According to the linked text, the "average" person can see 2 pixels at about 2 minutes of arc, and has a field of view of 100 degrees. There are 30 sets of 2 minutes of arc in one degree, and one hundred of those in the field of view, so we get: 2 * 30 * 100, or about 6000 pixel acuity overall.
1080p is 1920 horizontally and 1080 vertically at most. So horizontally, where the 100 degree figure is accurate, there is no question that 1080p is about 2/3 less than your ability to see detail, and the answer to the question in the summary is, yes, it is worth it.
You probably would have been in a better position to comment if you'd read the entire article. Yes, if you sit so close that the screen entirely fills your field of view, than 1080p will definitely give a perceptible improvement. But the article was about real-world viewing conditions. Read down a bit further, and your find that at a distance of 8 feet,
Using trigonometry, we find that our 50 inch display subtends a viewing angle of about 28 degrees
And your conclusion essentially repeats the conclusion of the article:
But what does 1080p offer? Two things: increased screen size and closer viewing distances.
i've never used ITMS, but i'd be surprised if they could offer decent quality videos without taking quite a while to download. in my experience, regarless of the codec, if the file is less than about 1.5 GB for 1-2 hours of video, then some part of the quality has taken a serious hit (it's more often the audio than the video).
I don't really care how long it takes. On my TiVo, I may ask for something a week or two ahead of time. Eventually, it shows up. The issue isn't waiting for the show to arrive; it's finding time to watch the stuff I've already got online.
The only thing the whole Xbox360+Windows PC setup has over AppleTV+iTunes is the movie rental. But even so I'm not buying a Windows PC and paying a monthly fee to do that. I'll stick to renting DVDs, thank you.
One other advantage--I didn't have to buy a separate box to download videos. I bought the XBox360 to play games, which is sufficient to justify its price; the videos and music are a bonus.
It sure is noisy, though, although not so much that I notice it when I'm actually watching something.
Although DRM is annoying in principle, in practice I don't much care about DRM on video unless it gets in my way. I might listen to the same song repeatedly for years, on multiple devices. There is not much on video that I want to watch more than once, and almost nothing that I'd want to watch more than 2 or 3 times. The only real issue is convenience and quality. I am annoyed that I have to buy a box to watch an iTunes video on my TV, when I have a perfectly good DVD burner on my computer. At least with a standard definition TiVo, it is possible to burn videos to DVD. And the XBox 360 videos aren't portable, but the box does a bit more than enable me to do something that I would have been able to do anyway if not for DRM, and the videos are HD.
So if Apple wants to sell me one of these gadgets, I'm going to want something more than SD.
In the 1970's, the worry was Global Cooling, because global temps were on a down swing, so we're all going to die.
As somebody who was actually reading the scientific literature back then, I can tell you that this is simply a lie. There was never any serious scientific concern about global cooling. There were a couple of papers that argued that we were in a long-term cooling trend (i.e. over hundreds of years) if the effect on climate of human activity is ignored. There were some sensationalistic articles in the nonscientific press, but the notion that there was ever serious scientific concern about global cooling is disinformation manufactured by those whose financial or political interests would be endangered by efforts at reduction of CO2 emissions.
Copying and pasting ten pages of quotes for a ten (or even twenty) page paper, even if properly credited, is not just bad writing. It's failing to write at all. It's not technically plagiarism, but it could still be considered trying to skirt the work -- maybe even a form of cheating.
There is no cheating without dishonesty. Turning in a paper that is all (properly credited) quotations is more like failing to turn the paper in at all. It's lazy writing, and might reasonably earn a failing grade, but it is not dishonest writing.
I ran into a case where and exam I wrote was over 80% the same as a copy of an exam I had aquired from a few years before. Sure it provided me with an easy mark but I actually felt somewhat guilty as I had lucked out on getting the old exam and other than a few friends I had shared it with no one else in the class had one (I found this out after the marks were given out; the class average was less than 60%). It felt like I had somehow cheated because basically I had an answer key to the exam. I talked to the professor about it and he related the fact that over the years he had tried the track of not recycling exam questions. The problem he ran into is that when teaching the same course material there is only so many ways you can ask questions about the same topics
If the exam questions are well constructed, it doesn't matter if students do this. Most of my exam questions are variants of questions that I have asked before, changed just enough so that you can't get away with simply memorizing the previous answer without understanding it. The questions are based upon what I want the students to take away from my lectures, so if they can answer variants of all of the questions that I've asked in the last 2 or 3 years, they've learned the most important stuff that I want them to know.
The alternative is to ask questions about trivia, because eventually you've asked very good question you can think about regarding every important topic you've taught. Then the students end up studying inconsequential details instead of the things that you really want them to understand.
Plagiarism, of course, is a matter of degree. A quote or a few quotes is not plagiarism. Properly credited quotes can be supporting evidence for a position, although it's often better to write one's own explanation of something with a footnote (or endnote, internal reference, etc) to where the fact was found.
A properly credited quote is never plagiarism. The essence of plagiarism is fraud; misrepresenting somebody else's work or ideas as your own. It is not not a matter of degree, but of intent. But the more you do it, the more likely it is that you will be caught. It tends to be a slippery slope--the more you rely upon other people's words, the less practice you get at saying things in your own words, and the more you feel the need to steal.
Overuse of quotations may be lazy writing or bad writing, and will not necessarily net you a good grade on an essay, but it is never plagiarism.
Would you care to explain how having DRM-free indy bands' tracks on iTMS would have made such negotiation with major labels somehow more difficult?
Apple's major concern is clearly to avoid a situation where you have to "read the fine print" to know what you can do with a particular song and how much it costs. Having a heavyweight such as EMI on board puts Apple in a position to at least limit it to a 2-tier system. Expect them to tell other music publishers that the deal for non-DRM music is now established, take it or leave it. A deal with a small indie would not carry the same weight; big publishers would say, "That deal might be OK for a small publisher that has a lot to gain and little to lose, but we're a major publisher and will require more favorable terms."
For me, the noise level is the one thing that might convince me to upgrade, if it actually is quieter. Whether or not it includes the new processor, it could have better sound insulation, for example.
I do find it ironic though that the very community that considers online anonymity to be so sacred can turn around so quickly and demand that these people - again, vile fucktards - be "brought to justice". But then I guess we all have our double standards.
The "community" is actually a bunch of people who do not necessarily think with a single mind. I'm sure that there must be some people who believe that anonymity should be sacrosanct up to and including specific and credible threats of terrorism. But I think that you'll find that there are a great many who feel that, as important as anonymity may be for freedom of expression, the right to anonymity ends when it comes to direct or indirect (e.g. "I hope that somebody...") threats of physical violence.
As to whether the specific comments are technically illegal, I think that they are close enough to the line that the question should be decided in a court of law, so I hope that anybody who has knowledge of the identity of the perpetrators will turn this information over to the police.
I think that there is general agreement that the planet has undergone numerous significant temperature shifts over the its life. And on the topic of global warming or a global climate change, I'm not sure that there is that much dissent. I think the question is really whether or not the current upswing in temperatures is the result of something that humans are doing or something else.
Actually there is not much scientific dissent over either. But the political and economic interests that are fighting public awareness of the global warming problem have realized that the "global warming doesn't exist" line isn't selling any more, so their fallback story is "OK, maybe it does exist but its not our fault and there's nothing we can do about it." Even the notorious environmental skeptic Bjorn Lomborg accepts that global warming is the result of human activity (although he questions whether amelioration efforts are cost-effective).
It strikes me as somewhat odd that the planet can undergo a number of changes over time and yet this one must be our fault.
I've never understood this objection. There have been climate changes in the past, some of which were the result of human activity (e.g. the dust bowl) and some of which were not.
Computer models are only as good as the data that they use and the assumptions on which they are built. Since we have evidence of increasing CO2 levels and warmer average temperature, a model trying to fit those things with an assumption about CO2 causing the temperature to rise, will tend to show higher temperatures as we inject more CO2 into the atmosphere.
The effect of CO2 arises from the fundamental physics; it is not an arbitrary assumption, nor is it a simple correlation as you seem to be imagining. Modern climate models are very sophisticated, allowing for CO2 buffering, effects of water vapor, etc., all of which are based upon physical models and measurements. It is a very competitive area, with different research groups developing their own models and criticizing those of their competitors. But as the models and data have gotten better and better, the predictions of the different models have converged until there is now general agreement that temperatures are increasing as a result of human activity.
That is a straw man argument of your own creation and is utterly irrelevant to the situation at hand. We're not talking about Slashdot.
In what way is it a strawman? Currently, there is no central registry of who has permission for what. So how is the operator of a web site supposed to verify whether a user's representation that they have authorization to post something is true or false? Only the copyright holder has knowledge of what rights have been granted to whom.
And who is liable for mistakes? It makes sense that a copyright holder should be liable if they falsely accuse somebody of violating copyright, or cause non-violating material to be taken down. Should this liability now be shifted to web sites? If so, it seems like it is a decision that is most appropriately made by Congress after open debate, rather than by the judiciary.
Again.. I haven't decided which way I believe. Give me some real, unbiased facts, and I'll maybe make a decision. But if there's any hint of bias, I will see it and disregard said report. As far as I can tell so far, it really seems like claiming global warming in 2007 is nothing more than claiming global cooling as in the 1970's..
This is an excellent example of the the point raised. It is a widespread myth that the scientific consensus and evidence supporting man-made global warming is comparable to that supporting global cooling in the 70's. The truth is that "global cooling" of the 70's was almost entirely a media phenomenon, based on sensationalist misinterpretation and exaggeration of a couple of scientific reports. In contrast, the consensus supporting global warming is genuine, gradually built over many years as more and more scientists were convinced by accumulated data and improved models.
This maize is modified to express Bt toxin, which is a bacterial protein not normally present in maize, so it could conceivably produce toxic effects in the rat. However, I'm not particularly worried by a protein that produces such small effects on blood and urine chemistry, within the normal range of variation, in an animal that has been eating it for three months straight.
Different tap water gives me the runs for days until I grow used to it (usually when I'm on vacation). Even cooking or bathing with the water can cause this for me. I grow used to the water in the new location and return home to sit in the bathroom again for several more days.
It's not the water that gives you the runs, it is the bacteria in the water. Small traces of bacteria are far more likely to cause illness than a new food, or even a food with small traces of chemical toxins, because bacteria are capable of reproducing within your body to large numbers. Over time, your intestinal bacteria reach a new balance and your body adjusts to them.
So Greenpeace found slight differences weight gain and in blood and urine chemistry, within the normal range, that "suggest" liver and kidney toxicity.
To a scientist, "suggest" is a keyword that translates to "I can't prove that this is true, but based upon the data this hypothesis cannot be excluded."
"Toxicity" is also a fairly slippery term that can mean any change in function, and does not necessarily translate to "harm."
In fact, there is no evidence presented of harm. These plants are genetically modified to produce BT toxin, a bacterial toxin that is widely applied as an insecticide. It is favored over standard chemical insecticides because it is generally thought to be less likely to be toxic. It is pretty unlikely that BT produced by the plant as a result of genetic modification is more toxic that BT that is applied externally.
Most vegetables, other than those produced by the most rigorous "organic" methods, has some sort of insecticide residues. So the real question for the average consumer is, "Is BT-producing maize more likely to produce harm than maize grown using standard pesticides?"
If things could arise without a cause, then they would be arising without causes all the time.
At a small enough scale, it seems that they do. Virtual particles that are constantly arising without cause and disappearing are fundamental to quantum mechanics. So if universes can start small and "inflate," it could be happening all the time. Unless they interact with this universe, we wouldn't see them.
Sony is pitching the PS3 as a high-tech state of the art HD game system to justify its premium price, yet it can't do something absolutely basic--scale all output to either of the major HD standards, 1080i or 720p. Many older 1080i HD monitors will not accept 720p input at all. Other sets may offer scaling but not do a good job of it. This is something that every other HD output device on the market can do. Any cheap upscaling DVD player, HD cable box, or HD PVR can do it. The XBox 360 most certainly can do it. If this is really a deficiency of the PS3 hardware, then Sony needs to update the hardware.
I was ready to buy a PS3 until I learned about this deficiency.
While they do cite the huge amount of research demonstrating the role of ion channels and electrical currents, they then proceed to ignore it. With respect to anesthetics, they go back to what used to be a favored theory of general anesthetic action, that they work by perturbing the structure of the membrane, which was based on the Meyer-Overton rule that potency of general anesthetics is correlated with their lipid solubility. This MO rule lost much of its persuasive power when it was discovered that effects of general anesthetics on luciferase--a soluble enzyme in the absence of membranes--also follow the MO rule. The explanation is that the interior of most proteins is also a hydrophobic "lipid like" environment even though it contains no actual lipid.
The authors are a bit more sophisticated, citing other "lipid-like" phenomenae such as pressure reversal of general anesthesia. They are correct that this is not explained by the current model, but are probably barking up the wrong tree in retreating to the lipid model of general anesthesia. In fact, membrane proteins show a variety of interesting and poorly understood effects of pressure, so the explanation probably does not reside in a lipid-only model, but rather in a better understanding of how pressure and temperature affect membrane ion channels. It is possible that some sort of hybrid approach, taking into account interactions between proteins and membrane lipids will be necessary to achieve a full understanding. So while I think that they are on the wrong track, they are making a contribution in pointing out that there is a need for a more thermodynamic understanding of nerve conduction. I suspect that this is what led the Biophysical Journal to accept the paper, even though the authors' favored model lacks physiologically plausibility.
So was there anything about solving the PS3's scaling problems that prevent games from playing in HD on some HD monitors? So far as I know, the PS3 is the only device that claims HD output, but that does not have the capability to scale all output to either 1080i or 720p to support all HD monitors. Even some fairly cheap scaling DVD players have this ability, so its absence in a $600 device is incomprehensible.
For me, this is the single issue that has prevented me from ordering a PS3. Most of the new stuff listed announced kind of cool, but probably not the sort of thing I'd use much--certainly not appealing enough to compensate for a fundamental hardware limitation.
Which facts do you think I haven't checked?....Seriously, simply pretending that the source invalidates the facts doesn't convince anybody (except the already convinced). Are you actually refuting that Gore is a gluttonous power pig, living a lifestyle completely incongruous with what he advocates other people follow?
Everything that I've seen from Gore advocates exactly what he seems to be doing--buying energy from producers that use low CO2 emission technologies, and purchasing carbon credits where that is not possible. But you say that you have checked the facts, so maybe you can provide a source for your contention that Gore advocates that no Americans should live in large houses?
Here I am, perhaps mildly conservative by politics (hey I'm in my 30s -- I went from the far left to slightly right of center as I aged, as many do), yet I'm disgusted by the US Republican Party, think Bush was the worst thing to happen to the US, and still think Clinton was a great president....but because I'm disgusted that Gore has such a schism between the cart that he's hooked himself up to, and his actual actions (ever hear that actions speak louder than words? Well there's a reason, because any asshat can talk about how great they are), I'm a part of the right-wing attack machine.
Yes, because you are parroting a canard carefully concocted by an anti-Gore attack group without bothering to check the facts, that is exactly what you are. This is not to question your own sincerity or honesty. Many of the people who propagated the "Gore exaggerations" meme the last time around were equally sincere or honest (or at worst, just trying to make a joke at a stuffed-shirt candidates expense). That is how this kind of propaganda works--the narrative is carefully concocted, perhaps even screened on focus groups, and perfectly designed to be repeated over and over by honest dupes.
See the defense many Gore fanatics brought forth to defend his gluttony: Sure the coal plants in Tennessee are going overtime to power his mansion, but his investment group invested in some nebulous scheme that might possibly reduce CO2 somewhere.
I must confess to a certain amount of admiration for the bit of anti-Gore propaganda to emerge from the right wing attack machine. As dishonest as it is, it is beautifully constructed.
The key allegation, of course, is that Gore is a hypocrite because he lives in a large house that consumes more energy than average. What I think is quite elegant is the way that the perpetrators (a right wing front organization with the typically misleading name of Tennessee Center for Policy Research) use minor deceptions to conceal a big lie. The object is clearly to get people arguing about the minor deceptions, such as overstating Gore's relative energy use by comparing it to the national average rather than the regional average, and in the process to spread the real attack meme across the media. Here it is, shorn of the distractions:
Al Gore wants to destroy Americans' standard of living in the name of fighting global warming
Of course, stated baldly like that, it sounds pretty idiotic, since Al Gore has clearly never said anything of the sort. But look at how cleverly it is concealed to slip it past our critical faculties: The suggestion is that Al Gore is a hypocrite for living in a big house. The only way that could be true, of course, is if Al Gore is opposed to Americans having large houses, which would of course make him the enemy of anybody who owns a big house, or who aspires someday to do so.
Of course, the reality is that Al Gore believes that the use of low carbon emission energy sources, combined with economic incentives (such as carbon credits, a part of the Kyoto Protocol that Gore supports) to promote commercial development of low carbon emission technologies will allow Americans to reduce carbon emissions without sacrificing our standard of living. And he is in fact doing exactly what he advocates--paying extra to buy energy from sources that do not contribute to carbon pollution, buying carbon credits, investing in solar technology for his home--which makes him pretty much the exact opposite of a hypocrite.
But truth is not much of a defense when it comes to propaganda as John Kerry and John McCain can attest. Remember how well the "Al Gore can't be trusted" meme stuck even after it was established that all of the supposed examples of Al Gore's "exaggerations" were false. There is clearly a great fear that Al Gore will decide to run. After all, this is a guy who won the popular vote before, and actually warned that the Iraq war was a mistake before we dug ourselves into a quagmire, which is more than you can say for most of the other candidates. And in his lecture tour to raise consciousness regarding global warming, he has overcome his major liability, his former awkward style of public speaking. Clearly the old "Al Gore exaggerates" meme is wearing thin. I think we are seeing the birth of a new attack meme, designed to undermine Al Gore's greatest asset--the fact that he is one of the few modern politicians with any real vision.
On the face of it, this sounds rather foolish. Mars has a very different atmosphere and orbit. Given variations in solar output and orbit. there is a good chance that at any given time Mars is either warming or cooling. So whatever is happening to climate on earth, it would not be surprising to see the same thing happening on Mars, even if the causes were entirely different.
Slashdot Mirror
1080p is 1920 horizontally and 1080 vertically at most. So horizontally, where the 100 degree figure is accurate, there is no question that 1080p is about 2/3 less than your ability to see detail, and the answer to the question in the summary is, yes, it is worth it.
You probably would have been in a better position to comment if you'd read the entire article. Yes, if you sit so close that the screen entirely fills your field of view, than 1080p will definitely give a perceptible improvement. But the article was about real-world viewing conditions. Read down a bit further, and your find that at a distance of 8 feet,
And your conclusion essentially repeats the conclusion of the article:
I don't really care how long it takes. On my TiVo, I may ask for something a week or two ahead of time. Eventually, it shows up. The issue isn't waiting for the show to arrive; it's finding time to watch the stuff I've already got online.
One other advantage--I didn't have to buy a separate box to download videos. I bought the XBox360 to play games, which is sufficient to justify its price; the videos and music are a bonus.
It sure is noisy, though, although not so much that I notice it when I'm actually watching something.
Although DRM is annoying in principle, in practice I don't much care about DRM on video unless it gets in my way. I might listen to the same song repeatedly for years, on multiple devices. There is not much on video that I want to watch more than once, and almost nothing that I'd want to watch more than 2 or 3 times. The only real issue is convenience and quality. I am annoyed that I have to buy a box to watch an iTunes video on my TV, when I have a perfectly good DVD burner on my computer. At least with a standard definition TiVo, it is possible to burn videos to DVD. And the XBox 360 videos aren't portable, but the box does a bit more than enable me to do something that I would have been able to do anyway if not for DRM, and the videos are HD.
So if Apple wants to sell me one of these gadgets, I'm going to want something more than SD.
As somebody who was actually reading the scientific literature back then, I can tell you that this is simply a lie. There was never any serious scientific concern about global cooling. There were a couple of papers that argued that we were in a long-term cooling trend (i.e. over hundreds of years) if the effect on climate of human activity is ignored. There were some sensationalistic articles in the nonscientific press, but the notion that there was ever serious scientific concern about global cooling is disinformation manufactured by those whose financial or political interests would be endangered by efforts at reduction of CO2 emissions.
There is no cheating without dishonesty. Turning in a paper that is all (properly credited) quotations is more like failing to turn the paper in at all. It's lazy writing, and might reasonably earn a failing grade, but it is not dishonest writing.
If the exam questions are well constructed, it doesn't matter if students do this. Most of my exam questions are variants of questions that I have asked before, changed just enough so that you can't get away with simply memorizing the previous answer without understanding it. The questions are based upon what I want the students to take away from my lectures, so if they can answer variants of all of the questions that I've asked in the last 2 or 3 years, they've learned the most important stuff that I want them to know.
The alternative is to ask questions about trivia, because eventually you've asked very good question you can think about regarding every important topic you've taught. Then the students end up studying inconsequential details instead of the things that you really want them to understand.
A properly credited quote is never plagiarism. The essence of plagiarism is fraud; misrepresenting somebody else's work or ideas as your own. It is not not a matter of degree, but of intent. But the more you do it, the more likely it is that you will be caught. It tends to be a slippery slope--the more you rely upon other people's words, the less practice you get at saying things in your own words, and the more you feel the need to steal.
Overuse of quotations may be lazy writing or bad writing, and will not necessarily net you a good grade on an essay, but it is never plagiarism.
Apple's major concern is clearly to avoid a situation where you have to "read the fine print" to know what you can do with a particular song and how much it costs. Having a heavyweight such as EMI on board puts Apple in a position to at least limit it to a 2-tier system. Expect them to tell other music publishers that the deal for non-DRM music is now established, take it or leave it. A deal with a small indie would not carry the same weight; big publishers would say, "That deal might be OK for a small publisher that has a lot to gain and little to lose, but we're a major publisher and will require more favorable terms."
For me, the noise level is the one thing that might convince me to upgrade, if it actually is quieter. Whether or not it includes the new processor, it could have better sound insulation, for example.
The "community" is actually a bunch of people who do not necessarily think with a single mind. I'm sure that there must be some people who believe that anonymity should be sacrosanct up to and including specific and credible threats of terrorism. But I think that you'll find that there are a great many who feel that, as important as anonymity may be for freedom of expression, the right to anonymity ends when it comes to direct or indirect (e.g. "I hope that somebody...") threats of physical violence.
As to whether the specific comments are technically illegal, I think that they are close enough to the line that the question should be decided in a court of law, so I hope that anybody who has knowledge of the identity of the perpetrators will turn this information over to the police.
Actually there is not much scientific dissent over either. But the political and economic interests that are fighting public awareness of the global warming problem have realized that the "global warming doesn't exist" line isn't selling any more, so their fallback story is "OK, maybe it does exist but its not our fault and there's nothing we can do about it." Even the notorious environmental skeptic Bjorn Lomborg accepts that global warming is the result of human activity (although he questions whether amelioration efforts are cost-effective).
I've never understood this objection. There have been climate changes in the past, some of which were the result of human activity (e.g. the dust bowl) and some of which were not.
The effect of CO2 arises from the fundamental physics; it is not an arbitrary assumption, nor is it a simple correlation as you seem to be imagining. Modern climate models are very sophisticated, allowing for CO2 buffering, effects of water vapor, etc., all of which are based upon physical models and measurements. It is a very competitive area, with different research groups developing their own models and criticizing those of their competitors. But as the models and data have gotten better and better, the predictions of the different models have converged until there is now general agreement that temperatures are increasing as a result of human activity.
In what way is it a strawman? Currently, there is no central registry of who has permission for what. So how is the operator of a web site supposed to verify whether a user's representation that they have authorization to post something is true or false? Only the copyright holder has knowledge of what rights have been granted to whom.
And who is liable for mistakes? It makes sense that a copyright holder should be liable if they falsely accuse somebody of violating copyright, or cause non-violating material to be taken down. Should this liability now be shifted to web sites? If so, it seems like it is a decision that is most appropriately made by Congress after open debate, rather than by the judiciary.
This is an excellent example of the the point raised. It is a widespread myth that the scientific consensus and evidence supporting man-made global warming is comparable to that supporting global cooling in the 70's. The truth is that "global cooling" of the 70's was almost entirely a media phenomenon, based on sensationalist misinterpretation and exaggeration of a couple of scientific reports. In contrast, the consensus supporting global warming is genuine, gradually built over many years as more and more scientists were convinced by accumulated data and improved models.
This maize is modified to express Bt toxin, which is a bacterial protein not normally present in maize, so it could conceivably produce toxic effects in the rat. However, I'm not particularly worried by a protein that produces such small effects on blood and urine chemistry, within the normal range of variation, in an animal that has been eating it for three months straight.
Different tap water gives me the runs for days until I grow used to it (usually when I'm on vacation). Even cooking or bathing with the water can cause this for me. I grow used to the water in the new location and return home to sit in the bathroom again for several more days.
It's not the water that gives you the runs, it is the bacteria in the water. Small traces of bacteria are far more likely to cause illness than a new food, or even a food with small traces of chemical toxins, because bacteria are capable of reproducing within your body to large numbers. Over time, your intestinal bacteria reach a new balance and your body adjusts to them.
So Greenpeace found slight differences weight gain and in blood and urine chemistry, within the normal range, that "suggest" liver and kidney toxicity.
To a scientist, "suggest" is a keyword that translates to "I can't prove that this is true, but based upon the data this hypothesis cannot be excluded."
"Toxicity" is also a fairly slippery term that can mean any change in function, and does not necessarily translate to "harm."
In fact, there is no evidence presented of harm. These plants are genetically modified to produce BT toxin, a bacterial toxin that is widely applied as an insecticide. It is favored over standard chemical insecticides because it is generally thought to be less likely to be toxic. It is pretty unlikely that BT produced by the plant as a result of genetic modification is more toxic that BT that is applied externally.
Most vegetables, other than those produced by the most rigorous "organic" methods, has some sort of insecticide residues. So the real question for the average consumer is, "Is BT-producing maize more likely to produce harm than maize grown using standard pesticides?"
At a small enough scale, it seems that they do. Virtual particles that are constantly arising without cause and disappearing are fundamental to quantum mechanics. So if universes can start small and "inflate," it could be happening all the time. Unless they interact with this universe, we wouldn't see them.
Sony is pitching the PS3 as a high-tech state of the art HD game system to justify its premium price, yet it can't do something absolutely basic--scale all output to either of the major HD standards, 1080i or 720p. Many older 1080i HD monitors will not accept 720p input at all. Other sets may offer scaling but not do a good job of it. This is something that every other HD output device on the market can do. Any cheap upscaling DVD player, HD cable box, or HD PVR can do it. The XBox 360 most certainly can do it. If this is really a deficiency of the PS3 hardware, then Sony needs to update the hardware.
I was ready to buy a PS3 until I learned about this deficiency.
While they do cite the huge amount of research demonstrating the role of ion channels and electrical currents, they then proceed to ignore it. With respect to anesthetics, they go back to what used to be a favored theory of general anesthetic action, that they work by perturbing the structure of the membrane, which was based on the Meyer-Overton rule that potency of general anesthetics is correlated with their lipid solubility. This MO rule lost much of its persuasive power when it was discovered that effects of general anesthetics on luciferase--a soluble enzyme in the absence of membranes--also follow the MO rule. The explanation is that the interior of most proteins is also a hydrophobic "lipid like" environment even though it contains no actual lipid.
The authors are a bit more sophisticated, citing other "lipid-like" phenomenae such as pressure reversal of general anesthesia. They are correct that this is not explained by the current model, but are probably barking up the wrong tree in retreating to the lipid model of general anesthesia. In fact, membrane proteins show a variety of interesting and poorly understood effects of pressure, so the explanation probably does not reside in a lipid-only model, but rather in a better understanding of how pressure and temperature affect membrane ion channels. It is possible that some sort of hybrid approach, taking into account interactions between proteins and membrane lipids will be necessary to achieve a full understanding. So while I think that they are on the wrong track, they are making a contribution in pointing out that there is a need for a more thermodynamic understanding of nerve conduction. I suspect that this is what led the Biophysical Journal to accept the paper, even though the authors' favored model lacks physiologically plausibility.
So was there anything about solving the PS3's scaling problems that prevent games from playing in HD on some HD monitors? So far as I know, the PS3 is the only device that claims HD output, but that does not have the capability to scale all output to either 1080i or 720p to support all HD monitors. Even some fairly cheap scaling DVD players have this ability, so its absence in a $600 device is incomprehensible.
For me, this is the single issue that has prevented me from ordering a PS3. Most of the new stuff listed announced kind of cool, but probably not the sort of thing I'd use much--certainly not appealing enough to compensate for a fundamental hardware limitation.
Everything that I've seen from Gore advocates exactly what he seems to be doing--buying energy from producers that use low CO2 emission technologies, and purchasing carbon credits where that is not possible. But you say that you have checked the facts, so maybe you can provide a source for your contention that Gore advocates that no Americans should live in large houses?
Yes, because you are parroting a canard carefully concocted by an anti-Gore attack group without bothering to check the facts, that is exactly what you are. This is not to question your own sincerity or honesty. Many of the people who propagated the "Gore exaggerations" meme the last time around were equally sincere or honest (or at worst, just trying to make a joke at a stuffed-shirt candidates expense). That is how this kind of propaganda works--the narrative is carefully concocted, perhaps even screened on focus groups, and perfectly designed to be repeated over and over by honest dupes.
I must confess to a certain amount of admiration for the bit of anti-Gore propaganda to emerge from the right wing attack machine. As dishonest as it is, it is beautifully constructed.
The key allegation, of course, is that Gore is a hypocrite because he lives in a large house that consumes more energy than average. What I think is quite elegant is the way that the perpetrators (a right wing front organization with the typically misleading name of Tennessee Center for Policy Research) use minor deceptions to conceal a big lie. The object is clearly to get people arguing about the minor deceptions, such as overstating Gore's relative energy use by comparing it to the national average rather than the regional average, and in the process to spread the real attack meme across the media. Here it is, shorn of the distractions:
Al Gore wants to destroy Americans' standard of living in the name of fighting global warming
Of course, stated baldly like that, it sounds pretty idiotic, since Al Gore has clearly never said anything of the sort. But look at how cleverly it is concealed to slip it past our critical faculties: The suggestion is that Al Gore is a hypocrite for living in a big house. The only way that could be true, of course, is if Al Gore is opposed to Americans having large houses, which would of course make him the enemy of anybody who owns a big house, or who aspires someday to do so.
Of course, the reality is that Al Gore believes that the use of low carbon emission energy sources, combined with economic incentives (such as carbon credits, a part of the Kyoto Protocol that Gore supports) to promote commercial development of low carbon emission technologies will allow Americans to reduce carbon emissions without sacrificing our standard of living. And he is in fact doing exactly what he advocates--paying extra to buy energy from sources that do not contribute to carbon pollution, buying carbon credits, investing in solar technology for his home--which makes him pretty much the exact opposite of a hypocrite.
But truth is not much of a defense when it comes to propaganda as John Kerry and John McCain can attest. Remember how well the "Al Gore can't be trusted" meme stuck even after it was established that all of the supposed examples of Al Gore's "exaggerations" were false. There is clearly a great fear that Al Gore will decide to run. After all, this is a guy who won the popular vote before, and actually warned that the Iraq war was a mistake before we dug ourselves into a quagmire, which is more than you can say for most of the other candidates. And in his lecture tour to raise consciousness regarding global warming, he has overcome his major liability, his former awkward style of public speaking. Clearly the old "Al Gore exaggerates" meme is wearing thin. I think we are seeing the birth of a new attack meme, designed to undermine Al Gore's greatest asset--the fact that he is one of the few modern politicians with any real vision.
On the face of it, this sounds rather foolish. Mars has a very different atmosphere and orbit. Given variations in solar output and orbit. there is a good chance that at any given time Mars is either warming or cooling. So whatever is happening to climate on earth, it would not be surprising to see the same thing happening on Mars, even if the causes were entirely different.