Pipelines are transporting more than most people can imagine, and they're great.
No kidding, and they're not particularly new, either. In 18 months of 1942 and 1943, when the US was busy with some other projects, it found the time to put in the Big Inch Pipeline from Texas to Pennsylvania, a continuous two-foot-diameter pipeline that transported 300,000 barrels of oil a day. However, the downside of this was that at the time, the pumps for the pipeline consumed more electricity than anything else in the US, a problem I can't help but think would be an issue with this proposed pipeline. Fluids are a lot easier to transport than solids.
if assange does anything that irritates russian intelligence (kgb fsb or whatever) the very next day he'll be an unfortunate victim of a very peculiar, uncommon and comically spectacular accident. russians aren't the half-assed weak-sauce fascists that the americans are.
On the one hand, the Russians shoot people with radioactive pellets.
On the other, it appears that Americans manage to get people charged with rape.
In the long term, which is a better tactic for discrediting someone and bringing everything that person was associated with, into question and disrepute?
It wasn't phosphorus free, in fact they hadn't confirmed how much of the phosphorus had been substituted with arsenic, but they did mentioned it was not 100%. They also mentioned it was more than just DNA (ATP was also mentioned, although they implied more).
In one way, if you replace the P in DNA with As, you get ATP -- well, we should be calling it ATAs, shouldn't we? -- for free, since the adenosine in ATP is derived from the adenine in DNA: adenosine is adenine attached to a ribose, while the base in DNA is adenine attached to a ribose missing one oxygen, hence the "deoxyribo" part of deoxyribonucleic acid.
But with that said, the chemistry of a triarsenate should be significantly different than the chemistry of a triphosphate, so that's more surprising to me than finding out that something can survive point substitutions of arsenic for phosphorous in a DNA strand, especially since ATP chemistry is probably the single most relied-upon reaction in all of metabolism, if we're going by weight. (In a day, humans turn over their body weight in ATP.)
>The number of cell phone induced accidents is GROSSLY inflated in another act of security theater.
I freely admit this is anecdotal evidence, but in the last four years I've had four people run into the back end of my car when I was stopped at a stoplight. Every time I've seen it coming, and I've seen the person talking on a cellphone right up to the moment of impact.
I'm having some bumperstickers made that say "is that call worth $2500?/that's how much bumper replacements will cost you" if I can trim the second line down to something legible on a bumper sticker. Though they'll be too busy talking on their phones to read it.
>Ask just about anyone geeky and my age,, and they'll telll you so: "yes, Pluto is a Fucking Planet, now stop trying to change things".
And ask anyone my grandmother's age and they'll tell you that they're not really convinced Pluto is a planet because when they were in school in the 1920's, it wasn't a planet, it was just a chunk of rock that nobody had ever seen.
There won't ever be a post-scarcity society. It will just shift from physical items to the energy required to make those physical items. Both Smith and Stephenson deal with this: in Smith's case, the matter duplicators are an outgrowth of research into solar energy concentrators (which for reasons beyond the scope of this discussion result in practically unlimited available energy) and in Stephenson's case, people can build anything they want, but they're charged for the energy they use building it. That's actually a plot point in Diamond Age: the kids use the matter duplicator to build a bunch of toys and clothes they want, and their mom can't pay the energy bill for what they've made, so they're *still* living in a scarcity society.
I'm going to make an assertion that if we had matter replicators that could make anything, we'd soak up the entire energy output of the sun and still need more energy. (And fairly quickly we'd run into a scarcity-of-raw-materials problem because there's only so much gold, and there are only so many available *atoms*.) Humans, like all other animals, have a track record of using up 100% of the available resources, no matter how much of the resources are available. If we have matter duplicators I expect the same thing will happen.
I'm not arguing with any of your points, by the way: I entirely agree (although I'd add that people believe in the necessity of scarcity because it's their business plan, and as such they're very willing to restrict freedoms of other people and quash innovation, if it threatens their income.) I'm just saying I think your points don't address the central observable tendency of humans to use 100% of anything they like/want/need and then ask for more yet.
Yes those panics were silly, but a Star Trek style replicator would create a gigantic social upheaval, physical tokens of value such as gold and cash would be essentially worthless. The only things left to trade would be time and talent. Now that I think about it, the "gigantic social upheaval" might be a GoodThing(TM)...
If you feel like reading some cool old science fiction, the George O. Smith collection "Venus Equilateral" has a series of stories about exactly this: the hero manages to make (by mistake, as it happens, because they're busy trying to solve a related problem) a matter duplicator that can flawlessly reproduce masterpieces of art, food, whatever, and society pretty much collapses as everyone has to figure out how to become service industry personnel just so they have something to do. There's a resolution of sorts when the engineers who built the machine come up with a way to make things somewhat like batteries, that are in an energetically non-equilibrium state that the matter duplicator, being purely matter-centric, can't duplicate, and using that as money to get a trade system going again, but there's still a huge change in how society is run.
Neal Stephenson also dealt with this somewhat in "Diamond Age" but swept a lot of it under the carpet by essentially saying that you got charged money for building stuff with your matter compiler and somehow there was a verifiable difference between original items and duplicated ones, so maybe he was positing matter compilers that print flawed, detectable copies much like current laser printers add yellow dots to their printouts making them traceable. Since it seems to be working pretty well for laser printers, it's likely something similar would happen with fabricators if/when we get to the point they can print usable mechanical stuff.
If it makes you feel better, you can keep playing this game. Or, alternatively, you could just man-up and accept that there will be some risks if you don't live in a shell and let yourself be terrorized.
I think most (not all, just most) people accept that. I think even most government officials accept that. What nobody accepts is the blame they would get if something goes wrong and they didn't do as much as they possibly could to appear to have tried to prevent that. That's what's driving all this: people in positions of responsibility have an extremely high incentive to propose anything they can think of to reduce their exposure to risk, even if what they're proposing is unethical, immoral, and unconstitutional, because it's what stands between their current lives and being on the front page when the next nogoodnik blows something up. They, individually, see an extremely small cost to reducing our civil liberties compared to the benefit they get from doing so, and as such it is an entirely rational behavior for them to try to pass laws and regulations against everything. So how do we, as a culture, try to fix this?
Why would the effect only be limited to pharmaceuticals?
I'm a little surprised, because the two situations are completely different. In one you're taking a fake pill and somehow that alters the physical functioning of your immune system, helping you to recover. In the other, you're making an action that you expect to have an effect, and being satisfied when the effect you expected happens, without noticing that it wasn't causally related to your action. It seems to me like the two processes are so different they shouldn't be called the same thing, because there really is no similarity at all save that in both there's a person expecting something to happen that does, in fact, happen. We see that all the time under other circumstances that we don't call the placebo effect: winning the lottery, turning a switch and having the room light come on, and multitudes of other causal, pseudo-causal, and entirely random processes.
For the record, and not that this is going to help the problem, small to mid-size owls are peaceful and surprisingly easy to get along with, far less willing and able to attack handlers than hawks, eagles, or particularly vultures. I've done work with raptor rehab and have dated two falconers and most everyone prefers working with owls.
When my mom was a child one of her uncles had an owl that had self-domesticated. It lived in their house, and they left a window open for it to fly in/out. They couldn't get close enough to touch it, but it would take food that they held up, and would let them clean the room (which was amazingly messy: have you ever seen an owl or hawk eat? they're the messiest eaters I've ever seen: I've watched an eagle terrorize a prairie dog village and feed five or six crows just from the bits that the eagle dropped while tearing the prarie dogs apart.) Her uncle compared the owl to keeping a parakeet, only it was quieter. (By which he meant: cockatiels and cockatoos will let you handle them, and even enjoy it, while parakeets can be trained to hop on your finger but rarely seem to like/want to be touched.)
I'm not saying it's a good idea, *especially* in anywhere where there are natural reserves of small animals that have plague (in the western US, plague is endemic in prairie dogs) because if you get to the point where the owl's going out and coming back, which it will if you train it, you have a great chance of having the whole family wiped out. But owls are better animals to have around the house than some other animals that are at least moderately popular pets.
Presumably, to give some official sanction to the shenanigans. If some guy walked up to you and asked you for a donation to the contact-the-aliens fund, you'd think he was going to use the money to go get drunk. In contrast, if some guy walked up to you and provided you with official City Of Denver contact-the-aliens literature and explained how the voters had passed a resolution to... well, do whatever it is they were going to do, you'd at least know that your money wasn't going to be used to get that guy drunk right that very moment, that there would at least be some official oversight and transparency to the whole lobbyist-martian-hookers-and-glowing-green-blow show.
In much the same way, the local utility company runs a fund to subsidize low-income families' heating bills, run entirely by voluntary donations that people add to their standard utility bill. A similar fund run privately would have nearly zero traction for a number of reasons.
A decent number of people are born with herpes, and most vaccinations have some risk, that at least a few people will be harmed by them. That's the reason the anti-vaccination crowd exists. They mistakenly think it's mercury, causing autism, but there *is* a risk, generally between 1/10,000 and 1/1,000,000, of serious, permanent side-effects from vaccination gone awry. To be fair, that's roughly 1/100 to 1/1000 the risk of serious, permanent side-effects from the diseases in question.
That's not so much the case with, say, herpes 1/2: the main risk is that the initial infection becomes systemic, which is really nasty. Imagine herpes sores on the inside of your heart, for instance. So people have to balance risk-of-damage-from-disease against risk-of-damage-from-vaccination, and they generally error on the side of risk-from-disease for liability reasons. (You can't get sued for not vaccinating someone's kid, but you can get sued for vaccinating the kid and it going awry.)
I think the shingles thing is just that until about 10 years ago there wasn't anything anyone could do, so they just shrugged. Complications can be nasty but generally they're seen in older or immunocompromised people, so a young healthy woman is very unlikely to have any issues besides the immediate incredible discomfort.
The main problem with immunizing against herpies 1/2 is that many/most people already have it. A lot of people are born with it. Vaccination does a good job of stopping an initial infection.
Okay, see, here's the thing. Your body produces cells called B cells, and they make antibodies against *everything*. Seriously. You don't build antibodies against a specific thing. Your body has millions of B cells, each one producing its own antibody type. When you encounter a new molecule, another cell, often a T cell, engulfs the molecule and then exposes it on the surface of the cell, and when an antibody fits to the molecule that's being presented, that signals the B cell to start reproducing and producing scads of offspring, that all produce that particular type of antibody. Then your body has a huge stock of them and they work great.
The result is that the first time you're exposed to something, it takes about a week and change for the B cells to build up their population, during which time you're getting beat up by the virus/bacterium/whatever. Then you form an immune response and from then on you react extremely quickly: the antibodies bind the invader as soon as it gets into you and those prevent it getting into cells, signal the immune system to go after the stuff that has antibodies hanging off it, and even just makes stuff clump together in an antibody/antigen clot, mechanically immobilizing it.
Vaccination pretty much fakes that initial contact so you don't have to wait that initial week or so to build up your immune response: you get the benefits of a quick response without having to pay for it.
But, to get back to your question, specifically: if you already have herpes integrated into your DNA, it's too late for a vaccination. You'll produce a quick immune response against it, but it keeps coming back. (That's why people don't die from herpes very often, although sometimes they go blind because there are parts of your eyes that don't have much of an immune system presence -- but that's why corneal replacement is so easy, so it's a good/bad situation.)
Along with that, eventually your body forgets previous exposures, so you need a second exposure, hence the periodic nature of tetanus vaccinations. That's the deal with Zoster: you have an initial outbreak when you're a kid, and retain immunity for 20-30 years, and then it comes back as shingles. (Which is *nasty*, by the way: complications include blindness and partial paralysis, and complications are by no means uncommon. So vaccinations are a really amazingly good idea.) Zoster vaccinations in middle age give you another 20-30 years of immunity.
The dimples help by adding energy to the boundary layer when the airflow is transitioning from laminar to turbulent. The point is to keep the airflow from becoming detached. If you know what those terms mean, then go beat up your car in very specific areas to make it ugly as hell, and it will perform ever so slightly better under very constrained test conditions. Otherwise, it will just make the car ugly. For the most part though, cars don't travel fast enough to make boundary layer aerodynamics a significant factor until the separation at the rear.
Well, that's the case on golf balls, too, right? Generally what you're doing is reducing the volume of the separated airflow, which only occurs at the back, but on a golf ball you don't know which side is going to be the back, as it's spinning, so you put them everywhere. But on a car, you can tell where separation occurs (by taping bits of yarn to the side of the car and driving beside it with a video camera as your test driver accelerates to highway speeds, if nothing else.) So you put your dots from just before the separation point on back as far as they do any good.
If we had stainless steel cars we could do the same thing, in a much less ugly manner, by drilling very small holes all across the surface at and past where separation occurs, and pulling a vacuum on the area to pull air in and keep the boundary layer close. A few airplanes tried doing this. Problems with holes getting blocked sucking up bugs, and they have turbines to provide copious amounts of vacuum. (I suppose we could just have an exhaust at the top of the windscreen, at a very low-pressure point, and draw air through the rear roof pillars.)
This would be pretty much useless in city driving, though, where most all the fuel usage goes into accelerating the car from stoplights. But it could be useful for vehicles that spend most of their time on interstates.
Will this help in the effectiveness of antivirals for things like herpes, hepatitis and aids?
Possibly. The main reason herpes and HIV are so nasty is because the virus behaves in a fundamentally different manner than it does in colds, influenza, and even hepatitis. Most viruses get into a cell and replicate madly until the cell bursts, and then the millions of viral particles produced go out and infect adjacent cells, and so forth. That's called the lytic cycle. A few viruses -- herpes, HIV, a handful of others -- have a different cycle called a lysogenic cycle, in which they get inside a cell and rather than taking it over they just splice their DNA (or in the case of HIV, they change their RNA into DNA) into the cell's DNA. You can think of this as a backdoor in software. Then they just sit there. A while later, when the cell is repairing itself from damage, or preparing to replicate, it starts reading off its DNA, reads off the virus, and wham, the virus takes off from inside the cell, replicates wildly, sends out millions of viral particles... and some of those, again, go integrate into other cells' DNA. It's a two-pronged attack: simulaneously infiltrating and subverting cells, while doing a standard full frontal attack.
So what TFA's findings are about, is helping the body to target viral proteins within a cell. As far as I can tell it's only proteins, not DNA, because that'd involve getting into the cell nucleus, which is a *far* harder task than targeting stuff that's within the cell membrane.
At that point it gets complicated. Nothing in the immune system has the ability to proofread DNA and find viral sections, and even if it did, nothing anyone knows about can come even close to selectively cutting out viral DNA. (That's an extremely hard problem since there's lots of what used to be viral dna in our genetic material that we *need*, these days, because evolution has repurposed it. We wouldn't *want* something to go chopping out viral DNA unless we were very sure that it was only getting the bad stuff, and that's currently way beyond anything we can come up with.)
However, this could target a viral outbreak when herpes or HIV starts to re-emerge, although it's not clear to me how the immune system would know this is happening until the first cell lyses, at which point you already have a gazillion viral particles dumped into the bloodstream.
But with THAT said, up until now we didn't know we even had the option of getting the cell-mediated immune system to attack stuff within cells.
They're not promising a cure for the common cold and they are only speaking of the possibility of some future antiviral drugs.
Medical researchers should be required to keep their yap shut until they produce something that works in humans. For decades I've read thousands (probably tens of thousands) of science articles that promised medical cures. Yet in that time only a handful were produced. Medical science today is little more than a money machine for researchers. I doubt that the investment is worthwhile.
Where's a cure for cancer, for diabetes, for heart disease? Nowhere to be found in the USA.
Since anyone doing research gets grants and career advancements through publishing papers, and since science is advanced purely by people reading other people's results, replicating them, and then going further with those results, what you're advocating is getting rid of science.
Perhaps instead you should stop reading things that make you mad, and let science get on with gradually solving the world's problems.
For what it's worth, this is already the case with most all anti-cancer treatments: they *do* kill every cell in your body, but since cancer cells are replicating much faster, they kill cancer faster than they kill the rest of you. (Except for the cells in your body that are rapidly replicating because they're supposed to, which is why chemo patients lose their hair and their digestive systems fall apart.) Sure, having perforins run around everywhere in your body is a bad idea, but all you need is for it to kill cells in proportion to how rapidly they're reproducing and you've a good chance of recovering from cancer.
The fundamental problem is that cancer cells are our cells. We've found pretty much no unique chemical targets in cancer cells, so we can't uniquely target them. So, the best we can do is target the thing that makes cancer cells kill us -- their rapid reproduction rate -- because that is a unique target. (There *are* some metabolic and receptor differences in cancer cells compared to non-cancerous cells, but so far nobody has had a lot of success hitting those.)
In case anyone is interested, n-hexane is a straight-chain hydrocarbon, six (predictably) carbons long. It's similar to gasoline, which is a mixture of straight-chain and branched-chain hydrocarbons, that average about eight carbons (hence 'octane number': the reference for gasoline volatility is a specific eight-carbon molecule.) Hexane is often used as a solvent and cleaning agent, replacing the much better but much more toxic benzene, also a six-carbon molecule, and a number of other solvents that do a great job solvating but also do a great job poisoning people in both short and long term exposures.
It's pretty common in production facilities, particularly manufacturing lines, to start out with good chemical control: a fireproof safe from which people have to check out material, and over time, as the manufacturing process evolves, people keep finding they need to wash stuff up at one step and pretty soon a jug of solvent just gets left there and people start splashing it around. Gloves get in the way, or get caught in machinery, so people stop using those, too. Then, in the US, OSHA makes more and more drastic rules about allowing solvents of any sort, to try to prevent this happening, and manufacturers have to find another solvent, which then gets used in the same way with the same results.
Point being, it's not particularly OSHA that's the problem: they're trying to stop people poisoning themselves. The issue is manufacturing processes with unanticipated problems, and production workers who find ways to overcome the problems without realizing that they're endangering themselves. In China there's less concern over workers endangering themselves than in the US, although the difference is primarily in degree, but the same general problem is seen in most manufacturing environments.
Wait, so the non-metric system is now defined in terms of the metric system?
Wow, seriously, why are we holding out at all.
Well, seeing as the English system of weights and measures has been defined by the metric system, legally and factually, since 1893 -- more than a hundred years ago -- and in practice, for maybe thirty years before that, I'm going to guess the answer to your question is inertia and cultural resistance to change.
Wikipedia, as linked in the summary: "Its secure government communications work has involved the NSA in numerous technology areas, including the design of specialized communications hardware and software, production of dedicated semiconductors (at the Ft. Meade chip fabrication plant), and advanced cryptography research. The agency contracts with the private sector in the fields of research and equipment."
I dunno about the NSA, but I do know that *my* semiconductor fabrication company has a dedicated military fab line in California, and if the DoD orders a simple voltage regulator and is willing to pay for the extra cost, the fab goes through the layout, makes sure it's good, and runs it and packages it in a secure facility. I've not *seen* this, but coworkers have been in the fab and said that where most engineers in our company have Dilbert cartoons up, everyone in that facility has posters of military aircraft -- that it's like a military facility inside our company. Apparently they have full production capability: silicon design, fabrication, packaging, applications engineering, test engineering, and production engineering.
I know my company's aversion to spending money. They wouldn't *do* this unless it was economically profitable, which means we're actively pitching our secure fabrication capability to buyers, so anyone who is buying compromised hardware is doing so knowing the risk.
On the one hand, I'd *love* to see more responsibility for corporate behavior laid on the individuals who directed that behavior.
On the OTHER hand, I'm in the process of starting up a company that will be offering electronics kits to do interesting and somewhat exciting things, and if we didn't have the option of a limited liability company, and there was a high likelihood that we, personally, could be held responsible for how people misuse the products, we wouldn't even be talking about trying this startup, much less pursuing it. With the sue-crazy state of the USA, *some* insulation between companies and their employees is necessary if we wish to continue having companies that make anything other than, I dunno, spherical pillows.
There's a continuum here, and I think we're way on the corporations-can-do-anything side of the continuum, and I'd like to see that changed... but not too far to the *other* side.
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Pipelines are transporting more than most people can imagine, and they're great.
No kidding, and they're not particularly new, either. In 18 months of 1942 and 1943, when the US was busy with some other projects, it found the time to put in the Big Inch Pipeline from Texas to Pennsylvania, a continuous two-foot-diameter pipeline that transported 300,000 barrels of oil a day. However, the downside of this was that at the time, the pumps for the pipeline consumed more electricity than anything else in the US, a problem I can't help but think would be an issue with this proposed pipeline. Fluids are a lot easier to transport than solids.
Really?
The article says they had their house on a real estate site, so presumably they were moving. I bet I know where.
if assange does anything that irritates russian intelligence (kgb fsb or whatever) the very next day he'll be an unfortunate victim of a very peculiar, uncommon and comically spectacular accident. russians aren't the half-assed weak-sauce fascists that the americans are.
On the one hand, the Russians shoot people with radioactive pellets. On the other, it appears that Americans manage to get people charged with rape. In the long term, which is a better tactic for discrediting someone and bringing everything that person was associated with, into question and disrepute?
It wasn't phosphorus free, in fact they hadn't confirmed how much of the phosphorus had been substituted with arsenic, but they did mentioned it was not 100%. They also mentioned it was more than just DNA (ATP was also mentioned, although they implied more).
In one way, if you replace the P in DNA with As, you get ATP -- well, we should be calling it ATAs, shouldn't we? -- for free, since the adenosine in ATP is derived from the adenine in DNA: adenosine is adenine attached to a ribose, while the base in DNA is adenine attached to a ribose missing one oxygen, hence the "deoxyribo" part of deoxyribonucleic acid.
But with that said, the chemistry of a triarsenate should be significantly different than the chemistry of a triphosphate, so that's more surprising to me than finding out that something can survive point substitutions of arsenic for phosphorous in a DNA strand, especially since ATP chemistry is probably the single most relied-upon reaction in all of metabolism, if we're going by weight. (In a day, humans turn over their body weight in ATP.)
I freely admit this is anecdotal evidence, but in the last four years I've had four people run into the back end of my car when I was stopped at a stoplight. Every time I've seen it coming, and I've seen the person talking on a cellphone right up to the moment of impact.
I'm having some bumperstickers made that say "is that call worth $2500?/that's how much bumper replacements will cost you" if I can trim the second line down to something legible on a bumper sticker. Though they'll be too busy talking on their phones to read it.
And ask anyone my grandmother's age and they'll tell you that they're not really convinced Pluto is a planet because when they were in school in the 1920's, it wasn't a planet, it was just a chunk of rock that nobody had ever seen.
I'm going to make an assertion that if we had matter replicators that could make anything, we'd soak up the entire energy output of the sun and still need more energy. (And fairly quickly we'd run into a scarcity-of-raw-materials problem because there's only so much gold, and there are only so many available *atoms*.) Humans, like all other animals, have a track record of using up 100% of the available resources, no matter how much of the resources are available. If we have matter duplicators I expect the same thing will happen.
I'm not arguing with any of your points, by the way: I entirely agree (although I'd add that people believe in the necessity of scarcity because it's their business plan, and as such they're very willing to restrict freedoms of other people and quash innovation, if it threatens their income.) I'm just saying I think your points don't address the central observable tendency of humans to use 100% of anything they like/want/need and then ask for more yet.
Yes those panics were silly, but a Star Trek style replicator would create a gigantic social upheaval, physical tokens of value such as gold and cash would be essentially worthless. The only things left to trade would be time and talent. Now that I think about it, the "gigantic social upheaval" might be a GoodThing(TM)...
If you feel like reading some cool old science fiction, the George O. Smith collection "Venus Equilateral" has a series of stories about exactly this: the hero manages to make (by mistake, as it happens, because they're busy trying to solve a related problem) a matter duplicator that can flawlessly reproduce masterpieces of art, food, whatever, and society pretty much collapses as everyone has to figure out how to become service industry personnel just so they have something to do. There's a resolution of sorts when the engineers who built the machine come up with a way to make things somewhat like batteries, that are in an energetically non-equilibrium state that the matter duplicator, being purely matter-centric, can't duplicate, and using that as money to get a trade system going again, but there's still a huge change in how society is run.
Neal Stephenson also dealt with this somewhat in "Diamond Age" but swept a lot of it under the carpet by essentially saying that you got charged money for building stuff with your matter compiler and somehow there was a verifiable difference between original items and duplicated ones, so maybe he was positing matter compilers that print flawed, detectable copies much like current laser printers add yellow dots to their printouts making them traceable. Since it seems to be working pretty well for laser printers, it's likely something similar would happen with fabricators if/when we get to the point they can print usable mechanical stuff.
If it makes you feel better, you can keep playing this game. Or, alternatively, you could just man-up and accept that there will be some risks if you don't live in a shell and let yourself be terrorized.
I think most (not all, just most) people accept that. I think even most government officials accept that. What nobody accepts is the blame they would get if something goes wrong and they didn't do as much as they possibly could to appear to have tried to prevent that. That's what's driving all this: people in positions of responsibility have an extremely high incentive to propose anything they can think of to reduce their exposure to risk, even if what they're proposing is unethical, immoral, and unconstitutional, because it's what stands between their current lives and being on the front page when the next nogoodnik blows something up. They, individually, see an extremely small cost to reducing our civil liberties compared to the benefit they get from doing so, and as such it is an entirely rational behavior for them to try to pass laws and regulations against everything. So how do we, as a culture, try to fix this?
Why would the effect only be limited to pharmaceuticals?
I'm a little surprised, because the two situations are completely different. In one you're taking a fake pill and somehow that alters the physical functioning of your immune system, helping you to recover. In the other, you're making an action that you expect to have an effect, and being satisfied when the effect you expected happens, without noticing that it wasn't causally related to your action. It seems to me like the two processes are so different they shouldn't be called the same thing, because there really is no similarity at all save that in both there's a person expecting something to happen that does, in fact, happen. We see that all the time under other circumstances that we don't call the placebo effect: winning the lottery, turning a switch and having the room light come on, and multitudes of other causal, pseudo-causal, and entirely random processes.
"This homeless guy asked me for money the other day.
I was about to give it to him and then I thought he was going to use it on drugs or alcohol.
And then I thought, that's what I'm going to use it on.
Why am I judging this poor bastard."
When my mom was a child one of her uncles had an owl that had self-domesticated. It lived in their house, and they left a window open for it to fly in/out. They couldn't get close enough to touch it, but it would take food that they held up, and would let them clean the room (which was amazingly messy: have you ever seen an owl or hawk eat? they're the messiest eaters I've ever seen: I've watched an eagle terrorize a prairie dog village and feed five or six crows just from the bits that the eagle dropped while tearing the prarie dogs apart.) Her uncle compared the owl to keeping a parakeet, only it was quieter. (By which he meant: cockatiels and cockatoos will let you handle them, and even enjoy it, while parakeets can be trained to hop on your finger but rarely seem to like/want to be touched.)
I'm not saying it's a good idea, *especially* in anywhere where there are natural reserves of small animals that have plague (in the western US, plague is endemic in prairie dogs) because if you get to the point where the owl's going out and coming back, which it will if you train it, you have a great chance of having the whole family wiped out. But owls are better animals to have around the house than some other animals that are at least moderately popular pets.
In much the same way, the local utility company runs a fund to subsidize low-income families' heating bills, run entirely by voluntary donations that people add to their standard utility bill. A similar fund run privately would have nearly zero traction for a number of reasons.
In any case, it was to be funded by donations rather than taxes.
That's not so much the case with, say, herpes 1/2: the main risk is that the initial infection becomes systemic, which is really nasty. Imagine herpes sores on the inside of your heart, for instance. So people have to balance risk-of-damage-from-disease against risk-of-damage-from-vaccination, and they generally error on the side of risk-from-disease for liability reasons. (You can't get sued for not vaccinating someone's kid, but you can get sued for vaccinating the kid and it going awry.)
I think the shingles thing is just that until about 10 years ago there wasn't anything anyone could do, so they just shrugged. Complications can be nasty but generally they're seen in older or immunocompromised people, so a young healthy woman is very unlikely to have any issues besides the immediate incredible discomfort.
Okay, see, here's the thing. Your body produces cells called B cells, and they make antibodies against *everything*. Seriously. You don't build antibodies against a specific thing. Your body has millions of B cells, each one producing its own antibody type. When you encounter a new molecule, another cell, often a T cell, engulfs the molecule and then exposes it on the surface of the cell, and when an antibody fits to the molecule that's being presented, that signals the B cell to start reproducing and producing scads of offspring, that all produce that particular type of antibody. Then your body has a huge stock of them and they work great.
The result is that the first time you're exposed to something, it takes about a week and change for the B cells to build up their population, during which time you're getting beat up by the virus/bacterium/whatever. Then you form an immune response and from then on you react extremely quickly: the antibodies bind the invader as soon as it gets into you and those prevent it getting into cells, signal the immune system to go after the stuff that has antibodies hanging off it, and even just makes stuff clump together in an antibody/antigen clot, mechanically immobilizing it.
Vaccination pretty much fakes that initial contact so you don't have to wait that initial week or so to build up your immune response: you get the benefits of a quick response without having to pay for it.
But, to get back to your question, specifically: if you already have herpes integrated into your DNA, it's too late for a vaccination. You'll produce a quick immune response against it, but it keeps coming back. (That's why people don't die from herpes very often, although sometimes they go blind because there are parts of your eyes that don't have much of an immune system presence -- but that's why corneal replacement is so easy, so it's a good/bad situation.)
Along with that, eventually your body forgets previous exposures, so you need a second exposure, hence the periodic nature of tetanus vaccinations. That's the deal with Zoster: you have an initial outbreak when you're a kid, and retain immunity for 20-30 years, and then it comes back as shingles. (Which is *nasty*, by the way: complications include blindness and partial paralysis, and complications are by no means uncommon. So vaccinations are a really amazingly good idea.) Zoster vaccinations in middle age give you another 20-30 years of immunity.
The dimples help by adding energy to the boundary layer when the airflow is transitioning from laminar to turbulent. The point is to keep the airflow from becoming detached. If you know what those terms mean, then go beat up your car in very specific areas to make it ugly as hell, and it will perform ever so slightly better under very constrained test conditions. Otherwise, it will just make the car ugly. For the most part though, cars don't travel fast enough to make boundary layer aerodynamics a significant factor until the separation at the rear.
Well, that's the case on golf balls, too, right? Generally what you're doing is reducing the volume of the separated airflow, which only occurs at the back, but on a golf ball you don't know which side is going to be the back, as it's spinning, so you put them everywhere. But on a car, you can tell where separation occurs (by taping bits of yarn to the side of the car and driving beside it with a video camera as your test driver accelerates to highway speeds, if nothing else.) So you put your dots from just before the separation point on back as far as they do any good.
If we had stainless steel cars we could do the same thing, in a much less ugly manner, by drilling very small holes all across the surface at and past where separation occurs, and pulling a vacuum on the area to pull air in and keep the boundary layer close. A few airplanes tried doing this. Problems with holes getting blocked sucking up bugs, and they have turbines to provide copious amounts of vacuum. (I suppose we could just have an exhaust at the top of the windscreen, at a very low-pressure point, and draw air through the rear roof pillars.)
This would be pretty much useless in city driving, though, where most all the fuel usage goes into accelerating the car from stoplights. But it could be useful for vehicles that spend most of their time on interstates.
Will this help in the effectiveness of antivirals for things like herpes, hepatitis and aids?
Possibly. The main reason herpes and HIV are so nasty is because the virus behaves in a fundamentally different manner than it does in colds, influenza, and even hepatitis. Most viruses get into a cell and replicate madly until the cell bursts, and then the millions of viral particles produced go out and infect adjacent cells, and so forth. That's called the lytic cycle. A few viruses -- herpes, HIV, a handful of others -- have a different cycle called a lysogenic cycle, in which they get inside a cell and rather than taking it over they just splice their DNA (or in the case of HIV, they change their RNA into DNA) into the cell's DNA. You can think of this as a backdoor in software. Then they just sit there. A while later, when the cell is repairing itself from damage, or preparing to replicate, it starts reading off its DNA, reads off the virus, and wham, the virus takes off from inside the cell, replicates wildly, sends out millions of viral particles... and some of those, again, go integrate into other cells' DNA. It's a two-pronged attack: simulaneously infiltrating and subverting cells, while doing a standard full frontal attack.
So what TFA's findings are about, is helping the body to target viral proteins within a cell. As far as I can tell it's only proteins, not DNA, because that'd involve getting into the cell nucleus, which is a *far* harder task than targeting stuff that's within the cell membrane.
At that point it gets complicated. Nothing in the immune system has the ability to proofread DNA and find viral sections, and even if it did, nothing anyone knows about can come even close to selectively cutting out viral DNA. (That's an extremely hard problem since there's lots of what used to be viral dna in our genetic material that we *need*, these days, because evolution has repurposed it. We wouldn't *want* something to go chopping out viral DNA unless we were very sure that it was only getting the bad stuff, and that's currently way beyond anything we can come up with.)
However, this could target a viral outbreak when herpes or HIV starts to re-emerge, although it's not clear to me how the immune system would know this is happening until the first cell lyses, at which point you already have a gazillion viral particles dumped into the bloodstream.
But with THAT said, up until now we didn't know we even had the option of getting the cell-mediated immune system to attack stuff within cells.
They're not promising a cure for the common cold and they are only speaking of the possibility of some future antiviral drugs.
Medical researchers should be required to keep their yap shut until they produce something that works in humans. For decades I've read thousands (probably tens of thousands) of science articles that promised medical cures. Yet in that time only a handful were produced. Medical science today is little more than a money machine for researchers. I doubt that the investment is worthwhile.
Where's a cure for cancer, for diabetes, for heart disease? Nowhere to be found in the USA.
Since anyone doing research gets grants and career advancements through publishing papers, and since science is advanced purely by people reading other people's results, replicating them, and then going further with those results, what you're advocating is getting rid of science.
Perhaps instead you should stop reading things that make you mad, and let science get on with gradually solving the world's problems.
The fundamental problem is that cancer cells are our cells. We've found pretty much no unique chemical targets in cancer cells, so we can't uniquely target them. So, the best we can do is target the thing that makes cancer cells kill us -- their rapid reproduction rate -- because that is a unique target. (There *are* some metabolic and receptor differences in cancer cells compared to non-cancerous cells, but so far nobody has had a lot of success hitting those.)
It's pretty common in production facilities, particularly manufacturing lines, to start out with good chemical control: a fireproof safe from which people have to check out material, and over time, as the manufacturing process evolves, people keep finding they need to wash stuff up at one step and pretty soon a jug of solvent just gets left there and people start splashing it around. Gloves get in the way, or get caught in machinery, so people stop using those, too. Then, in the US, OSHA makes more and more drastic rules about allowing solvents of any sort, to try to prevent this happening, and manufacturers have to find another solvent, which then gets used in the same way with the same results.
Point being, it's not particularly OSHA that's the problem: they're trying to stop people poisoning themselves. The issue is manufacturing processes with unanticipated problems, and production workers who find ways to overcome the problems without realizing that they're endangering themselves. In China there's less concern over workers endangering themselves than in the US, although the difference is primarily in degree, but the same general problem is seen in most manufacturing environments.
Wait, so the non-metric system is now defined in terms of the metric system?
Wow, seriously, why are we holding out at all.
Well, seeing as the English system of weights and measures has been defined by the metric system, legally and factually, since 1893 -- more than a hundred years ago -- and in practice, for maybe thirty years before that, I'm going to guess the answer to your question is inertia and cultural resistance to change.
Wikipedia, as linked in the summary: "Its secure government communications work has involved the NSA in numerous technology areas, including the design of specialized communications hardware and software, production of dedicated semiconductors (at the Ft. Meade chip fabrication plant), and advanced cryptography research. The agency contracts with the private sector in the fields of research and equipment."
Spectrum IEEE: "The DOD also maintained its own chip-making plant at Fort Meade, near Washington, D.C., until the early 1980s, when costs became prohibitive."
I'm betting this statement is now bullshit.
I dunno about the NSA, but I do know that *my* semiconductor fabrication company has a dedicated military fab line in California, and if the DoD orders a simple voltage regulator and is willing to pay for the extra cost, the fab goes through the layout, makes sure it's good, and runs it and packages it in a secure facility. I've not *seen* this, but coworkers have been in the fab and said that where most engineers in our company have Dilbert cartoons up, everyone in that facility has posters of military aircraft -- that it's like a military facility inside our company. Apparently they have full production capability: silicon design, fabrication, packaging, applications engineering, test engineering, and production engineering.
I know my company's aversion to spending money. They wouldn't *do* this unless it was economically profitable, which means we're actively pitching our secure fabrication capability to buyers, so anyone who is buying compromised hardware is doing so knowing the risk.
As one of my friends likes to say, changing the name Echelon to Facebook was the most successful rebranding exercise ever.
On the OTHER hand, I'm in the process of starting up a company that will be offering electronics kits to do interesting and somewhat exciting things, and if we didn't have the option of a limited liability company, and there was a high likelihood that we, personally, could be held responsible for how people misuse the products, we wouldn't even be talking about trying this startup, much less pursuing it. With the sue-crazy state of the USA, *some* insulation between companies and their employees is necessary if we wish to continue having companies that make anything other than, I dunno, spherical pillows.
There's a continuum here, and I think we're way on the corporations-can-do-anything side of the continuum, and I'd like to see that changed... but not too far to the *other* side.
Complicated, man, complicated.