I'm certainly not pissed off. I certainly don't believe this is good news, or much any news for that matter. It is a single 'data' point that has enormous (unstated) error bars and certainly does not give much support the thesis of the article - that there is not hard and fast correlation between CO2 out put and economic growth.
The only interpretation that I can make is that the EIA - which is really a tool of the developed countries and particularly the energy exporting countries - is willing to discuss the possibility that we can drop our use of fossil fuels and not tank the economy. That's sort of new although they have been moving very slowly towards this over the past year (and as the evidence for replacement of fossil fuels gets bigger and bigger).
Central banks have dumped credit, not wealth, into the global economy. That has goosed the numbers only, not the organic growth of world economies.
This has occurred in order to mask the poor quality of the debt held by private and public banks, and to allow gov'ts the ability to spend in deficit.
The patient has been giving more blood than is healthy for about thirty years now. Replacement with saline and meth has made them alert and conversant, but collapse is inevitable without ENERGY INPUT.
So, give it some Twinkies and we're golden, right?
There ya go. The costs for many drugs could plummet if access to manufacture were made more easy.
Most drugs ARE easy to manufacture. That's what the generic manufacturers do for a living. It's hard to design and test them. It's hard to ensure purity. It's hard to crunch through the legal and bureaucratic wastelands that surround design, testing and manufacturing.
The bulk organic chemistry is actually pretty straightforward.
How about if we start by just landing on the damned moon and beaming back pictures? Maybe a Curiosity level probe, but leave the big drills until later. Who knows, maybe the Ganyamedians will come visiting (yes, the reference is to Europa, but the idea is the same).
Really what you describe is the RNA world hypothesis (which you actually mention) - only you substitute some other polymer for RNA.
Breaking this down to first principles, you basically need conditions where ** something ** forms a semi stable polymer and those conditions are stable enough for random chance to allow autocatalysis. That something probably can't be just a metal but isn't necessarily carbon-hydrogen. So there are lots of potential environments for life to occur. How often this actually happens is, of course, subject to much debate.
But given the enormous number of potential types of chemistries, the enormous numbers of different environments and one hell of a lot of time for the molecules to muck about, it seems that life has to have evolved in more than one place and more than one time.
Life is obviously exceedingly adaptable; extremophiles in all kinds of crazy conditions have been discovered. But I don't think anyone suggests that life actually arose in such extreme conditions. You need somewhere more favorable for living organisms to come from, then produce extremophile descendants.
Not necessarily. You might need more time to produce viable life forms under less than ideal circumstances, but if you can support life at all, conditions could have created the life form in the first place. Of course, this is the big question - what parameters are really needed for life to form. Since we are at n=1, we need more data....
Nope, it's much close to what Neil Stephenson describes in the 'Diamond Age' although calling it a 'printer' is a bit disingenuous. It looks like a complicated solid phase chemistry setup. And it only 'prints' four classes of simple molecules.
But it is interesting. It's not your father's organic chemistry any more.
That's OK. Using the same logic, by 2038 the Dow Jones Industrial average should be about 29490859 and the world economy will have increased by a factor of four.
Only idiots, economists and insects use exponential growth over long periods of time.
Things that reach statistical significance are often rather small differences clinically. So unless you clarify exactly what type of significance you are looking at it the effects can be quite small. You see this is 'regular' medicine quite a bit. A drug company will advertise a 'significant difference' between drug x and placebo, but they are looking at one of various statistical tests showing that the effect is real. However, when you look at it in clinical terms, it's perhaps 2-3% better - an effect you would never see in practice. But it's real....
Placebos can be effective in clinical terms - sometimes up to 10 - 20% effect which, although not earth shattering, is on par with many 'regular medicine' treatments. Homeopathy is basically a placebo effect. It's a fairly harmless one - if it is actually water. The caveat being it might prevent the patient from seeking 'real' medical attention in a timely fashion. That can be devastating at times, other times it can actually be useful.
If all programs and operating systems were perfect, increasing RAM would help more than faster swap. But things aren't perfect and operating systems like to talk to swap 'just because'.
On my aging Mac Pro with 32 GB RAM I put a 60 GB SSS (left over from a laptop upgrade) in as swap. Seems to make a modest difference with Premiere, After Effects and Vue, especially renders. But it really isn't all that noticeable. Not as noticeable as increasing the RAM. But if you have an extra drive caddy and an extra SSD it's easy to try.
If you want to learn how a manual transmission works, get a junk small motorcycle engine, pull the head off and split the case. All of those fun gears in their oily shininess. For extra bonus points, do this on the kitchen table.
(Worked for me, my mother wouldn't let me near the kitchen for months.....)
Simply amazing that creative individuals, trying to make enough money to survive, modify their creations to fit the wants and needs of their prospective audience.
I'm just totally dumfounded. Next thing you'll tell me is that graphic artists are using computers these days. Maybe somebody should patent that.
Now with modern technology, you don't even have to leave the comfort and security of your basement --
Create an app that:
1) Takes a picture of the user (bonus points against a green screen or monochromatic background) 2) Isolates the selfie from the background 3) Overlays that image on the rear facing camera to aid in composition 4) Takes the pseudo selfie 5) Allows the 'photographer' to adjust various parameters, filters etc so it looks even cheesier.
If you can make a 3D representation of an object, you can have it made in meatspace using any one of a number of construction technologies - printing, CNC, molding, etc. They key is to have a decent software model that can drive the construction device.
I see this as a sort of game changer for hobbyists / prototypers. Personally, I don't want to babysit a fussy 3D printer which will be out of date in a year. Nor do I want to try and run a sintering printer, complex CNC machine or the like. I would like to upload a file and have the object mailed to me in a couple of days. I see this as analogous to printing photographs. It used to be that you had to buy your own printer, calibrate it, feed it and keep your kids from printing out Disney cartoons using the most expensive liquid on the planet. Now you just upload the data to Snapfish or whomever.
Yes, you can get slightly better results by yourself, if you are willing to take the time and spend the money - but for most people, the quality is quite good enough. And I say that as someone who has an expensive Canon 8 ink printer with expensive Hahnemuhle paper. Once I use up my supply of both of those consumables, I'm out of the printing business.
This is pretty interesting. From a brief perusal of TFA, it seems like the only thing hard to DIY is the special ink and paper - both of which could be manufactured by any company considering commercializing this (the authors made the stuff). The electronics are pretty simple assuming that you can avoid electrocuting yourself on 220V.
I would certainly buy a kit even if I have no practical use for it.
The nuclear power plants will be ACP1000s. There is half a century of experience between the ACP1000 and the BWR-3/4 used in Fukushima Daiichi. And wouldn't you know it, there have been improvements in the meantime!
"Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so."
Wrong... (and I think you were trying to be amusing but - ) Facebook and Walmart suffer from from the fact that they are not necessarily a representative sample of the population. Everybody takes a dump and the vast majority of them end up in the sewage system. This technique gives you an excellent and easy to obtain* series of sample.
Furthermore, IF this pans out you have a powerful method for screening for the DNA sequences associated with obesity on a population wide basis. And possibly other diseases with a mixed environmental / genetic basis.
And, IF fecal transplants turn out to be safe and effective you have a potential treatment pathway.
Who would have predicted that the road to the good life of a rich, skinny ski resort inhabitant would basically be a shit sandwich?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm certainly not pissed off. I certainly don't believe this is good news, or much any news for that matter. It is a single 'data' point that has enormous (unstated) error bars and certainly does not give much support the thesis of the article - that there is not hard and fast correlation between CO2 out put and economic growth.
The only interpretation that I can make is that the EIA - which is really a tool of the developed countries and particularly the energy exporting countries - is willing to discuss the possibility that we can drop our use of fossil fuels and not tank the economy. That's sort of new although they have been moving very slowly towards this over the past year (and as the evidence for replacement of fossil fuels gets bigger and bigger).
Central banks have dumped credit, not wealth, into the global economy. That has goosed the numbers only, not the organic growth of world economies.
This has occurred in order to mask the poor quality of the debt held by private and public banks, and to allow gov'ts the ability to spend in deficit.
The patient has been giving more blood than is healthy for about thirty years now. Replacement with saline and meth has made them alert and conversant, but collapse is inevitable without ENERGY INPUT.
So, give it some Twinkies and we're golden, right?
Probably because they are only capable of synthesizing nanogram quantities of stuff.
It's gonna take a while to make enough to get a buzz. Better pop another beer.
There ya go. The costs for many drugs could plummet if access to manufacture were made more easy.
Most drugs ARE easy to manufacture. That's what the generic manufacturers do for a living. It's hard to design and test them. It's hard to ensure purity. It's hard to crunch through the legal and bureaucratic wastelands that surround design, testing and manufacturing.
The bulk organic chemistry is actually pretty straightforward.
How about if we start by just landing on the damned moon and beaming back pictures? Maybe a Curiosity level probe, but leave the big drills until later. Who knows, maybe the Ganyamedians will come visiting (yes, the reference is to Europa, but the idea is the same).
Really what you describe is the RNA world hypothesis (which you actually mention) - only you substitute some other polymer for RNA.
Breaking this down to first principles, you basically need conditions where ** something ** forms a semi stable polymer and those conditions are stable enough for random chance to allow autocatalysis. That something probably can't be just a metal but isn't necessarily carbon-hydrogen. So there are lots of potential environments for life to occur. How often this actually happens is, of course, subject to much debate.
But given the enormous number of potential types of chemistries, the enormous numbers of different environments and one hell of a lot of time for the molecules to muck about, it seems that life has to have evolved in more than one place and more than one time.
Life is obviously exceedingly adaptable; extremophiles in all kinds of crazy conditions have been discovered. But I don't think anyone suggests that life actually arose in such extreme conditions. You need somewhere more favorable for living organisms to come from, then produce extremophile descendants.
Not necessarily. You might need more time to produce viable life forms under less than ideal circumstances, but if you can support life at all, conditions could have created the life form in the first place. Of course, this is the big question - what parameters are really needed for life to form. Since we are at n=1, we need more data....
Think...
Come on Slashdot. Editing posts is so 20th Century.
Wrong printer analogy. Thing drugs, not guns.
"Without chemicals, life itself would not be possible"
- Monsanto, 1977
Nope, it's much close to what Neil Stephenson describes in the 'Diamond Age' although calling it a 'printer' is a bit disingenuous. It looks like a complicated solid phase chemistry setup. And it only 'prints' four classes of simple molecules.
But it is interesting. It's not your father's organic chemistry any more.
That's OK. Using the same logic, by 2038 the Dow Jones Industrial average should be about 29490859 and the world economy will have increased by a factor of four.
Only idiots, economists and insects use exponential growth over long periods of time.
Things that reach statistical significance are often rather small differences clinically. So unless you clarify exactly what type of significance you are looking at it the effects can be quite small. You see this is 'regular' medicine quite a bit. A drug company will advertise a 'significant difference' between drug x and placebo, but they are looking at one of various statistical tests showing that the effect is real. However, when you look at it in clinical terms, it's perhaps 2-3% better - an effect you would never see in practice. But it's real....
Placebos can be effective in clinical terms - sometimes up to 10 - 20% effect which, although not earth shattering, is on par with many 'regular medicine' treatments. Homeopathy is basically a placebo effect. It's a fairly harmless one - if it is actually water. The caveat being it might prevent the patient from seeking 'real' medical attention in a timely fashion. That can be devastating at times, other times it can actually be useful.
It gets complicated.
If all programs and operating systems were perfect, increasing RAM would help more than faster swap. But things aren't perfect and operating systems like to talk to swap 'just because'.
On my aging Mac Pro with 32 GB RAM I put a 60 GB SSS (left over from a laptop upgrade) in as swap. Seems to make a modest difference with Premiere, After Effects and Vue, especially renders. But it really isn't all that noticeable. Not as noticeable as increasing the RAM. But if you have an extra drive caddy and an extra SSD it's easy to try.
If you want to learn how a manual transmission works, get a junk small motorcycle engine, pull the head off and split the case. All of those fun gears in their oily shininess. For extra bonus points, do this on the kitchen table.
(Worked for me, my mother wouldn't let me near the kitchen for months.....)
Baloney. People who hate on California have never lived here.
We don't need to. We see Californians all of the time, that's enough.
Ever heard of the term "Californication"?
Well, I certainly have been guilty of trashing a few DB-9 plugs in my day.
RS-232 was never my favorite protocol.
Simply amazing that creative individuals, trying to make enough money to survive, modify their creations to fit the wants and needs of their prospective audience.
I'm just totally dumfounded. Next thing you'll tell me is that graphic artists are using computers these days. Maybe somebody should patent that.
Now with modern technology, you don't even have to leave the comfort and security of your basement --
Create an app that:
1) Takes a picture of the user (bonus points against a green screen or monochromatic background)
2) Isolates the selfie from the background
3) Overlays that image on the rear facing camera to aid in composition
4) Takes the pseudo selfie
5) Allows the 'photographer' to adjust various parameters, filters etc so it looks even cheesier.
6) Profit!
If you can make a 3D representation of an object, you can have it made in meatspace using any one of a number of construction technologies - printing, CNC, molding, etc. They key is to have a decent software model that can drive the construction device.
I see this as a sort of game changer for hobbyists / prototypers. Personally, I don't want to babysit a fussy 3D printer which will be out of date in a year. Nor do I want to try and run a sintering printer, complex CNC machine or the like. I would like to upload a file and have the object mailed to me in a couple of days. I see this as analogous to printing photographs. It used to be that you had to buy your own printer, calibrate it, feed it and keep your kids from printing out Disney cartoons using the most expensive liquid on the planet. Now you just upload the data to Snapfish or whomever.
Yes, you can get slightly better results by yourself, if you are willing to take the time and spend the money - but for most people, the quality is quite good enough. And I say that as someone who has an expensive Canon 8 ink printer with expensive Hahnemuhle paper. Once I use up my supply of both of those consumables, I'm out of the printing business.
This is pretty interesting. From a brief perusal of TFA, it seems like the only thing hard to DIY is the special ink and paper - both of which could be manufactured by any company considering commercializing this (the authors made the stuff). The electronics are pretty simple assuming that you can avoid electrocuting yourself on 220V.
I would certainly buy a kit even if I have no practical use for it.
I thought they already had this sort of capability.
You're telling me that there is no red button on the Enterprise bridge? I don't believe it for a second.
Fire Photon torpedoes!
"In this day and age of emergency failsafe backups".
What world do you live in? The day and age I inhabit seems to have had it's operating manual written by some clown named Murphy.
Wouldn't that be 40 km? I thought you people were civilized.
The nuclear power plants will be ACP1000s. There is half a century of experience between the ACP1000 and the BWR-3/4 used in Fukushima Daiichi. And wouldn't you know it, there have been improvements in the meantime!
"Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so."
Douglas Adams
Wrong... (and I think you were trying to be amusing but - ) Facebook and Walmart suffer from from the fact that they are not necessarily a representative sample of the population. Everybody takes a dump and the vast majority of them end up in the sewage system. This technique gives you an excellent and easy to obtain* series of sample.
Furthermore, IF this pans out you have a powerful method for screening for the DNA sequences associated with obesity on a population wide basis. And possibly other diseases with a mixed environmental / genetic basis.
And, IF fecal transplants turn out to be safe and effective you have a potential treatment pathway.
Who would have predicted that the road to the good life of a rich, skinny ski resort inhabitant would basically be a shit sandwich?
* as long as somebody else does it.