A major issue here is that standard glass can wear down through abrasion pretty quickly. Glass is fairly hard stuff, with a Mohs hardness of 5 it's comparable to steel which is why you need specialized tools like diamond cutters to cut it. However, quartz- one of the most common minerals on earth and a major component of most sands and gravels- has a Mohs hardness of 7, so a bit of sand and grit can easily scratch and wear standard glass. Take a look at a piece of glass that's been on a rocky beach and you'll see that it's been worn down and frosted by the constant action of the waves and stones; thousands of cars a day driving over a surface and grinding pebbles and grit into it will have the same effect. It will wear grind down any texturing, and frost the glass such that it reduces the amount of light getting through to the solar cells. There are harder glasses out there, like the Gorilla Glass that smartphone screens are made out of, but it's unclear whether they've addressed this wear-and-tear issue or not.
When you start comparing crime rates, violent crime rates, gun deaths, or any other socially important data, you really need to pay careful attention to terminology. It matters little that the UK may experience only 1% of our gun deaths, if they also experience 800% of our violent crime rate.
That's not true. The homicide rate in the United Kingdom is 1.2 per 100,000. The homicide rate in Canada is 1.6. The homicide rate in Australia is 1.0 And the homicide rate for the US is 4.8 per 100,000. You can look it up on Wikipedia if you're so inclined ("List of Countries By Intentional Homicide Rate") but it's clear you've already made up your mind and are simply going to ignore any facts that don't support your preconceptions. Yes, the human tendency to murder other humans is a powerful force, and so a certain percentage of people who would otherwise be murdered by guns in the UK are murdered with knives, poison, or cricket bats, because those guns aren't available. But the end result of strict gun control is a per-capita homicide rate that is around 25% of the U.S. rate in the UK and 33% in Canada and 20% in Australia. The statistics don't lie, gun control saves lives.
I think it's time to start talking about real gun control in the United States. I'm not talking about banning a few models of assault rifles; I think the end goal of gun-control should be keeping rapid-fire weapons out of the public hands, which means requiring licensing for or simply banning all revolvers, semiautomatic pistols and semiautomatic rifles, creating something similar to the gun control laws seen in the UK. We've tried letting things run wild and all it's gotten us is thousands of deaths a year and an endless series of mass shootings. The next logical step is implementing the kinds of firearms controls seen in Canada and the United Kingdom, and I think the left needs to start pushing this seriously. No, Obama isn't out to get your guns... and it's a shame, because dammit, he SHOULD be. And if that takes a constitutional amendment, then we should pass a constitutional amendment- I'll line up to vote for that. Yes, it's in the constitution, but so was slavery, and we outgrew that. Times change, and a law written for muzzle-loaders is no longer useful in an age of machine guns. I'm tired of seeing thousands of people senselessly slaughtered every year because the political debate is held hostage by a handful of extremists. For too long we've played it the NRA's way and refused to talk about gun control. We need to start talking about gun control again, and nothing should be off the table.
Intelligent, informed speculation has a place and purpose. I remember Larry Niven's essay, "Bigger than Worlds" in this respect. He goes off into some metaphorical and literal deep-space territory here, but he's trying to constrain speculation in terms of the laws of physics. How would we build artificial worlds? He discusses Dyson spheres but can't figure out where the gravity comes from, so comes up with a compromise where you have a ring the diameter of Earth's orbit and spin it. This lead to the novel Ringworld; some engineering students later pointed out the structure's orbit was unstable, so in the sequel he adds in motors to stabilize the whole thing... obviously Niven's essays haven't led to any major, useful advances in building artifical worlds (although it did help give us the Halo franchise). But this sort of speculation- wondering what is possible, given the constraints of the real world, what is impossible and what is possible but just not realized yet- has led to major, useful advances. Arthur C. Clarke, another hard sci-fi author, was the first to sketch out the idea of orbital communications satellites. We don't have any cloned dinosaurs yet, but arguably Crichton's Jurassic Park helped spur people to do things like sequence the neanderthal genome. Virtual worlds are probably more advanced than they would be if Snow Crash hadn't sketched out what those worlds might look like and how they would function. Star Trek got people to think about how future computer interfaces might work. Perhaps more importantly, Star Trek got people to speculate about how future social and political structures might work in terms of sex, race, economics, and political boundaries. And soforth.
That being said, I don't think Adams really falls into that camp of informed speculators. He says at one point "If you put some scrubbers in the device I think there's a way to deal with pollution and climate change too. I saw some sort of tube-to-the-sky concept that was supposed to do that but I'm too lazy to search for the link." He's just screwing around. He's having fun playing with ideas, but can't actually be bothered to do the math or even Google something before saying it. It just comes across as self-indulgent and vain, not insightful or intelligent. For someone who spent so much time deriding people for being stupid or intellectually lazy, he's showing a lot of intellectual laziness himself.
If antidepressants are really the answer, why does America, with one of the highest rates of antidepressant use, also have one of the highest rates of depression in the world? If they were really effective, people should be less depressed, and in fact there's more depression and mental illness than ever. There's increasingly concern that antidepressants are actually making things worse. In the short term, antidepressants can be effective in managing the treatment of depression, for some people. The problem is that they can cause long-term changes in how the brain functions, such that the person becomes dependent upon the drug. This means that on quitting antidepressants, the depression is more likely to return than it would have been if it had simply been left to resolve itself. There have been a number of studies published that suggest that the long-term outcome of mental illness is worse when antidepressants are used. As far as I know, there isn't a single study that has shown that outcomes for depression are improved long-term- over the course of 5-10 years instead of 5-10 weeks- by the use of antidepressants.
Maybe antidepressants do have a role in treating mental illness, but given the risks- increased risk of suicide, the highly addictive nature of some of the drugs (especially ones with short half-lives) and the risk that they can make people worse than when they started, these should be a method of last resort for severe clinical depression, NOT a first-line treatment for everyone who seems moderately sad or anxious. There are a *lot* of things that have been shown to be potentially beneficial- cognitive behavioral therapy, exercise, light therapy, sleep therapy, and supplements like Omega 3 fatty acids, vitamin B, D, zinc and magnesium, cutting down on carbohydrates- which come without the risks posed by antidepressants.
How in the hell can you write an article called "The World's Worst Planes" and not include the massively over-budget and behind-schedule F-35 Lightning II?
The whole plan seems pretty sketchy. You can't just create a mashup of two distantly related animals and automatically expect to get something viable out of the mix. Mammoths and Asian elephants aren't actually that closely related- African elephant, Asian elephant, and mammoth are thought to have diverged around six million years ago, so mammoths are about as close to Asian elephants as chimps are to humans.
Hybridization can result in improved fitness if the parents aren't too distantly related. However, the more distant the relationship between the parents, the less likely the offspring are to be viable. Humans and Neanderthals split around 600,000 years ago and were able to successfully interbreed. However, horses and asses split around four million years ago. The offspring- mules and hinnies- are healthy, but they are either sterile or have reduced fertility. Breeding more distantly related animals produces non-viable offspring.
The article does mention that there have been hybrids between Asian and African elephants, which are slightly more distantly related than Asian elephant and mammoth. What the article neglects to mention is that the only known example of an African-Asian hybrid died several weeks after birth; there are other reports of hybrids being born but strikingly no reports of any surviving. This suggests that mixing mammoth and Asian elephant DNA is going to produce an unhealthy or non-viable offspring.
Would the robot shoot a US commander that is about the bomb a village of men woman and children?
The US navy don't want robots with morals, they want robots that do as they say.
Country A makes robots with morals, Country B makes robots without morals - all else being equal the robots without morals would win. Killer robots are worse than landmines and should be banned and any country making them should be completely embargoed.
Wars are as much political conflicts as anything else, so acting in a moral fashion, or at a bare minimum appearing to do so, is vital to winning the war. Predator drones are a perfect example of this. In terms of the cold calculus of human lives, they are probably a good thing. They are highly precise, minimize American casualties, and probably minimize civilian casualties compared to more conventional methods like sending in bombers, tanks, platoons, etc. etc. That's cold comfort if your family is slaughtered of course, but Afghanistan is probably a much cleaner war than previous wars such as the Russian occupation of Afghanistan, or the U.S. war in Viet Nam.
The issue is that there is just something deeply unnerving about the idea of a soulless, unfeeling machine piloted from thousands of miles away raining Hellfire missiles down on unsuspecting people below. It's not really any worse than getting killed by a soldier, but somehow it feels worse- the civilians never had a chance, and even the combatants are simply slaughtered without any chance to fight back. When you're killing someone who never even has a chance, it's more a form of murder than warfare. It feels, in a word, immoral. And that is costing the U.S. hugely. From a purely rational standpoint, the drones make sense. From a moral standpoint, there is something repugnant and indecent and hideous about them. That is swaying public opinion against the U.S. and helping to increase support for the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Maybe behaving in an amoral fashion wins you the battles. But you can win all the battles and turn everyone against you, in which case you may lose the war.
No idea why you're being downmoderated. It's *absolutely* the NSA's job to eavesdrop on foreigners. That's what they're being paid to do.
While it is the NSA's job to spy on people, that's traditionally been something you do against your adversaries, not your allies. I mean, it's one thing if we're talking about tapping the USSR's undersea cables. They had nuclear-tipped ICBMs pointed at us. It's quite another thing when we're talking about tapping the phone of Angela Merkel. She's the democratically elected president of an allied NATO state. I mean, up until that point she and Obama had a pretty good working relationship, so if he really wanted to know what she was thinking, he probably could have you, know, asked her.
What is your point precisely? Taxonomy is about determining the number of species and the boundaries between them- whether that means identifying a new population, or subdividing one group into two distinct species. Either one is taxonomy in action, the fact that we are seeing a dramatic increase in the number of species means that taxonomy is an active field, not a dying one.
If taxonomy is really a dying science, you'd have a hard time telling from the number of species being described. According to reptile-database.org, there were 3149 snake species in 2008, as of Feb 2014, there are 3458. That's 309 species, 51 species a year, roughly a 10% increase in six years- which is stunning when you consider that we have been naming species since the 1700s. There were 5079 lizards in 2008, and 5914 in 2014. That's 835 species,139 a year, and a 16% increase. This is just the reptiles; you'll see similar trends if you look at other groups like frogs, or fish, or insects. Given these numbers, you could argue that we are in fact in a golden age of taxonomy. DNA is a big part of this- using DNA it's possible to show that populations that may look superficially similar, even to an experienced taxonomist, stopped exchanging genes millions of years ago.
Bird and mammal taxonomy is a different story. Historically they have been really well studied, to the point that there simply aren't that many species left to be described. Only 44 birds have been described since 2010, which works out to around a dozen a year, around 10% the rate of discovery for reptiles. That's enough work to occupy a few taxonomists full-time, or a number of taxonomists part-time, but it suggests that we really don't need more bird taxonomists because there's just not much left for them to do.
Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent
- Keynes
Eventually, the bubble pops, the collective delusion ends, and gravity and other natural laws reassert themselves, the whole thing comes crashing down. The key word being "eventually". Bubbles are self-sustaining, there's a feedback loop. People buy in because the price goes up, as more people buy in, the price goes up more, and so on. Sober, rational people look at fools making money and eventually decide they've made a mistake and start jumping in even as the whole thing starts racing towards disaster and becoming more unstable, so the bubble converts more people over time. The media eventually start calling it a bubble, but lots of people stay in the game even though they know it's unsustainable because they think they can time the market. They know their luck can't last, but they money is too good so they stay in. Like a gambling addict at a casino, they tell themselves they'll just play one more hand...
The result of all these things is that bubbles take years to play out. If you look on Google Trends you'll see that "Housing Bubble" becomes popular in 2005, a full three years before the financial crisis and the collapse of the housing market. People realized we were in a housing bubble and yet the whole thing kept going, becoming more and more delusional, until it finally exploded. The same thing happened with the Internet Bubble- it popped in 2000, but in 1999 there was already a book called "The Internet Bubble."
Selling short into a bubble is a bit like being the one sane guy at a cult compound trying to tell everyone that no, the magical silver spaceships are not coming to take you to heaven when the world ends. Yes, eventually the whole thing will burn to the ground and the survivors will realize that the Shining Leader was just a creepy perv with serious mental health issues. But it's anybody's guess when that will happen.
I don't know if I'd call it a tech bubble, it's more of a froth- lots of little bubbles. During the original tech bubble that started in the late '90s, pretty much everything was massively overvalued, and pretty much every shitty startup would go public and see its stock rocket up, even (especially) if they didn't make a profit and didn't have a business plan. It was widespread financial insanity, collective economic madness. The average stock on the S&P 500 traded at 40 times earnings, versus about 18.8 today. In other words, the average company costs about twice as much (relative to its earning potential) then as now.
Today, there are definitely some overvalued tech stocks. Facebook has a P/E of 76, Netflix has a P/E of 128, Amazon has a P/E of 428. Which means that at current earnings levels, a dollar invested in Facebook will pay off in 76 years, that same dollar invested in Netflix will pay off in 128 years, and Amazon stock will pay for itself in a little over four centuries. You're speculating (i.e. gambling) if you buy any of those companies. But other tech stocks are more reasonably priced. Google has a P/E of 28, Microsoft's P/E ratio is 15, Apple's is only 14. We are seeing bubble-like behavior in certain companies and in certain industries (social media, for example) but it's going a little far to say that the entire industry is in a bubble.
The bitter irony is that she could turn out to be right in a general sense- that the medical establishment are the ones causing the sudden surge in autism. There's a new study just out today that suggests that autism is linked to antidepressant use, with autism rates tripling in boys exposed to antidepressants during the first trimester:
It's published in the New England Journal of Medicine and given the previous, fraudulent work concerning autism and vaccines, I am guessing that the editors and reviewers took a very, very careful look at the evidence before accepting this paper for publication. As always, correlation does not equal causation, however it provides a good hint of where to look. It would hardly be surprising to find that powerful drugs that alter neurotransmitter levels and expression of growth factors in the brain affect the brain of a developing fetus. Furthermore, the sudden epidemic of autism seems to take off at about the same time doctors start prescribing these drugs to everyone and their dog. If this turns out to be true... we're looking at billions of dollars in liability for the drug companies and the credibility of the psychiatric industry left in shreds.
Stephen Colbert has been called "The biggest Tolkien geek I've ever met". Coming from Peter Jackson, that's quite an honor. The guy's a nerd, so it's something remarkable that he's become as much of a cultural phenomenon as he is, and now he's set to take on one of the big late night shows. It'll be interesting to see what happens- weird to see him out of character, but he's phenomenally talented and versatile, if anyone can pull it off he can. The thing I like about Colbert is that it's clear he really enjoys doing what he's doing, there's just something about watching someone at work who's having the time of their life.
It's also going to be interesting to see what Comedy Central does now. John Oliver and now Stephen Colbert have left, so they've lost two of their top three comics, and I'd argue that they've lost the best two. I know a number of people who are still John Stewart fans but personally I think Stewart has lost his mojo. He's not passionate, he seems tired and burned out, his humor has an edge that's not just self-deprecating, it's self-pitying, an endless series of sad jokes about how old he is and how short he is. The humor is also increasingly juvenile, but not in a good way. It's all dick jokes, which would be great if Stewart and the writers could make funny dick jokes like Parker and Stone, but they can't. The supporting cast has issues as well. In particular Jason Jones is supposed to be playing a character who's a dick, but he just comes across as actually being dick, and the show has taken on a mean-spirited tone that it didn't used to have.
Personally, I think Comedy Central is in trouble. The Daily Show has some serious issues and Stewart's directorial gig and Oliver's stint as guest host makes it clear he's thinking about moving on. Colbert has now left. John Oliver demonstrated last summer that he's talented and charming enough to host a half-hour show, but now he's on HBO. This move probably doesn't come as a complete shock, so if Comedy Central was clever, they would have encouraged John Oliver to sign a contract that would leave him free to come back to Comedy Central. But the other issue is that Oliver seems like a perfect replacement for Stewart. It's unclear who would- or could- fill in for someone as unique as Colbert.
Besides everyone knows star trek is a sifi based entertainment show, its not claiming to be factual..
"Uh, Bill, you do realize that this is a TV show, right? You are not actually the captain of a starship. We are not actually on a five year mission in space. These computer banks? They're just cardboard boxes wired up with blinking Christmas lights."
"Wait... what? But... Leonard that... can't... BE!!!!"
There's no doubt that manufacturing fuel on board is desirable from a logistics standpoint.
Is it, though? If you run out of fuel, just refuel the damn thing. At sea refueling is trivially easy, all you need is a ship that can carry a lot of fuel, a pump, and a hose. Pretty much any ship will work if it will carry enough- for example in the summer fishing season in Alaska, the canneries hire on the big Bering Sea crab boats to act as tenders, and they provide fuel to the smaller salmon boats. Refueling a destroyer at sea isn't all that different except in scale, and the Navy has logistics ships designed specifically to do this.
The other variable that needs to be considered is time. I'm guessing that not only is this process very energy-intensive, it takes a while. The article shows them fueling a hobby plane with the fuel they've generated, which suggests they're not exactly churning the stuff out by the barrel. Unless you can create a system that can deliver tens of thousands of gallons a day, it's probably going to be far faster to divert a support ship and have it show up with 7 million gallons of the stuff.
And realistically, when is a carrier or other ship likely to be far from supply lines? Current and potential flashpoints would include places like Syria, the Ukraine, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Taiwan, and North Korea. Likely areas of operation for the Navy will be the Mediterranean, Arabian Sea, South China Sea, and the Sea of Japan. None are far from civilization. Not coincidentally, the U.S. already has bases near all of these places. The U.S. Navy did have a tough time in the Pacific theater in WWII, trying to fight the Japanese in Indonesia on the far side of the Pacific, and that was even after they had the good fortune that the Japanese didn't think to bomb the fuel tanks in Hawaii. Part of what they learned from Pearl Harbor is that you don't wait until the fighting starts to establish a supply chain and stockpile fuel.
At this rate, I suspect the actual linked article is a rather bland study of the inter-penguin behaviors of a group of rockhopper penguins during a 4 month observation that was initially proposed because the researcher thought the penguin-keeper at the zoo was hot.
Close. It's just some idiot's brain-dead blog post that he submitted to Slashdot in a desperate attempt to get some readers. It's slightly longer than the summary, but doesn't actually contain any more content. The basic premise of the argument is that live TV and satellite TV matter and they'll continue to call the shots. The reality of the situation is that digital, on-demand services like Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu are rapidly expanding in terms of the content available, and in terms of not just distributing but creating new content (House of Cards, Arrested Development). HBO is a holdout here- you still need a cable subscription to be able to watch it online- but the number of people watching video-on-demand online will continue to grow, and as the content migrates to follow, cable-cutters will increase, and HBO and others will follow them. Eventually, traditional TV and satellite will die. It may take a while, but that's the way things are going. It makes far more sense for Apple, Amazon and Google to focus on where the TV industry will be in 10-20 years than where it is now, so who really cares what the networks and cable companies want?
There's one thing I will agree with: to figure out the fate of the plane we have to get inside the pilot's head and try to figure out what he's doing. The trick here is that based on the available facts, we have to stop thinking in terms of someone who's trying desperately to save the plane and his passengers, and try to understand someone's whose goal is to do the opposite.
One thing to think about- where would you crash a plane if your goal was not simply to crash a plane, but to conceal its fate? Whoever took the plane seems to have wanted its resting place to remain a mystery. They must have known that the path of the plane would be tracked by military radar, so by heading northwest until they were off radar, and then turning southeast, they must have wanted to mislead searchers about the direction of the flight. And by sending the plane into the deeps of the Indian Ocean, they must have hoped that the wreckage would never be found. But one thing didn't make sense here. If you were going to go to this kind of length to lose a plane forever, where would you crash it? Not southwest of Australia; the sea there is deep but its a fairly broad and flat ocean floor. Yes the search area here is huge and the seas are rough, but if the wreckage ends up on a flat expanse of seafloor, it's going to be pretty easy to spot on sonar. It would take a long time to find, but eventually it would be found. No, you wouldn't want an abyssal plain. You'd go for the deepest, most rugged stretch you could find. You'd pilot the plain straight into an ocean trench.
Then a curious thing happened. The search area was changed, again, for something like the third time. The new data suggests the plane didn't fly as far, and instead of crashing southwest of Australia, it crashed almost due west of Australia. At first this seems to suggest the search will be easier. But if you look on the maps, you'll see that the new search area overlaps an ocean trench- the Diamantina Trench, the deepest point in the entire Indian Ocean. Its maximum depth is 8,000 meters/26,000 feet. Eight kilometers. Five miles. Its rugged terrain, which will conceal the plane and scatter any noise from the sonar beacon. Plus, the Navy's pinger locator can only go about 6,000 meters down, and the range of the black box ping signal is only about a mile, so if the plane is at the deepest part of the trench, it's may well be out of the range of sonar equipment. On top of everything, the terrain is going to be unstable; unlike a flat abyssal plain where the sediments accumulate slowly and don't shift, the mountainous terrain of the Diamantina Trench will be subject to slumps and debris flows, with avalanches of fine mud that could easily bury a plane.
Up until now, it seemed like a good bet that the plane would be found, eventually. After all the Titanic was sitting on the seafloor for the better part of a century before it was discovered. But if the pilot really did crash the plane into the Diamantina Trench, there's a real chance that it's lost for good.
I think the fire scenario is a pretty reasonable explanation, but it's by no means the only possibility.
The fire scenario has been pretty thoroughly debunked at this point. Radar shows that the plane made multiple turns and changes in altitude, meaning that it was being actively piloted. Here's what we currently do know: the ACARS transmitter was turned off, the plane made a sharp turn to the west and climbed to 45,000 feet. Radar then shows the plane descending to 23,000 feet. The plane turns again and climbs, heading out over the Indian Ocean. At this point, radar contact is lost; however the satellite pings indicate that the plane ended up in the southern Indian Ocean, which means it had to turn again. So after the transmitter is turned off, the plane made at least three turns and changed altitude three times. Someone was definitely at the controls until radar contact was lost.
There's increasing evidence that diet may play a role in mental illness. I've always been skeptical of the low-carb craze and the recent war on sugar. However, it's been shown that a number of neurological disorders do respond to carbohydrate reduction. One is epilepsy, which can respond to a very low carbohydrate (ketogenic) diet. In these diets, sugar and carbohydrates are cut out, and the body primarily burns fat for fuel. The other is bipolar II. There are a couple of documented case studies of bipolar sufferers managing their symptoms by switching to a low-carbohydrate diet. It worked better than their drugs, to the point that they actually stopped the drugs and just used the diet.
This raises the question of whether diet could contribute to depression. If reducing carbohydrates can treat psychiatric problems, then could a diet high in refined sugars and carbohydrates cause psychiatric problems? It sounds a bit crazy, but the brain is just another organ. If excess sugar can cause your kidneys to fail, what the hell is it doing to your brain?
There is a condition known as "manic depressive disorder." Essentially, you can have a day where you're feeling so great that you decide to move all of the furniture in your house, repaint the living room, run a mile, begin a novel, and more. You have tons of energy and can do it all. And then you crash into the depression stage where getting out of bed is a major achievement.
These days it's called Bipolar Disorder. and it comes in two varieties, Bipolar I and Bipolar II. Bipolar I is the classic Manic Depressive disorder. In BPII the ups tend to be much milder and shorter, and the depression tends to be more chronic. BP I is pretty hard to miss- the manias tend to be the kind of thing that land you either in the hospital or in jail. But a lot of people suffering from depression may actually suffer from BP II. The highs in Bipolar II are hypomanic- they're characterized by being in a good mood, being creative, being productive, being outgoing. Nobody ever goes to the doctor complaining about hypomania. The depression in Bipolar II tends to be the dominant symptom, however, and it tends to be chronic. The problem here is that a lot of people who are treated by doctors for depression actually suffer from bipolar II, and the treatments are completely different. The standard treatments for BPII are anticonvulsants- lamotrigine and valproic acid. BPII suffers do respond to antidepressants, but the problem is that they respond too well; antidepressants actually tend to make bipolar people manic and can make the disorder worse. If you do seek psychiatric help, it's critical to get the right diagnosis, because the treatment options are completely different.
Indeed, may I add one caveated to that, educate yourself on what the professional advises, read the labels and be aware of the side-effects of anti-anxiety pills such as Zoloft, mixed with regular alcohol I've seen at least 4 middle aged friends have their lives totally wrecked by that particular combination, two of whom ended up spending time in jail, not to mention the distress caused to their partners and kids...
Used properly the drugs are effective, I have more friends that have benefited from their correct use than have suffered from incorrect use.
You've listed four friends who had their lives wrecked and your conclusion is that "used properly the drugs are effective"? The lesson I would draw from this is that there are other approaches which are shown to be at least as effective in managing depression for many people- exercise, counseling, and sleep training- that do not destroy people's lives and land them in jail. So instead of running to the doctor for a Zoloft prescription, a more sensible treatment plan would be to implement some of the non-drug approaches for a few months, and treating the drugs as a backup plan for when all else fails? Maybe the drugs do have a place, but doctors are far too quick to prescribe them.
If the drugs really worked, we'd see depression rates going down, and America would have one of the lowest rates of mental illness on the planet. Instead, depression has gone up over time, and we now are one of the most depressed countries in the world.
There is a lot of evidence that these drugs can be effective in the short term, but there's little if any evidence to suggest that they're effective in the long term. In fact, a number of studies suggest that in the long term, antidepressants cause worse outcomes. Left untreated, depression tends to resolve itself after 3-12 months. That makes getting relief from an antidepressant in 4-6 weeks sound appealing. But once you've been on antidepressants, you're more likely to get depressed again, and your depression is more likely to become chronic. Basically, your body becomes dependent on the drugs and has difficulty functioning without them. Maybe this doesn't happen to everybody, but it's far more common than the pharmaceutical companies would have you believe. That also makes antidepressants difficult to get off of, because the body goes into withdrawal when the dose is cut, particularly for things with short half-life. There are real risks with antidepressants. This is especially true if you're bipolar- if your depressions tend to be repeated and cyclical you may have bipolar depression, not standard depression. In that case, antidepressants may trigger mania and cause the disorder to become worse.
There are a lot of other options out there. Counseling, exercise, improving your sleep patterns, meditation, changing your diet, supplements like Omega 3 fatty acids and B vitamins. For many people, these can be every bit as effective as antidepressants. Lifestyle changes take a bit more work and discipline, but they come with far fewer risks and in the long run may be more helpful.
The Indian ocean is very deep, it is a remote location and two weeks have passed already. This black box will be harder to find than that of the Air France flight which got lost over the Atlantic. Back then they said that the sender of the black box will run for a month. I don't believe that they will find it this time.
There's no doubt that they'll find it, the question is when. As we speak, the remains of MH 370 are sitting on the bottom of the ocean, under 5,000 meters of water, and they're not going anywhere. Nothing is disturbing the wreckage, so it will just sit there for months, years, or decades until someone comes along. The Titanic sat on the seafloor for 73 years until new technologies made it possible to locate the wreckage, and yet it was remarkably well-preserved given how long it had been underwater. I doubt it will take 73 years- technology has advanced a lot, and continues to advance- but even if it does, the plane will be waiting.
Whether anything useful comes out of the flight data recorders or not is another issue. After 2 years, the data recorders from the Air France flight still worked, I don't know if anyone really knows how long the data would still be good. Solid state memory is pretty indestructible, so if the chips can survive being immersed in saltwater, maybe a long time. The bigger issue is whether the pilot shut down the recorders as well. In the SilkAir crash, the pilot or copilot shut down the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder before deliberately putting the plane into a dive. Whoever hijacked this plane seems to have wanted its fate to be a mystery, so there is a real possibility that he shut off the recorders as well. If so, we may find the crashed plane, but if so, we'll never know anything more than what we know now.
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Unless you are living a more off-the grid lifestyle than Dick Proenneke, you can not honestly claim to be a "non-user" of the road system.
Even the Unabomber used the U.S. mail...
A major issue here is that standard glass can wear down through abrasion pretty quickly. Glass is fairly hard stuff, with a Mohs hardness of 5 it's comparable to steel which is why you need specialized tools like diamond cutters to cut it. However, quartz- one of the most common minerals on earth and a major component of most sands and gravels- has a Mohs hardness of 7, so a bit of sand and grit can easily scratch and wear standard glass. Take a look at a piece of glass that's been on a rocky beach and you'll see that it's been worn down and frosted by the constant action of the waves and stones; thousands of cars a day driving over a surface and grinding pebbles and grit into it will have the same effect. It will wear grind down any texturing, and frost the glass such that it reduces the amount of light getting through to the solar cells. There are harder glasses out there, like the Gorilla Glass that smartphone screens are made out of, but it's unclear whether they've addressed this wear-and-tear issue or not.
When you start comparing crime rates, violent crime rates, gun deaths, or any other socially important data, you really need to pay careful attention to terminology. It matters little that the UK may experience only 1% of our gun deaths, if they also experience 800% of our violent crime rate.
That's not true. The homicide rate in the United Kingdom is 1.2 per 100,000. The homicide rate in Canada is 1.6. The homicide rate in Australia is 1.0 And the homicide rate for the US is 4.8 per 100,000. You can look it up on Wikipedia if you're so inclined ("List of Countries By Intentional Homicide Rate") but it's clear you've already made up your mind and are simply going to ignore any facts that don't support your preconceptions. Yes, the human tendency to murder other humans is a powerful force, and so a certain percentage of people who would otherwise be murdered by guns in the UK are murdered with knives, poison, or cricket bats, because those guns aren't available. But the end result of strict gun control is a per-capita homicide rate that is around 25% of the U.S. rate in the UK and 33% in Canada and 20% in Australia. The statistics don't lie, gun control saves lives.
I think it's time to start talking about real gun control in the United States. I'm not talking about banning a few models of assault rifles; I think the end goal of gun-control should be keeping rapid-fire weapons out of the public hands, which means requiring licensing for or simply banning all revolvers, semiautomatic pistols and semiautomatic rifles, creating something similar to the gun control laws seen in the UK. We've tried letting things run wild and all it's gotten us is thousands of deaths a year and an endless series of mass shootings. The next logical step is implementing the kinds of firearms controls seen in Canada and the United Kingdom, and I think the left needs to start pushing this seriously. No, Obama isn't out to get your guns... and it's a shame, because dammit, he SHOULD be. And if that takes a constitutional amendment, then we should pass a constitutional amendment- I'll line up to vote for that. Yes, it's in the constitution, but so was slavery, and we outgrew that. Times change, and a law written for muzzle-loaders is no longer useful in an age of machine guns. I'm tired of seeing thousands of people senselessly slaughtered every year because the political debate is held hostage by a handful of extremists. For too long we've played it the NRA's way and refused to talk about gun control. We need to start talking about gun control again, and nothing should be off the table.
That being said, I don't think Adams really falls into that camp of informed speculators. He says at one point "If you put some scrubbers in the device I think there's a way to deal with pollution and climate change too. I saw some sort of tube-to-the-sky concept that was supposed to do that but I'm too lazy to search for the link." He's just screwing around. He's having fun playing with ideas, but can't actually be bothered to do the math or even Google something before saying it. It just comes across as self-indulgent and vain, not insightful or intelligent. For someone who spent so much time deriding people for being stupid or intellectually lazy, he's showing a lot of intellectual laziness himself.
If antidepressants are really the answer, why does America, with one of the highest rates of antidepressant use, also have one of the highest rates of depression in the world? If they were really effective, people should be less depressed, and in fact there's more depression and mental illness than ever. There's increasingly concern that antidepressants are actually making things worse. In the short term, antidepressants can be effective in managing the treatment of depression, for some people. The problem is that they can cause long-term changes in how the brain functions, such that the person becomes dependent upon the drug. This means that on quitting antidepressants, the depression is more likely to return than it would have been if it had simply been left to resolve itself. There have been a number of studies published that suggest that the long-term outcome of mental illness is worse when antidepressants are used. As far as I know, there isn't a single study that has shown that outcomes for depression are improved long-term- over the course of 5-10 years instead of 5-10 weeks- by the use of antidepressants.
Maybe antidepressants do have a role in treating mental illness, but given the risks- increased risk of suicide, the highly addictive nature of some of the drugs (especially ones with short half-lives) and the risk that they can make people worse than when they started, these should be a method of last resort for severe clinical depression, NOT a first-line treatment for everyone who seems moderately sad or anxious. There are a *lot* of things that have been shown to be potentially beneficial- cognitive behavioral therapy, exercise, light therapy, sleep therapy, and supplements like Omega 3 fatty acids, vitamin B, D, zinc and magnesium, cutting down on carbohydrates- which come without the risks posed by antidepressants.
How in the hell can you write an article called "The World's Worst Planes" and not include the massively over-budget and behind-schedule F-35 Lightning II?
The whole plan seems pretty sketchy. You can't just create a mashup of two distantly related animals and automatically expect to get something viable out of the mix. Mammoths and Asian elephants aren't actually that closely related- African elephant, Asian elephant, and mammoth are thought to have diverged around six million years ago, so mammoths are about as close to Asian elephants as chimps are to humans.
Hybridization can result in improved fitness if the parents aren't too distantly related. However, the more distant the relationship between the parents, the less likely the offspring are to be viable. Humans and Neanderthals split around 600,000 years ago and were able to successfully interbreed. However, horses and asses split around four million years ago. The offspring- mules and hinnies- are healthy, but they are either sterile or have reduced fertility. Breeding more distantly related animals produces non-viable offspring.
The article does mention that there have been hybrids between Asian and African elephants, which are slightly more distantly related than Asian elephant and mammoth. What the article neglects to mention is that the only known example of an African-Asian hybrid died several weeks after birth; there are other reports of hybrids being born but strikingly no reports of any surviving. This suggests that mixing mammoth and Asian elephant DNA is going to produce an unhealthy or non-viable offspring.
Would the robot shoot a US commander that is about the bomb a village of men woman and children?
The US navy don't want robots with morals, they want robots that do as they say.
Country A makes robots with morals, Country B makes robots without morals - all else being equal the robots without morals would win. Killer robots are worse than landmines and should be banned and any country making them should be completely embargoed.
Wars are as much political conflicts as anything else, so acting in a moral fashion, or at a bare minimum appearing to do so, is vital to winning the war. Predator drones are a perfect example of this. In terms of the cold calculus of human lives, they are probably a good thing. They are highly precise, minimize American casualties, and probably minimize civilian casualties compared to more conventional methods like sending in bombers, tanks, platoons, etc. etc. That's cold comfort if your family is slaughtered of course, but Afghanistan is probably a much cleaner war than previous wars such as the Russian occupation of Afghanistan, or the U.S. war in Viet Nam.
The issue is that there is just something deeply unnerving about the idea of a soulless, unfeeling machine piloted from thousands of miles away raining Hellfire missiles down on unsuspecting people below. It's not really any worse than getting killed by a soldier, but somehow it feels worse- the civilians never had a chance, and even the combatants are simply slaughtered without any chance to fight back. When you're killing someone who never even has a chance, it's more a form of murder than warfare. It feels, in a word, immoral. And that is costing the U.S. hugely. From a purely rational standpoint, the drones make sense. From a moral standpoint, there is something repugnant and indecent and hideous about them. That is swaying public opinion against the U.S. and helping to increase support for the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Maybe behaving in an amoral fashion wins you the battles. But you can win all the battles and turn everyone against you, in which case you may lose the war.
No idea why you're being downmoderated. It's *absolutely* the NSA's job to eavesdrop on foreigners. That's what they're being paid to do.
While it is the NSA's job to spy on people, that's traditionally been something you do against your adversaries, not your allies. I mean, it's one thing if we're talking about tapping the USSR's undersea cables. They had nuclear-tipped ICBMs pointed at us. It's quite another thing when we're talking about tapping the phone of Angela Merkel. She's the democratically elected president of an allied NATO state. I mean, up until that point she and Obama had a pretty good working relationship, so if he really wanted to know what she was thinking, he probably could have you, know, asked her.
What is your point precisely? Taxonomy is about determining the number of species and the boundaries between them- whether that means identifying a new population, or subdividing one group into two distinct species. Either one is taxonomy in action, the fact that we are seeing a dramatic increase in the number of species means that taxonomy is an active field, not a dying one.
If taxonomy is really a dying science, you'd have a hard time telling from the number of species being described. According to reptile-database.org, there were 3149 snake species in 2008, as of Feb 2014, there are 3458. That's 309 species, 51 species a year, roughly a 10% increase in six years- which is stunning when you consider that we have been naming species since the 1700s. There were 5079 lizards in 2008, and 5914 in 2014. That's 835 species,139 a year, and a 16% increase. This is just the reptiles; you'll see similar trends if you look at other groups like frogs, or fish, or insects. Given these numbers, you could argue that we are in fact in a golden age of taxonomy. DNA is a big part of this- using DNA it's possible to show that populations that may look superficially similar, even to an experienced taxonomist, stopped exchanging genes millions of years ago.
Bird and mammal taxonomy is a different story. Historically they have been really well studied, to the point that there simply aren't that many species left to be described. Only 44 birds have been described since 2010, which works out to around a dozen a year, around 10% the rate of discovery for reptiles. That's enough work to occupy a few taxonomists full-time, or a number of taxonomists part-time, but it suggests that we really don't need more bird taxonomists because there's just not much left for them to do.
Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent
- Keynes
Eventually, the bubble pops, the collective delusion ends, and gravity and other natural laws reassert themselves, the whole thing comes crashing down. The key word being "eventually". Bubbles are self-sustaining, there's a feedback loop. People buy in because the price goes up, as more people buy in, the price goes up more, and so on. Sober, rational people look at fools making money and eventually decide they've made a mistake and start jumping in even as the whole thing starts racing towards disaster and becoming more unstable, so the bubble converts more people over time. The media eventually start calling it a bubble, but lots of people stay in the game even though they know it's unsustainable because they think they can time the market. They know their luck can't last, but they money is too good so they stay in. Like a gambling addict at a casino, they tell themselves they'll just play one more hand...
The result of all these things is that bubbles take years to play out. If you look on Google Trends you'll see that "Housing Bubble" becomes popular in 2005, a full three years before the financial crisis and the collapse of the housing market. People realized we were in a housing bubble and yet the whole thing kept going, becoming more and more delusional, until it finally exploded. The same thing happened with the Internet Bubble- it popped in 2000, but in 1999 there was already a book called "The Internet Bubble."
Selling short into a bubble is a bit like being the one sane guy at a cult compound trying to tell everyone that no, the magical silver spaceships are not coming to take you to heaven when the world ends. Yes, eventually the whole thing will burn to the ground and the survivors will realize that the Shining Leader was just a creepy perv with serious mental health issues. But it's anybody's guess when that will happen.
I don't know if I'd call it a tech bubble, it's more of a froth- lots of little bubbles. During the original tech bubble that started in the late '90s, pretty much everything was massively overvalued, and pretty much every shitty startup would go public and see its stock rocket up, even (especially) if they didn't make a profit and didn't have a business plan. It was widespread financial insanity, collective economic madness. The average stock on the S&P 500 traded at 40 times earnings, versus about 18.8 today. In other words, the average company costs about twice as much (relative to its earning potential) then as now.
Today, there are definitely some overvalued tech stocks. Facebook has a P/E of 76, Netflix has a P/E of 128, Amazon has a P/E of 428. Which means that at current earnings levels, a dollar invested in Facebook will pay off in 76 years, that same dollar invested in Netflix will pay off in 128 years, and Amazon stock will pay for itself in a little over four centuries. You're speculating (i.e. gambling) if you buy any of those companies. But other tech stocks are more reasonably priced. Google has a P/E of 28, Microsoft's P/E ratio is 15, Apple's is only 14. We are seeing bubble-like behavior in certain companies and in certain industries (social media, for example) but it's going a little far to say that the entire industry is in a bubble.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/antidepressant-use-in-pregnancy-linked-to-autism-risk-in-boys/
It's published in the New England Journal of Medicine and given the previous, fraudulent work concerning autism and vaccines, I am guessing that the editors and reviewers took a very, very careful look at the evidence before accepting this paper for publication. As always, correlation does not equal causation, however it provides a good hint of where to look. It would hardly be surprising to find that powerful drugs that alter neurotransmitter levels and expression of growth factors in the brain affect the brain of a developing fetus. Furthermore, the sudden epidemic of autism seems to take off at about the same time doctors start prescribing these drugs to everyone and their dog. If this turns out to be true... we're looking at billions of dollars in liability for the drug companies and the credibility of the psychiatric industry left in shreds.
Stephen Colbert has been called "The biggest Tolkien geek I've ever met". Coming from Peter Jackson, that's quite an honor. The guy's a nerd, so it's something remarkable that he's become as much of a cultural phenomenon as he is, and now he's set to take on one of the big late night shows. It'll be interesting to see what happens- weird to see him out of character, but he's phenomenally talented and versatile, if anyone can pull it off he can. The thing I like about Colbert is that it's clear he really enjoys doing what he's doing, there's just something about watching someone at work who's having the time of their life.
It's also going to be interesting to see what Comedy Central does now. John Oliver and now Stephen Colbert have left, so they've lost two of their top three comics, and I'd argue that they've lost the best two. I know a number of people who are still John Stewart fans but personally I think Stewart has lost his mojo. He's not passionate, he seems tired and burned out, his humor has an edge that's not just self-deprecating, it's self-pitying, an endless series of sad jokes about how old he is and how short he is. The humor is also increasingly juvenile, but not in a good way. It's all dick jokes, which would be great if Stewart and the writers could make funny dick jokes like Parker and Stone, but they can't. The supporting cast has issues as well. In particular Jason Jones is supposed to be playing a character who's a dick, but he just comes across as actually being dick, and the show has taken on a mean-spirited tone that it didn't used to have.
Personally, I think Comedy Central is in trouble. The Daily Show has some serious issues and Stewart's directorial gig and Oliver's stint as guest host makes it clear he's thinking about moving on. Colbert has now left. John Oliver demonstrated last summer that he's talented and charming enough to host a half-hour show, but now he's on HBO. This move probably doesn't come as a complete shock, so if Comedy Central was clever, they would have encouraged John Oliver to sign a contract that would leave him free to come back to Comedy Central. But the other issue is that Oliver seems like a perfect replacement for Stewart. It's unclear who would- or could- fill in for someone as unique as Colbert.
Besides everyone knows star trek is a sifi based entertainment show, its not claiming to be factual..
"Uh, Bill, you do realize that this is a TV show, right? You are not actually the captain of a starship. We are not actually on a five year mission in space. These computer banks? They're just cardboard boxes wired up with blinking Christmas lights."
"Wait... what? But... Leonard that... can't... BE!!!!"
There's no doubt that manufacturing fuel on board is desirable from a logistics standpoint.
Is it, though? If you run out of fuel, just refuel the damn thing. At sea refueling is trivially easy, all you need is a ship that can carry a lot of fuel, a pump, and a hose. Pretty much any ship will work if it will carry enough- for example in the summer fishing season in Alaska, the canneries hire on the big Bering Sea crab boats to act as tenders, and they provide fuel to the smaller salmon boats. Refueling a destroyer at sea isn't all that different except in scale, and the Navy has logistics ships designed specifically to do this.
The other variable that needs to be considered is time. I'm guessing that not only is this process very energy-intensive, it takes a while. The article shows them fueling a hobby plane with the fuel they've generated, which suggests they're not exactly churning the stuff out by the barrel. Unless you can create a system that can deliver tens of thousands of gallons a day, it's probably going to be far faster to divert a support ship and have it show up with 7 million gallons of the stuff.
And realistically, when is a carrier or other ship likely to be far from supply lines? Current and potential flashpoints would include places like Syria, the Ukraine, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Taiwan, and North Korea. Likely areas of operation for the Navy will be the Mediterranean, Arabian Sea, South China Sea, and the Sea of Japan. None are far from civilization. Not coincidentally, the U.S. already has bases near all of these places. The U.S. Navy did have a tough time in the Pacific theater in WWII, trying to fight the Japanese in Indonesia on the far side of the Pacific, and that was even after they had the good fortune that the Japanese didn't think to bomb the fuel tanks in Hawaii. Part of what they learned from Pearl Harbor is that you don't wait until the fighting starts to establish a supply chain and stockpile fuel.
At this rate, I suspect the actual linked article is a rather bland study of the inter-penguin behaviors of a group of rockhopper penguins during a 4 month observation that was initially proposed because the researcher thought the penguin-keeper at the zoo was hot.
Close. It's just some idiot's brain-dead blog post that he submitted to Slashdot in a desperate attempt to get some readers. It's slightly longer than the summary, but doesn't actually contain any more content. The basic premise of the argument is that live TV and satellite TV matter and they'll continue to call the shots. The reality of the situation is that digital, on-demand services like Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu are rapidly expanding in terms of the content available, and in terms of not just distributing but creating new content (House of Cards, Arrested Development). HBO is a holdout here- you still need a cable subscription to be able to watch it online- but the number of people watching video-on-demand online will continue to grow, and as the content migrates to follow, cable-cutters will increase, and HBO and others will follow them. Eventually, traditional TV and satellite will die. It may take a while, but that's the way things are going. It makes far more sense for Apple, Amazon and Google to focus on where the TV industry will be in 10-20 years than where it is now, so who really cares what the networks and cable companies want?
There's one thing I will agree with: to figure out the fate of the plane we have to get inside the pilot's head and try to figure out what he's doing. The trick here is that based on the available facts, we have to stop thinking in terms of someone who's trying desperately to save the plane and his passengers, and try to understand someone's whose goal is to do the opposite.
One thing to think about- where would you crash a plane if your goal was not simply to crash a plane, but to conceal its fate? Whoever took the plane seems to have wanted its resting place to remain a mystery. They must have known that the path of the plane would be tracked by military radar, so by heading northwest until they were off radar, and then turning southeast, they must have wanted to mislead searchers about the direction of the flight. And by sending the plane into the deeps of the Indian Ocean, they must have hoped that the wreckage would never be found. But one thing didn't make sense here. If you were going to go to this kind of length to lose a plane forever, where would you crash it? Not southwest of Australia; the sea there is deep but its a fairly broad and flat ocean floor. Yes the search area here is huge and the seas are rough, but if the wreckage ends up on a flat expanse of seafloor, it's going to be pretty easy to spot on sonar. It would take a long time to find, but eventually it would be found. No, you wouldn't want an abyssal plain. You'd go for the deepest, most rugged stretch you could find. You'd pilot the plain straight into an ocean trench.
Then a curious thing happened. The search area was changed, again, for something like the third time. The new data suggests the plane didn't fly as far, and instead of crashing southwest of Australia, it crashed almost due west of Australia. At first this seems to suggest the search will be easier. But if you look on the maps, you'll see that the new search area overlaps an ocean trench- the Diamantina Trench, the deepest point in the entire Indian Ocean. Its maximum depth is 8,000 meters/26,000 feet. Eight kilometers. Five miles. Its rugged terrain, which will conceal the plane and scatter any noise from the sonar beacon. Plus, the Navy's pinger locator can only go about 6,000 meters down, and the range of the black box ping signal is only about a mile, so if the plane is at the deepest part of the trench, it's may well be out of the range of sonar equipment. On top of everything, the terrain is going to be unstable; unlike a flat abyssal plain where the sediments accumulate slowly and don't shift, the mountainous terrain of the Diamantina Trench will be subject to slumps and debris flows, with avalanches of fine mud that could easily bury a plane.
Up until now, it seemed like a good bet that the plane would be found, eventually. After all the Titanic was sitting on the seafloor for the better part of a century before it was discovered. But if the pilot really did crash the plane into the Diamantina Trench, there's a real chance that it's lost for good.
I think the fire scenario is a pretty reasonable explanation, but it's by no means the only possibility.
The fire scenario has been pretty thoroughly debunked at this point. Radar shows that the plane made multiple turns and changes in altitude, meaning that it was being actively piloted. Here's what we currently do know: the ACARS transmitter was turned off, the plane made a sharp turn to the west and climbed to 45,000 feet. Radar then shows the plane descending to 23,000 feet. The plane turns again and climbs, heading out over the Indian Ocean. At this point, radar contact is lost; however the satellite pings indicate that the plane ended up in the southern Indian Ocean, which means it had to turn again. So after the transmitter is turned off, the plane made at least three turns and changed altitude three times. Someone was definitely at the controls until radar contact was lost.
Eat more fish and vegetables.
There's increasing evidence that diet may play a role in mental illness. I've always been skeptical of the low-carb craze and the recent war on sugar. However, it's been shown that a number of neurological disorders do respond to carbohydrate reduction. One is epilepsy, which can respond to a very low carbohydrate (ketogenic) diet. In these diets, sugar and carbohydrates are cut out, and the body primarily burns fat for fuel. The other is bipolar II. There are a couple of documented case studies of bipolar sufferers managing their symptoms by switching to a low-carbohydrate diet. It worked better than their drugs, to the point that they actually stopped the drugs and just used the diet.
This raises the question of whether diet could contribute to depression. If reducing carbohydrates can treat psychiatric problems, then could a diet high in refined sugars and carbohydrates cause psychiatric problems? It sounds a bit crazy, but the brain is just another organ. If excess sugar can cause your kidneys to fail, what the hell is it doing to your brain?
There is a condition known as "manic depressive disorder." Essentially, you can have a day where you're feeling so great that you decide to move all of the furniture in your house, repaint the living room, run a mile, begin a novel, and more. You have tons of energy and can do it all. And then you crash into the depression stage where getting out of bed is a major achievement.
These days it's called Bipolar Disorder. and it comes in two varieties, Bipolar I and Bipolar II. Bipolar I is the classic Manic Depressive disorder. In BPII the ups tend to be much milder and shorter, and the depression tends to be more chronic. BP I is pretty hard to miss- the manias tend to be the kind of thing that land you either in the hospital or in jail. But a lot of people suffering from depression may actually suffer from BP II. The highs in Bipolar II are hypomanic- they're characterized by being in a good mood, being creative, being productive, being outgoing. Nobody ever goes to the doctor complaining about hypomania. The depression in Bipolar II tends to be the dominant symptom, however, and it tends to be chronic. The problem here is that a lot of people who are treated by doctors for depression actually suffer from bipolar II, and the treatments are completely different. The standard treatments for BPII are anticonvulsants- lamotrigine and valproic acid. BPII suffers do respond to antidepressants, but the problem is that they respond too well; antidepressants actually tend to make bipolar people manic and can make the disorder worse. If you do seek psychiatric help, it's critical to get the right diagnosis, because the treatment options are completely different.
Indeed, may I add one caveated to that, educate yourself on what the professional advises, read the labels and be aware of the side-effects of anti-anxiety pills such as Zoloft, mixed with regular alcohol I've seen at least 4 middle aged friends have their lives totally wrecked by that particular combination, two of whom ended up spending time in jail, not to mention the distress caused to their partners and kids...
Used properly the drugs are effective, I have more friends that have benefited from their correct use than have suffered from incorrect use.
You've listed four friends who had their lives wrecked and your conclusion is that "used properly the drugs are effective"? The lesson I would draw from this is that there are other approaches which are shown to be at least as effective in managing depression for many people- exercise, counseling, and sleep training- that do not destroy people's lives and land them in jail. So instead of running to the doctor for a Zoloft prescription, a more sensible treatment plan would be to implement some of the non-drug approaches for a few months, and treating the drugs as a backup plan for when all else fails? Maybe the drugs do have a place, but doctors are far too quick to prescribe them.
There is a lot of evidence that these drugs can be effective in the short term, but there's little if any evidence to suggest that they're effective in the long term. In fact, a number of studies suggest that in the long term, antidepressants cause worse outcomes. Left untreated, depression tends to resolve itself after 3-12 months. That makes getting relief from an antidepressant in 4-6 weeks sound appealing. But once you've been on antidepressants, you're more likely to get depressed again, and your depression is more likely to become chronic. Basically, your body becomes dependent on the drugs and has difficulty functioning without them. Maybe this doesn't happen to everybody, but it's far more common than the pharmaceutical companies would have you believe. That also makes antidepressants difficult to get off of, because the body goes into withdrawal when the dose is cut, particularly for things with short half-life. There are real risks with antidepressants. This is especially true if you're bipolar- if your depressions tend to be repeated and cyclical you may have bipolar depression, not standard depression. In that case, antidepressants may trigger mania and cause the disorder to become worse.
There are a lot of other options out there. Counseling, exercise, improving your sleep patterns, meditation, changing your diet, supplements like Omega 3 fatty acids and B vitamins. For many people, these can be every bit as effective as antidepressants. Lifestyle changes take a bit more work and discipline, but they come with far fewer risks and in the long run may be more helpful.
The Indian ocean is very deep, it is a remote location and two weeks have passed already. This black box will be harder to find than that of the Air France flight which got lost over the Atlantic. Back then they said that the sender of the black box will run for a month. I don't believe that they will find it this time.
There's no doubt that they'll find it, the question is when. As we speak, the remains of MH 370 are sitting on the bottom of the ocean, under 5,000 meters of water, and they're not going anywhere. Nothing is disturbing the wreckage, so it will just sit there for months, years, or decades until someone comes along. The Titanic sat on the seafloor for 73 years until new technologies made it possible to locate the wreckage, and yet it was remarkably well-preserved given how long it had been underwater. I doubt it will take 73 years- technology has advanced a lot, and continues to advance- but even if it does, the plane will be waiting.
Whether anything useful comes out of the flight data recorders or not is another issue. After 2 years, the data recorders from the Air France flight still worked, I don't know if anyone really knows how long the data would still be good. Solid state memory is pretty indestructible, so if the chips can survive being immersed in saltwater, maybe a long time. The bigger issue is whether the pilot shut down the recorders as well. In the SilkAir crash, the pilot or copilot shut down the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder before deliberately putting the plane into a dive. Whoever hijacked this plane seems to have wanted its fate to be a mystery, so there is a real possibility that he shut off the recorders as well. If so, we may find the crashed plane, but if so, we'll never know anything more than what we know now.