Perhaps from an engineers perspective this makes sense. But heat isn't some universal currency passed between materials; it's an expression of energy contained in the degrees of freedom of a given material. So no, the submerged portion of the heating element is not perfectly coupled to the water. It is producing radiation at frequencies that do not have corresponding water modes.
Firstly, you mean corresponding far-field radiative water modes. However the coupling is by near-field photons, which are rather promiscuous in the modes they will interact with.
Secondly, water has both a high density and intensity of modes in the 0-100 deg. C blackbody radiation range. This is why water is the greatest greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, to the extent that cloudy nights feel noticeably warmer than cloudless ones. It is also why eye injuries from heat radiation take the form of corneal rather than retinal burns.
The best way to think of it is take a standard good quality camera with big pixels, subdivide each pixel into a grid of 12x12 or so tiny pixels - more like the size of pixels in cell phone cameras - and put a microlens over it. You get... roughly the same noise characteristics,...
The space between the pixels tends to be hard to shrink, so as you add pixels an ever-increasing fraction of the image sensor tends to become dead zones. Using Foveon-style stacked detectors instead of a filter mosaic would, of course, help quite a bit.
A question: can you refocus colors independently to correct chromatic abberation of the lens?
... the rotation of an axially symmetric mass distribution should not have anything to do with its gravitational field. General relatitivity does not agree with Newtonian mechanics here,...
However, Newtonian gravity plus special relativity does predict a gravitational analogue of magnetism. The parts of the rotating bodies moving at higher relative velocity experience more relative length contraction, thus appearing to be denser masses.
Francisella tularensis, the cause of tularemia (rabbit fever), is Not Good when inhaled. This was discovered by some poor bastards who ran over an infected rabbit with a lawnmower and inhaled the resulting infected rabbit fog. Fortunately it does not normally spread in this fashion.
The way in which the atmospheric cycles have operated for the last 2 billion years or so-- long stable periods followed by slowly increasing, then sudden and dramtic shifts-- suggest not that climate is some preplanned externally determined thing, caused by the hand of God moving a knob on a thermostat somewhere.
He's really old and his hand shakes, you insensitive clod!
Even on modern systems, you need to enable DMA for these sorts of devices to get acceptable performance, and the Singularity model seems like it will preclude this.
In theory at least, an IOMMU can protect system memory from DMA-capable peripherals under the control of hostile code. I don't know if any existing machines have a good enough IOMMU, though.
Old, used technical equipment tends to still be worth a lot of money. Sure, the really bleeding edge stuff might lose 85% off its original cost, but that's still a big pile of money when it started out at $10M for the whole building. In fact, there's an entire industry based on reselling used technical equipment. (See the ads on this web search for example.)
It isn't a building code or age issue. Retrofitting sprinklers pays for itself rapidly in reduced insurance premiums, particularly with a building full of ultra-expensive equipment (wafer steppers and related fab equipment) and dangerous gas canisters (arsine, elemental fluorine).
And the point of sprinklers is to prevent a fire from becoming devastating in the first place, by limiting the wide-area temperature to the boiling point of water. One notable case where they don't work is with metals like magnesium and aluminum, for which water is an oxidizer.
If I own your machine, is it hard for me to install drivers back? Is it hard for me to hide the fact of installation? Is it hard for me to access hardware directly if I'm really after you? This is a good example of advice giving false sense of security.
Don't be silly. There are no certainties in security, just probabilities. Every obstacle you add filters out a few more bad guys who don't have sufficient time and skill to overcome that obstacle, thus reducing the probability of compromise.
That hurts, guys. It really does. My tax dollars paid for them, my sweat and tears makes them run, and the gov't just hauls them outside and crushes them...
You think that's tough, what about the guys who sell cruise missiles to the government?
While some of the linked articles note many similarities between plague and AIDS in the methods they use to attack the body, there is one key difference between the two. AIDS is viral, plague is bacterial. As a result, plague can be treated easily with modern antibiotics.
You can easily turn off HIV with a drug too (although there are problems getting the current drugs into the brain). When you turn off most parasites, including viruses, they gradually fall to pieces and die, if the immune system doesn't nuke them first. The key difference is that HIV is not just an ordinary virus, it is a retrovirus: once it is established in a cell, it stashes its genes in the host's DNA. Unfortunately cells have no good way to detect or remove foreign DNA, so HIV will come out of hiding as soon as the drug stops.
So far, the art of modifying a person's genetic makeup is in its infancy. (In face, I'm not sure if it has ever even been done yet...
It's trivial, and has been done a number of times. Unfortunately we don't yet have good tools for saying where to modify the DNA, so the victims, er, patients get cancer apallingly often due to important regulatory genes being mucked up.
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
I think this can only increase the market...?
What Google is doing destroys the value of licensing a book to a commercial search service. For example, a publisher could give an exclusive full-text search license to Amazon, who could then use their "customers who purchased this also purchased..." to increase sales of the publisher's other titles.
Remember, the whole point of book copyright is control. The author doesn't just get a certain number of pennies for each copy, he gets exclusivity, which is much more useful for building a self-sustaining business. We can argue whether it should be that way, but right now that's what the law says.
And the control cuts both ways. If a publisher tries to sneak cigarette advertisements into a novel against the author's will, the copyright holder can haul them into court and get major financial damages. (This example is not theoretical. Some sleazeball publishers actually did this to, IIRC, Harlan Ellison. And then probably wished they hadn't.)
Since the theoretical separation I described didn't even hint at measurables you would go and do an experiment on, this is not an econometric model. I know, I know, you were just being careless, so it's "no big deal" but it betrays a poor underlying understanding of the issues, and I wanted to help you get it right.
Huh? Your gun-to-the-head test is both trivial to perform and provides a readily-measurable result.
First of all, it doesn't make any good-bad distinction; that's a value judgment, which I specifically warned against using and avoided using in the analysis.
Which is one reason it is meaningless, as I pointed out in great detail. People are hard-wired to seek certain states and avoid others; certain value judgements are built in.
Second, you don't even explain how they imply what you say they imply about costs, or even what a cognitive cost is. (Sounds like a buzzword you probably wouldn't be able to define if asked.)
A cost paid with the coin of thinking, obviously. For a given set of cognitive tasks, a given person can only complete them so fast. The presence of a condition with a high cognitive cost reduces the amount of cognition available for general purpose use, and general cognition (the so called g-factor) is the single most important determinant of personal economic productivity.
Third, in no way does the model contradict the idea of varying traits among the population; it fact, it affirms it. If you have a reason why it would contradict, you didn't give it,...
It ignores the spectrum of variation, saying a mental trait is either 100% unchangeable constraint and 0% changeable preference, or vice versa. But here in the real world, each trait has both fixed and variable components. For example, you claim that "No matter what you want, you can't will yourself to stop sneezing..." which is simply false. I have sometimes made myself not sneeze despite the drive to do it; it takes a great deal of concentration and willpower, leaving less cognition for other tasks.
For example, what is your psychopath example supposed to prove? It affirmed my post. The "psychopath" has different preferences than you would like.
I was dispassionate regarding the psychopath's preferences. My point was that his preferences are highly decoupled from his decisions. He consistently does things that hurt himself, generally in spectacular call-the-cops lock-up-your-daughters fashion. If you ask him, he can tell you articulately why he is suffering and how he has hurt others, and how much he would like it to end. Blood tests (of things like cortisol and adrenaline) would show the distress is real. Yet he is helpless to have his preferences inform his decisions.
He passes the gun-to-the-head just, just like my post would expect him too.
You utterly miss the point. A "pass" is postulated to show that preferences cause decisions, and by extension outcomes. However a psychopath will pass even though his preferences are in general poorly coupled to decisions, and cause outcomes that he despises.
I stand corrected, to my surprise. I always assumed that when astronomers talked confidently about galactic rotation curves, they were actually talking about galaxies. Silly me. Sure, stellar winds ought to couple pretty strongly to the interstellar medium and drag it along with the stars, but that is not the same thing as measuring the stars. Magic pixies dragging the gas around are not much more preposterous than invisible gravity pixies.
Preferences are what you want, in the order you want them; constraints are anything that stops you from getting what you really want.
Like many econometric models, this is pretty terrible. It essentially says that the cognitive cost of "preferences" is identically zero, while the cognitive cost of "constraints" is more than is available to spend (infinity). This is unrealistic, since any given mental characteristic in a large population varies smoothly over wide range. An arbitrary good-bad threshold is just that: arbitrary.
To understand the difference, you can apply the "gun-to-the-head" test. Ask: if you pointed a gun at the person and credibly told him you would kill him if he didn't stop, and he still couldn't, it's a constraint. If he could, it's a preference.
Consider four hypothetical people with Tourette's syndrome. The first experiences a few tics (involuntary actions) per week. The second can suppress their tics for hours while solving advanced calculus problems at the same time. The third can only suppress their tics for 30 seconds at a stretch, and requires total concentration to achieve even that. The fourth cannot suppress their tics at all.
These differences have major economic implications. However not only can the "gun-to-the-head" test not find them, the inquisitor can get any answer by manipulating their threshold.
ADD doesn't need constraints to explain it: the person just has a high preference for variety and a low preference for monotony.
Not true. Some ADDers are agnostic regarding variety but are highly distracted by it. Distraction, unfortunately, tends to create even more variety, in a vicious circle. This is a common maladaptive pattern in mental disorders.
Mental illnesses are generally not constraints, but preferences.
Then what of psychopaths? They usually appear normal most of the time. In fact, they are likely to pass most "gun-to-the-head" tests better than the average person, due to their boldness and fearlessness. Yet they are deeply abnormal, as they cannot reliably connect actions with suffering. As a result they tend to periodically drift more and more off course until an outlandish meltdown occurs, something like selling a company car and investing the proceeds in vintage dirty magazines. The resulting outrage and unpleasantness is so extreme that they figure out something is wrong and they need to be more careful, but they never really know why, and gradually drift back off course to the next meltdown. Yet they generally have sufficient understanding to know that being shot in the head is Really Bad, and can hold that thought together for a few seconds, so they pass your test.
No, the "anxiety" label is a moral judgment. Anxiety is "bad", so it must be attributable to something physiological; no rational person would think that way, right?
What garbage. In higher vertebrates, physical stress reliably causes objective changes mediated by the sympathetic nervous system: faster heart rate, increased level of consciousness, various cognitive changes, dilated pupils, contracted peripheral capillaries, reduced digestion, changes in circulating blood volume and therefore pressure, and so forth. When an animal has learned something that predicts stress, exposure to the predictor can cause the changes; in humans this is accompanied by a characteristic sensation called anxiety. Drugs that reduce the learned stress response in animals generally reduce anxiety in humans. Likewise, human anti-anxiety drugs generally reduce the learned stress response in animals. This is all Psychology 101 stuff, and trivially measurable with basic instruments. Get a blood pressure monitor and measure the increase after somebody randomly sticks you with a pin.
The stress response is itself noxious in humans. Most people do not like a racing heart or the inabili
As someone who has experienced and recovered from a psychosomatic disorder (in my case what I thought was "repetitive strain injury"), I tend to agree that sometimes its better that patient doesn't know about physical evidence.
I've experienced it from the other side: bizarre perceived symptoms that turned out to have a real cause. Random aches and pains, indigestion and cramping, mood changes, general feeling of illness, and so forth. (Naturally resulting in an impressive medical diagnostic work-up.) The doctors nearly had me convinced it was somatization, but luckily I started seeing flashing lights and an ophthalmologist helped me figure out it was migraine with minimal headache. Even then it took me weeks to work up the courage to go back to my doctor, on account of the somatization diagnosis.
They will start to think it is a chronic problem that won't go away, and they just have to live with it, which just leads to using medicine to alleviate the symptoms, rather that going after cause. Maybe it actually is something physically/chemically wrong (an idea I'm very skeptical about after my own experiences),...
I am considerably less skeptical. Research suggests that the noxious sensations of migraine (particularly pain) act upon the pain receiver in the brain to make it more sensitive. In this case, the symptom and the disease process are the same thing, and both arise from a runaway positive feedback loop. To me it seems that anxiety is very similar: distress can make a person more sensitive to detecting additional distress.
Some migraineurs can discover things that trigger the runaway pain process and avoid them (he writes while sitting in a dark room, wearing sunglasses, with his monitor's refresh rate set to 103 Hz). However, they still have a lower threshold than normal people, and spending your life "thinking on eggshells" is less than fun. I think it is reasonable to use a drug to dial down the brain's sensitivity-dependent-sensitivity.
In my studied opinion it is far better for the chemical/physical causes of mental illness to be hidden safely away from the subject.
Mental diagnosis and treatment are currently very limited. However it does not follow that because voodoo is the best you have to offer, patients ought to be ignorant.
The patient should understand that their problem stems from within themselves, not from generations of malignant genes.
Several facts speak against that position:
Researchers are closing in on alleles that directly cause migraine, a disorder that is a kissing cousin of bipolar disorder and associated fluctuating affective disorders. I predict that genetic causes will be found for this spectrum of disorders, and that specific drugs will follow. (I have a personal interest here. For most of my life I had migraine with the mood disturbances that commonly accompany it, but with minimal to no headache. Finally at the age of 30 I started seeing flashing lights and an ophthalmologist diagnosed me properly. I was not, in fact, lazy, depressed, or a hypochondriac. I suspect there are many others on the epilepsy/migraine/bipolar spectrum in this same boat. We need objective tests and good drugs.)
Twin studies have shown that much mental illness (esp. schizophrenia) can be caused by heritable biochemical factors.
Research has shown that numerous parasites reprogram the minds of their hosts, and it frequently takes the form of spectacular and suicidal behavior. Due to lack of volunteers this has not been clearly demonstrated in humans, but it is a virtual certainty that humans are affected. (For further reading look up the common mammalian parasite toxoplasma gondii.)
The PANDAS (pediatric autoimmune neuropsychiatric disorders associated with streptococcus) hypothesis, that strep infections can trigger production of autoantibodies against important CNS proteins, is supported by very suggestive evidence. Even if it doesn't pan out, it would be shocking if there were no diseases of this type, with bizarre yet highly-stereotyped symptoms.
This places the burden and yoke of recovery squarely on their shoulders, where it belongs.
Many mental disorders are no more under conscious control than migraine is. It wasn't cognitive-behavioral therapy or a fad for personal responsibility that emptied the insane asylums. It was chlorpromazine and the serotonergic drugs, which were discovered by accident and not by psychiatry.
the cited velocity measurements look at the interstellar gas, while the stars, with most of the galactic mass, might orbit at a very different speed
I was under the impression that the rotation curves were measured using Doppler spectrometry of the emission lines of stars, and thus measure the stars themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
Secondly, water has both a high density and intensity of modes in the 0-100 deg. C blackbody radiation range. This is why water is the greatest greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, to the extent that cloudy nights feel noticeably warmer than cloudless ones. It is also why eye injuries from heat radiation take the form of corneal rather than retinal burns.
I stand corrected. Good idea.
A question: can you refocus colors independently to correct chromatic abberation of the lens?
Yeah, kilolenses (kl). Yippee.
Francisella tularensis, the cause of tularemia (rabbit fever), is Not Good when inhaled. This was discovered by some poor bastards who ran over an infected rabbit with a lawnmower and inhaled the resulting infected rabbit fog. Fortunately it does not normally spread in this fashion.
Old, used technical equipment tends to still be worth a lot of money. Sure, the really bleeding edge stuff might lose 85% off its original cost, but that's still a big pile of money when it started out at $10M for the whole building. In fact, there's an entire industry based on reselling used technical equipment. (See the ads on this web search for example.)
And the point of sprinklers is to prevent a fire from becoming devastating in the first place, by limiting the wide-area temperature to the boiling point of water. One notable case where they don't work is with metals like magnesium and aluminum, for which water is an oxidizer.
Hmmm... Google's cache of http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/admissions/pg/history.p hp (the original page being gone forever) says the Mountbatten building was finished in 1991.
What about the building's fire sprinkler system? Why did it fail? Or why didn't it have one?
Dammit Jim, I'm a doctor, not a robot driver!
Remember, the whole point of book copyright is control. The author doesn't just get a certain number of pennies for each copy, he gets exclusivity, which is much more useful for building a self-sustaining business. We can argue whether it should be that way, but right now that's what the law says.
And the control cuts both ways. If a publisher tries to sneak cigarette advertisements into a novel against the author's will, the copyright holder can haul them into court and get major financial damages. (This example is not theoretical. Some sleazeball publishers actually did this to, IIRC, Harlan Ellison. And then probably wished they hadn't.)
I stand corrected, to my surprise. I always assumed that when astronomers talked confidently about galactic rotation curves, they were actually talking about galaxies. Silly me. Sure, stellar winds ought to couple pretty strongly to the interstellar medium and drag it along with the stars, but that is not the same thing as measuring the stars. Magic pixies dragging the gas around are not much more preposterous than invisible gravity pixies.
Like many econometric models, this is pretty terrible. It essentially says that the cognitive cost of "preferences" is identically zero, while the cognitive cost of "constraints" is more than is available to spend (infinity). This is unrealistic, since any given mental characteristic in a large population varies smoothly over wide range. An arbitrary good-bad threshold is just that: arbitrary.
Consider four hypothetical people with Tourette's syndrome. The first experiences a few tics (involuntary actions) per week. The second can suppress their tics for hours while solving advanced calculus problems at the same time. The third can only suppress their tics for 30 seconds at a stretch, and requires total concentration to achieve even that. The fourth cannot suppress their tics at all.
These differences have major economic implications. However not only can the "gun-to-the-head" test not find them, the inquisitor can get any answer by manipulating their threshold.
Not true. Some ADDers are agnostic regarding variety but are highly distracted by it. Distraction, unfortunately, tends to create even more variety, in a vicious circle. This is a common maladaptive pattern in mental disorders.
Then what of psychopaths? They usually appear normal most of the time. In fact, they are likely to pass most "gun-to-the-head" tests better than the average person, due to their boldness and fearlessness. Yet they are deeply abnormal, as they cannot reliably connect actions with suffering. As a result they tend to periodically drift more and more off course until an outlandish meltdown occurs, something like selling a company car and investing the proceeds in vintage dirty magazines. The resulting outrage and unpleasantness is so extreme that they figure out something is wrong and they need to be more careful, but they never really know why, and gradually drift back off course to the next meltdown. Yet they generally have sufficient understanding to know that being shot in the head is Really Bad, and can hold that thought together for a few seconds, so they pass your test.
What garbage. In higher vertebrates, physical stress reliably causes objective changes mediated by the sympathetic nervous system: faster heart rate, increased level of consciousness, various cognitive changes, dilated pupils, contracted peripheral capillaries, reduced digestion, changes in circulating blood volume and therefore pressure, and so forth. When an animal has learned something that predicts stress, exposure to the predictor can cause the changes; in humans this is accompanied by a characteristic sensation called anxiety. Drugs that reduce the learned stress response in animals generally reduce anxiety in humans. Likewise, human anti-anxiety drugs generally reduce the learned stress response in animals. This is all Psychology 101 stuff, and trivially measurable with basic instruments. Get a blood pressure monitor and measure the increase after somebody randomly sticks you with a pin.
The stress response is itself noxious in humans. Most people do not like a racing heart or the inabili
Some migraineurs can discover things that trigger the runaway pain process and avoid them (he writes while sitting in a dark room, wearing sunglasses, with his monitor's refresh rate set to 103 Hz). However, they still have a lower threshold than normal people, and spending your life "thinking on eggshells" is less than fun. I think it is reasonable to use a drug to dial down the brain's sensitivity-dependent-sensitivity.
- Researchers are closing in on alleles that directly cause migraine, a disorder that is a kissing cousin of bipolar disorder and associated fluctuating affective disorders. I predict that genetic causes will be found for this spectrum of disorders, and that specific drugs will follow. (I have a personal interest here. For most of my life I had migraine with the mood disturbances that commonly accompany it, but with minimal to no headache. Finally at the age of 30 I started seeing flashing lights and an ophthalmologist diagnosed me properly. I was not, in fact, lazy, depressed, or a hypochondriac. I suspect there are many others on the epilepsy/migraine/bipolar spectrum in this same boat. We need objective tests and good drugs.)
- Twin studies have shown that much mental illness (esp. schizophrenia) can be caused by heritable biochemical factors.
- Research has shown that numerous parasites reprogram the minds of their hosts, and it frequently takes the form of spectacular and suicidal behavior. Due to lack of volunteers this has not been clearly demonstrated in humans, but it is a virtual certainty that humans are affected. (For further reading look up the common mammalian parasite toxoplasma gondii.)
- The PANDAS (pediatric autoimmune neuropsychiatric disorders associated with streptococcus) hypothesis, that strep infections can trigger production of autoantibodies against important CNS proteins, is supported by very suggestive evidence. Even if it doesn't pan out, it would be shocking if there were no diseases of this type, with bizarre yet highly-stereotyped symptoms.
Many mental disorders are no more under conscious control than migraine is. It wasn't cognitive-behavioral therapy or a fad for personal responsibility that emptied the insane asylums. It was chlorpromazine and the serotonergic drugs, which were discovered by accident and not by psychiatry.