I'm not quite sure what you're asking. If what you're asking is "how can you tell the difference between originally human DNA and originally virus DNA" my first answer would be that neither one is original. However, past that, one thing that stands out is that viruses have tremendous selection pressure to economize (because the faster you replicate the faster you spread, and the speed of replication is linearly proportional to the length of the genome.) As a result, evolution removes anything that isn't unneeded, and in fact some viruses stack genes on top of one another. To explain that I have to do a bit of cell bio: every three DNA bases code for one protein, so you read DNA by threes. Since this provides for 64 combinations and there are only 20-ish proteins, there is what's called genetic degeneracy: multiple codons map to each protein. As a result, there are lots of viruses that encode one protein by threes, and taking advantage of degeneracy, code for *another* protein by shifting one over and again reading by threes. Given the sequence abc def ghi jkl, one protein is produced that reads off abc:A, def:B,..., while another protein is produced that reads off bcd:G, efg:H,..., and so forth. In some cases, viral DNA can even be read backwards to produce yet another protein.
So if you're looking at a chunk of DNA and it appears to be continuous, particularly continuous and overlapping, it's very likely recently viral, while if it has big chunks of other stuff in it, long promotion/repression sequences, lots of regulatory stuff, it's probably not recently viral. Does that answer what you're wondering?
The propositions are indistinguishable: everything that has DNA has copied it from something else. The issue is that we're increasingly finding that organisms don't just get copies of their parents' DNA -- that there's swapping, obviously during sex, but less obviously from viral infections adding stuff into the target, and less obviously yet from viral infections of one organism transferring its genetic material to another organism that the virus subsequently infects, and less obviously yet, the idea that retroviruses might be eukaryotic mechanisms for DNA transposition. So, yeah, viruses got their code from hosts, hosts got their code from viruses.
What matters here is statistically significant matches. Pretend for a second that DNA is C code. If you're reading a long stretch of code and suddenly run across a #define ; void main(void) { int virus, x;... and so forth, you know that you're looking at a chunk of code that's not supposed to be there and you know that everything between that { and the matching } is part of the stuff that's not supposed to be there -- and it might be several kilobytes of wrong DNA. In the case of genes, the #define/main stuff is a group of genes known as promoters and repressers and stuff like that, which are preambles that provide a control system for the DNA replication machinery so it can tell where to start reading and when to replicate a section, and most viruses have similar setups since they have to fool the cellular machinery into thinking it's replicating its own DNA.
The complication comes in that DNA replication is lossy, but evolution is conservative. So if random changes creep into critical stretches of DNA, called conserved sequences, bad things will happen to the cell. If changes creep into DNA that isn't currently functional, as is the case with endogenous retroviruses or other viral material that got stashed in but didn't end up producing a virus for whatever reason, those changes stick around since the DNA isn't expressed: there's no evolutionary pressure to maintain the code, so it slowly degrades.
The rate at which it degrades is reasonably constant. DNA polymerases have a measurable, consistent error rate. So your old viral code slowly accumulates errors, but it's still recognizeable: you know what you're seeing when you read #defne <virus.h>. A nice side-effect of this is that, since the replication error rate is fairly constant, you can also tell roughly how long a chunk of viral material has been in the DNA by the number of errors it has accumulated compared to a reference genome.
So as a long answer to a short question, you don't look for six-base correlation, you look for a 95% correlation over several thousand sequential bases before you announce you've found a virus-like pattern.
Re:Lots of evidence for higher frame rates
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Framerates Matter
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· Score: 1
In the case of all the drivers we make -- which, now, specifically include car lighting -- the only brightness control we provide is a dim pin that accepts 0 or 5 volts, telling the driver to turn off or keep running. As such, PWM is the only way to dim them. It's possible to drive an LED using other circuitry but a closed-loop switcher is amazingly efficient compared to most alternatives, and when you consider both cost and efficiency, they're pretty much unbeatable.
With the LED brake systems, again, that's just poor design on the part of the automotive engineers. All the parts I know of can take dim signals in the tens of khz so there is no reason to use low refresh rates -- and in that case, it's even dumber because if you're working with a fixed lighting value, you change the sense resistor on the switcher and run the LED's at a reduced current, without bothering to dim them. Only if you want to vary the brake brightness with ambient lighting would it make sense to play with dimming brake lights, and while that's a really great idea, there aren't any cars that currently offer it (to the best of my knowledge) except possibly high-end Audi's.
Re:Lots of evidence for higher frame rates
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Framerates Matter
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· Score: 5, Informative
For the record (as an ex-LED-backlight hardware designer) the LED's are waaay too bright to run full-out, both visually and from a power usage and heat generation standpoint, and the only good way to dim an LED is by cycling it on and off rapidly to approximate the desired brightness. The reason I say 'the only good way' is because LED's are constant-current devices and all the drivers I'm familiar with are all designed around that, so you can't just go varying the voltage to try and dim them: the drivers aren't really voltage devices.
With THAT said, I have absolutely zero idea why any sane LED driver dimmer would be anywhere near frequencies that any human could see. LED's can turn on and off in nanoseconds, so a reasonable dim signal should be in the kilohertz range, at least, not the 100hz range. It's *possible* to put a 100hz dim signal on an LED driver, but it seems really dumb to me.
It's not a ripoff, though. All those crapware and dell/bestbuy/aol links are companies who are paying the vendor to include their crap on the system. They're subsidizing the hardware/software purchase through advertising. Optimization just means you're paying the actual hardware/software cost (plus profit) for your optimized system. It's not really any different than the old Juno days where the "free" ISP would use a fraction of your screen space bannering advertising at you, and if you shelled out some more money, by going to a real ISP, you'd get your whole screen to yourself. In either case, you're getting something for your money, so it's not really a ripoff. You're just pissed that the base-level package is filled with crap.
You kid, but Barnaby Wainfan's unique Facetmobile aircraft originally had a pull-start motor that could only be started from the outside of the aircraft, which made life complicated. For that matter, most older aircraft, pre-1950, didn't have starters at all, and were started by hand-pulling the propeller hard enough to get the engine to fire. As you can imagine, this injured and killed a lot of people -- a lot more people killed than crank-starting cars -- and ended up with a fairly large number of aircraft flying off with no pilot. Some of them managed to fly hundreds of miles this way, in fact.
No kidding. The KR2 can do 180 mph at 50 miles per gallon. Of course, it does this by having the internal volume of a refrigerator rather than a bathroom, like most SUV's.
The ADI Stallion homebuilt is more efficient than a 747, as regards fuel spent per person carried, and if you're willing to only carry 2 people rather than 6, you can take along a motorcycle as well, at 230mph, while still using less gas than many larger SUV's.
However, for the VTOL demands, maybe they should consider an autogyro with a prerotator like the Carter Copter or several others, that can manage vertical takeoff and landing (and has the happy side-effect that it flies the same after an engine failure as before, except its climbing capability is severely limited.)
I am the child of an engineer, spent my childhood hanging out with other kids of engineers and their parents, and have spent most of my life working with engineers. The place where I work now, every person is an electrical engineer except for our admin assistant. I have never seen such a high proportion of people who pray, out loud, before eating *lunch*. Two of my coworkers are creationists. One has a PhD in electrical engineering. There is a Bible in the bathroom, just in case you want to do some reading while on the throne. I've worked in other jobs -- silversmithing, say -- where my coworkers were regular church attendees, but nobody ever said much about it. It was important to them but they didn't tell you all about how their view of the world was Right.
And on the other side, the atheists. Again, other atheists I've worked with in other areas just didn't care about religion. They didn't talk about it, they didn't think about it. At this job, five of my coworkers will go out of their way, if any of the highly religious engineers are in earshot, to say things just like what you're saying, loudly, "I don't know why ANYONE who wasn't GOOFY would believe in a BIG INVISIBLE MAN in the SKY!"
Normal people don't DO that.
The people who are drawn to engineering tend to be very bright, sure of themselves, and little inclined to spend time worrying about what other people think of their appearance or opinions, because they're sure of themselves: introverts, in other words, who take their values from themselves rather than from society at large. People who are bright, sure of themselves, and who consider what other people think of them, go into politics or become lawyers or high-level business, where telling someone that their beliefs are crazy is a career-limiting move. But people drawn to engineering have strong senses of their self-confidence and self-approval. That's why they're good at building stuff, and that's why they're good at deciding that God wants them to go blow up a building.
Dude. Nobody is missing anything. W and the other people who run businesses -- on all ends of the political spectrum -- know very well that outsourcing manufacturing is a bad idea for the country as a whole, but it's a good idea for *them* personally because it increases their profit margin. So they do it. Everyone ELSE knows very well that outsourcing manufacturing is a bad idea for the country as a whole and for them personally, but they can't do anything about it because they're not running companies, and if they did, they'd be outcompeted by the companies that outsource manufacturing.
I agree with your conclusion, that we're becoming a has-been, but I think your premises are entirely too charitable.
Slashdot needs to create a numbered list of arguments called Slashdot's List Of Same Old Arguments (SLOSOA). Then/.ers can save bandwidth (and lower Taco's bills) by disputing by numerical reference to an argument, just as Mennonites are said to argue by reference chapter and verse in the Bible rather than repeating the words.
Time to pull out my numbers joke.
New guy has been hired at the Federal Penitentiary. Old guard is taking him around showing him how to do his new job. They're in one of the blocks and they hear an inmate yell out "23!" and a bunch of other inmates laugh.
New guy says "what was THAT about?"
Guard says, "well, they've been here so long they've memorized the joke book. You just call out the page number and everyone knows the joke and the punchline."
New guy says "can I try?"
Guard says, "knock yourself out, kid."
So the new guy clears his throat, and yells out "43!"
Dead silence. Awkward silence, even. New guy whispers, "what happened? Why didn't they laugh?"
Old guard slaps him on the shoulder and says "no offense, kid, but some people just can't tell a joke."
So there's a SECOND new guard who has been watching all this. He says, "mind if I try?"
Guard shrugs.
Second guy yells "minus 3!"
The entire block erupts in laughter, people howling and crying they're laughing so hard.
First guy says "wait, why was THAT so funny?"
The guard, wiping the tears off his face, says "nobody ever heard that one before!"
Great article. As someone who grew up in Cheyenne, WY near F.E. Warren AFB (an AFB without planes or a landing strip - you can guess the mission) the details of these monsters have always fascinated me. I'd hear stories from my friends whose dads worked either as the missile capsule crews themselves or were maintenance personnel.
If Slashdot readers are flying in and out of Denver International Airport (or any area around CO, NE, WY) you can look out the window and see the launch facilities from the air. Amid the farm lands and country roads, you can look down and see an outcrop of buildings and maybe a quonset hut or two, and then a separate concrete reinforced pad maybe a hundred yards away; the whole area carefully fenced. You can tell they don't quite fit in with everything else. The number of them is startling. Yeah, in fact a little scary. But the author is correct when he states that in the (then) USSR they had the exact same thing pointing at us. Gives me the willies still.
As someone who grew up in part in northern Colorado, and ran across several missile silos while out on horseback or mountain biking, I'd like to point out that Warren AFB has helicopters, lots and lots of helicopters, and I've been told they show up in a hurry if you spend too much time poking about a missile silo because of the rash of anti-missile protests in the '80's.
Warren *does* have a landing strip, actually: the WWI flying ace Eddie Rickenbacher wrecked a plane there once in the 1920's. But AFAIK it hasn't been used in 40 years.
If the batteries are next to your balls, I don't think you are using the lawnmower in an approved manner.
Whole different meaning to "whacking off".
I had a friend who worked in the ER in a fairly redneck-filled state. I asked her about the weirdest accident she'd ever seen and she said they'd brought in her *cousin*, who had actually managed to injure his penis (and leg and hand and other bits) with a lawnmower.
There was a moment of silence, and then everyone hearing the story said "HOW??!?"
She said "I think alcohol was involved..." but that was all we ever got.
That was my reaction too: the shame culture mentality will last just long enough for all the people who have myspace profiles with pictures of them drinking become middle managers and are the people in charge of hiring new employees, and then it'll vanish from mainstream thought. It'll linger on in conservative circles for a while, but eventually we'll be past it.
Just sucks for people who get caught in it now, when it still matters to the people making hiring decisions.
At the risk of sounding perhaps trollish or inflammatory, or even over-generalizing, I have to ask why, over the course of the past couple of decades or so, perhaps longer, have the terms "China" and "cheap knockoffs" become synonymous?
Out of curiosity I headed over to this list of Chinese inventions and I am surprised to see the numerous inventions by, and subsequent contributions to, humanity by the Chinese people.
It seems to me that they are quite capable of making new products and contributing new ideas, so why do they not do so? Why are there repeated examples of this sort of blatant copying? Can anyone clue me in here?
They're business-oriented. The point of a business is to get the highest profit margin. All other things being equal, you get a higher profit margin by copying something successful, because A: you have lower R&D costs, B: lower marketing costs, and C: lower risk that your product won't be successful. So in an environment where you *can* succeed by copying, that's the smart thing to do.
There are plenty of Chinese innovations. We don't hear about them because they're moving at the same pace as every other innovator is: doing slow, costly, risky work. What we hear about are the people copying, because they're stepping on the toes of the people who are pissed off by copying.
30 years ago people were saying exactly the same thing about the Japanese... before they devoured American manufacturing through innovation and research.
If you want something a little more exciting than a knife-based paper cutter, consider a 450mW laser diode module. It'll do a great job of cutting stuff and it should be capable of light metal cutting. (Disclaimer: while I'm building one I haven't actually tried it on metal, but I know 350mW was enough to mark copper at a previous job I had, although that was in the green range rather than red.)
However, the problem is getting the printer to run when it thinks it's out of ink: some I've used refuse to do anything until they have a filled cartridge, which is why I'm building mine out of a vintage plotter rather than a printer.
It sounds like Lindstein was caught in the Rehabilitation Project Force program, which is where Scientology dissidents are placed until they get better, where 'better' is defined by the people who put them there. Gold Base is by no means the only such place people are kept: the first RPF people were on ships, cleaning out the sewage systems by hand. Sort of hard to call the police when you're being held on a ship in international waters...
I had a similar experience. No paper anywhere: the PA asked me what hurt, sent me to the x-ray department. The nice lady there looked at her computer, where she saw my description and the PA's inspection, took some pictures, and sent me back. The doctor looked at the x-ray pictures and gave me instructions on how to deal with a separated shoulder.
Even better is the family physician I go to. He says "okay, I'm prescribing you this. What pharmacy do you use?" I say "uh, this supermarket that's about at State Street and Governor's Street" and he hits a button on his laptop and says "it'll be waiting for you when you get there." Now that's just flat-out awesome.
I worked in a rehab one time, and I talked to various folks who were getting off of things: alcohol, coke, crack, etc... all of the ones who smoked cigarettes said that nicotine was the hardest drug to kick. Meaning, many of them beat all the other drugs but were struggling to kick cigarettes.
I know a couple ex-heroin junkies, an ex-meth-head, and some mostly ex-potheads who still smoke. The heroin junkies in particular said that the withdrawal symptoms of heroin were excruciating, but once they were off, they could stay off. The problem is how difficult it is to stay off smoking because cigarettes are so widely available and there are people smoking everywhere. There is just enough difficulty in getting illegal drugs to make it fairly easy to stay away from them, but nicotene is too easy to get.
Which is, by the way, the only valid reason I see for keeping illegal drugs illegal: it just slightly reduces the ease of availability, which reduces the number of people who use them until they die. I don't think anti-drug laws are a good idea, because of the other damage they're causing to society, but I do think there's evidence that they have some effect on reducing long-term usage.
In other words, it's just a big oscilloscope, with the signal replaced by a list of numbers. The longer the list, the more time it takes to traverse it and draw it, the lower the refresh rate, and the greater the flicker.
Since you obviously know a lot more about this than I, I'm curious: I had a graphics workstation from the early 1980's, and the monitor had a panel that was filled with tiny adjustment knobs, that allowed me to adjust the x/y for individual sections of the screen so straight lines were actually straight. Your comment about 'the longer the list' makes me wonder if that monitor had 9 different electron guns rather than just one, since it was (for the times) a huge screen and the obvious way to deal with the long-list-slow-refresh is to add multiple guns.
Dude. They suck out your vitreous and just pump in nitrogen? Zowie. What a crazy thought. I had no idea. (One would think I'd know these things since my gf is an ophthalmic tech...)
I did find out an interesting thing about how the vitreous humor works or doesn't work: my mom was seeing sparkles and flashes, and apparently the vitreous humor is in a sort of sac, and if it's not filling fast enough (an aging thing) it'll sometimes pull away from the retina and that stimulates the rods and cones. Again: I had no idea. It's an idea that I think is simultaneously cool and disgusting.
I've read about laser-riveting detached retinas back in place, and my gf has aided in that process. She says it's awesome, but I keep in mind which end of the needle she's on when I hear her say that.
I didn't work extensively with the greens because I didn't *want* to, so they might've been more than 500mW, but I know they were in that range -- under 2W, at least. Class II lasers assume your blink response will prevent you from getting injured, and even so the threshhold is 1mW. 5mW is all the way up to Class IIIM, if I remember correctly, which means the risk of injury is low but not zero, even taking into account the aversion response. Another thing to keep in mind is that the eye is a really excellent optics system, so even though a couple milliwatts doesn't seem like much, once it's focussed by the eye you get a *lot* of power per unit area.
The big industrial place I worked for, my desk was in a room containing seven excimer laser systems, big monster Spectra-Physic units. It was pretty cool. I was on earlier about the fluorine, and one thing I thought was hilarous: we had alarm systems for fires, and for fluorine. When the fire alarm went off people would sit around and look at each other, and finally if it kept going off we'd say 'ho hum' and get up and look out into the main manufacturing floor and see if there was actually a visible fire and then wander outside finally and socialize. When the fluorine alarm went off, people broke wrists running for the doors. We were required to sit within 30 feet of an exit door because they calculated that's how far we could run without having to take a breath. Oddly enough, we never had a fluorine leak, but we did have a number of fires, and I actually got to go in with a SCBA and a couple fire extinguishers and put one out. Even with a SCBA, halon makes you cough like a smoker for a week afterwards, so if you have the choice, grab the CO2.
None were fully blind, but of the 5 PhD's I've worked with, 2 had sector blindness in one eye (both from working with 500mW green pump lasers for ultrafast Ti:sapphire systems) and 1 had changed one eye by a couple diopters from an inadvertent UV exposure. Both the people with partial blindness had actually been wearing glasses, but they weren't against-the-cheek, and they'd been exposed from specular reflection off hardware, so that particular lab was near-fetishistic about matte black hardware. Even the screwheads had to be black.
I'll remember to not work in a near-IR lab. (I'm in the process of building a CO2 laser at home... hm. Maybe I'll put up another enclosure.)
The main problem seems to be that most of these guys are research guys and there's not even any attempt at safety standards. The industrial place I worked, we had the UV laser in an enclosure, and had interlocks on the doors so when the laser was running you couldn't get in unless you were let in, and there were UV goggles in bins beside the doors. The last research-based business I worked in, who had been a university lab until they spun off, had all these watt-level green lasers sitting in the open, no enclosures, no curtains. I walked into a room that was usually used for system assembly and they had a live green laser pointed right at the door because it was a convenient place to set it up. I open the door and, y'know, GREEEEEEEN! and I'm like what the HELL at least put up a curtain or a sign on the door!?!
Anyone who thinks all OSHA does is hinder American innovation should go spend six months working in a laser research lab, and then I'll listen to what they have to say.
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So if you're looking at a chunk of DNA and it appears to be continuous, particularly continuous and overlapping, it's very likely recently viral, while if it has big chunks of other stuff in it, long promotion/repression sequences, lots of regulatory stuff, it's probably not recently viral. Does that answer what you're wondering?
The propositions are indistinguishable: everything that has DNA has copied it from something else. The issue is that we're increasingly finding that organisms don't just get copies of their parents' DNA -- that there's swapping, obviously during sex, but less obviously from viral infections adding stuff into the target, and less obviously yet from viral infections of one organism transferring its genetic material to another organism that the virus subsequently infects, and less obviously yet, the idea that retroviruses might be eukaryotic mechanisms for DNA transposition. So, yeah, viruses got their code from hosts, hosts got their code from viruses.
The complication comes in that DNA replication is lossy, but evolution is conservative. So if random changes creep into critical stretches of DNA, called conserved sequences, bad things will happen to the cell. If changes creep into DNA that isn't currently functional, as is the case with endogenous retroviruses or other viral material that got stashed in but didn't end up producing a virus for whatever reason, those changes stick around since the DNA isn't expressed: there's no evolutionary pressure to maintain the code, so it slowly degrades.
The rate at which it degrades is reasonably constant. DNA polymerases have a measurable, consistent error rate. So your old viral code slowly accumulates errors, but it's still recognizeable: you know what you're seeing when you read #defne <virus.h>. A nice side-effect of this is that, since the replication error rate is fairly constant, you can also tell roughly how long a chunk of viral material has been in the DNA by the number of errors it has accumulated compared to a reference genome.
So as a long answer to a short question, you don't look for six-base correlation, you look for a 95% correlation over several thousand sequential bases before you announce you've found a virus-like pattern.
With the LED brake systems, again, that's just poor design on the part of the automotive engineers. All the parts I know of can take dim signals in the tens of khz so there is no reason to use low refresh rates -- and in that case, it's even dumber because if you're working with a fixed lighting value, you change the sense resistor on the switcher and run the LED's at a reduced current, without bothering to dim them. Only if you want to vary the brake brightness with ambient lighting would it make sense to play with dimming brake lights, and while that's a really great idea, there aren't any cars that currently offer it (to the best of my knowledge) except possibly high-end Audi's.
With THAT said, I have absolutely zero idea why any sane LED driver dimmer would be anywhere near frequencies that any human could see. LED's can turn on and off in nanoseconds, so a reasonable dim signal should be in the kilohertz range, at least, not the 100hz range. It's *possible* to put a 100hz dim signal on an LED driver, but it seems really dumb to me.
It's not a ripoff, though. All those crapware and dell/bestbuy/aol links are companies who are paying the vendor to include their crap on the system. They're subsidizing the hardware/software purchase through advertising. Optimization just means you're paying the actual hardware/software cost (plus profit) for your optimized system. It's not really any different than the old Juno days where the "free" ISP would use a fraction of your screen space bannering advertising at you, and if you shelled out some more money, by going to a real ISP, you'd get your whole screen to yourself. In either case, you're getting something for your money, so it's not really a ripoff. You're just pissed that the base-level package is filled with crap.
You kid, but Barnaby Wainfan's unique Facetmobile aircraft originally had a pull-start motor that could only be started from the outside of the aircraft, which made life complicated. For that matter, most older aircraft, pre-1950, didn't have starters at all, and were started by hand-pulling the propeller hard enough to get the engine to fire. As you can imagine, this injured and killed a lot of people -- a lot more people killed than crank-starting cars -- and ended up with a fairly large number of aircraft flying off with no pilot. Some of them managed to fly hundreds of miles this way, in fact.
The ADI Stallion homebuilt is more efficient than a 747, as regards fuel spent per person carried, and if you're willing to only carry 2 people rather than 6, you can take along a motorcycle as well, at 230mph, while still using less gas than many larger SUV's.
However, for the VTOL demands, maybe they should consider an autogyro with a prerotator like the Carter Copter or several others, that can manage vertical takeoff and landing (and has the happy side-effect that it flies the same after an engine failure as before, except its climbing capability is severely limited.)
And on the other side, the atheists. Again, other atheists I've worked with in other areas just didn't care about religion. They didn't talk about it, they didn't think about it. At this job, five of my coworkers will go out of their way, if any of the highly religious engineers are in earshot, to say things just like what you're saying, loudly, "I don't know why ANYONE who wasn't GOOFY would believe in a BIG INVISIBLE MAN in the SKY!"
Normal people don't DO that.
The people who are drawn to engineering tend to be very bright, sure of themselves, and little inclined to spend time worrying about what other people think of their appearance or opinions, because they're sure of themselves: introverts, in other words, who take their values from themselves rather than from society at large. People who are bright, sure of themselves, and who consider what other people think of them, go into politics or become lawyers or high-level business, where telling someone that their beliefs are crazy is a career-limiting move. But people drawn to engineering have strong senses of their self-confidence and self-approval. That's why they're good at building stuff, and that's why they're good at deciding that God wants them to go blow up a building.
I agree with your conclusion, that we're becoming a has-been, but I think your premises are entirely too charitable.
Slashdot needs to create a numbered list of arguments called Slashdot's List Of Same Old Arguments (SLOSOA). Then /.ers can save bandwidth (and lower Taco's bills) by disputing by numerical reference to an argument, just as Mennonites are said to argue by reference chapter and verse in the Bible rather than repeating the words.
Time to pull out my numbers joke.
New guy has been hired at the Federal Penitentiary. Old guard is taking him around showing him how to do his new job. They're in one of the blocks and they hear an inmate yell out "23!" and a bunch of other inmates laugh.
New guy says "what was THAT about?"
Guard says, "well, they've been here so long they've memorized the joke book. You just call out the page number and everyone knows the joke and the punchline."
New guy says "can I try?"
Guard says, "knock yourself out, kid."
So the new guy clears his throat, and yells out "43!"
Dead silence. Awkward silence, even. New guy whispers, "what happened? Why didn't they laugh?"
Old guard slaps him on the shoulder and says "no offense, kid, but some people just can't tell a joke."
So there's a SECOND new guard who has been watching all this. He says, "mind if I try?"
Guard shrugs.
Second guy yells "minus 3!"
The entire block erupts in laughter, people howling and crying they're laughing so hard.
First guy says "wait, why was THAT so funny?"
The guard, wiping the tears off his face, says "nobody ever heard that one before!"
Great article. As someone who grew up in Cheyenne, WY near F.E. Warren AFB (an AFB without planes or a landing strip - you can guess the mission) the details of these monsters have always fascinated me. I'd hear stories from my friends whose dads worked either as the missile capsule crews themselves or were maintenance personnel.
If Slashdot readers are flying in and out of Denver International Airport (or any area around CO, NE, WY) you can look out the window and see the launch facilities from the air. Amid the farm lands and country roads, you can look down and see an outcrop of buildings and maybe a quonset hut or two, and then a separate concrete reinforced pad maybe a hundred yards away; the whole area carefully fenced. You can tell they don't quite fit in with everything else. The number of them is startling. Yeah, in fact a little scary. But the author is correct when he states that in the (then) USSR they had the exact same thing pointing at us. Gives me the willies still.
As someone who grew up in part in northern Colorado, and ran across several missile silos while out on horseback or mountain biking, I'd like to point out that Warren AFB has helicopters, lots and lots of helicopters, and I've been told they show up in a hurry if you spend too much time poking about a missile silo because of the rash of anti-missile protests in the '80's. Warren *does* have a landing strip, actually: the WWI flying ace Eddie Rickenbacher wrecked a plane there once in the 1920's. But AFAIK it hasn't been used in 40 years.
If anyone is bored, here's a list of coordinates for known ICBM sites in the US. Here's satellite photography of a silo I found while out riding horses. It's empty. There was a silo you could tour at Greeley's Missile Silo Park but from what I've heard, the tornado two years ago ripped up all the above-ground stuff, including the museum, so it might not be all that interesting now.
Oh yeah? Prove it.
I'll come visit once you're done.
"Boeing's factory in Everett, Washington, United States is presently the largest building in the world by volume while Terminal 3 of Dubai International Airport is the largest building in terms of total floor area. The surface area of the proposed Crystal Island complex in Moscow is more than double that of the largest current building, though this project has been delayed indefinitely by the global economic crisis.".
Two seconds on Google.
If the batteries are next to your balls, I don't think you are using the lawnmower in an approved manner.
Whole different meaning to "whacking off".
I had a friend who worked in the ER in a fairly redneck-filled state. I asked her about the weirdest accident she'd ever seen and she said they'd brought in her *cousin*, who had actually managed to injure his penis (and leg and hand and other bits) with a lawnmower.
There was a moment of silence, and then everyone hearing the story said "HOW??!?"
She said "I think alcohol was involved..." but that was all we ever got.
Just sucks for people who get caught in it now, when it still matters to the people making hiring decisions.
At the risk of sounding perhaps trollish or inflammatory, or even over-generalizing, I have to ask why, over the course of the past couple of decades or so, perhaps longer, have the terms "China" and "cheap knockoffs" become synonymous?
Out of curiosity I headed over to this list of Chinese inventions and I am surprised to see the numerous inventions by, and subsequent contributions to, humanity by the Chinese people.
It seems to me that they are quite capable of making new products and contributing new ideas, so why do they not do so? Why are there repeated examples of this sort of blatant copying? Can anyone clue me in here?
They're business-oriented. The point of a business is to get the highest profit margin. All other things being equal, you get a higher profit margin by copying something successful, because A: you have lower R&D costs, B: lower marketing costs, and C: lower risk that your product won't be successful. So in an environment where you *can* succeed by copying, that's the smart thing to do.
There are plenty of Chinese innovations. We don't hear about them because they're moving at the same pace as every other innovator is: doing slow, costly, risky work. What we hear about are the people copying, because they're stepping on the toes of the people who are pissed off by copying.
30 years ago people were saying exactly the same thing about the Japanese... before they devoured American manufacturing through innovation and research.
However, the problem is getting the printer to run when it thinks it's out of ink: some I've used refuse to do anything until they have a filled cartridge, which is why I'm building mine out of a vintage plotter rather than a printer.
It sounds like Lindstein was caught in the Rehabilitation Project Force program, which is where Scientology dissidents are placed until they get better, where 'better' is defined by the people who put them there. Gold Base is by no means the only such place people are kept: the first RPF people were on ships, cleaning out the sewage systems by hand. Sort of hard to call the police when you're being held on a ship in international waters...
Even better is the family physician I go to. He says "okay, I'm prescribing you this. What pharmacy do you use?" I say "uh, this supermarket that's about at State Street and Governor's Street" and he hits a button on his laptop and says "it'll be waiting for you when you get there." Now that's just flat-out awesome.
Well, much as I dislike smoking, smokers generally live for decades longer than junkies who are still using, so let's hear it for substitution.
It's funny you should mention heroin.
I worked in a rehab one time, and I talked to various folks who were getting off of things: alcohol, coke, crack, etc... all of the ones who smoked cigarettes said that nicotine was the hardest drug to kick. Meaning, many of them beat all the other drugs but were struggling to kick cigarettes.
I know a couple ex-heroin junkies, an ex-meth-head, and some mostly ex-potheads who still smoke. The heroin junkies in particular said that the withdrawal symptoms of heroin were excruciating, but once they were off, they could stay off. The problem is how difficult it is to stay off smoking because cigarettes are so widely available and there are people smoking everywhere. There is just enough difficulty in getting illegal drugs to make it fairly easy to stay away from them, but nicotene is too easy to get.
Which is, by the way, the only valid reason I see for keeping illegal drugs illegal: it just slightly reduces the ease of availability, which reduces the number of people who use them until they die. I don't think anti-drug laws are a good idea, because of the other damage they're causing to society, but I do think there's evidence that they have some effect on reducing long-term usage.
In other words, it's just a big oscilloscope, with the signal replaced by a list of numbers. The longer the list, the more time it takes to traverse it and draw it, the lower the refresh rate, and the greater the flicker.
Since you obviously know a lot more about this than I, I'm curious: I had a graphics workstation from the early 1980's, and the monitor had a panel that was filled with tiny adjustment knobs, that allowed me to adjust the x/y for individual sections of the screen so straight lines were actually straight. Your comment about 'the longer the list' makes me wonder if that monitor had 9 different electron guns rather than just one, since it was (for the times) a huge screen and the obvious way to deal with the long-list-slow-refresh is to add multiple guns.
I did find out an interesting thing about how the vitreous humor works or doesn't work: my mom was seeing sparkles and flashes, and apparently the vitreous humor is in a sort of sac, and if it's not filling fast enough (an aging thing) it'll sometimes pull away from the retina and that stimulates the rods and cones. Again: I had no idea. It's an idea that I think is simultaneously cool and disgusting.
I've read about laser-riveting detached retinas back in place, and my gf has aided in that process. She says it's awesome, but I keep in mind which end of the needle she's on when I hear her say that.
The big industrial place I worked for, my desk was in a room containing seven excimer laser systems, big monster Spectra-Physic units. It was pretty cool. I was on earlier about the fluorine, and one thing I thought was hilarous: we had alarm systems for fires, and for fluorine. When the fire alarm went off people would sit around and look at each other, and finally if it kept going off we'd say 'ho hum' and get up and look out into the main manufacturing floor and see if there was actually a visible fire and then wander outside finally and socialize. When the fluorine alarm went off, people broke wrists running for the doors. We were required to sit within 30 feet of an exit door because they calculated that's how far we could run without having to take a breath. Oddly enough, we never had a fluorine leak, but we did have a number of fires, and I actually got to go in with a SCBA and a couple fire extinguishers and put one out. Even with a SCBA, halon makes you cough like a smoker for a week afterwards, so if you have the choice, grab the CO2.
I'll remember to not work in a near-IR lab. (I'm in the process of building a CO2 laser at home... hm. Maybe I'll put up another enclosure.)
The main problem seems to be that most of these guys are research guys and there's not even any attempt at safety standards. The industrial place I worked, we had the UV laser in an enclosure, and had interlocks on the doors so when the laser was running you couldn't get in unless you were let in, and there were UV goggles in bins beside the doors. The last research-based business I worked in, who had been a university lab until they spun off, had all these watt-level green lasers sitting in the open, no enclosures, no curtains. I walked into a room that was usually used for system assembly and they had a live green laser pointed right at the door because it was a convenient place to set it up. I open the door and, y'know, GREEEEEEEN! and I'm like what the HELL at least put up a curtain or a sign on the door!?!
Anyone who thinks all OSHA does is hinder American innovation should go spend six months working in a laser research lab, and then I'll listen to what they have to say.