You're just reaffirming the argument that man is an agent of mass extinction. But mass extinctions in the past have always been brought on by inanimate agents. So it could be argued that man is acting like a cancer infection on Earth, and what happens when cancer kills its' host? It dies along with the host. Then we can repeat your sentence and try to be glib about it: Boo hoo hoo. Welcome to Darwinism in action.
We're not really advanced, if you think about it. Man's mind is still in jungle mode, but with lack of vision, delusions of grandeur and a death complex. Boo hoo hoo.
The old estimates of 8 or 9 billion years for the age of the universe came from calculations where it was assumed that the universe was matter-dominated.
I'm not so sure about that, as I distinctly remember since the eighties reading and hearing that the age of the Universe was around 15 Gyr, so what WMAP actually confirmed is a younger Universe than classic models suggested. White dwarves were aged around 16 Gyr, so my impression is that the dating technique was off by 3 Gyr at least, very iffy to say the least. But my memory may be iffier, as I'm not currently looking this up.
OK, I'll bite, I love thinking out of the box, it's a cool exercise. But upon first reading of your post, I cannot reconcile a few things that popped into my mind. From what you are saying:
- As radiation travels, it expands through space geometrically in three dimensions, so that an infinitesimal fraction hits some object on the other side of the galaxy in this case, bounces and that bounce itself expands as it travels back, so that we detect an infinitesimal fraction of the infinitesimal fraction of the original radiation. To further obscure things, there's the issue of reflectivity. To visualize the weakness here, we only have to look up at a full Moon - how much sunlight is being reflected towards us? Not a lot. So we have three layers of weakening, wouldn't it be physically impossible to detect the bounce of the ping that came from here? - The further an object is from us, the closer it is to that big mirror at the edge of the Universe. Since light from these distant objects have to travel less distance (there and back) to reach us than closer objects, why is the light so faint, as compared to HE 1523? Shouldn't HE 1523 be the fainter object, since it had to travel much longer to get there and back again? - The extreme redshifts of perceived faraway objects means that... we're receding from ourselves at a tenth of the speed of light, and accelerating away from ourselves at that?
Oh Lordy, my mind is turning into a pretzel right behind my eyes, I resign from my duties, effective forthwith. To paraphrase an old comic strip, we have peered into the far reaches of the Universe to catch a glimpse of the enemy, and the enemy is us.
Actually, given it's composition, it's likely a second or third generation star.
My thoughts exactly. How did this ancient star show traces of heavy elements beyond the ability of Sun-like furnaces to generate? Remember that in those early days, as the Universe was way more compact, mass was bunched that much closer together, so that ridiculously monstrous stars were the norm, by their very nature going supernova within a couple of million years. The more fuel you have, the faster you go through it, so the first generation of stars came and went in a cosmic blink. I would make a calculated guess and say that formation of such incredibly massive stars today are not only rare but highly improbable. But they were there back in those days, and it's highly likely that they stirred the soup where this stellar relic was born.
Now a bit of a tangent, while not straying from the subject: I remember in the mid-nineties there was a strange snafu in the world of astrophysics, as the apparent age of globular clusters made them older than the Universe itself! As it turned out, of course, the star dating technique was wrong and off by a couple of billion years. Just how fined-tuned is this new dating technique?
After fixing my laptop, Jobs made me a cup of tea & rescued my cat from a tree it had been stuck up for several weeks (using telekinesis). He also fixed a leaking tap, did my old filing & satisfied my sexually frustrated wife.
...then he entertained us all night long with old time tunes on the piano, and as the sun was coming up, he fixed us up a bit of breakfast, Eggs a la Wozniak, he called it. And I'll tell you something Jedidiah, as he was stirring those eggs in the frying pan, I swear I could hear him sobbing.
How do you tackle the sex in our space program issue in a society with so many hangups and hypocrisies about it?
Think about it, you're cooped up in a limited space with several roommates, an extremely stressful environment, even though there is an individual and collective sense of higher purpose in a manned space mission. But I still think there needs to be...um...release, not just physical (masturbation), but emotional (intercourse). Physical contact is a crucial part of a healthy body and mind.
My solution would probably never be accepted, particularly after the driving from Texas to Florida in diapers fiasco, but here goes: After extensive psychological screening, accept the super balanced and respectful individuals who are comfortable with a couple-swapping scenario, a collective zero G free love kinda thing. Open minded individuals are way more relaxed than uptight ones, so that would be a plus when you're in a capsule for months if not years. But you probably couldn't tell the US public about it.
Of course, it's likely they'll contemplate going the opposite way and giving the astronauts some sort of medication that suppresses the libido, which in my opinion would be inhumane, not to mention unnecessary.
But then again, like I said, the US is a prudish society. Do we really want prudes to lead the way for humanity?
Death in space. That's gonna be nasty. They'll likely never allow jettisoning the body into space, as it's the body of a hero that deserves the full honors. Remember, the US makes an extra effort to pull the bodies of KIA soldiers from combat zones. A friend of mine is an astrophysicist and participated in the great neutrino hunt a couple of decades ago in a mine shaft in Alaska during the winter. One of the colleagues died, but they were shut in until weather allowed for a helicopter pickup, so they ended up storing the colleague in the meat freezer. My friend still has occasional nightmares about it, almost twenty years on.
Illness. I can think of nothing more horrifying that being a woman two months out into space, examining myself in the shower and finding a lump in my breast. So antioxidants, vitamin supplements, etc, will have to be an essential part of the rigorous diet, probably organic (no McDonald's for you mister/missus) for a couple of years before the launch. How about a daily glass of red wine and lots of garlic, too?
If NASA tackles the health problem with the same fervor that they tackled the issues surrounding the Moon program, something much better than Tang or Velcro will eventually trickle down to the general public: great advancements in preventive medicine. And who knows what else.
OK, so they've built the Cray Computer equivalent of CO2 absorption machines.
It'll get interesting if they can make them small and inexpensive, then stick them in car mufflers, factory chimneys and the like, stopping CO2 release at its' origin point, as well as using the large devices to restore an optimal equilibrium (for us) to the atmosphere. But today, we're looking at a big, expensive prototype. First steps.
I get excited when news of this sort comes out, as I like to consider myself an optimist, so I like to believe in the historical principle of extropianism, which means, in a nutshell: The next generation will find the way to clean up after their fathers' f**k-ups. I think we all have a vested interest in this principle being true.
Personally, I'd love to see a Manhattan Project style effort to make these things a reality in every home. Hopefully the next US president will have the conviction to fully explore the possibility of government funding for this type of technology.
As much as I love the idea, sorry to poop the party but we're forgetting the white elephant in the room: 3D interstellar billiards.
Course correction on the way will be next to impossible, so we'd have to know the exact position of the planet, to the second, of the probe's arrival to the gravitational influence of the planet. Here we are, messing up martian probes with six months' travel time because of measurement glitches, and now this? We'll have to wait much longer for a manned mission.
"I'm dating this girl who's like Jessica Alba. She's latina, has dark hair, and is only five times Jessica Alba's size! So you see, she is plainly like Jessica Alba!"
That would be Jennifer Lopez and her massive, 2.5 G caboose.
I read last week that the sensitivity of new instruments can now detect the chemical fingerprints of extrasolar planetary atmospheres. They should get on the ball with this baby as of yesterday. However, I don't know if 2.5 Earth masses is big enough for measurement, as many of these extrasolar planets have 5-6 or more Jupiter masses, and the instruments are probably pointed at these monsters.
I'm a sucker for this kind of news, so I'll be waiting until somebody can measure and report results with a major presence of either CO2, nitrogen, methane, whatever's there. But then again, Gliese 581 is a red dwarf, has it gone through a red giant stage? If so, any atmosphere may have been blasted into deep space.
Then again, maybe atmospheres can regenerate through the leaking of gases from beneath the planetary crust, volcanic-style, and with 2.5 G's, I would imagine it wouldn't drift into space on its' own very easily. If so, a red dwarf may be extremely stable, creating an exponentially longer window for life on systems like these than with a main-sequence system like our own. But obviously, this is completely speculative territory.
I do not buy anything made in China. Its not easy to find out what parts of a laptop of computer are made in China, so my plan isn't foolproof, but it's what I know that I can do to stop support for the Chinese government.
Even beyond electronics, how can you know if what you're buying doesn't have something-or-other made in China?
Many US pet food companies, as an immediate example, were caught with their pants around their ankles, buying melamine-contaminated wheat gluten originating from China. And if that wasn't enough, a month after the recall, then they were caught with contaminated rice gluten, again from China. Even so-called holistic pet food companies, such as Natural Balance, were using the ingredients without listing them on the labels. And the thing is, they weren't even breaking the law, as there is a six-month grace period to change the labels after switching ingredients.
First it was dogs and cats that were tragically affected through liver failure, and now it's been detected in California farm hogs, so the culprit has been detected entering the human food supply.
Notice how the US importer, as well as the pet food companies, are all listed by name in the press releases, which is the way it should be, but there's not a sausage of information on the chinese side of things. Aren't the chinese suppliers of wheat and rice gluten subject to any kind of oversight in their operations? Or are they given special treatment because, you know, trade is all-important and good, and you do NOT want to piss off the chinese?
What horrible parents! You're absolutely right, every parent should have at least 100 grand in their pocket to hire attorneys or bail money to rescue their children from the "legal" system when the police make a little boo-boo.
Damn right, regardless of the sarcastic tone. Here we are, outraged about how a kid spent 12 nights in jail because nobody bothered to review the log/hour change, nor believed him, while simultaneously jumping to conclusions about the parents and finding them guilty with no evidence necessary.
Add to that palettes of tightly pressed american legal tender sent to the Middle East, to be divided amongst salivating suits (That's one for you, one for me, two for you, one-two for me, three for you, one-two-three for me).
During the six year monopoly of republican government, we found out a trickle of these things. With actual opposition and oversight, we're going to find out so much more. The Democrats may not be able to stop the fiascos in the Middle East yet, but the american people have regained the most powerful weapon they have against tyranny: subpoena power.
I, for one, do NOT welcome any fucking texan petroleum overlords, because they've always kept their intention hidden, they're always shortsighted, and they're always and only looking out for Number One.
Good one, rev063! However, the link you provide to the Urban Legends page confirms a fact from 2005. The one I write about happened in the seventies in Germany, which I read about it in the mid-eighties. In the original article, there was no description about the father, only about the births and mother's ethnicity, pretty limited information now that you bring it to mind (in a very gentle way).
BTW, that's a beautiful family in your link. I'm slavic and married to a mexican girl, no children yet. She plays mexican folk music, I design databases and webpages, we take super cool road trips to off-the-beaten-path places, we're in no hurry to anchor ourselves. Fuck, man, when I turned her on to Monty Python, she became more obsessed with it than me!
Now why the hell am I talking about my personal life?
I've grown to think that Wallace and the Wallechinskis (David and Amy) did a true geek's job with their The Book Of Lists and People's Almanac series of books back in the seventies and early eighties, and while I'm at it, I'll throw in Uncle John's Bathroom Reader series in the nineties.
Anyway, my point is, thanks for the link, if you can turn my so-called truth into skepticism, I wanna buy you a drink.
Taking this to the other extreme, I'm reminded of a little story. I once worked as manager for a full-service gas station, and one of the employees kept on eating during most of his shift. Almost every day I'd admonish him after catching him handle money, gasoline, etc, then eating potato chips and licking the salt of his fingers. One day, he came to work with half of his face paralyzed, to hand me a disability notice, saying he thought that this had happened because he had eaten ice cream at home, just before taking a hot shower. Well, Einstein never did come back to work, and it took him about a year to regain full control of his face.
Patients who do not finish their course of medication, do not kill all the bacteria.
Maybe if people were compliant with Doctors' orders you wouldn't have resistant strains cropping up.
It's easy to blame the doctors, try looking beyond that.
Agreed, but from a different angle.
What does it say about the application of "modern" medicine (or more to the point, the pharmaceutical industry) when millions of people have stopped taking their medications prematurely since the antibiotic was commercialized? Surely there's a psychological component there, such as the hassle of remembering to take the medication three times a day. In the stress of daily life, you forget to take one or two consecutive dosages, you're already feeling better, so you just say "f**k it, I'm already behind, what's the point in continuing".
How about a time-release mechanism that keeps on working, like a water-resistant patch that changes from skin-color to red when it's time to apply the new one after a few days, or an implant administered by your doctor with a bit of local anesthesia (such as xylocaine) rubbed on the skin to minimize the unpleasantness, and you're good to go?
The problem is that the status quo works like a charm for big pharma, twenty (or fifty) pills in a small bottle looks inscrutable and expensive, so we pay and they laugh, all the way to the swiss bank. And while we're at it, most general practitioners have been little more than the sales squad for big pharma, cut off from the feedback and development process even if they wanted to be part of it (probably a minority), prescribing antibiotics for the most banal of infections during the last half-century.
Similar (but not, ahem, identical) cases have popped up before.
I remember reading a long time ago, in one of the Wallace/Wallechinski Book Of Lists, an article about a case in the seventies in Germany, more mundane in that two eggs were fertilized, so that the kids were not chimeras, but extremely weird in outcome, as the woman gave birth to two boys, one fully african and the other fully caucasian!
I believe it's the only recorded case of two simultaneous fertilizations from different ethnic gene pools, but that has more to do with the woman having sex with two men on a day she ovulated twice. So it's not as deeply unique as the case in TFA, but it must have been quite a spectacular sight.
I would have loved to have seen the faces of the delivery room staff when the second kid was coming out. In fact, when mommy was presented with her newborns, she fainted in shock. I don't know if she was married, but if she was, her first thought when coming round must have been, however it's said in german, "I've got some explaining to do".
Anyway, my point is that at least in Germany at least, there's a civil precedent for two simultaneous daddies.
As much as the RIAA has stirred up resentment for attempting to keep the status quo at all costs, including alienating the record buyer, I pretty sure that this poll was done before Halliburton announced that they're moving their headquarters to Dubai.
Slashdot Mirror
You're just reaffirming the argument that man is an agent of mass extinction. But mass extinctions in the past have always been brought on by inanimate agents. So it could be argued that man is acting like a cancer infection on Earth, and what happens when cancer kills its' host? It dies along with the host. Then we can repeat your sentence and try to be glib about it: Boo hoo hoo. Welcome to Darwinism in action.
We're not really advanced, if you think about it. Man's mind is still in jungle mode, but with lack of vision, delusions of grandeur and a death complex. Boo hoo hoo.
The old estimates of 8 or 9 billion years for the age of the universe came from calculations where it was assumed that the universe was matter-dominated.
I'm not so sure about that, as I distinctly remember since the eighties reading and hearing that the age of the Universe was around 15 Gyr, so what WMAP actually confirmed is a younger Universe than classic models suggested. White dwarves were aged around 16 Gyr, so my impression is that the dating technique was off by 3 Gyr at least, very iffy to say the least. But my memory may be iffier, as I'm not currently looking this up.
Damn! So close and nobody's yet come up with the obvious one. Ladies and gentlemen:
Dick Clark!
OK, I'll bite, I love thinking out of the box, it's a cool exercise. But upon first reading of your post, I cannot reconcile a few things that popped into my mind. From what you are saying:
- As radiation travels, it expands through space geometrically in three dimensions, so that an infinitesimal fraction hits some object on the other side of the galaxy in this case, bounces and that bounce itself expands as it travels back, so that we detect an infinitesimal fraction of the infinitesimal fraction of the original radiation.
To further obscure things, there's the issue of reflectivity. To visualize the weakness here, we only have to look up at a full Moon - how much sunlight is being reflected towards us? Not a lot.
So we have three layers of weakening, wouldn't it be physically impossible to detect the bounce of the ping that came from here?
- The further an object is from us, the closer it is to that big mirror at the edge of the Universe. Since light from these distant objects have to travel less distance (there and back) to reach us than closer objects, why is the light so faint, as compared to HE 1523? Shouldn't HE 1523 be the fainter object, since it had to travel much longer to get there and back again?
- The extreme redshifts of perceived faraway objects means that... we're receding from ourselves at a tenth of the speed of light, and accelerating away from ourselves at that?
Oh Lordy, my mind is turning into a pretzel right behind my eyes, I resign from my duties, effective forthwith. To paraphrase an old comic strip, we have peered into the far reaches of the Universe to catch a glimpse of the enemy, and the enemy is us.
Actually, given it's composition, it's likely a second or third generation star.
My thoughts exactly. How did this ancient star show traces of heavy elements beyond the ability of Sun-like furnaces to generate?
Remember that in those early days, as the Universe was way more compact, mass was bunched that much closer together, so that ridiculously monstrous stars were the norm, by their very nature going supernova within a couple of million years. The more fuel you have, the faster you go through it, so the first generation of stars came and went in a cosmic blink. I would make a calculated guess and say that formation of such incredibly massive stars today are not only rare but highly improbable. But they were there back in those days, and it's highly likely that they stirred the soup where this stellar relic was born.
Now a bit of a tangent, while not straying from the subject:
I remember in the mid-nineties there was a strange snafu in the world of astrophysics, as the apparent age of globular clusters made them older than the Universe itself! As it turned out, of course, the star dating technique was wrong and off by a couple of billion years.
Just how fined-tuned is this new dating technique?
How do you tackle the sex in our space program issue in a society with so many hangups and hypocrisies about it?
Think about it, you're cooped up in a limited space with several roommates, an extremely stressful environment, even though there is an individual and collective sense of higher purpose in a manned space mission. But I still think there needs to be...um...release, not just physical (masturbation), but emotional (intercourse). Physical contact is a crucial part of a healthy body and mind.
My solution would probably never be accepted, particularly after the driving from Texas to Florida in diapers fiasco, but here goes:
After extensive psychological screening, accept the super balanced and respectful individuals who are comfortable with a couple-swapping scenario, a collective zero G free love kinda thing. Open minded individuals are way more relaxed than uptight ones, so that would be a plus when you're in a capsule for months if not years. But you probably couldn't tell the US public about it.
Of course, it's likely they'll contemplate going the opposite way and giving the astronauts some sort of medication that suppresses the libido, which in my opinion would be inhumane, not to mention unnecessary.
But then again, like I said, the US is a prudish society. Do we really want prudes to lead the way for humanity?
Death in space. That's gonna be nasty. They'll likely never allow jettisoning the body into space, as it's the body of a hero that deserves the full honors. Remember, the US makes an extra effort to pull the bodies of KIA soldiers from combat zones.
A friend of mine is an astrophysicist and participated in the great neutrino hunt a couple of decades ago in a mine shaft in Alaska during the winter. One of the colleagues died, but they were shut in until weather allowed for a helicopter pickup, so they ended up storing the colleague in the meat freezer. My friend still has occasional nightmares about it, almost twenty years on.
Illness. I can think of nothing more horrifying that being a woman two months out into space, examining myself in the shower and finding a lump in my breast. So antioxidants, vitamin supplements, etc, will have to be an essential part of the rigorous diet, probably organic (no McDonald's for you mister/missus) for a couple of years before the launch. How about a daily glass of red wine and lots of garlic, too?
If NASA tackles the health problem with the same fervor that they tackled the issues surrounding the Moon program, something much better than Tang or Velcro will eventually trickle down to the general public: great advancements in preventive medicine. And who knows what else.
Damn, these issues are fascinating.
OK, so they've built the Cray Computer equivalent of CO2 absorption machines.
It'll get interesting if they can make them small and inexpensive, then stick them in car mufflers, factory chimneys and the like, stopping CO2 release at its' origin point, as well as using the large devices to restore an optimal equilibrium (for us) to the atmosphere. But today, we're looking at a big, expensive prototype. First steps.
I get excited when news of this sort comes out, as I like to consider myself an optimist, so I like to believe in the historical principle of extropianism, which means, in a nutshell: The next generation will find the way to clean up after their fathers' f**k-ups. I think we all have a vested interest in this principle being true.
Personally, I'd love to see a Manhattan Project style effort to make these things a reality in every home. Hopefully the next US president will have the conviction to fully explore the possibility of government funding for this type of technology.
Steve: " What's the third hooter for?"
Al: " It's on the back for dancin"
Cue the Detroit Grand Poobahs:
"I know you wanna do it
you know I wanna do it, too
so get out on the dance floor
we can make sandwiches"
And in Soviet Cuba, Gliese 581 c dances sumo wrestler mambo around you!
When we talk to these people, we don't discuss religion or politics, or work. That just leaves the weather and women. Nothing else matters. Got it?
Sports?
As much as I love the idea, sorry to poop the party but we're forgetting the white elephant in the room: 3D interstellar billiards.
Course correction on the way will be next to impossible, so we'd have to know the exact position of the planet, to the second, of the probe's arrival to the gravitational influence of the planet. Here we are, messing up martian probes with six months' travel time because of measurement glitches, and now this? We'll have to wait much longer for a manned mission.
"I'm dating this girl who's like Jessica Alba. She's latina, has dark hair, and is only five times Jessica Alba's size! So you see, she is plainly like Jessica Alba!"
That would be Jennifer Lopez and her massive, 2.5 G caboose.
I read last week that the sensitivity of new instruments can now detect the chemical fingerprints of extrasolar planetary atmospheres. They should get on the ball with this baby as of yesterday. However, I don't know if 2.5 Earth masses is big enough for measurement, as many of these extrasolar planets have 5-6 or more Jupiter masses, and the instruments are probably pointed at these monsters.
I'm a sucker for this kind of news, so I'll be waiting until somebody can measure and report results with a major presence of either CO2, nitrogen, methane, whatever's there. But then again, Gliese 581 is a red dwarf, has it gone through a red giant stage? If so, any atmosphere may have been blasted into deep space.
Then again, maybe atmospheres can regenerate through the leaking of gases from beneath the planetary crust, volcanic-style, and with 2.5 G's, I would imagine it wouldn't drift into space on its' own very easily. If so, a red dwarf may be extremely stable, creating an exponentially longer window for life on systems like these than with a main-sequence system like our own. But obviously, this is completely speculative territory.
Tabbed UI, Apple Lisa, circa 1980.
Holy cow, p0wned! The case should be laughed out of court on these grounds.
But then again, the judge is in Texas, where different rules apply.
I do not buy anything made in China. Its not easy to find out what parts of a laptop of computer are made in China, so my plan isn't foolproof, but it's what I know that I can do to stop support for the Chinese government.
Even beyond electronics, how can you know if what you're buying doesn't have something-or-other made in China?
Many US pet food companies, as an immediate example, were caught with their pants around their ankles, buying melamine-contaminated wheat gluten originating from China. And if that wasn't enough, a month after the recall, then they were caught with contaminated rice gluten, again from China. Even so-called holistic pet food companies, such as Natural Balance, were using the ingredients without listing them on the labels. And the thing is, they weren't even breaking the law, as there is a six-month grace period to change the labels after switching ingredients.
First it was dogs and cats that were tragically affected through liver failure, and now it's been detected in California farm hogs, so the culprit has been detected entering the human food supply.
Notice how the US importer, as well as the pet food companies, are all listed by name in the press releases, which is the way it should be, but there's not a sausage of information on the chinese side of things. Aren't the chinese suppliers of wheat and rice gluten subject to any kind of oversight in their operations? Or are they given special treatment because, you know, trade is all-important and good, and you do NOT want to piss off the chinese?
What horrible parents! You're absolutely right, every parent should have at least 100 grand in their pocket to hire attorneys or bail money to rescue their children from the "legal" system when the police make a little boo-boo.
Damn right, regardless of the sarcastic tone. Here we are, outraged about how a kid spent 12 nights in jail because nobody bothered to review the log/hour change, nor believed him, while simultaneously jumping to conclusions about the parents and finding them guilty with no evidence necessary.
Irony, indeed.
Maybe so, but remember: Never get involved in a land war with Eurasia.
"See the cat? See the cradle?
WAAAAAAAH! (kid crying)
So long, Mr Vonnegut. The world was a better place with you in it.
Why you haven't modded 5 Insightful is beyond me.
Haliburton is actually responsible for deaths.
Add to that palettes of tightly pressed american legal tender sent to the Middle East, to be divided amongst salivating suits (That's one for you, one for me, two for you, one-two for me, three for you, one-two-three for me).
During the six year monopoly of republican government, we found out a trickle of these things. With actual opposition and oversight, we're going to find out so much more. The Democrats may not be able to stop the fiascos in the Middle East yet, but the american people have regained the most powerful weapon they have against tyranny: subpoena power.
I, for one, do NOT welcome any fucking texan petroleum overlords, because they've always kept their intention hidden, they're always shortsighted, and they're always and only looking out for Number One.
Good one, rev063! However, the link you provide to the Urban Legends page confirms a fact from 2005. The one I write about happened in the seventies in Germany, which I read about it in the mid-eighties. In the original article, there was no description about the father, only about the births and mother's ethnicity, pretty limited information now that you bring it to mind (in a very gentle way).
BTW, that's a beautiful family in your link. I'm slavic and married to a mexican girl, no children yet. She plays mexican folk music, I design databases and webpages, we take super cool road trips to off-the-beaten-path places, we're in no hurry to anchor ourselves. Fuck, man, when I turned her on to Monty Python, she became more obsessed with it than me!
Now why the hell am I talking about my personal life?
I've grown to think that Wallace and the Wallechinskis (David and Amy) did a true geek's job with their The Book Of Lists and People's Almanac series of books back in the seventies and early eighties, and while I'm at it, I'll throw in Uncle John's Bathroom Reader series in the nineties.
Anyway, my point is, thanks for the link, if you can turn my so-called truth into skepticism, I wanna buy you a drink.
Taking this to the other extreme, I'm reminded of a little story. I once worked as manager for a full-service gas station, and one of the employees kept on eating during most of his shift. Almost every day I'd admonish him after catching him handle money, gasoline, etc, then eating potato chips and licking the salt of his fingers.
One day, he came to work with half of his face paralyzed, to hand me a disability notice, saying he thought that this had happened because he had eaten ice cream at home, just before taking a hot shower. Well, Einstein never did come back to work, and it took him about a year to regain full control of his face.
Patients who do not finish their course of medication, do not kill all the bacteria.
Maybe if people were compliant with Doctors' orders you wouldn't have resistant strains cropping up.
It's easy to blame the doctors, try looking beyond that.
Agreed, but from a different angle.
What does it say about the application of "modern" medicine (or more to the point, the pharmaceutical industry) when millions of people have stopped taking their medications prematurely since the antibiotic was commercialized?
Surely there's a psychological component there, such as the hassle of remembering to take the medication three times a day. In the stress of daily life, you forget to take one or two consecutive dosages, you're already feeling better, so you just say "f**k it, I'm already behind, what's the point in continuing".
How about a time-release mechanism that keeps on working, like a water-resistant patch that changes from skin-color to red when it's time to apply the new one after a few days, or an implant administered by your doctor with a bit of local anesthesia (such as xylocaine) rubbed on the skin to minimize the unpleasantness, and you're good to go?
The problem is that the status quo works like a charm for big pharma, twenty (or fifty) pills in a small bottle looks inscrutable and expensive, so we pay and they laugh, all the way to the swiss bank. And while we're at it, most general practitioners have been little more than the sales squad for big pharma, cut off from the feedback and development process even if they wanted to be part of it (probably a minority), prescribing antibiotics for the most banal of infections during the last half-century.
Similar (but not, ahem, identical) cases have popped up before.
I remember reading a long time ago, in one of the Wallace/Wallechinski Book Of Lists, an article about a case in the seventies in Germany, more mundane in that two eggs were fertilized, so that the kids were not chimeras, but extremely weird in outcome, as the woman gave birth to two boys, one fully african and the other fully caucasian!
I believe it's the only recorded case of two simultaneous fertilizations from different ethnic gene pools, but that has more to do with the woman having sex with two men on a day she ovulated twice. So it's not as deeply unique as the case in TFA, but it must have been quite a spectacular sight.
I would have loved to have seen the faces of the delivery room staff when the second kid was coming out. In fact, when mommy was presented with her newborns, she fainted in shock. I don't know if she was married, but if she was, her first thought when coming round must have been, however it's said in german, "I've got some explaining to do".
Anyway, my point is that at least in Germany at least, there's a civil precedent for two simultaneous daddies.
As much as the RIAA has stirred up resentment for attempting to keep the status quo at all costs, including alienating the record buyer, I pretty sure that this poll was done before Halliburton announced that they're moving their headquarters to Dubai.