There are around 43,000 traffic fatalities per year in the US. If we posit that a mere 60,000,000 people (only 1/5th of the US population) get in a car or cross the street on foot every year, that's a total death rate of about 0.00072%.
43,000 divided by 60,000,000 is 0.00072, which is 0.072%.
You'll therefore have to excuse me if I find your math lacking.
Seprate airway and food ingestion
on
An Alternate Human
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I'm surprised no one has suggested this yet, but it's astonishing how many people die from choking on food or inhaling their own vomit after a traumatic injury or serious illness.
If I had to make a major modification to the human body plan, I would separate the mouth for breathing and talking from the mouth for eating.
What do you mean? If we're products of evolution, then we humans are supremely natural.
There's a difference between being "natural" and "sustainable". The vast majority of natural creatures are also sustainable, because if you don't live a sustainable lifestyle your lifestyle (or species) will not persist. The unsustainable ones get winnowed out. Being "natural" or not has no bearing on whether your species will go extinct or not.
The word "natural" has become so mangled that it that it is both useless and meaningless except as part of a marketing campaign.
On a more serious note, because farming is more dependable, and causes less wear and tear on people, than hunting and gathering.
Actually, as anthropologist Jared Diamond discussed in his essay The Worst Mistake
in the History of the Human Race the transition to agriculture was really bad for people's health, and resulted in an instant decline in stature, dental health, and lifespan.
And agriculture caused much more wear and tear on the body. It involves highly repetative tasks that the paleolithic human body isn't built for, tasks based on brute strength rather than the endurance that is more valuable for hunter-gatherers. There's more on that here.
You said it yourself, farmers have more children. Do you really think they reproduce more, or that their children have a better survival rate?
One of these factors is long-term breast-feeding.(32) As I have mentioned, foraging women carry their children on gathering treks, into rivers, through forests, sitting around the fire, and they feed them on demand for the first three or four years of their young lives. This practice offers yet another facet of the elliptical whole of the natural world: it not only provides the nurturance necessary for the child's physical and psychological development, but can trigger the secretion of a pituitary hormone that suppresses the mother's menstrual cycle. As Lee puts it, the child's frequent stimulation of the breast is "rather like carrying your contraceptive on your hip."(33)
Other contributing factors to low birthrates among nature-based women include a noticeably late onset of menstruation, as well as extended periods when the blood cycle simply disappears.(34) Contemporary researchers attribute these physiological conditions, in part, to the high-protein diets and lean bodies of hunter-gatherer women and, in part, to the strenuous demands of walking long distances while carrying equipment, mounds of plant food, and children--physical conditions that are reproduced among today's female athletes who also report fewer periods and irregular cycles. The upshot of all these factors is that family size is small, the pressures we typically associate with child rearing are more relaxed, and population remains low--because for every woman of reproductive age, a new child arrives but every five, six, or seven years.
The survival rates vary.
So agriculture spread because farmers were too stupid to realize that they could get by perfectly well being hunter-gatherers and with less effort? I don't think so.
The growth of agriculture was probably led by emerging elites, as discussed below, who benefitted from controlling a stockpile of grain. And it spread because agriculturalists have more babies, and need to spread and get more land to feed a constantly growing population.
If they move to an area that doesn't have much game or plant foods, they get hungry. If their luck is bad for long enough, they starve and that's the end of them. Once they get hungry a couple of times the novelty wears off and anything that'll prevent hunger starts looking pretty interesting. Like agriculture even if you have to work more then 2-4 hours a day.
This simply isn't true, because of the wide variety of possible options hunter-gatherers have. They choose from thousands of species in every terrain and ecological niche. That diversity moderates the effects of droughts or severe weather. In contrast, early agriculturalists were depen
Changing whether people post their preferences isn't actually going to change how people act. If a woman only wants a female room-mate her being forbidden to post that fact isn't going to change her preference. It only means that more people will contact her who she doesn't want to live with, and that she will have to turn down more contacts.
It just decreases the efficiency of the system, and provides a superficial illusion of change. It doesn't even remotely address any of the deeper issues actually related to discrimination which these lawyers claim to care about.
Science fiction author Bruce Sterling wrote about a similar system in his 1982, Hugo-nominated short story Spider Rose.
In that story eight pods eight radial cables rotated around the center of the web to maintain tension. Incoming packages would be caught in the centre of the web, wand the spinning pod would be drawn intowards the center to absorb the kinetic energy as the web bowed out.
Any work that needed to be done on the web was done by numerous spider-bots.
I love font-resizing too, but I actually prefer the way Opera does it. Opera resizes the images and tables as well, so that resizing maintains the page layout.
It should have no more effect than a tree does, and in windy areas where wind power is a viable source (my old stomping grounds in West Texas spring to mind), having windbreaks is generally a good thing in terms of reducing erosion.
But trees don't just block wind. They transpire huge amounts of water, cooling the area around them. That's part of why deforestation creates deserts -- because it increases the temperature and decreases the humidity.
I've read at least one study (can't find a link) that suggest that a large number of windmills would increase the local temperature by slowing down the wind -- wind being in part the "convection" of the atmosphere, moving hot air to high altitude and releasing the heat.
So in the way, a "field" of windmills would have a very different effect from a forest. (Not to mention that trees provide food, shelter, and other important ecological contributions).
How does it work? A spinning screen, must be transparent I guess... what's the sci-fi sphere for?
According to the article, the screen spins at 900 RPM. The sphere is probably to keep the noise and air disturbance from the spinning screen down, keep people from sticking their fingers into it, etc.
Just because a corporation is more "exposed" doesn't mean that it will do good things. Hilter was very overt about what he wanted to do, and the public agreed with him.
If people are willing ignore (or even applaud) the general atrocities and exploitation that underlie a given corporation, that company can afford to be "public" about everything it is doing and contiue unobstructed.
New Tools to Help Patients Reclaim Damaged Senses
By SANDRA BLAKESLEE
Published: November 23, 2004
Cheryl Schiltz vividly recalls the morning she became a wobbler. Seven years ago, recovering from an infection after surgery with the aid of a common antibiotic, she climbed out of bed feeling pretty good.
"Then I literally fell to the floor," she said recently. "The whole world started wobbling. When I turned my head, the room tilted. My vision blurred. Even the air felt heavy."
The antibiotic, Ms. Schiltz learned, had damaged her vestibular system, the part of the brain that provides visual and gravitational stability. She was forced to quit her job and stay home, clinging to the walls to keep from toppling over.
But three years ago, Ms. Schiltz volunteered for an experimental treatment - a fat strip of tape, placed on her tongue, with an array of 144 microelectrodes about the size of a postage stamp. The strip was wired to a kind of carpenter's level, which was mounted on a hard hat that she placed on her head. The level determined her spatial coordinates and sent the information as tiny pulses to her tongue.
The apparatus, called a BrainPort, worked beautifully. By "buzzing" her tongue once a day for 20 minutes, keeping the pulses centered, she regained normal vestibular function and was able to balance.
Ms. Schiltz and other patients like her are the beneficiaries of an astonishing new technology that allows one set of sensory information to substitute for another in the brain.
Using novel electronic aids, vision can be represented on the skin, tongue or through the ears. If the sense of touch is gone from one part of the body, it can be routed to an area where touch sensations are intact. Pilots confused by foggy conditions, in which the horizon disappears, can right their aircraft by monitoring sensations on the tongue or trunk. Surgeons can feel on their tongues the tip of a probe inside a patient's body, enabling precise movements.
Sensory substitution is not new. Touch substitutes for vision when people read Braille. By tapping a cane, a blind person perceives a step, a curb or a puddle of water but is not aware of any sensation in the hand; feeling is experienced at the tip of the cane.
But the technology for swapping sensory information is largely the effort of Dr. Paul Bach-y-Rita, a neuroscientist in the University of Wisconsin Medical School's orthopedics and rehabilitation department. More than 30 years ago, Dr. Bach-y-Rita developed the first sensory substitution device, routing visual images, via a head-mounted camera, to electrodes taped to the skin on people's backs. The subjects, he found, could "see" large objects and flickering candles with their backs. The tongue, sensitive and easy to reach, turned out to be an even better place to deliver substitute senses, Dr. Bach-y-Rita said.
Until recently sensory substitution was confined to the laboratory. But electronic miniaturization and more powerful computer algorithms are making the technology less cumbersome. Next month, the first fully portable device will be tested in Dr. Bach-y-Rita's lab.
The BrainPort is nearing commercialization. Two years ago, the University of Wisconsin patented the concept and exclusively licensed it to Wicab Inc., a company formed by Dr. Bach-y-Rita to develop and market BrainPort devices. Robert Beckman, the company president, said units should be available a year from now.
Meanwhile, a handful of clinicians around the world who are using the BrainPort on an experimental basis are effusive about its promise.
"I have never seen any other device do what this one does," said Dr. F. Owen Black, an expert on vestibular disorders at the Legacy Clinical Research and Technology Center in Portland, Ore. "Our patients are begging us to continue using the device."
Dr. Maurice Ptito, a neuroscientist at University of Montreal School of Optometry, is conducting brain imaging experiments to explore how BrainPort works.
Dr. Eliana Sampaio, a neuroscientist at the National Conservatory of Arts and Métiers in Paris, is u
A hacker in Germany stole the code through their internet connection. They actually realized that it was happening part way through and ran around unplugging all of the computers, but it was too late to stop the transfer completely. See the Final Hours of Half Life 2.
Great, now the terrorists will be able to create genetically enhanced supermen to fight our all natural 100% human soldiers. We're doomed!!!
Unless the Bush Administration is holding back on the biological engineering capabilities of "terrorists", it will probably be the other way around. Genetically "enhanced" soldiers to invade whatever country is "lacking in freedom", and force "freedom" upon them.
But don't worry -- we're still doomed.
Maybe we can eliminate eVoting and voting entirely and have some university researchers tell us who will win. That would save everyone a lot of hassle.
Yeah! Or better yet, we can just have some Supreme Court justices tell us who won.
Oh, wait...
They probably put their code on a internet connected computer a year ago because they knew that it would take that long for the Steam servers to verify and decrypt it.;-)
So in the future, child abductors don't actually have to go out and look for children anymore. They just use their RFID scanner to find children of the age and gender they're looking for?
How the hell is this a good idea?
Slashdot Mirror
...but it's being spelled "compactifiy" with an extra "i" in the summary. Double sigh.
43,000 divided by 60,000,000 is 0.00072, which is 0.072%.
You'll therefore have to excuse me if I find your math lacking.
I'm surprised no one has suggested this yet, but it's astonishing how many people die from choking on food or inhaling their own vomit after a traumatic injury or serious illness.
If I had to make a major modification to the human body plan, I would separate the mouth for breathing and talking from the mouth for eating.
What do you mean? If we're products of evolution, then we humans are supremely natural.
There's a difference between being "natural" and "sustainable". The vast majority of natural creatures are also sustainable, because if you don't live a sustainable lifestyle your lifestyle (or species) will not persist. The unsustainable ones get winnowed out. Being "natural" or not has no bearing on whether your species will go extinct or not.
The word "natural" has become so mangled that it that it is both useless and meaningless except as part of a marketing campaign.
Actually, as anthropologist Jared Diamond discussed in his essay The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race the transition to agriculture was really bad for people's health, and resulted in an instant decline in stature, dental health, and lifespan.
And agriculture caused much more wear and tear on the body. It involves highly repetative tasks that the paleolithic human body isn't built for, tasks based on brute strength rather than the endurance that is more valuable for hunter-gatherers. There's more on that here.
Farmers do have more children. Hunter-gathers have fewer for various reasons:
The survival rates vary.
The growth of agriculture was probably led by emerging elites, as discussed below, who benefitted from controlling a stockpile of grain. And it spread because agriculturalists have more babies, and need to spread and get more land to feed a constantly growing population.
This simply isn't true, because of the wide variety of possible options hunter-gatherers have. They choose from thousands of species in every terrain and ecological niche. That diversity moderates the effects of droughts or severe weather. In contrast, early agriculturalists were depen
Changing whether people post their preferences isn't actually going to change how people act. If a woman only wants a female room-mate her being forbidden to post that fact isn't going to change her preference. It only means that more people will contact her who she doesn't want to live with, and that she will have to turn down more contacts.
It just decreases the efficiency of the system, and provides a superficial illusion of change. It doesn't even remotely address any of the deeper issues actually related to discrimination which these lawyers claim to care about.
In that story eight pods eight radial cables rotated around the center of the web to maintain tension. Incoming packages would be caught in the centre of the web, wand the spinning pod would be drawn intowards the center to absorb the kinetic energy as the web bowed out.
Any work that needed to be done on the web was done by numerous spider-bots.
I love font-resizing too, but I actually prefer the way Opera does it. Opera resizes the images and tables as well, so that resizing maintains the page layout.
But trees don't just block wind. They transpire huge amounts of water, cooling the area around them. That's part of why deforestation creates deserts -- because it increases the temperature and decreases the humidity.
I've read at least one study (can't find a link) that suggest that a large number of windmills would increase the local temperature by slowing down the wind -- wind being in part the "convection" of the atmosphere, moving hot air to high altitude and releasing the heat.
So in the way, a "field" of windmills would have a very different effect from a forest. (Not to mention that trees provide food, shelter, and other important ecological contributions).
According to the article, the screen spins at 900 RPM. The sphere is probably to keep the noise and air disturbance from the spinning screen down, keep people from sticking their fingers into it, etc.
Just because a corporation is more "exposed" doesn't mean that it will do good things. Hilter was very overt about what he wanted to do, and the public agreed with him.
If people are willing ignore (or even applaud) the general atrocities and exploitation that underlie a given corporation, that company can afford to be "public" about everything it is doing and contiue unobstructed.
It comes from a Slashdot story from earier today called In Korea, Email Is Only For Old People .
In Soviet Russia, new jokes about Korea overuse Slashdotters!
New Tools to Help Patients Reclaim Damaged Senses By SANDRA BLAKESLEE Published: November 23, 2004 Cheryl Schiltz vividly recalls the morning she became a wobbler. Seven years ago, recovering from an infection after surgery with the aid of a common antibiotic, she climbed out of bed feeling pretty good. "Then I literally fell to the floor," she said recently. "The whole world started wobbling. When I turned my head, the room tilted. My vision blurred. Even the air felt heavy." The antibiotic, Ms. Schiltz learned, had damaged her vestibular system, the part of the brain that provides visual and gravitational stability. She was forced to quit her job and stay home, clinging to the walls to keep from toppling over. But three years ago, Ms. Schiltz volunteered for an experimental treatment - a fat strip of tape, placed on her tongue, with an array of 144 microelectrodes about the size of a postage stamp. The strip was wired to a kind of carpenter's level, which was mounted on a hard hat that she placed on her head. The level determined her spatial coordinates and sent the information as tiny pulses to her tongue. The apparatus, called a BrainPort, worked beautifully. By "buzzing" her tongue once a day for 20 minutes, keeping the pulses centered, she regained normal vestibular function and was able to balance. Ms. Schiltz and other patients like her are the beneficiaries of an astonishing new technology that allows one set of sensory information to substitute for another in the brain. Using novel electronic aids, vision can be represented on the skin, tongue or through the ears. If the sense of touch is gone from one part of the body, it can be routed to an area where touch sensations are intact. Pilots confused by foggy conditions, in which the horizon disappears, can right their aircraft by monitoring sensations on the tongue or trunk. Surgeons can feel on their tongues the tip of a probe inside a patient's body, enabling precise movements. Sensory substitution is not new. Touch substitutes for vision when people read Braille. By tapping a cane, a blind person perceives a step, a curb or a puddle of water but is not aware of any sensation in the hand; feeling is experienced at the tip of the cane. But the technology for swapping sensory information is largely the effort of Dr. Paul Bach-y-Rita, a neuroscientist in the University of Wisconsin Medical School's orthopedics and rehabilitation department. More than 30 years ago, Dr. Bach-y-Rita developed the first sensory substitution device, routing visual images, via a head-mounted camera, to electrodes taped to the skin on people's backs. The subjects, he found, could "see" large objects and flickering candles with their backs. The tongue, sensitive and easy to reach, turned out to be an even better place to deliver substitute senses, Dr. Bach-y-Rita said. Until recently sensory substitution was confined to the laboratory. But electronic miniaturization and more powerful computer algorithms are making the technology less cumbersome. Next month, the first fully portable device will be tested in Dr. Bach-y-Rita's lab. The BrainPort is nearing commercialization. Two years ago, the University of Wisconsin patented the concept and exclusively licensed it to Wicab Inc., a company formed by Dr. Bach-y-Rita to develop and market BrainPort devices. Robert Beckman, the company president, said units should be available a year from now. Meanwhile, a handful of clinicians around the world who are using the BrainPort on an experimental basis are effusive about its promise. "I have never seen any other device do what this one does," said Dr. F. Owen Black, an expert on vestibular disorders at the Legacy Clinical Research and Technology Center in Portland, Ore. "Our patients are begging us to continue using the device." Dr. Maurice Ptito, a neuroscientist at University of Montreal School of Optometry, is conducting brain imaging experiments to explore how BrainPort works. Dr. Eliana Sampaio, a neuroscientist at the National Conservatory of Arts and Métiers in Paris, is u
A hacker in Germany stole the code through their internet connection. They actually realized that it was happening part way through and ran around unplugging all of the computers, but it was too late to stop the transfer completely. See the Final Hours of Half Life 2.
They probably put their code on a internet connected computer a year ago because they knew that it would take that long for the Steam servers to verify and decrypt it. ;-)
No, the source code wasn't stolen from inside, someone hacked into their computers and copied it out. See the Final Hours of Half Life 2.
So in the future, child abductors don't actually have to go out and look for children anymore. They just use their RFID scanner to find children of the age and gender they're looking for? How the hell is this a good idea?