Wasn't this covered by a couple of episodes of "Star Trek"? They would find some civilization where the people had become dumb and relied on machines that had been invented years before?
I don't know much about ST but any *good* science fiction is a story written to show what could happen if a culture stays on its current path, as a warning to the reader. I do know that Asimov wrote about this topic in the second book of the Foundation series, where the Foundationers found some of the old Empire nuclear reactors still running and realized the people using the power from them had no idea how they worked or how to fix them (and became quite upset and angry when asked about the possibility.) That was published in 1952. I'd bet that other scifi writers wrote about the subject before that.
This is just not the case now 25+yrs later. I work a great deal with teens teaching them tech from an art and theater end. What I find is that they know how to use the front end with incredible alacrity and skill. However once that tech has a glitch or fails them they're dumb founded. Yes, I am generalizing, but I've found an overwhelming majority lack even the basic sense to trouble shoot. At best they just let it sit until someone fixes it. At worst I've seen them toss cell phones and laptops in the dumpster because it was broke. (And I was able to retrieve it and fix it later.) It's that lack of trouble shooting ability that is the key to me. They've never been taught to do that. It's not just the tech that is different for them vs. me it's the societal thinking. You do not fix stuff now and keep using it. You toss it out and buy new. And that has deprived them of the desire, curiosity and ability to think creatively and trouble shoot.
While the complexity of the tech has grown since my first introduction, with an almost perfect inverse the ignorance of that same tech's fundamental workings has grown. Your results may vary, but this seems to be the same experience with a broad scope of my friends and colleagues as well. I personally do not see it getting any better. It's created wonderful consumers and that's just what the market wants.
In the 1500's up until about 1850 people tore houses down piece by piece so they could recover the nails that held the wood together, because nails were very valuable. Then someone invented decent nail-making machines, and all the older tradesmen complained and bewailed all these young people who just threw away valuable old nails when they disassembled or burnt old structures.
I'm not making this up. There were laws passed to force people to reclaim nails rather than just burning houses to get rid of them.
When the time + money of repair is significantly less than the time + money of replacement, people repair things. When that's inverted, they replace them. It takes a large chunk of time and effort to learn how to fix things. If you've already spent that, it seems very reasonable to fix things, but if you have to learn troubleshooting, it's a much more effective use of your time and money to just buy another. More critically, as you get older, that becomes even more the case because you have less opportunities to amortize the large fixed cost of learning how to fix things, and you have to keep up with new technologies.
It's not stupid to throw away slightly broken things: it's a rational behavior based on priorities.
I'd write more but I'm in the middle of tearing apart a 1986 LeCroy 350 megahertz oscilloscope that has something wrong with the horizontal scan hardware on the video board and a miscalibrated clipping detector on channel 3, and if I can get those problems diagnosed and fixed I'll have a completely rocking blazingly fast quad-channel scope...
they are not 3D, they are just thinner and deeper than the standard, we still dont see transistors on top of each other. the latice is still pretty much 2D. i ussually dont complain too much, but slash dot summaries are batting way below the mendoza line.
No the structure is totally different. Look at how the source, drain, and the gate are arranged. Different geometry here.
Well... the geometry is still pretty similar. What they've done is raised the source/drain up and wrapped the gate around it, which means they have increased gate area, and can pretty much further increase it as much as they want, without changing the surface area required by the transistor.
However, it seems to me that this is going to increase the gate oxide leakage, which is a significant part of the power burned non-usefully by FETs, and also increase the gate capacitance, which means the gate drive current is going to increase. Gate drive current is already a huge part of the power required by (and burned by, and heat having to be removed from) a fet, and rises as the clock switching speed rises.
Am I wrong about this? Does this design evade these two problems somehow? Making a transistor smaller while increasing the power it uses and the heat it dissipates seems like going in almost exactly the wrong direction. Obviously they're making it work, so I'm wondering what I'm missing.
Lengthening the time of the amber light decreases accidents without the trade-off.
Maybe where you live it does. Around here cars keep going into the intersection until the light has turned red and the last car routinely enters on red. I was down in Santa Fe, NM, not too long ago, where they have the longest yellow lights I've ever seen, on the highway between Santa Fe and Los Alamos, and I saw the same thing: four-second-long yellow lights, and cars careening through the intersection the whole time. Longer amber lights appear to do precisely nothing once people have gotten used to them.
It's not the light cycle that's the problem. It's the drivers.
That's why I write my own OS, drivers and software. I also dug my own well in my backyard, bought a windmill-powered generator, built my own car, bake my own bread and only read stories that I wrote myself. Of course, with the latter, I usually have to wait about five years to forget the plot, but at least I know I'll like it.
Actually, I do bake my own bread, weather permitting.
I know you're joking but I've several friends who have *built* their own wind-powered generator systems (largely from instructions in MAKE magazine or Instructables) and while small generators like that certainly aren't running their whole houses, they do offset some electricity usage. Likewise, one of them has also made his own inverter for his solar panels, so he can back-drive into the grid (which seems like a Very Bad Idea, but hey he's the one with the master's degree in electrical engineering, not me.)
I was in a car crash a couple years ago and have serious memory problems. Back when my brain worked better I used to write a lot of short fiction, and guess what? I do reread my old stuff with no clear idea of how it's going to end. Le sigh. So your joke is all too real.
In 1988, Congress passed the Omnibus Trade and Competitiveness Act, which designates "the metric system of measurement as the preferred system of weights and measures for United States trade and commerce."
Try 1893: the Mendenhall Order said that the United States English system of weights and measures was fundamentally based on the Metric System. We've officially been on the metric system for over a hundred years: we just use really, really stupid units.
That was my first idea, too -- what happens when a 1500 mAh battery discharges into the data pins in 2 seconds? While smoking one of their multihousand dollar devices sounds like a good idea, I'm sure it would cause other problems..
A better idea is a device that mimics the data protocol of the phone model it represents but instead outputs 1000 or more times of data, ideally canned data, like copies of the constitution, video of the Rodney King beating, etc
Fun idea but the designers would be stupid to have not thought of this: optocouplers, current-limiting resistors, and ESD-protection structures are routinely put on device inputs/outputs intended for consumer usage, especially in industrial settings where the devices are expensive and expected to be used by inexperienced operators. I design stuff like this at work, and the chips and systems we make can handle thousand-volt spikes and have car batteries shorted across the leads: they don't draw enough current to get hurt and they have high(ish) voltage diodes to protect them from getting zapped through casual handling. If you can jam several kilovolts down that data line then you can probably do some damage, but then you're carrying something somewhat dangerous to you and any accessory you plug it into as well.
Almost all that we eat is converted to sugar by our own bodies. Protein is the exception. The catch is that carmelization occurs and this end product clogs our internal organs. It is one reason why older peoples eyes don't look as clear as when they were young. So yes sugar does help to kill you and there is nothing at all that you can do about it other than a mild state of starvation all your life. Prevention may extend life but it ruins the quality of life to such a degree that one almost must be perverted to maintain that degree of hunger.
I don't mean to rain on your parade, but there's a lot of stuff you just said that I can't let stand.
Sugar, starches, and some proteins are broken down and reformed into other sugars and sugar polymers, called glycogen, that we use for aerobic respiration. They're broken down into three-carbon units, called pyruvates, and any three-carbon unit can be built back into sugar, through a process called gluconeogenesis. Fats and some proteins are broken down in two carbon units, called acetyl groups. Animals lack the enzyme to convert two-carbon units to three-carbon units, so once something's a two-carbon unit it's stuck: we can build them back up into complex fats, but they're still broken down in two-carbon units, and used in anaerobic energy production. Sugars are eventually broken down into two-carbon units, as well, and from there everything is broken down into carbon dioxide. Fats, as stored in the body, are long hydrocarbon chains hooked in groups of three to three-carbon glycerol units, and those glycerol units can be built back into sugars by the body. But everything ends up broken down into acetates and then into carbon dioxide.
I don't know what you're on about with the caramelization thing. Caramelization is pyrolysis whereas the related Maillard Reaction is a sort of polymerization, so I suppose it could be seen as a chemical reaction that tends towards clogging?
And elderly people have cataracts, which is UV- or IR-catalyzed polymerization of the proteins that make up the eyes. You can get it young if you stare at fires a lot. That's called Glassblower Cataracts. It's no different than how the white of an egg turns from clear to white when the egg hits a frying pan. It's just slower. It has very, very little to do with what you eat, because the front of the eye has almost no circulation and almost no interaction with the rest of the body (which is why corneal transplants are so easy: your immune system doesn't mess about there so you can just stick any old person's cornea in place of yours. The downside is that herpesvirus infections of the cornea *suck* because your body can't fight them off. So keep your eyes away from people with cold sores.)
Sugar is definitely toxic in high concentrations for some organisms - that's why it's used as a preservative. High concentrations of sugar kill many bacteria.
We're getting close to the limits of the definition of 'toxic' here. Hypertonic solutions kill bacteria because they dehydrate them: the water inside the bacteria gets sucked out because the external solution is more concentrated than the stuff in the bacteria. As such, any highly concentrated solution -- table salt, potassium sulfate, what have you -- will also do the same thing, so you can't say this is a property of sugar, but a property of concentrated solutions, and as such, it's not really useful, and by extension not really correct, to say sugar in high concentrations is toxic.
Honey has been shown to have some antibacterial properties, by the way. Honey *is* (most likely) toxic to (some) bacteria, above/beyond its sugar content. But sucrose only kills by osmotic dehydration. Pure water, which is hypotonic, will also bugger up bacteria for the opposite reason. Indeed, fish spend enormous amounts of energy trying to keep their innards in, and only a few fish can handle going from a hypertonic environment in the sea, where they have to avoid dehydration, to living in a hypotonic environment in fresh water, where they have to avoid their cells swelling up and bursting. That's not to say either salt water or fresh water are toxic, they're just not isotonic, so it takes work to survive in them, and at some molar concentration most cells can't do enough work to manage it.
Reminds me of a scene in All Quiet on the Western Front where a German soldier has killed a French soldier and finds an ID that gives his name, Gérard Duval, and that he was a printer.
The real world isn't as simple as an FPS.
My grandfather pretty much lived that: he was in the German trenches and they went through the pockets of bodies, looking for operational information, ammo, food, and along the way found letters from home and photos of kids, because people kept the stuff that meant the most to them, with them. Remember the mob scene in "To Kill A Mockingbird" where Atticus stops the mob by calling them out by name and reminding them of how he and they are connected? Then they can't be a mob howling for (imaginary, wrong-headed) justice by killing everyone in their way, because the people in their way are their friends.
The part that I find unsettling is that we all know this, and if we're in a situation where we're going to have a war, we pre-emptively compensate for it by trying to cut contacts, using biased writing to emphasize the difference between us (good upstanding) people and those (nasty, brutish) people, and it's precisely that capacity to try to inflame our emotions towards hatred that's so creepy. Not the hatred itself or the willingness to kill, but the willingness to actively delude ourselves into a state where we can feel that the hatred and willingness to kill is okay. And, again, we probably need to do that to not be killed ourselves, but that doesn't make it any less creepy when we're manipulating ourselves.
Right on topic: if there's ambiguity, or if you suddenly start realizing that the opposition is human and can be sympathetic, it changes the whole FPS experience. And people know this, too, which is why we engage in demonization of our enemies in the run-up to a war: so we can less badly about killing them because we've already justified it to ourselves. We probably have to do that in order to survive, but propaganda is the least attractive form of advertising.
Well, you're entitled to your opinion, I guess. I just can't see how a "good person" could fondle people in an airport without puking.
Because they're getting paid for it, they have a mortgage, and their boss said it was okay? Read up about the Milgram experiment. It's how people work. You can deny that fact or you can accept it and take it into account when you figure out how to deal with people.
No doubt. With the NEC requirement of never having to go more than 1.8 meters for an outlet, that means an average of 7 outlets per bedroom (assuming 14x14' bedroom with an outlet in the closet.) 10 ea for living and dining room, and probably 6 for the kitchen, so for a 3bd/2ba that's about 60 for the upstairs alone. Habitable space in the basement, which means dens and playrooms, has the same requirement, so it'll probably be at least 3/4 as many downstairs, so let's call it 100 outlets. That breaker panel is going to be the size of a refrigerator and we haven't even started wiring in lights or major appliances.
Dedicated 20 amp lines to the refrigerator and microwave and a couple places in the living room, where you expect an A/V setup to be installed, make a lot of sense. But past that, two circuits to each bedroom, plus a circuit for the lights so you don't end up in the dark if you trip a breaker, is going to handle anything but mad scientists. Running 12ga everywhere is a good idea and not that expensive. But breaker-per-outlet is infeasible.
For America, the problem is that for the last 20 years, being a lawyer or Wall Street-type manager or financial manager was where the money was. Unfortunately, those types don't actually create anything. They are, at best, enablers of the people who do and make things. In most cases, though, they are simply fat parasites on the free market draining our best & brightest into pointless careers making derivatives, etc.
America's decline isn't from government, or even necessarily the Rich and Powerful, but from her people. They've turned their back on getting rich by working hard (understandable because of above) or inventing & discovering things. They've turned their back on learning and education (See for example, TLC's transformation from a science/learning channel to reality TV channel). They've also begun turning their back on science and logic in favor of "gut feelings" (Thanks, Glen Beck and Fox News!).
While we all like to bag on lawyers and financial types, if their jobs were truly worthless they wouldn't exist. High-powered lawyers are the corporate equivalent of a country's nuclear weapons: you have them so you don't have to use them. Saying that they don't create anything is like saying fire alarms don't create anything. It's true right up until a fire starts. It's harder for me to defend financiers, because it looks to me like they've created an ecosystem for themselves, carving profit out of cash flow, but there's lots of competition for that money so it's hard to justify the claim that they're not creating anything.
America has *always* turned its back on people who invent & discover things: we've always had a deep-seated suspicion of smart people, wonks, eggheads, or nerds. My dad was ridiculed in school in the 1940's for spending his time making model rockets and mutating goldfish with x-rays, because he wasn't interested in football: there was tremendous pressure to be a jock. Likewise in the counter-culture 1960's, tune in/drop out wasn't about getting a nice lab job, it was about rejecting modern science-based society for eastern mysticism.
I *think* the difference is that for what we think of as America's scientific golden age, you could make good money in science, and now you can't, compared to finance or law (or professional sports) so now that's where all the kids want to go, and who can blame them for going where the money is?
Second, it is because people price shop the last 45 cents off a $1500 TV, but don't think twice about paying $35 more for a cable. A long time ago, I used to work in sales, selling printers that cost $450 that people would shop around on, and drive 90 miles to the next big city to save $5 ($445).
This is an interesting claim. All the economics textbooks, some psychology textbooks, and watching newspaper articles, all say exactly the opposite: people, when asked if they'd drive across town to pay $25 less on a $100 item, say they would, but when asked if they'd drive across town to pay $25 less on a $1500 item, say they wouldn't. It's probably the classical example of human irrational behavior in economics. Now, it's possible that this is a testing artifact, and that they don't *actually* behave the way all economic models and tests say they do, but I'm a bit dubious and would like to hear what other people think.
>I would expect people who are able to understand subjects involving big numbers, are also able to understand the meaning of prefixes like "k", "M" and "G", and even (shudder) metric units.
While I feel the same way, and so do a lot of my friends, telling people that I rode 5 megameters on my bicycle last year, or that I'm going to drive 2 megameters to Canada next week, makes them frown. I can't imagine that anyone would find it smooth or intuitive to talk about megamiles. It's much easier to understand a base unit with very large scalars than much less-well-known prefixes and a scalar between 0 and 9, and while kilometers, for example, isn't designated as a base unit it functions as one in people's minds when they're talking about driving distances. I think the same thing happens with tons: people know how much a pound is, and may even know that 8000 pounds is roughly double the weight of their car, but most people don't have any good feel of what a ton is even if you tell them it's 2000 pounds. Sure, it's just math, but for a lot of people the added distance of having to do that math changes the idea from "that's a lot!" to "is that a lot?"
There's also a lot to be said for having a captive fab when the DoD comes knocking and says "we want a part that *we* can guarantee doesn't have any backdoors in the silicon". NatSemi has a prototyping fab and a secure fab in Santa Clara, and the secure fab -- I'm told, insofar as I've never seen the inside as I don't have the clearance required -- will build you a part with your engineers as involved as you want, from design, through fab, to test and packaging. That's worth a lot to a bunch of customers, apparently.
As they say in the study, it's quite possible motivated kids take Algebra II and that's why they do well in life. One of the study authors says the causal relationship is "very very weak." Meanwhile, requiring that everyone take this to graduate means more kids drop out, and then try to go into the workforce with no degree at all.
It'd be really great if we were all Philosopher-Kings that understood everything, but one-size-fits-all education is the sort of utopian idea that has difficulty translating to real life.
Totally agree with you. However: have you ever used an auto-darkening helmet? (If not, *get one*, it's the single biggest improvement to welding technology in 30 years.) Auto-darkening helmets are made to be fast enough to stop seriously bright flashes before your retinas get bleached. I'm not suggesting wearing a welding helmet when you go out to start a riot. However, at some point in the not too distant future, (geeky) people will be wearing glasses that act like heads-up displays, and adding auto-darkening, or even better, localized auto-darkening will be an obvious application, primarily so people driving at night don't have the same general thing happen to them but it's easily extensible to reducing flash blindness and laser-pointer-airplane problems. My 10 year old welding helmet goes from shade 3 to shade 14 in less than 20 microseconds. If I spend all day running the TIG my eyes start to sting because of those brief 1/50,000 second flashes, but I never lose accommodation. (A weird side-note: the UV attracts bugs when I'm welding after dark. I'll finish a weld and look and there will be a circle of dead bugs, about 10-20 cm away from the item I'm welding, because they flew closer and closer until the UV and heat killed them. I also have a lot of shirts that are faded and falling apart right across chest-height where all the UV is, but are fine below that where they're shielded by the table.)
I've always found a teenage giggle for the thought that -- at least where I live -- the two most commonly seen manufacturers of "self-erecting concrete pumps" are named Schwing and Putzmeister.
I have a friend who wants to try to explore the US using nothing but a compass and a sextant,
What kind of a tent?
It's a 'tant' which is real close to a 'taint' (you know: tain't the one, tain't the other). If it doesn't make you tense, we can call it the same, for all intents.
We already have Word Lens, and wearable eyeglass-style displays. I have a friend who wants to try to explore the US using nothing but a compass and a sextant, but with the ubiquity of direction signs you don't actually need navigation equipment. He's hoping he can get Word Lens running on a wearable display so he can scramble all the street signs and have a whole new country to explore.
Just build a cyclotron. They're quite easy to make, being basically a huge magnet and a curved track in a vacuum. There is a minor technical challenge that they're designed to accelerate protons or electrons, but I'm sure it's easy to adapt it to handle neutrons instead.
I'd rather not see a miles traveled tax. It would be better to have a new vehicle fee proportional to the expected life of the vehicle and the 4th power of the axle weight. That cost gets passed along proportionally in the further sale of the vehicle.
As a bicyclist, I'd love to see this and I'd gladly pay road taxes on my (7 kilogram) bicycle. Unfortunately, taxes on semi trucks would exceed the value of the cargo they carry, and the downstream effects of that would be disastrous. Sure, that'd be great for trains -- which should be carrying more cargo -- and right now our taxes are subsidizing commercial transportation by providing them with roads, but that might be a worthwhile subsidy considering how much value we get back by having cheap transportation, even if that cheap transportation is trashing our roads.
Slashdot Mirror
Wasn't this covered by a couple of episodes of "Star Trek"? They would find some civilization where the people had become dumb and relied on machines that had been invented years before?
I don't know much about ST but any *good* science fiction is a story written to show what could happen if a culture stays on its current path, as a warning to the reader. I do know that Asimov wrote about this topic in the second book of the Foundation series, where the Foundationers found some of the old Empire nuclear reactors still running and realized the people using the power from them had no idea how they worked or how to fix them (and became quite upset and angry when asked about the possibility.) That was published in 1952. I'd bet that other scifi writers wrote about the subject before that.
This is just not the case now 25+yrs later. I work a great deal with teens teaching them tech from an art and theater end. What I find is that they know how to use the front end with incredible alacrity and skill. However once that tech has a glitch or fails them they're dumb founded. Yes, I am generalizing, but I've found an overwhelming majority lack even the basic sense to trouble shoot. At best they just let it sit until someone fixes it. At worst I've seen them toss cell phones and laptops in the dumpster because it was broke. (And I was able to retrieve it and fix it later.) It's that lack of trouble shooting ability that is the key to me. They've never been taught to do that. It's not just the tech that is different for them vs. me it's the societal thinking. You do not fix stuff now and keep using it. You toss it out and buy new. And that has deprived them of the desire, curiosity and ability to think creatively and trouble shoot.
While the complexity of the tech has grown since my first introduction, with an almost perfect inverse the ignorance of that same tech's fundamental workings has grown. Your results may vary, but this seems to be the same experience with a broad scope of my friends and colleagues as well. I personally do not see it getting any better. It's created wonderful consumers and that's just what the market wants.
In the 1500's up until about 1850 people tore houses down piece by piece so they could recover the nails that held the wood together, because nails were very valuable. Then someone invented decent nail-making machines, and all the older tradesmen complained and bewailed all these young people who just threw away valuable old nails when they disassembled or burnt old structures.
I'm not making this up. There were laws passed to force people to reclaim nails rather than just burning houses to get rid of them.
When the time + money of repair is significantly less than the time + money of replacement, people repair things. When that's inverted, they replace them. It takes a large chunk of time and effort to learn how to fix things. If you've already spent that, it seems very reasonable to fix things, but if you have to learn troubleshooting, it's a much more effective use of your time and money to just buy another. More critically, as you get older, that becomes even more the case because you have less opportunities to amortize the large fixed cost of learning how to fix things, and you have to keep up with new technologies.
It's not stupid to throw away slightly broken things: it's a rational behavior based on priorities.
I'd write more but I'm in the middle of tearing apart a 1986 LeCroy 350 megahertz oscilloscope that has something wrong with the horizontal scan hardware on the video board and a miscalibrated clipping detector on channel 3, and if I can get those problems diagnosed and fixed I'll have a completely rocking blazingly fast quad-channel scope...
they are not 3D, they are just thinner and deeper than the standard, we still dont see transistors on top of each other. the latice is still pretty much 2D. i ussually dont complain too much, but slash dot summaries are batting way below the mendoza line.
No the structure is totally different. Look at how the source, drain, and the gate are arranged. Different geometry here.
The article from AnanTech has the best explanation of the technique I have come across so far today:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4313/intel-announces-first-22nm-3d-trigate-transistors-shipping-in-2h-2011
Well... the geometry is still pretty similar. What they've done is raised the source/drain up and wrapped the gate around it, which means they have increased gate area, and can pretty much further increase it as much as they want, without changing the surface area required by the transistor.
However, it seems to me that this is going to increase the gate oxide leakage, which is a significant part of the power burned non-usefully by FETs, and also increase the gate capacitance, which means the gate drive current is going to increase. Gate drive current is already a huge part of the power required by (and burned by, and heat having to be removed from) a fet, and rises as the clock switching speed rises.
Am I wrong about this? Does this design evade these two problems somehow? Making a transistor smaller while increasing the power it uses and the heat it dissipates seems like going in almost exactly the wrong direction. Obviously they're making it work, so I'm wondering what I'm missing.
Lengthening the time of the amber light decreases accidents without the trade-off.
Maybe where you live it does. Around here cars keep going into the intersection until the light has turned red and the last car routinely enters on red. I was down in Santa Fe, NM, not too long ago, where they have the longest yellow lights I've ever seen, on the highway between Santa Fe and Los Alamos, and I saw the same thing: four-second-long yellow lights, and cars careening through the intersection the whole time. Longer amber lights appear to do precisely nothing once people have gotten used to them.
It's not the light cycle that's the problem. It's the drivers.
That's why I write my own OS, drivers and software. I also dug my own well in my backyard, bought a windmill-powered generator, built my own car, bake my own bread and only read stories that I wrote myself. Of course, with the latter, I usually have to wait about five years to forget the plot, but at least I know I'll like it.
Actually, I do bake my own bread, weather permitting.
I know you're joking but I've several friends who have *built* their own wind-powered generator systems (largely from instructions in MAKE magazine or Instructables) and while small generators like that certainly aren't running their whole houses, they do offset some electricity usage. Likewise, one of them has also made his own inverter for his solar panels, so he can back-drive into the grid (which seems like a Very Bad Idea, but hey he's the one with the master's degree in electrical engineering, not me.)
I was in a car crash a couple years ago and have serious memory problems. Back when my brain worked better I used to write a lot of short fiction, and guess what? I do reread my old stuff with no clear idea of how it's going to end. Le sigh. So your joke is all too real.
I found this online somewhere:
In 1988, Congress passed the Omnibus Trade and Competitiveness Act, which designates "the metric system of measurement as the preferred system of weights and measures for United States trade and commerce."
Try 1893: the Mendenhall Order said that the United States English system of weights and measures was fundamentally based on the Metric System. We've officially been on the metric system for over a hundred years: we just use really, really stupid units.
That was my first idea, too -- what happens when a 1500 mAh battery discharges into the data pins in 2 seconds? While smoking one of their multihousand dollar devices sounds like a good idea, I'm sure it would cause other problems..
A better idea is a device that mimics the data protocol of the phone model it represents but instead outputs 1000 or more times of data, ideally canned data, like copies of the constitution, video of the Rodney King beating, etc
Fun idea but the designers would be stupid to have not thought of this: optocouplers, current-limiting resistors, and ESD-protection structures are routinely put on device inputs/outputs intended for consumer usage, especially in industrial settings where the devices are expensive and expected to be used by inexperienced operators. I design stuff like this at work, and the chips and systems we make can handle thousand-volt spikes and have car batteries shorted across the leads: they don't draw enough current to get hurt and they have high(ish) voltage diodes to protect them from getting zapped through casual handling. If you can jam several kilovolts down that data line then you can probably do some damage, but then you're carrying something somewhat dangerous to you and any accessory you plug it into as well.
Almost all that we eat is converted to sugar by our own bodies. Protein is the exception. The catch is that carmelization occurs and this end product clogs our internal organs. It is one reason why older peoples eyes don't look as clear as when they were young. So yes sugar does help to kill you and there is nothing at all that you can do about it other than a mild state of starvation all your life. Prevention may extend life but it ruins the quality of life to such a degree that one almost must be perverted to maintain that degree of hunger.
I don't mean to rain on your parade, but there's a lot of stuff you just said that I can't let stand.
Sugar, starches, and some proteins are broken down and reformed into other sugars and sugar polymers, called glycogen, that we use for aerobic respiration. They're broken down into three-carbon units, called pyruvates, and any three-carbon unit can be built back into sugar, through a process called gluconeogenesis. Fats and some proteins are broken down in two carbon units, called acetyl groups. Animals lack the enzyme to convert two-carbon units to three-carbon units, so once something's a two-carbon unit it's stuck: we can build them back up into complex fats, but they're still broken down in two-carbon units, and used in anaerobic energy production. Sugars are eventually broken down into two-carbon units, as well, and from there everything is broken down into carbon dioxide. Fats, as stored in the body, are long hydrocarbon chains hooked in groups of three to three-carbon glycerol units, and those glycerol units can be built back into sugars by the body. But everything ends up broken down into acetates and then into carbon dioxide.
I don't know what you're on about with the caramelization thing. Caramelization is pyrolysis whereas the related Maillard Reaction is a sort of polymerization, so I suppose it could be seen as a chemical reaction that tends towards clogging?
And elderly people have cataracts, which is UV- or IR-catalyzed polymerization of the proteins that make up the eyes. You can get it young if you stare at fires a lot. That's called Glassblower Cataracts. It's no different than how the white of an egg turns from clear to white when the egg hits a frying pan. It's just slower. It has very, very little to do with what you eat, because the front of the eye has almost no circulation and almost no interaction with the rest of the body (which is why corneal transplants are so easy: your immune system doesn't mess about there so you can just stick any old person's cornea in place of yours. The downside is that herpesvirus infections of the cornea *suck* because your body can't fight them off. So keep your eyes away from people with cold sores.)
Sugar is definitely toxic in high concentrations for some organisms - that's why it's used as a preservative. High concentrations of sugar kill many bacteria.
We're getting close to the limits of the definition of 'toxic' here. Hypertonic solutions kill bacteria because they dehydrate them: the water inside the bacteria gets sucked out because the external solution is more concentrated than the stuff in the bacteria. As such, any highly concentrated solution -- table salt, potassium sulfate, what have you -- will also do the same thing, so you can't say this is a property of sugar, but a property of concentrated solutions, and as such, it's not really useful, and by extension not really correct, to say sugar in high concentrations is toxic.
Honey has been shown to have some antibacterial properties, by the way. Honey *is* (most likely) toxic to (some) bacteria, above/beyond its sugar content. But sucrose only kills by osmotic dehydration. Pure water, which is hypotonic, will also bugger up bacteria for the opposite reason. Indeed, fish spend enormous amounts of energy trying to keep their innards in, and only a few fish can handle going from a hypertonic environment in the sea, where they have to avoid dehydration, to living in a hypotonic environment in fresh water, where they have to avoid their cells swelling up and bursting. That's not to say either salt water or fresh water are toxic, they're just not isotonic, so it takes work to survive in them, and at some molar concentration most cells can't do enough work to manage it.
Reminds me of a scene in All Quiet on the Western Front where a German soldier has killed a French soldier and finds an ID that gives his name, Gérard Duval, and that he was a printer.
The real world isn't as simple as an FPS.
My grandfather pretty much lived that: he was in the German trenches and they went through the pockets of bodies, looking for operational information, ammo, food, and along the way found letters from home and photos of kids, because people kept the stuff that meant the most to them, with them. Remember the mob scene in "To Kill A Mockingbird" where Atticus stops the mob by calling them out by name and reminding them of how he and they are connected? Then they can't be a mob howling for (imaginary, wrong-headed) justice by killing everyone in their way, because the people in their way are their friends.
The part that I find unsettling is that we all know this, and if we're in a situation where we're going to have a war, we pre-emptively compensate for it by trying to cut contacts, using biased writing to emphasize the difference between us (good upstanding) people and those (nasty, brutish) people, and it's precisely that capacity to try to inflame our emotions towards hatred that's so creepy. Not the hatred itself or the willingness to kill, but the willingness to actively delude ourselves into a state where we can feel that the hatred and willingness to kill is okay. And, again, we probably need to do that to not be killed ourselves, but that doesn't make it any less creepy when we're manipulating ourselves.
Right on topic: if there's ambiguity, or if you suddenly start realizing that the opposition is human and can be sympathetic, it changes the whole FPS experience. And people know this, too, which is why we engage in demonization of our enemies in the run-up to a war: so we can less badly about killing them because we've already justified it to ourselves. We probably have to do that in order to survive, but propaganda is the least attractive form of advertising.
...since most TSA employees are good people...
Well, you're entitled to your opinion, I guess. I just can't see how a "good person" could fondle people in an airport without puking.
Because they're getting paid for it, they have a mortgage, and their boss said it was okay? Read up about the Milgram experiment. It's how people work. You can deny that fact or you can accept it and take it into account when you figure out how to deal with people.
No doubt. With the NEC requirement of never having to go more than 1.8 meters for an outlet, that means an average of 7 outlets per bedroom (assuming 14x14' bedroom with an outlet in the closet.) 10 ea for living and dining room, and probably 6 for the kitchen, so for a 3bd/2ba that's about 60 for the upstairs alone. Habitable space in the basement, which means dens and playrooms, has the same requirement, so it'll probably be at least 3/4 as many downstairs, so let's call it 100 outlets. That breaker panel is going to be the size of a refrigerator and we haven't even started wiring in lights or major appliances.
Dedicated 20 amp lines to the refrigerator and microwave and a couple places in the living room, where you expect an A/V setup to be installed, make a lot of sense. But past that, two circuits to each bedroom, plus a circuit for the lights so you don't end up in the dark if you trip a breaker, is going to handle anything but mad scientists. Running 12ga everywhere is a good idea and not that expensive. But breaker-per-outlet is infeasible.
For America, the problem is that for the last 20 years, being a lawyer or Wall Street-type manager or financial manager was where the money was. Unfortunately, those types don't actually create anything. They are, at best, enablers of the people who do and make things. In most cases, though, they are simply fat parasites on the free market draining our best & brightest into pointless careers making derivatives, etc.
America's decline isn't from government, or even necessarily the Rich and Powerful, but from her people. They've turned their back on getting rich by working hard (understandable because of above) or inventing & discovering things. They've turned their back on learning and education (See for example, TLC's transformation from a science/learning channel to reality TV channel). They've also begun turning their back on science and logic in favor of "gut feelings" (Thanks, Glen Beck and Fox News!).
While we all like to bag on lawyers and financial types, if their jobs were truly worthless they wouldn't exist. High-powered lawyers are the corporate equivalent of a country's nuclear weapons: you have them so you don't have to use them. Saying that they don't create anything is like saying fire alarms don't create anything. It's true right up until a fire starts. It's harder for me to defend financiers, because it looks to me like they've created an ecosystem for themselves, carving profit out of cash flow, but there's lots of competition for that money so it's hard to justify the claim that they're not creating anything.
America has *always* turned its back on people who invent & discover things: we've always had a deep-seated suspicion of smart people, wonks, eggheads, or nerds. My dad was ridiculed in school in the 1940's for spending his time making model rockets and mutating goldfish with x-rays, because he wasn't interested in football: there was tremendous pressure to be a jock. Likewise in the counter-culture 1960's, tune in/drop out wasn't about getting a nice lab job, it was about rejecting modern science-based society for eastern mysticism.
I *think* the difference is that for what we think of as America's scientific golden age, you could make good money in science, and now you can't, compared to finance or law (or professional sports) so now that's where all the kids want to go, and who can blame them for going where the money is?
Second, it is because people price shop the last 45 cents off a $1500 TV, but don't think twice about paying $35 more for a cable. A long time ago, I used to work in sales, selling printers that cost $450 that people would shop around on, and drive 90 miles to the next big city to save $5 ($445).
This is an interesting claim. All the economics textbooks, some psychology textbooks, and watching newspaper articles, all say exactly the opposite: people, when asked if they'd drive across town to pay $25 less on a $100 item, say they would, but when asked if they'd drive across town to pay $25 less on a $1500 item, say they wouldn't. It's probably the classical example of human irrational behavior in economics. Now, it's possible that this is a testing artifact, and that they don't *actually* behave the way all economic models and tests say they do, but I'm a bit dubious and would like to hear what other people think.
>I would expect people who are able to understand subjects involving big numbers, are also able to understand the meaning of prefixes like "k", "M" and "G", and even (shudder) metric units.
While I feel the same way, and so do a lot of my friends, telling people that I rode 5 megameters on my bicycle last year, or that I'm going to drive 2 megameters to Canada next week, makes them frown. I can't imagine that anyone would find it smooth or intuitive to talk about megamiles. It's much easier to understand a base unit with very large scalars than much less-well-known prefixes and a scalar between 0 and 9, and while kilometers, for example, isn't designated as a base unit it functions as one in people's minds when they're talking about driving distances. I think the same thing happens with tons: people know how much a pound is, and may even know that 8000 pounds is roughly double the weight of their car, but most people don't have any good feel of what a ton is even if you tell them it's 2000 pounds. Sure, it's just math, but for a lot of people the added distance of having to do that math changes the idea from "that's a lot!" to "is that a lot?"
There's also a lot to be said for having a captive fab when the DoD comes knocking and says "we want a part that *we* can guarantee doesn't have any backdoors in the silicon". NatSemi has a prototyping fab and a secure fab in Santa Clara, and the secure fab -- I'm told, insofar as I've never seen the inside as I don't have the clearance required -- will build you a part with your engineers as involved as you want, from design, through fab, to test and packaging. That's worth a lot to a bunch of customers, apparently.
As they say in the study, it's quite possible motivated kids take Algebra II and that's why they do well in life. One of the study authors says the causal relationship is "very very weak." Meanwhile, requiring that everyone take this to graduate means more kids drop out, and then try to go into the workforce with no degree at all.
It'd be really great if we were all Philosopher-Kings that understood everything, but one-size-fits-all education is the sort of utopian idea that has difficulty translating to real life.
Totally agree with you. However: have you ever used an auto-darkening helmet? (If not, *get one*, it's the single biggest improvement to welding technology in 30 years.) Auto-darkening helmets are made to be fast enough to stop seriously bright flashes before your retinas get bleached. I'm not suggesting wearing a welding helmet when you go out to start a riot. However, at some point in the not too distant future, (geeky) people will be wearing glasses that act like heads-up displays, and adding auto-darkening, or even better, localized auto-darkening will be an obvious application, primarily so people driving at night don't have the same general thing happen to them but it's easily extensible to reducing flash blindness and laser-pointer-airplane problems. My 10 year old welding helmet goes from shade 3 to shade 14 in less than 20 microseconds. If I spend all day running the TIG my eyes start to sting because of those brief 1/50,000 second flashes, but I never lose accommodation. (A weird side-note: the UV attracts bugs when I'm welding after dark. I'll finish a weld and look and there will be a circle of dead bugs, about 10-20 cm away from the item I'm welding, because they flew closer and closer until the UV and heat killed them. I also have a lot of shirts that are faded and falling apart right across chest-height where all the UV is, but are fine below that where they're shielded by the table.)
I've always found a teenage giggle for the thought that -- at least where I live -- the two most commonly seen manufacturers of "self-erecting concrete pumps" are named Schwing and Putzmeister.
I have a friend who wants to try to explore the US using nothing but a compass and a sextant,
What kind of a tent?
It's a 'tant' which is real close to a 'taint' (you know: tain't the one, tain't the other). If it doesn't make you tense, we can call it the same, for all intents.
Hey! look up! there are a bunch of neutrons shooting over your head making a strange noise!
We already have Word Lens, and wearable eyeglass-style displays. I have a friend who wants to try to explore the US using nothing but a compass and a sextant, but with the ubiquity of direction signs you don't actually need navigation equipment. He's hoping he can get Word Lens running on a wearable display so he can scramble all the street signs and have a whole new country to explore.
Just build a cyclotron. They're quite easy to make, being basically a huge magnet and a curved track in a vacuum. There is a minor technical challenge that they're designed to accelerate protons or electrons, but I'm sure it's easy to adapt it to handle neutrons instead.
Road damage goes as the 4th power of the axle weight so a Honda Insight does essentially no damage. An Escalade does do damage. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road#Maintenance
I'd rather not see a miles traveled tax. It would be better to have a new vehicle fee proportional to the expected life of the vehicle and the 4th power of the axle weight. That cost gets passed along proportionally in the further sale of the vehicle.
As a bicyclist, I'd love to see this and I'd gladly pay road taxes on my (7 kilogram) bicycle. Unfortunately, taxes on semi trucks would exceed the value of the cargo they carry, and the downstream effects of that would be disastrous. Sure, that'd be great for trains -- which should be carrying more cargo -- and right now our taxes are subsidizing commercial transportation by providing them with roads, but that might be a worthwhile subsidy considering how much value we get back by having cheap transportation, even if that cheap transportation is trashing our roads.