You should read the NASA report on building a space elevator.
I did. With something like a space elevator, where the thing breaking could have catastrophic consequences, you can bet that the first cable is going to be larger than the one in the NASA study. Especially if the people (and their families) designing and managing the project are made to live in the path of the most probable destruction should something fail.
Cheap lifting capability will still be a major benefit in the construction of a space elevator.
I do wonder what the cost of the nanotubes will be. If we can get biologicals to grow them and splice them together, it will knock down the cost. On the other hand, you can bet whoever gets the patent on those little tricks will be charging as much as the market can bear - which would probably be a lot.
the universe is pretty big (156 billion light years across, to be more precise)
It's worth pointing out that the156 billion lyrs number is a minimum size for the universe. There's nothing in the data that tells us it's only this large.
It also doesn't tell us anything about the shape of the universe. Recent studies of the microwave background have proposed that the universe has a soccer ball or even a Picard (no relation to the TV character) shape. Neither of these have been ruled out, but the minimum size for either of these shapes in our region of space would be 156 billion lyrs.
This new result doesn't even tell us if there is a boundary (no, don't ask me what happens at the edge, I don't know) or if the universe "wraps" like the Asteroids game.
Space elevators require an enormous mass of carbon (all those kilometers-long nanotubes to make cable out to geosynchronous orbit) plus who knows what else (monitoring equipment, micrometeorite insulation, solar panels, counterweight beyond geosynchronous orbit (although maybe you'd want more cable), etc.
So if you ever want a space elevator, you're going to need some cheap way to build it in the first place. For you non-nerds out there - building a space elevator ground-up won't work. You have to build it in orbit and lower the cable down.
The reason I thought it was rhetorical was because the blood levels were non-zero, after doing the math.
They were non-zero prior to the consumption of aspartame and (except in the case of a phenylketonuric) the consumption of aspartame does not significantly change the baseline levels - even after an extreme consumption. The values seen are within normal physiological variation and well within those caused by other normal foods.
Clearly, you completely missed the point, which is that there's not enough of a change in the blood levels of phenylalanine to cause any effect that would not normally be seen without the consumption of aspartame.
Your statement is incorrect. As one example, please see paragrph 3:
NAMI reference on Lithium Carbonate and its use in the treatment of schizophrenia
That's an article for laypeople. What they are actually talking about are the situations where schizophrenia and bipolar disorder exist concomitantly. They are two separate illnesses caused by two separate biochemical mechanisms. Lithium acts because of a defect in a membrane sodium ion channel. Schizophrenia is a collection of illnesses caused by problems with dopamine in the brain - problems that are unrelated to the sodium ion channel involved in bipolar disorder. Now, if some poor sap happens to have both go wrong...I feel sorry for them, and yes, they get lithium, but so would someone with antisocial personality disorder and bipolar. It doesn't mean ASPD is treated with lithium.
If aspartame interfered with lithium (as you claim) the major comment would be that aspartame screws up those being medicated for bipolar disorder. Given that the effective dose of lithium is fairly near a toxic dose, it would be almost impossible to increase the medication (as you claim was done).
With both schizophrenic and bipolar patients, the major problem with medicating the patients is simply getting them to take their medicines reliably. Aspartame consumption is not known to be a problem. My wife began working as a psychologist in 1990. She's worked in emergency psychiatric intake as well as clinical practice during that time. At no time was the consumption of aspartame a problem. Given that aspartame is far more common today than back in 1984, and that you are relaying second-hand information.
Having taught medical professionals how to deal with psychiatric emergencies (from 1987-1996), I also would have come across something like this. My specialty were oddball problems - neuroleptic malignant syndrome, consumption of fermentation products by MAOI patients, etc. I used to search the literature and pick the brains of the psychiatrists, looking for "fasicnomas," which (because they are unusual and thus easily remembered) make it easier to get students to remember the basics.
Aspartame never came up.
I just checked with Poison Control and the on-duty House Officer at the DEC (emergency psych intake facility). Both denied that there was any problem with aspartame and neuroleptic medications.
Call the local psych and poison control facilities in your home town. Pardon me for not listing the numbers of the folks I just called - neither Poison Control nor the DEC are there for public "question and answers." I get away with it because I have friends in both places. I'd like to have them stay friends, which I suspect they wouldn't if they got slashdotted.
I suppose that there could be some giant conspiracy by the makers of aspartame and the pharmaceutical industry to cover up what you claim is an obvious and extreme reaction to aspartame by those on neuroleptics and/or lithium. But frankly, that sounds like something a paranoid schizophrenic would say.
258 journal articles and you haven't read one. It also appears you didn't read my own message, either.
You can't do even the simplest math that would show that phenylalanine levels don't change significantly with aspartame.
Try doing a PubMed search on aspartame and blood levels of phenylalanine. Then actually read the articles instead of their titles.
You have in no way addressed the fact that
a) there's no indication in the literature that aspartame interferes with schizophrenic medications,
b) there's no warning on the medications that aspartame interferes with schizophrenic medications
c) lithium isn't used as an anti-schizophrenic medication (as you claimed)
d) your anecdotal evidence doesn't even make sense.
There's so many misunderstandings on your part that trying to teach you about them would wind up giving you a graduate level biochemistry course or two.
Believe what you want. I don't have the time nor the inclination to educate you.
So the distance between the lens and R is very short in comparison with the distance rom the laser and the lens, thus compensating for my parenthetical statement above. Was this what you had in mind? That might work.
You're correct. Sorry for not being so clear.
I'm thinking of using the large fresnel lense to concentrate the light received. Laser light is parallel in an approximation. Longer, more expensive lasers are better, short cheap ones far less. (Guess which ones I use - here's a clue - they have small lenses to help focus the laser light!) But no matter what, laser light eventually diverges. Hence a lense can be valuable.
When you bounce the laser light off a cloud, the beam diverges pretty rapidly. No surprise there.
If you want to bounce a laser off the corner reflectors on the moon left by the Apollo astronauts, this is a significant problem. Divergence can be so bad that the laser light scattered back by the lunar surface can overwhelm the signal of the light bounced back from the corner reflectors.
...as long as you keep a careful eye on the clouds, because if they suddenly disperse, you'll be focussing daylight on your receiver...
To keep down the S/N ratio, most long-range laser comm experiments are done at night. I suppose safety is another good reason for working after the sun goes down!
Reading the medical literature is one thing. Understanding it is apparently something else.
A list of journal articles proves nothing, especially when the most recent article is almost two decades ago.
I'm not sure where to begin. Let's start with the basics, using a simplified model of the human body you could do with a spreadsheet. Take 250 cc of the pourable Nutrasweet. How much phenylalanine, asparagine, and methanol does that represent (in moles)? How long does it take to break down after ingestion? Assuming a simple 7 compartment model of the body, what percentage increase in blood values would that represent, assuming a non-phenylketonuric 70 kg patient?
(This is why I suggested the spreadsheet. The laplace transforms suck big time for a seven-compartment model. Runge-Kutta the diffeqs and you'll get an answer that will be within about 5% - good enough for jazz and Internet arguments on a Friday night. Imagine the bad old days when you had to write these models in Fortran and run them on a PDP-11. Trust me, it sucked.)
What is the effect of the blood-brain barrier on the concentration that the brain sees? What percentage would actually reach brain cells?
Note that we haven't even considered the active metabolism of these components that would decrease the blood concentration.
Now, compare this to a normal serving of asparagus or, say, flour (for fun, consider the health-food low-fat soya flour for a real shock). With the spreadsheet set up, it's easy to compare.
Finally, figure out how to get someone to ingest a 250 cc bolus of pourable Nutrasweet without resorting to a feeding tube or IV. Even I couldn't gag down that much in one sitting, let alone in a coffee slurry. Besides, I prefer Splenda in my coffee.
Do you see the problem? The blood values are trivial compared to normal, everyday foods. If the effect of aspartame were real, other common foods (even those considered health foods) would cause far more problems - but that simply isn't observed. Look at the blood values used and compare them to the mouse model. The ranges in the mouse model can occur in someone with an inborn error of metabolism like PKU, but not in a human under fairly unreasonable conditions. Overdosing makes a sort of sense when you're looking for rare cancers. If you're trying to find out enzyme inhibition in the brain, it makes no sense. Michaelis-Menten curves aren't just for breakfast any more. (No, that's not word salad, it's word play.)
My spouse/psychologist pointed out to me that no connection is seen clinically between schizophrenic medication failure and aspartame use. Her clinical experience began long after Tab was on the market. Just to make sure I wasn't missing something, I checked, and no, there's no connection between bipolar medication failure and aspartame use, either. Nowhere in the literature for any of the common shitnizines (slang psych term for antipsychotics like thorazine, etc.) is there a caution about the use of aspartame. The atypical antipsychotics also have no such warning. Between death and diabetes, the atypicals have their own problems, but interactions with aspartame isn't one of them.
It's always nice when clinical experience confirms what the theoretical number-crunching says.
The aspartame debate has been beaten to death elsewhere (3 July 1999 Lancet, among others) - with references in the last decade, even!
My feelings on the matter are best summarized here in a reply to Rich Murray's anti-aspartame screed. I am rather partial to one of the replies. Rarely does someone miss the point quite so badly.
Besides destorying things, these fresnel lenses cand be used for all sorts of constructive fun.
A perfect example is a laser communication system. A laser beam can be modulated and used to transmit audio. The receiver needs to collect as many photons as possible from the laser transmitter - hence the use of the fresnel lense. Signals can be bounced off clouds - I've heard of transmissions going over 60 miles!
Avoid aspartame (Nutrasweet) if you are schitzophrenic[sic]. It bonds to the N-Dopamine receptors, and makes medications which moderate N-Dopamine uptake, like the Lithium salts normally used to treat conditions like schitzophrenia, less effective.
Aspartame has no effect on the dopamine receptors. It breaks down rapidly in the body into two common amino acids, and those amino acids do not rise above physiologically normal levels. This is just another one of the nonsense uban legends about aspartame.
Lithium is not "normally used to treat conditions like" schizophrenia. It's used to treat bipolar disorders - something completely different. If your doctor can't tell the difference between schizophrenia and the manic phase of a bipolar disorder....
My mother was a psychiatric social worker who dealt with the chronically mentally ill at around the time "Tab" came out.
Tab never had aspartame in it. Tab was sweetened with saccharin. Saccharin doesn't interfere with dopamine reactions, either.
Heck, even MAOIs don't interact with aspartame and saccharin.
(Remember, it's not nice to invite your Parnate or Nardil patients to a "Wine and Cheese" or "Beer and Pizza" party. Can you say "The patient's diastolic was over 300 mm Hg before he died?" I knew you could!)
I'm sorry, but the post I am replying to pretty much demonstrates why asking for psych info on slashdot ain't a good idea.
There's a recent SciAm article on schizophrenia that gives a good overview of the current state of treatment for this illness. The current state of treatment (as the article points out) leaves a lot to be desired.
There is a tremendous amount of stress placed upon the family of schizophrenic patients - by the patients, the medical community, and society in general. I've had three friends with this illness - one died in jail, one homeless and untreated by his own choice, and one has a wonderful life, family and career. Outcomes can vary widely.
Anyone with a schizophrenic family member should seek support -- from friends, family and social groups as well as professional counselling. At the least, this will help the family member deal with the stress of the situation and learn how to deal with the ill family member.
I, too, would like to extend my prayers for you and your family, for whatever it's worth to you - whether as something that is effective or simply an expression of concern from one human being to others in a difficult situation.
Slashdot Mirror
I did. With something like a space elevator, where the thing breaking could have catastrophic consequences, you can bet that the first cable is going to be larger than the one in the NASA study. Especially if the people (and their families) designing and managing the project are made to live in the path of the most probable destruction should something fail.
Cheap lifting capability will still be a major benefit in the construction of a space elevator.
I do wonder what the cost of the nanotubes will be. If we can get biologicals to grow them and splice them together, it will knock down the cost. On the other hand, you can bet whoever gets the patent on those little tricks will be charging as much as the market can bear - which would probably be a lot.
It's worth pointing out that the156 billion lyrs number is a minimum size for the universe. There's nothing in the data that tells us it's only this large.
It also doesn't tell us anything about the shape of the universe. Recent studies of the microwave background have proposed that the universe has a soccer ball or even a Picard (no relation to the TV character) shape. Neither of these have been ruled out, but the minimum size for either of these shapes in our region of space would be 156 billion lyrs. This new result doesn't even tell us if there is a boundary (no, don't ask me what happens at the edge, I don't know) or if the universe "wraps" like the Asteroids game.
Space elevators require an enormous mass of carbon (all those kilometers-long nanotubes to make cable out to geosynchronous orbit) plus who knows what else (monitoring equipment, micrometeorite insulation, solar panels, counterweight beyond geosynchronous orbit (although maybe you'd want more cable), etc.
So if you ever want a space elevator, you're going to need some cheap way to build it in the first place. For you non-nerds out there - building a space elevator ground-up won't work. You have to build it in orbit and lower the cable down.
They were non-zero prior to the consumption of aspartame and (except in the case of a phenylketonuric) the consumption of aspartame does not significantly change the baseline levels - even after an extreme consumption. The values seen are within normal physiological variation and well within those caused by other normal foods.
Clearly, you completely missed the point, which is that there's not enough of a change in the blood levels of phenylalanine to cause any effect that would not normally be seen without the consumption of aspartame.
Your statement is incorrect. As one example, please see paragrph 3: NAMI reference on Lithium Carbonate and its use in the treatment of schizophrenia
That's an article for laypeople. What they are actually talking about are the situations where schizophrenia and bipolar disorder exist concomitantly. They are two separate illnesses caused by two separate biochemical mechanisms. Lithium acts because of a defect in a membrane sodium ion channel. Schizophrenia is a collection of illnesses caused by problems with dopamine in the brain - problems that are unrelated to the sodium ion channel involved in bipolar disorder. Now, if some poor sap happens to have both go wrong...I feel sorry for them, and yes, they get lithium, but so would someone with antisocial personality disorder and bipolar. It doesn't mean ASPD is treated with lithium.
If aspartame interfered with lithium (as you claim) the major comment would be that aspartame screws up those being medicated for bipolar disorder. Given that the effective dose of lithium is fairly near a toxic dose, it would be almost impossible to increase the medication (as you claim was done).
With both schizophrenic and bipolar patients, the major problem with medicating the patients is simply getting them to take their medicines reliably. Aspartame consumption is not known to be a problem. My wife began working as a psychologist in 1990. She's worked in emergency psychiatric intake as well as clinical practice during that time. At no time was the consumption of aspartame a problem. Given that aspartame is far more common today than back in 1984, and that you are relaying second-hand information.
Having taught medical professionals how to deal with psychiatric emergencies (from 1987-1996), I also would have come across something like this. My specialty were oddball problems - neuroleptic malignant syndrome, consumption of fermentation products by MAOI patients, etc. I used to search the literature and pick the brains of the psychiatrists, looking for "fasicnomas," which (because they are unusual and thus easily remembered) make it easier to get students to remember the basics.
Aspartame never came up.
I just checked with Poison Control and the on-duty House Officer at the DEC (emergency psych intake facility). Both denied that there was any problem with aspartame and neuroleptic medications.
Call the local psych and poison control facilities in your home town. Pardon me for not listing the numbers of the folks I just called - neither Poison Control nor the DEC are there for public "question and answers." I get away with it because I have friends in both places. I'd like to have them stay friends, which I suspect they wouldn't if they got slashdotted.
I suppose that there could be some giant conspiracy by the makers of aspartame and the pharmaceutical industry to cover up what you claim is an obvious and extreme reaction to aspartame by those on neuroleptics and/or lithium. But frankly, that sounds like something a paranoid schizophrenic would say.
I'm out of here.
You can't do even the simplest math that would show that phenylalanine levels don't change significantly with aspartame.
Try doing a PubMed search on aspartame and blood levels of phenylalanine. Then actually read the articles instead of their titles.
You have in no way addressed the fact that
a) there's no indication in the literature that aspartame interferes with schizophrenic medications,
b) there's no warning on the medications that aspartame interferes with schizophrenic medications
c) lithium isn't used as an anti-schizophrenic medication (as you claimed)
d) your anecdotal evidence doesn't even make sense.
There's so many misunderstandings on your part that trying to teach you about them would wind up giving you a graduate level biochemistry course or two.
Believe what you want. I don't have the time nor the inclination to educate you.
Of course, a movie-inspired video game will be produced....
You're correct. Sorry for not being so clear.
I'm thinking of using the large fresnel lense to concentrate the light received. Laser light is parallel in an approximation. Longer, more expensive lasers are better, short cheap ones far less. (Guess which ones I use - here's a clue - they have small lenses to help focus the laser light!) But no matter what, laser light eventually diverges. Hence a lense can be valuable.
When you bounce the laser light off a cloud, the beam diverges pretty rapidly. No surprise there.
If you want to bounce a laser off the corner reflectors on the moon left by the Apollo astronauts, this is a significant problem. Divergence can be so bad that the laser light scattered back by the lunar surface can overwhelm the signal of the light bounced back from the corner reflectors.
To keep down the S/N ratio, most long-range laser comm experiments are done at night. I suppose safety is another good reason for working after the sun goes down!
Reading the medical literature is one thing. Understanding it is apparently something else.
A list of journal articles proves nothing, especially when the most recent article is almost two decades ago. I'm not sure where to begin. Let's start with the basics, using a simplified model of the human body you could do with a spreadsheet. Take 250 cc of the pourable Nutrasweet. How much phenylalanine, asparagine, and methanol does that represent (in moles)? How long does it take to break down after ingestion? Assuming a simple 7 compartment model of the body, what percentage increase in blood values would that represent, assuming a non-phenylketonuric 70 kg patient?
(This is why I suggested the spreadsheet. The laplace transforms suck big time for a seven-compartment model. Runge-Kutta the diffeqs and you'll get an answer that will be within about 5% - good enough for jazz and Internet arguments on a Friday night. Imagine the bad old days when you had to write these models in Fortran and run them on a PDP-11. Trust me, it sucked.)
What is the effect of the blood-brain barrier on the concentration that the brain sees? What percentage would actually reach brain cells?
Note that we haven't even considered the active metabolism of these components that would decrease the blood concentration.
Now, compare this to a normal serving of asparagus or, say, flour (for fun, consider the health-food low-fat soya flour for a real shock). With the spreadsheet set up, it's easy to compare.
Finally, figure out how to get someone to ingest a 250 cc bolus of pourable Nutrasweet without resorting to a feeding tube or IV. Even I couldn't gag down that much in one sitting, let alone in a coffee slurry. Besides, I prefer Splenda in my coffee.
Do you see the problem? The blood values are trivial compared to normal, everyday foods. If the effect of aspartame were real, other common foods (even those considered health foods) would cause far more problems - but that simply isn't observed. Look at the blood values used and compare them to the mouse model. The ranges in the mouse model can occur in someone with an inborn error of metabolism like PKU, but not in a human under fairly unreasonable conditions. Overdosing makes a sort of sense when you're looking for rare cancers. If you're trying to find out enzyme inhibition in the brain, it makes no sense. Michaelis-Menten curves aren't just for breakfast any more. (No, that's not word salad, it's word play.)
My spouse/psychologist pointed out to me that no connection is seen clinically between schizophrenic medication failure and aspartame use. Her clinical experience began long after Tab was on the market. Just to make sure I wasn't missing something, I checked, and no, there's no connection between bipolar medication failure and aspartame use, either. Nowhere in the literature for any of the common shitnizines (slang psych term for antipsychotics like thorazine, etc.) is there a caution about the use of aspartame. The atypical antipsychotics also have no such warning. Between death and diabetes, the atypicals have their own problems, but interactions with aspartame isn't one of them.
It's always nice when clinical experience confirms what the theoretical number-crunching says.
The aspartame debate has been beaten to death elsewhere (3 July 1999 Lancet, among others) - with references in the last decade, even!
My feelings on the matter are best summarized here in a reply to Rich Murray's anti-aspartame screed. I am rather partial to one of the replies. Rarely does someone miss the point quite so badly.
A perfect example is a laser communication system. A laser beam can be modulated and used to transmit audio. The receiver needs to collect as many photons as possible from the laser transmitter - hence the use of the fresnel lense. Signals can be bounced off clouds - I've heard of transmissions going over 60 miles!
The Amatuer Radio Laser Communications Page has a good primer that has a link to a lot of the basics. And no, you don't need a ham license - although it helps!
Aspartame has no effect on the dopamine receptors. It breaks down rapidly in the body into two common amino acids, and those amino acids do not rise above physiologically normal levels. This is just another one of the nonsense uban legends about aspartame.
Lithium is not "normally used to treat conditions like" schizophrenia. It's used to treat bipolar disorders - something completely different. If your doctor can't tell the difference between schizophrenia and the manic phase of a bipolar disorder....
My mother was a psychiatric social worker who dealt with the chronically mentally ill at around the time "Tab" came out.
Tab never had aspartame in it. Tab was sweetened with saccharin. Saccharin doesn't interfere with dopamine reactions, either.
Heck, even MAOIs don't interact with aspartame and saccharin.
(Remember, it's not nice to invite your Parnate or Nardil patients to a "Wine and Cheese" or "Beer and Pizza" party. Can you say "The patient's diastolic was over 300 mm Hg before he died?" I knew you could!)
I'm sorry, but the post I am replying to pretty much demonstrates why asking for psych info on slashdot ain't a good idea.
There is a tremendous amount of stress placed upon the family of schizophrenic patients - by the patients, the medical community, and society in general. I've had three friends with this illness - one died in jail, one homeless and untreated by his own choice, and one has a wonderful life, family and career. Outcomes can vary widely.
Anyone with a schizophrenic family member should seek support -- from friends, family and social groups as well as professional counselling. At the least, this will help the family member deal with the stress of the situation and learn how to deal with the ill family member.
I, too, would like to extend my prayers for you and your family, for whatever it's worth to you - whether as something that is effective or simply an expression of concern from one human being to others in a difficult situation.