Have been tested in the '80's. I spent an interesting afternoon talking to a NASA engineer who was working on an American scramjet that got very little publicity. It was hydrogen-fueled and it "worked" (was all I really got from him.) He mentioned that the Russians were also testing scramjets and contrasted their techniques: the Americans built fantastic test suites and had all this fancy instrumentation but were having a lot of troubles actually getting the scramjets tested. The Russians were launching theirs on rockets from Poland and their instrumentation consisted of where the crash site was: if it hit within 200 miles of launch, the scramjet hadn't worked, but if it hit Siberia it had. Apparently they were consistently hitting Siberia with what they were running at the time. Both systems used hydrogen as the fuel. The Americans were presuming that the Soviets were doing the same thing they were and using hydrogen slush, a mix of solid and liquid, and forcing it through the nose of the scramjet to simultaneously cool it off and prevent it burning off, and also vaporize the H2 into burnable fuel. They used hydrogen because their primary limitation was the diffusion of fuel into oxygen: at the speeds this was designed to run (I think I recall hearing Mach 20 in the conversation) they were having a lot of trouble getting sufficient mixing for combustion to occur within the craft structure.
I've talked to a lead engineer on a NASA/DARPA scramjet project that hasn't made many headlines (intentionally.) There is a way to get a scramjet to develop thrust at 0 speed. I suspect it involves a very long tube that has a backwards-directed jet at the front, to make the air moving through the tube run at scramjet speeds. Once the thing gets off the ground and up to speed, they start injecting fuel at the front, where the jet is. The problem is that at these speeds you can't get the fuel and the air to mix sufficiently before they're out of the back of the craft, which necessitates long combustion/mixing paths (and use of hydrogen as a fuel because it disperses faster.) Once you have a long combustion path you might as well use the remainder of it, at low speeds. The person to whom I was speaking wouldn't answer *any* questions about developing thrust at 0 speed, but from the other questions I'd asked, I'd gotten a good feel of the geometry and design of the project, and I know that people have used jets to light up other jet and ramjet engines in the past.
A: I'd give my eyeteeth for a job at the NY, yeah. B: It's possible that someone there reads/. but/. is often running stuff that the WSJ ran first, or that digg ran, so it's also possible that some people on the NY staff are tuned into the same issues and there's a simultaneous awareness that an issue is big enough to write about. C: Plagiarism is copying from one source, research is copying from multiple sources (even if it's a bunch of comments on the same thread on/., I suppose...) D: That Malcolm Gladwell article on the Microsoft/Apple/Linux metaphor of making cookies -- yeah. I'm thinking he's definitely been looking around here. When opensource methodology and philosophy is showing up in the pages of an arbiter of the cultural elite you know it's becoming a big deal. E: I'd claim I read it for the articles but let's be honest: it's the cartoons.
This week's issue of The New Yorker had a one-page article briefly summarizing the *actual* tiered internet (google has to pay SBC to ensure QoS, not the tiered-to-consumer plan in TFA) and pointing out why it was such a bad idea. It read just like a +5 Informative from/. with the same points we've all made during previous posts on this, and got me to wondering if the person who wrote it reads/. -- so if you do, thanks! it was lovely and did a great job of explaining to the teeming masses what it means and why it's a bad idea.
So what do you think of HIPAA, anyway? Why repeal it? On the one hand it's nice that it's harder to get to my medical data, so presumably my personal information is harder to steal or misuse by insurance companies denying me coverage, but on the other it seems like an awfully convenient shield for health care providers to protect themselves against liability and negligence charges because it's much harder to show a systemic negligence when you can't get any data on it. I don't know what I think of it overall so mention that it has political overtones makes me curious.
Don't touch aviation with a ten-foot pole. (I say this as a pilot.) I can't tell you how many small high-tech manufacturing companies I've worked for in Denver/Boulder/Fort Collins that have had services/maintenance staff completely filled by graduates of the now-defunct aviation college in Denver: people making $10/hour with an aviation&powerplant certificate and the skills to rebuild a turbine engine. Horrible oversupply, lousy job market.
Truck driving. Nursing. Those are jobs that can't be outsourced. There might come a time when there won't be anyone who can afford to buy the stuff the trucks are shipping or the health care the nurses are part of, but that probably won't be for many years.
Brian Daley wrote a trio of books about Han and Chewie before meeting Luke. I liked them (but less than some of his other writing.) "Han Solo at Star's End", "Han Solo's Revenge", and "Han Solo and the Lost Legacy", I think they were called. Daley also wrote the radio adaption of Star Wars, some not-so-great mercenary books, and some cute cross-genre fantasy stuff, with armored-personnel-carrier.vs.dragon action and the like.
I think one thing you could do to convince yourself of how much things have changed is to look at the average life expectancy, the infant mortality rates, and the death rate due to epidemics, to see one enormous change. It might not seem like much to you that infant mortality has only fallen 100:1 in the last 200 years, but it sure does to the parents of all those children. Likewise, you might not think much about the average life expectancy going from 35 to 74 over the last 400 years, but you'd sure notice it if you actually lived in Angola, where both the life expectancy and infant mortality rates are only a little better than medieval Europe. You should read some of the diaries of Samuel Pepys some time. I'm thinking about the bit where he was talking about saving a particularly lovely, exotic fish for a week and a half until a friend showed up so he could serve it for dinner. Of course, without refrigeration, that meant that he had to scrape and cut carefully to avoid serving any of the particularly wormy bits to his friend. I also think it'd be instructional for you to work on a piece of machinery made before 1875 and learn how much fun it is to hand-file threads on a bolt of custom diameter and thread pitch. Or you could help dig a ditch across central England or the southern United States, 200 miles long, using a shovel, because nobody had bulldozers and canal boats were the only way to transport coal for heating. Did you know that in 1917 -- I know people that remember 1917! -- it took an Army convoy eighty days to cross the United States? And in 1913 it took a pilot 40 days to fly from New York to Boston. (he had a bad flight, let's put it that way.) Even simple things like communication are underrated. In the 1600's, some people interested in languages started doing surveys near London and they found that within 40 miles of London itself, there were villages where the majority of people in the village spoke a sufficiently different dialect of English that they could not talk to the Londoners. Now multiply that by the whole world. In the town where I grew up, the largest source of employment was mineral extraction: mining. Until the 1920's, mining was considered inherently hazardous -- in other words, by choosing to become a miner, you gave up any expectation of safe working conditions so you (or your heirs) could not sue the mine company if you were injured, no matter how unsafe the conditions. Imagine a world where there is no such thing as liability. Imainge a world where 10-year-old kids are valuable because they fit down chimneys and can pull mine carts through knee-high tunnels -- and they do so because if they don't they will starve. Imagine a world where a large proportion, maybe as much as 10%, of children are born blind because their mothers had syphilis. Imagine a world where a minor cut could become infected and kill you -- or your drinking water could, or the fleas that people had their whole lives. So yeah, I'd say the world's changed quite a lot.
Thank you for pointing that out. My first thought was similarly "well, that'll make a lousy solar cell" but the idea that a layered stack could selectively absorb by wavelength is superb. Matching the bandgap to the wavelength to maximise efficiency and minimize thermal heating... that's really cool. I'm going to be walking around mumbling about clever people all day.
That's what I was thinking, or IR light. There are a lot less transparent substances in the UV and IR than in the visible because of basic materials properties. That's what places I've worked with have done when they had to line up transparent lithography stacks for deep UV photolith.
I think the issue is that there are a lot of people who are scared, and willing to vote for what they perceive as safety. The people I know are generally smart and aware enough to realize that they personally face an infinitesimal risk of being hurt by terrorists or nogoodniks (especially compared to being hurt by drunk drivers, for instance.) We just need to get more people to read Bruce Schneier's "Beyond Fear."
Yeah, and most of the Libertarians I know are, personally, self-interested jerks. Which is too bad, coz the general tenets seem good. Guilt by association, I guess.
My boss calls himself 'fairly conservative' and I call myself a left-wing lunatic. And guess what? on almost every issue that the two of us think really matters right now, we're in 100% agreement: free speech, privacy, civil liberties, and general government-intervention-in-private-life. When we talk about this we decide that we would've been at completely opposite ends of the spectrum when Carter was in office but by now we're almost indistinguishable in what we'll be voting for next time around. Now if only someone that actually encapsulated what we want was going to be running, but that's probably not going to happen.
I find it fitting that a VP of one of the largest, slowest-responding companies in the world says "there's no next big thing." For him, and for IBM, he's probably completely right. Not so much for the people who are working on the next Google. Mesh networking using mass-produced embedded systems in cars? Could happen. Would be very useful. Won't be designed by IBM.
>The reason that the Justice Department publicised this rejection from Google is because they thought it helped them. That's what baffles me about this case. Was it their public image that they thought this helped? Was it in their interest to make people think their information was safe with Google? Did they think it would cause Fox News to smear Google? (And how would that help them?) Is this information honestly going to help them get their preferred verdict? I don't see how...
Because, by making sure everyone knows they've done this, when they win (which they will, somehow, hopefully not involving torture but who knows) then they will have the advance publicity to make their win general public knowledge. Then next time they have a fight, they have precedent, and in the meanwhile they have the intimidation factor working for them.
Distribution. I don't know that I'll still have the book in two years if the publisher has a snit.
It's also easier for me to read books and magazines because the contrast is better on paper than on screen, and since I buy about 90% (== 10 a week) of my books at used bookstores for a very small fraction of their new cost, it's largely a matter of impulse purchases.
Since I really enjoy regifting, I think the hip new term is, many of those books to other people, electronic versions also fall short there, unless they all have the same sort of reader I do (and then we're right back to the DRM issue.)
I'm in the process of designing a house to be used part of the year in a remote, weather-intensive area. What I would really like is a house that has UPS/hybrid technology so it can survive weeklong power outages, that I can call/telnet into before I get there and have it turn on the house power, heat, and water heater. (Probably using a very low power computer running off solar cells -- at almost 4 km altitude, we get more solar than we can consume. So having the mains power switched off when we're not there makes sense.) In an ideal world, it would also be able to prime, clear, and start the well and close the water system drains, since the house sees -20C for months at a time (when nobody is there) so we drain it down at the end of the warm season. If I had reliable (and reporting) solenoids on the water system, it could close them, pressurize the water system, and fire up the water heater and the house would be habitable when I got there. I'd just have to strip off the shutters over the windows rather than spending an hour or two in the crawl space and wellhouse getting the water system up and checking and tightening valve packing from the temperature-oscillation-induced leakages.
Temperature sensors and a webcam, so I could see what the weather was like before setting out on a rather long drive and get some idea of how long it was going to take, would also be nice.
If one wants to do something useful with all the excess styrofoam, consider that it is basically a long-chain alkane with phenyl group side chains, each of which individually look a lot like toluene. Looking at it from the phenyl group's point of view, it's an aromatic ring with a big anonymous alkane hanging off it, which will act perfectly well as an activating, ortho-para directing side chain. Add some nitric and sulfuric acid and you've made poly-TNT. The only reason this is more difficult than the standard stepwise nitration of toluene is that it's hard to find a solvent that dissolves polystyrene but is also fully miscible with the nitric/sulfuric, but there ARE solutions (pardon the pun) to the problem.
'course these days that's probably not a wise area to be researching.
While I'm on the subject of getting hydrophobic and hydrophilic things together: Know why white bears dissolve in water? Coz they're polar!
The parent wasn't quite clear enough: it's possible that syphilis was *native* to the New World, and it wasn't until Europeans came over, starting with Columbus, that it was exported to Europe. So the Lewis & Clark expedition was running into a native disease that was attacking Europeans, the opposite of the smallpox (and many other) epidemics that Europeans brought to the New World.
I'm not disagreeing with your general thesis, that antibiotics are overprescribed. But the disinfectants in wipes and sprays aren't noticeably increasing antibiotic resistance because they're an entirely different class of bug-killer, more akin to a blowtorch than an antibiotic. Bacteria can, at some cost to themselves, increase their resistance to a given drug, or at more cost to themselves, to a bunch of drugs, but that won't give them any help against Clorox (and vice versa.)
The hygiene hypothesis, that without early exposure to antigens we develop immature, unreliable immune systems, is an interesting idea (and one that I, among others, proposed well before the date listed on Wikipedia, but I'm just some dude, so...) but it's not yet proven or even very well-supported. I bet it's right, but that's about all I can do.
It amazes me how many serious experts in almost any technical discipline are here. Some of the astrophysics and theoretical math threads have made me feel like I'm about two inches high -- and with eight years of biochem and microbiology, I still often feel completely clueless when people with PhD's are going on about minutae I've never even heard of. This place is teeming with experts.
I'm not quibbling with your general outline, but probably the genetic precursor to DNA was RNA. Tom Cech got his Nobel for showing that RNA can act as an enzyme as well as its more standard job of transporting genetic information. If it can be coaxed to perform both protein and DNA functions, it's likely that in some previous iteration it DID perform both, and only later did life settle on dividing the functions up, leaving only dim echoes of RNA's old abilities. Since there are RNA viruses, this might indicate that they're very old, dating from the pre-DNA times, or it might indicate that they're escaped RNA sequences from cells. In the latter case, they could be thought of as basically a second, derivative, abogenetic event -- a pile of chemicals that gains the ability to self-replicate, parasitically. (All life is parasitic. Viruses are parasitic on life. It's just a matter of degree.) You can draw a continuum, from multicellular life, through large complex bacteria, through obligate parasitic bacteria like the chlamydia group that have a metabolism but can't actually survive on their own (probably), through viruses that have no metabolism and require cellular machinery, to stuff that's just protein -- prions -- but still manages to self-amplify. The line of "this is alive and that is not" is really fuzzy.
OrCAD's sucks. Cadence/Allegro is not half bad. With everything I've used, though, it always seems like the best plan is to have it autoroute, then rip out about half of what it did, do the critical circuits by hand, and let the autorouter go at it again.
I recently did an interface board that basically hooks two IC sockets of 80 pins each to a connector of 500 pins, no other components. OrCAD blew chunks. Allegro, however, did something in five minutes that with another two hours of tweaking, was very nice indeed: two layers, six vias. It would've taken me eight hours or more to do that on my own. I like good autorouters a LOT (by which I mean Allegro.) They're massive time-savers if used intelligently.
Sure would be nice to have that kind of functionality on linux for less than an Allegro license, but hey, that's what the money pays for.
Slashdot Mirror
Have been tested in the '80's. I spent an interesting afternoon talking to a NASA engineer who was working on an American scramjet that got very little publicity. It was hydrogen-fueled and it "worked" (was all I really got from him.) He mentioned that the Russians were also testing scramjets and contrasted their techniques: the Americans built fantastic test suites and had all this fancy instrumentation but were having a lot of troubles actually getting the scramjets tested. The Russians were launching theirs on rockets from Poland and their instrumentation consisted of where the crash site was: if it hit within 200 miles of launch, the scramjet hadn't worked, but if it hit Siberia it had. Apparently they were consistently hitting Siberia with what they were running at the time. Both systems used hydrogen as the fuel. The Americans were presuming that the Soviets were doing the same thing they were and using hydrogen slush, a mix of solid and liquid, and forcing it through the nose of the scramjet to simultaneously cool it off and prevent it burning off, and also vaporize the H2 into burnable fuel. They used hydrogen because their primary limitation was the diffusion of fuel into oxygen: at the speeds this was designed to run (I think I recall hearing Mach 20 in the conversation) they were having a lot of trouble getting sufficient mixing for combustion to occur within the craft structure.
I've talked to a lead engineer on a NASA/DARPA scramjet project that hasn't made many headlines (intentionally.) There is a way to get a scramjet to develop thrust at 0 speed. I suspect it involves a very long tube that has a backwards-directed jet at the front, to make the air moving through the tube run at scramjet speeds. Once the thing gets off the ground and up to speed, they start injecting fuel at the front, where the jet is. The problem is that at these speeds you can't get the fuel and the air to mix sufficiently before they're out of the back of the craft, which necessitates long combustion/mixing paths (and use of hydrogen as a fuel because it disperses faster.) Once you have a long combustion path you might as well use the remainder of it, at low speeds.
The person to whom I was speaking wouldn't answer *any* questions about developing thrust at 0 speed, but from the other questions I'd asked, I'd gotten a good feel of the geometry and design of the project, and I know that people have used jets to light up other jet and ramjet engines in the past.
informative. I had no idea they had the TOTT stuff online that quickly. Next time I'll do my research first.
A: I'd give my eyeteeth for a job at the NY, yeah. /. but /. is often running stuff that the WSJ ran first, or that digg ran, so it's also possible that some people on the NY staff are tuned into the same issues and there's a simultaneous awareness that an issue is big enough to write about. /., I suppose...)
B: It's possible that someone there reads
C: Plagiarism is copying from one source, research is copying from multiple sources (even if it's a bunch of comments on the same thread on
D: That Malcolm Gladwell article on the Microsoft/Apple/Linux metaphor of making cookies -- yeah. I'm thinking he's definitely been looking around here. When opensource methodology and philosophy is showing up in the pages of an arbiter of the cultural elite you know it's becoming a big deal.
E: I'd claim I read it for the articles but let's be honest: it's the cartoons.
This week's issue of The New Yorker had a one-page article briefly summarizing the *actual* tiered internet (google has to pay SBC to ensure QoS, not the tiered-to-consumer plan in TFA) and pointing out why it was such a bad idea. It read just like a +5 Informative from /. with the same points we've all made during previous posts on this, and got me to wondering if the person who wrote it reads /. -- so if you do, thanks! it was lovely and did a great job of explaining to the teeming masses what it means and why it's a bad idea.
So what do you think of HIPAA, anyway? Why repeal it? On the one hand it's nice that it's harder to get to my medical data, so presumably my personal information is harder to steal or misuse by insurance companies denying me coverage, but on the other it seems like an awfully convenient shield for health care providers to protect themselves against liability and negligence charges because it's much harder to show a systemic negligence when you can't get any data on it. I don't know what I think of it overall so mention that it has political overtones makes me curious.
Don't touch aviation with a ten-foot pole. (I say this as a pilot.) I can't tell you how many small high-tech manufacturing companies I've worked for in Denver/Boulder/Fort Collins that have had services/maintenance staff completely filled by graduates of the now-defunct aviation college in Denver: people making $10/hour with an aviation&powerplant certificate and the skills to rebuild a turbine engine. Horrible oversupply, lousy job market.
Truck driving. Nursing. Those are jobs that can't be outsourced. There might come a time when there won't be anyone who can afford to buy the stuff the trucks are shipping or the health care the nurses are part of, but that probably won't be for many years.
Brian Daley wrote a trio of books about Han and Chewie before meeting Luke. I liked them (but less than some of his other writing.)
"Han Solo at Star's End", "Han Solo's Revenge", and "Han Solo and the Lost Legacy", I think they were called.
Daley also wrote the radio adaption of Star Wars, some not-so-great mercenary books, and some cute cross-genre fantasy stuff, with armored-personnel-carrier.vs.dragon action and the like.
I think one thing you could do to convince yourself of how much things have changed is to look at the average life expectancy, the infant mortality rates, and the death rate due to epidemics, to see one enormous change. It might not seem like much to you that infant mortality has only fallen 100:1 in the last 200 years, but it sure does to the parents of all those children. Likewise, you might not think much about the average life expectancy going from 35 to 74 over the last 400 years, but you'd sure notice it if you actually lived in Angola, where both the life expectancy and infant mortality rates are only a little better than medieval Europe. You should read some of the diaries of Samuel Pepys some time. I'm thinking about the bit where he was talking about saving a particularly lovely, exotic fish for a week and a half until a friend showed up so he could serve it for dinner. Of course, without refrigeration, that meant that he had to scrape and cut carefully to avoid serving any of the particularly wormy bits to his friend. I also think it'd be instructional for you to work on a piece of machinery made before 1875 and learn how much fun it is to hand-file threads on a bolt of custom diameter and thread pitch. Or you could help dig a ditch across central England or the southern United States, 200 miles long, using a shovel, because nobody had bulldozers and canal boats were the only way to transport coal for heating. Did you know that in 1917 -- I know people that remember 1917! -- it took an Army convoy eighty days to cross the United States? And in 1913 it took a pilot 40 days to fly from New York to Boston. (he had a bad flight, let's put it that way.) Even simple things like communication are underrated. In the 1600's, some people interested in languages started doing surveys near London and they found that within 40 miles of London itself, there were villages where the majority of people in the village spoke a sufficiently different dialect of English that they could not talk to the Londoners. Now multiply that by the whole world. In the town where I grew up, the largest source of employment was mineral extraction: mining. Until the 1920's, mining was considered inherently hazardous -- in other words, by choosing to become a miner, you gave up any expectation of safe working conditions so you (or your heirs) could not sue the mine company if you were injured, no matter how unsafe the conditions. Imagine a world where there is no such thing as liability. Imainge a world where 10-year-old kids are valuable because they fit down chimneys and can pull mine carts through knee-high tunnels -- and they do so because if they don't they will starve. Imagine a world where a large proportion, maybe as much as 10%, of children are born blind because their mothers had syphilis. Imagine a world where a minor cut could become infected and kill you -- or your drinking water could, or the fleas that people had their whole lives. So yeah, I'd say the world's changed quite a lot.
Thank you for pointing that out. My first thought was similarly "well, that'll make a lousy solar cell" but the idea that a layered stack could selectively absorb by wavelength is superb. Matching the bandgap to the wavelength to maximise efficiency and minimize thermal heating... that's really cool. I'm going to be walking around mumbling about clever people all day.
That's what I was thinking, or IR light. There are a lot less transparent substances in the UV and IR than in the visible because of basic materials properties. That's what places I've worked with have done when they had to line up transparent lithography stacks for deep UV photolith.
I think the issue is that there are a lot of people who are scared, and willing to vote for what they perceive as safety. The people I know are generally smart and aware enough to realize that they personally face an infinitesimal risk of being hurt by terrorists or nogoodniks (especially compared to being hurt by drunk drivers, for instance.) We just need to get more people to read Bruce Schneier's "Beyond Fear."
Yeah, and most of the Libertarians I know are, personally, self-interested jerks. Which is too bad, coz the general tenets seem good. Guilt by association, I guess.
My boss calls himself 'fairly conservative' and I call myself a left-wing lunatic. And guess what? on almost every issue that the two of us think really matters right now, we're in 100% agreement: free speech, privacy, civil liberties, and general government-intervention-in-private-life. When we talk about this we decide that we would've been at completely opposite ends of the spectrum when Carter was in office but by now we're almost indistinguishable in what we'll be voting for next time around. Now if only someone that actually encapsulated what we want was going to be running, but that's probably not going to happen.
I find it fitting that a VP of one of the largest, slowest-responding companies in the world says "there's no next big thing." For him, and for IBM, he's probably completely right. Not so much for the people who are working on the next Google. Mesh networking using mass-produced embedded systems in cars? Could happen. Would be very useful. Won't be designed by IBM.
>The reason that the Justice Department publicised this rejection from Google is because they thought it helped them. That's what baffles me about this case. Was it their public image that they thought this helped? Was it in their interest to make people think their information was safe with Google? Did they think it would cause Fox News to smear Google? (And how would that help them?) Is this information honestly going to help them get their preferred verdict? I don't see how...
Because, by making sure everyone knows they've done this, when they win (which they will, somehow, hopefully not involving torture but who knows) then they will have the advance publicity to make their win general public knowledge. Then next time they have a fight, they have precedent, and in the meanwhile they have the intimidation factor working for them.
Distribution. I don't know that I'll still have the book in two years if the publisher has a snit.
It's also easier for me to read books and magazines because the contrast is better on paper than on screen, and since I buy about 90% (== 10 a week) of my books at used bookstores for a very small fraction of their new cost, it's largely a matter of impulse purchases.
Since I really enjoy regifting, I think the hip new term is, many of those books to other people, electronic versions also fall short there, unless they all have the same sort of reader I do (and then we're right back to the DRM issue.)
I'm in the process of designing a house to be used part of the year in a remote, weather-intensive area. What I would really like is a house that has UPS/hybrid technology so it can survive weeklong power outages, that I can call/telnet into before I get there and have it turn on the house power, heat, and water heater. (Probably using a very low power computer running off solar cells -- at almost 4 km altitude, we get more solar than we can consume. So having the mains power switched off when we're not there makes sense.) In an ideal world, it would also be able to prime, clear, and start the well and close the water system drains, since the house sees -20C for months at a time (when nobody is there) so we drain it down at the end of the warm season. If I had reliable (and reporting) solenoids on the water system, it could close them, pressurize the water system, and fire up the water heater and the house would be habitable when I got there. I'd just have to strip off the shutters over the windows rather than spending an hour or two in the crawl space and wellhouse getting the water system up and checking and tightening valve packing from the temperature-oscillation-induced leakages.
Temperature sensors and a webcam, so I could see what the weather was like before setting out on a rather long drive and get some idea of how long it was going to take, would also be nice.
If one wants to do something useful with all the excess styrofoam, consider that it is basically a long-chain alkane with phenyl group side chains, each of which individually look a lot like toluene. Looking at it from the phenyl group's point of view, it's an aromatic ring with a big anonymous alkane hanging off it, which will act perfectly well as an activating, ortho-para directing side chain. Add some nitric and sulfuric acid and you've made poly-TNT. The only reason this is more difficult than the standard stepwise nitration of toluene is that it's hard to find a solvent that dissolves polystyrene but is also fully miscible with the nitric/sulfuric, but there ARE solutions (pardon the pun) to the problem.
'course these days that's probably not a wise area to be researching.
While I'm on the subject of getting hydrophobic and hydrophilic things together:
Know why white bears dissolve in water?
Coz they're polar!
The parent wasn't quite clear enough: it's possible that syphilis was *native* to the New World, and it wasn't until Europeans came over, starting with Columbus, that it was exported to Europe. So the Lewis & Clark expedition was running into a native disease that was attacking Europeans, the opposite of the smallpox (and many other) epidemics that Europeans brought to the New World.
The hygiene hypothesis, that without early exposure to antigens we develop immature, unreliable immune systems, is an interesting idea (and one that I, among others, proposed well before the date listed on Wikipedia, but I'm just some dude, so...) but it's not yet proven or even very well-supported. I bet it's right, but that's about all I can do.
Lara's prominently displayed "Big Comebacks" indeed.
It amazes me how many serious experts in almost any technical discipline are here. Some of the astrophysics and theoretical math threads have made me feel like I'm about two inches high -- and with eight years of biochem and microbiology, I still often feel completely clueless when people with PhD's are going on about minutae I've never even heard of. This place is teeming with experts.
I'm not quibbling with your general outline, but probably the genetic precursor to DNA was RNA. Tom Cech got his Nobel for showing that RNA can act as an enzyme as well as its more standard job of transporting genetic information. If it can be coaxed to perform both protein and DNA functions, it's likely that in some previous iteration it DID perform both, and only later did life settle on dividing the functions up, leaving only dim echoes of RNA's old abilities. Since there are RNA viruses, this might indicate that they're very old, dating from the pre-DNA times, or it might indicate that they're escaped RNA sequences from cells. In the latter case, they could be thought of as basically a second, derivative, abogenetic event -- a pile of chemicals that gains the ability to self-replicate, parasitically. (All life is parasitic. Viruses are parasitic on life. It's just a matter of degree.) You can draw a continuum, from multicellular life, through large complex bacteria, through obligate parasitic bacteria like the chlamydia group that have a metabolism but can't actually survive on their own (probably), through viruses that have no metabolism and require cellular machinery, to stuff that's just protein -- prions -- but still manages to self-amplify. The line of "this is alive and that is not" is really fuzzy.
OrCAD's sucks. Cadence/Allegro is not half bad. With everything I've used, though, it always seems like the best plan is to have it autoroute, then rip out about half of what it did, do the critical circuits by hand, and let the autorouter go at it again.
I recently did an interface board that basically hooks two IC sockets of 80 pins each to a connector of 500 pins, no other components. OrCAD blew chunks. Allegro, however, did something in five minutes that with another two hours of tweaking, was very nice indeed: two layers, six vias. It would've taken me eight hours or more to do that on my own. I like good autorouters a LOT (by which I mean Allegro.) They're massive time-savers if used intelligently.
Sure would be nice to have that kind of functionality on linux for less than an Allegro license, but hey, that's what the money pays for.