's aged 10 years so we can have a 29 year old Jewel Staite trying to pass herself off as Kailey. Imagine similar scenarios for all actors involved. Surely nobody will notice the 10 year seam.
Hell, if they can make Johnny Depp look like a chameleon, then ILM can make Jewel State look 20 years old again.
(Goes back to dreaming).
What's different here is that Ford is now shipping software to their customers, as opposed to having their customers go back to their favorite garage and have the mechanic plug the car into a magic computer, that often even he has only a faint clue of how it works. This is a significant paradigm shift. It means that Ford will be able to manage more frequent software releases, and maybe start thinking about changing whole features within the lifetime of the car, outside of regular "oh you need to have an inspection after 100 000km" kind of things. So that's cool.
Iranian tin foil hat: All the pretty little USB sticks in the mail. Let's plug it into the computer at work to see what happens. It's from Ford, what could possibly go wrong? /Iranian tin foil hat
Just sayin...
It would be better having a standard USB charging port than anything that is installed in the car.
While I won't speak for Ford's lack of software prowess, you do realize that you practically get 'USB charging ports' as freebies in your breakfast cereal. I've got a half dozen of the little cigarette lighter plugs with a USB female port and either a red, blue or green LED (take your pick) power light. They come in practically everything with a USB cable these days.
Do cars still have cigarette lighter plugs these days?
The problem with the aftermarket stuff now is that it seems like, unlike back in the 90s, no one's using standard DIN-sized components any more, so it's nearly impossible to replace your radio or nav system without it looking like shit.
What are you ever about? Duct tape comes in all sorts of colors these days.
I seriously can't wait until all cars have at least a USB port so I can save/store/communicate things like radio stations, seat preferences, etc all just by uploading my own user config
Whatever happened to just driving?
Yeah, yeah, I know. Time for my meds.
Magic 8-ball says:
You will not be invited to any Christmas parties this year.
Actually, I thought he'd discovered something rather profound:
"I began to realize that the ‘control’ animals used for research studies throughout the world are couch potatoes," he tells me. It's been shown that mice living under standard laboratory conditions eat more and grow bigger than their country cousins. At the National Institute on Aging, as at every major research center, the animals are grouped in plastic cages the size of large shoeboxes, topped with a wire lid and a food hopper that's never empty of pellets. This form of husbandry, known as ad libitum feeding, is cheap and convenient since animal technicians need only check the hoppers from time to time to make sure they haven’t run dry. Without toys or exercise wheels to distract them, the mice are left with nothing to do but eat and sleep—and then eat some more.
(My emphasis)
The mice he had bred were perfect stand in for Americans . Contrary to the thesis in TFA, these critters are
the perfect research subject.
Of course, the article then conflated the issue completely. But he's got a gold mine here.
This really sounds like operator error to me.
From TFA:
But in its statement, the DHS said the water system was located in Springfield, Illinois.
Springfield....
Operator error....
Something in the back of my mind....
Perhaps it's time to start we stop believing that everything in the world needs to be connected to external networks.
Perhaps it's time to stop believing that everything in the world that goes wrong is due to a 'cyberattack'.
No, what I meant was it hasn't been demonstrated that taking the 'full dose' is more successful, either in terms of treatment efficacy or decreased antibiotic resistance.
You're right, the compliance rate for taking the complete dose isn't terribly good. Which basically bolsters my point. People still get better, in spite of themselves.
For the vast majority of infections, the studies that determine dosing and length of treatment have either not been done or done so poorly that they're useless.
3) Yes. For instance, if we're confined to a 3-brane -- basically, a three-dimensional sheet that we and everything around us is trapped on -- and neutrinos are allowed to leak slightly from the brane then little kinks and ripples in the brane will let them take short-cuts through the other seven spatial dimensions. Gravity can do the same, but the idea is that neutrinos would be more tightly trapped to the brane, while gravitons can roam freely.
My brane just asploded.
Actually I would argue that it's good that somebody(else) make this sort of major error. It's a common misconception so it needs to be brought up for discussion on a regular basis. I just hope to hell that Slashdotters understand computers better than they do biology.
Can I interest you in some very well insulated underwear?
This is one of the problems, people go to their doctor for anti-biotics for a cold or other Viral infection, and complain when the doctor (quite correctly) says it won't help ...
The other issue is that people are given a course of anti-biotics (e.g. 3 weeks) and stop after 2 "because they are feeling better" .. and so the remaining bacteria are the most resistant, and most likely to be treated by the same doctor with the same anti-biotic ...
That's a popular theme but I would point out that it doesn't make a whole like of sense and has never been demonstrated to be true.
Firstly, antibiotics never kill all of the bacteria. You need an intact immune system to help. That's one of the big issues with AIDS and cancer patients. You need to kill off enough bugs to let the immune system get the upper hand. So there will always be survivors and so there will always be relatively resistant drugs. The absolute magnitude of the effect is open to conjecture.
Even if you do take all of your antibiotics, the treatment length for the vast majority of infections is perfectly arbitrary. We really don't know how long to appropriately treat.
Then there is the issue of resident bacteria. You simply cannot and should not clear the body of useful bacteria such as staphylococcus and E.coli. Remember, most of "you" is bacteria. The pathogenic (disease causing) strains have this annoying habit of transferring genetic data to other strains and even other species with quite a degree of alacrity. In fact, the concept of 'species' in bacteria is getting strained because of rampant horizontal gene transfer. So Mr. Antibiotic resistant organism can send little packets of DNA glee to all of his friends and relatives, even at low numbers.
And, of course, then there is the problem of antibiotics in animal feed, antibiotics in soap, antibiotics in bog-knows-what-all.
It's a good idea to complete your course of antibiotics, or at least discuss stopping early with your provider, but it is not nearly as cut and dried as that.
A couple of points:
1. You're correct that just 'not finishing the prescription' isn't a big part of antibiotic resistance. It's complicated (sigh). And feed lot supplementation is a big, big problem however, it alone doesn't explain, for example, floroquinolone resistance (as such drugs aren't usually given to feedlot animals). So there are multiple issues in play which makes it virtually impossible to stop the process.
2. I suspect that the 'ideologically taken' physician is relatively rare (never say never in medicine). It is much more likely that the first physician did not see a clear reason for using antibiotics, the second doc already had the benefit of the first doc being 'wrong' and he/she did the obvious second thing - start the antibiotic. The rationale gets mistranslated or misunderstood by the patient - or simply was never explained in the first place. In that respect, the system did it right - try to avoid the antibiotic if at all possible, if not use it wisely. We're still missing quite a bit of basic clinical information on how to do this. Much of what we "know" comes from "learned wisdom" - things that have seemed correct and been deemed correct even if the intellectual underpinnings are pretty shaky. Question you assumptions!
Its already saved one life from the vaccine and the boy contracted the virus from his father. Link
Way to sensationalize. Maybe you should sign up as an editor.
Physicians stressed that the boy was not suffering from smallpox, but from the related vaccinia virus which is used to convey immunity to the much deadlier disease. They said the infection was a rare condition called eczema vaccinatum, which has not been reported since at least 1990, when the military ended a previous program of smallpox vaccination. Smallpox was declared eradicated in 1980. ...
Kahana said the boy had been treated with a potent antiviral drug, as well as with an anti vaccinia agent supplied by the Centers for Disease Control and the experimental drug ST-246, which was untried as a therapy in humans. She said the boy appeared to be improving this week.
He was given three drugs and might well have gotten better by himself. Even if your statement proved to be true, it's a bit of an expensive therapy for one life saved. (And eczema vaccinatum is pretty damned rare.)
Wait. What?
All you did was take the money required to follow the regulation away from the company and on to the government. How is that less wasteful? Now the government employee has to figure out the rules, figure out the tech, monitor the company. You just hand wave and posit that the government would have less paperwork / bureaucracy to deal with than the company. You show no precedent or example.
You have absolutely no concept on how these rule sets get set up. Yes it's complicated. Yes it's expensive. That's because it's hard to do, it involves hundreds if not thousands of people and compromises, exceptions and all the messy parts of the real world.
You just want some The Spirit of the West to walk by, figure out the Chromium level in the water (and ignore historical data, upstream data and measurement issues), call in Chuck Norris and have the offending factory kicked into low Earth orbit.
Grow up and stop smoking all that weed.
That's fine, but the public isn't in much of position to determine if the records are good, bad or indifferent and doesn't have the power to shut down an unsafe situation. The state radiation physicist, OTOH, is empowered to keep the public safe and, presumably, knows enough of radiation physics to do so.
But enough dreaming....
There are lots of useless weapons being bought by the pentagon, this isn't one of them. This is one of the few useful ones USAF has procured.
But I hope they have a backup guidance system, because sophisticated determined opponents can jam GPS guidance, at least over a few important targets. Like an Iranian nuclear complex....
The "backup guidance system" is gravity. It's big and heavy. A WW II Norden bombsight could land this thing.
Take your meds guy....
So, by having Hilary Clinton as Secretary of State, we're going make Ahmadinejad cry?
If you're referring to Israel, they aren't our friend. Israel is a bit like a therapist, they care about us as long as we're giving them money.
And they're crazier than the patient.
Nice Analogy!