Nooope. You have to use at least abit of it. The smaller it is, the more effective it is. Zero doesn't qualify. So, physics says 10^-26 is like zero, mathematics say 10^-26 is > zero. Homeopathy works differently if you re a math guy or a physics guy.
So let's treat it as a reciprocal. The efficacy of homeopathy is 1/amount used, so as the amount used goes to zero, the efficacy goes to infinity, and... beyond! (Well, okay, for 'beyond' you'd have to use a negative amount, but that's what happens when you get someone else to use yours, I guess?)
I'd be surprised if LED's are ever as cheap as incandescents, a few year back I bought a bulk pack of bulbs - I paid around 35 cents/bulb, and the 100W bulbs were the same price as the 60W bulbs.
LED's have many more components than a light bulb, and are more difficult to assemble.
One thing to consider is total cost of ownership, and over the lifetime of an LED, you would have bought somewhere between 30 and 100 incandescent bulbs. Another thing to consider is that the one LED will use about 1/8 the power of those incandescents, so unless your power is free, you're now looking at 240-1000x the total operating cost for incandescents compared to LED's. My next-door neighbor has very little money, so back in 2009 she bought a big SUV because it was $1200, compared to $3000 for a subcompact... and then couldn't afford the gas to get to work. People are really lousy at looking at anything other than the initial purchase price.
A third thing to consider is that as fewer people buy incandescents, the cost of maintaining tungsten-drawing machinery and other lightbulb-specific manufacturing equipment is going to rise. Vacuum tubes are hard to make well, and while we have a century of experience in doing so, silicon is dirt cheap and getting cheaper.
Nobody else knew it existed, which meant there wasn't a crapflood of angry reviews everywhere. I used it to put hours of operation notes on a bunch of local businesses that didn't list them, and in the case of one oddly-set-up webpage, instructions on how to get it to work. (Trying to get samples from a company that for whatever reason ships to just about every country in the world save the US, and if you email them about it they say oh yeah register as canadian and give a us address, rather than registering with a us address, submitting the sample request, and simply never getting any sort of response at all.) Sidewiki would have become useless if it had been popular, but as an almost unknown service, it was extremely useful.
We did lose a PT-22, though. Real geeks care about stuff like that more than Hollywood actors. Or should I say nerds.
'Geek' is more the 'script kiddie' version of a nerd. Nerds know what a wire-wrap gun is, even if they're more into grinding lenses for homemade telescopes. Geeks know what's cool right now on websites like Boing Boing.
Geeks make robots. Nerds role-play robots. Dorks dance like robots.
It's entirely possible that plane could be fixed. I've seen much worse aircraft restored, and the PT22 is a particularly simple aircraft. It's an interesting choice for a very, very rich high-time pilot to be flying, in fact: originally without any electrical system at all, implying hand-propping to start it, mechanical flaps, gravity fuel system. Main wingspar made of spruce. It's like someone who can afford a Ferrari choosing to drive a Nash.
Jet engines are an awful candidate. The tolerances and material requirements to not tear themselves apart are tremendous. We're talking about turbine blades spinning at 5k-45k RPM, at temperatures of several hundred degrees, and pressures far above atmospheric, and an airstream a few hundred MPH in velocity.
The inspection process for the individual blades, and then then for their attachment to the mount, to ensure that an imbalance doesn't destroy the engine is tremendously demanding.
On the other hand, there is a case to be made for an aim-for-the-stars strategy. If you can build a turbine blade you can build anything. I would have thought compressor blades would be a much more likely candidate, but if they can get this to work, more power to them. And maybe 3d printing will give them options they would not otherwise have: internal bleed air cooling channels that follow the leading edge along its curvature, for instance. It's possible that given completely different design and manufacturing capabilities, they'll be able to make something that can do the same job with different tradeoffs.
But at some point people will notice that their friends and neighbours are being burnt. The point is that you have to pacify the majority or else they turn on those in power.
In Brave New World, the proles had drugs and sex to keep them happy: it's a much better prediction of the future than 1984 in many ways.
As Martin Niemoller said, in a different context: "First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Socialist. Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Trade Unionist." and so forth. If they first kill off the homeless, then they kill off the very poor, then they kill off the illegal immigrants, they never have to pacify the majority. They just have to keep them scared enough to not protest.
By the way, Neil Postman wrote an interesting book called "Amusing Ourselves To Death", where he compared the futures predicted by Brave New World and 1984 and talked about why he thought we were heading towards Brave New World. Some of his information is pretty dated -- he totally didn't expect the universal surveillance state we seem to be entering into -- but it's still an excellent exploration of what you're suggesting.
If it costs $1B to get a drug through the FDA approval process, and your prize is $2B, you will only play the game if you think you'll get your first or possibly second try through the approval process. If you have to start half a dozen and have them fail at various points through the approval process, you've already spent the potential prize money without winning it.
We might need to look at how safe drugs have to be before they can be FDA-certified. I've harped on this before but I know people who thought Vioxx was a lifesaver in treating their arthritis, and experienced a very significant change in health and happiness when it was taken off the market because of the harm it did to other people. If we insist on drugs that have statistically significant positive effects, with infinitesimal negative effects, we may run out of options and end up dying the way people did in the middle ages, while the drugs we need sit on a shelf somewhere, waiting for a different regulatory environment.
I'm seriously regretting any anti-bacterial soap I've used over the years right about now.
Don't be. We may breed triclosan-resistant bacteria by using antibacterial soap, but that doesn't mean we're breeding carbapenem-resistant bacteria -- the C in CRE -- by using triclosan. There is very little evidence that developed resistance to one type of antibiotic increases resistance to another completely unrelated antibiotic. Triclosan inhibits fatty acid synthesis, carbapenem inhibits synthesis of the peptidoglycans used in bacterial cell walls.
My understanding of HIV is that when it infects human cells, it hijacks the tRNA (iirc) so that the human cells continue producing more HIV viruses. With the article describing synthetic antibodies binding to HIV, the virus is unable to infect human cells. So this would seem like a race condition where the antibody needs to get to the HIV *before* HIV has a chance to infect a human cell. How can this happen reliably?
Mostly through concentration: making sure there are 100x or more antibodies against HIV present than the cells HIV is targeting. But it's also helped by binding affinity. When a receptor and a substrate bind, it's generally reversible -- they can join or separate, and there is a measurable equilibrium between the bound and unbound states, which is a function of concentration of both receptor and substrate, and a constant that reflects how well they actually stick together. Generally, antibodies are _vastly_ better at sticking to things because they're designed to be. (Okay, the 'designed to be' is not actually true but for the purposes of this, it's an okay approximation) So if your antibody/HIV binding affinity is 100x better than the HIV/cell binding affinity, and you have 100x more antibodies than target cells, the number of viral/cell bindings is going to be much lower than the number of antibody/viral bindings.
This is interesting, because my diet, such as it is, is almost exactly the opposite. I eat just over 1 gram per kilogram of body weight of protein, and about the same amount of fat, and then fill in the rest with carbs. But I'm a bike racer, so in the winter that may be 3000 calories of 70% carbs, where in mid-summer that sometimes stretches to 6500 calories a day, close to 85% carbs -- and I can't manage to get through the summer without losing 10 kilos, at which point I'm below 6% body fat and health issues start showing up and I have to start adding some fats. Metabolism is weird. One of my microbiology professors used to say that he felt humans were giant life support units for mobile ecosystems. He felt that much of what we think and feel is actually manipulated by our bacteria to benefit them and deter invasion from other bacteria.
I have a friend who, in her thirties, just got measles from one of her son's friends, and now she's lost her hearing -- a fairly common, and often permanent, complication of measles. She's trying to sue the parents, on the basis of one of them posting about how they didn't vaccinate their child because they didn't believe in it. She figures that if a person who has AIDS and has unprotected sex with people can be charged with murder -- a criminal act -- she should be able to win a civil judgment for at least negligence. If it works, it could be an interesting new chapter in the vaccination story, and does raise the question of why AIDS is handled differently than measles.
Scenario: terminatored corn is widely succesful and replaces regular corn. Something bad happens to stop Monsanto from delivering more seends. What will the farmers plant? They can't use seeds from terminatored corn since they're infertile, and they can't plant regular corn seeds since they no longer have any. Mass starvation follows.
Scenario: the bad thing that happens is Monsanto realizes that they have more than 60% market share, and raises the price 20:1, because they'll make an enormous profit. There's nowhere nearly enough regular seed corn to plant, so everyone has to pay the piper. It's a monopoly in the making, and you know Monsanto and many other businesses have already thought of this and are just wriggling with anticipation.
The reason why power companies do not invest in reprocessing and consume fresh fissile material is because by federal law bans it. Remember Jimmy Carter's Non-proliferation deal? Yeah.
"In October 1976,[8] concern of nuclear weapons proliferation (especially after India demonstrated nuclear weapons capabilities using reprocessing technology) led President Gerald Ford to issue a Presidential directive to indefinitely suspend the commercial reprocessing and recycling of plutonium in the U.S. On 7 April 1977, President Jimmy Carter banned the reprocessing of commercial reactor spent nuclear fuel.... President Reagan lifted the ban in 1981, but did not provide the substantial subsidy that would have been necessary to start up commercial reprocessing." "In March 1999, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) reversed its policy and signed a contract with a consortium of Duke Energy, COGEMA, and Stone & Webster (DCS) to design and operate a mixed oxide (MOX) fuel fabrication facility.... the government has yet to find a single customer, despite offers of lucrative subsidies."
It's nothing to do with the ban on reprocessing that was only in place from 1977 to 1981, and everything to do with reprocessing being completely uneconomical. If we're going to reprocess, the government has to pay for it, as companies won't, but there are no technical or legislative barriers to doing so, as multiple other countries that are already reprocessing their waste demonstrate.
This podcast seems to be about tDCS, while Thync is appearantly "using transcranial pulsed ultrasound (tPU), transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) and other transcranial electrical stimulation (tES) methods".
I dated a woman who was involved in transcranial magnetic stimulation projects. She said it was like someone was flicking the inside of her brain, and similarly to tdcs, it had significant effects on her mental abilities: she'd sometimes be measurably better at math, or measurably worse at coming up with words during conversations. I hadn't heard of tpu before.
Have a patch that doesn't actually apply voltage, but vibrates or something like that. User still feels like he/she is getting some sort of effect, but there's no brain-zapping involved.
In the Radiolab discussion, they were doing tests with the woman who was doing the sniper training, both with and without the system running. She thought her performance was about the same, but the people analyzing it said it was dramatically different, because among the things affected was her perception of time. She felt like she was playing the game until she got killed, which was maybe a matter of a minute or two, but when she was playing really well, she was playing for much longer periods of time and didn't realize it. As I recall, they specifically compared it to programmers who talk about The Zone, where they're coding very effectively and have reduced perception of the passage of time, and making the claim that the two effects, of heightened efficiency and reduced perception of time passage, may be related.
There was a recent Radiolab about this general technique, that's totally worth listening to: http://www.radiolab.org/story/... (It's also a lot better-written than the summary.)
The idea is that by applying DC voltages to different parts of your skull, you can affect how your brain works. The theory is that the current passing across part of your brain changes how your brain learns from mistakes, messing with the pattern-acquisition feedback. In the story, they specifically concentrated on a woman training in a sniper video game, who was having to identify attackers vs. civilians, and how much it changed her ability to do that, but they also discussed a big underground scene of people trying this out at home for other purposes or just to learn about what happens. They were moving the contact patches around and then trying things to see what they were or weren't good at. One guy doing this found a spot that left him largely blind for several hours afterwards, so it's not all roses, but the people trying language acquisition and finding it much easier both to acquire and, later, post-treatment, to recall, new languages, really got me interested.
I seriously wonder why RS hasn't embraced the maker culture. It seems to me that they can only last another year trying to compete in consumer products and batteries.
Do you remember TechAmerica, RadioShack's last attempt to embrace the maker culture, in 1996? They opened five stores in major metro areas. They were wonderful. I could go in and decide which 10-bit A/D I preferred. The guy behind the counter knew what a 74141 was. They lasted five years. Over the three year lifetime of the Denver store, the electronics section got smaller, the toys and gadget section got larger, and they still didn't manage to make their rent.
After that, is it any surprise that their current maker section consists of half a dozen arduino boards and shields and a shelf of TH resistors in the back? How do you compete with Digikey, if you have to pay rent?
I'm just waiting for the day when some internet thugs not just encrypt your data, but hold your whole house for ransom until you pay up.
A friend who does hardware security has had to deal with an exploited internet-connected refrigerator that had been hacked into a spam relay. So: wait until the day when internet thugs encrypt your data, hold your house for ransom, and while doing that, use your devices to attack other people's houses and encrypt their data, plus rent out your house's bandwidth to DDoS farms.
First off, In the late 90's Tektronix made a series of digital oscilloscopes that ran an embedded version of Windows 98.
As far as I know, every current Tek scope has either Windows (higher-end) or embedded Linux running it. All our 4000-series and up scopes have a mix of Win2K and XP, which is for us a disaster since we're not allowed to use them on the corporate network now that there's no longer any OS support for them. Weirdly, the Linux-based systems, which appear to have 2.2-era kernels, are freely allowed on the network and feature integral webservers so you can control them remotely without needing any fancy software.
"Colorado already proved that with the tax revenue they brought in from legalized marijuana"
Colorado probably got significantly increased business from being the first, surrounded by neighbours where it is still illegal. They probably even have increased secondary trade from people travelling in to get marijuana and then buying other stuff. Also, there's probably the effect of the novelty. I'm not saying there isn't a permanent increase, but it will be less if Nebraska and Oklahoma also legalise it.
"Probably even have increased secondary trade" doesn't even begin to cover it. My wife works in ophthalmology and she has four patients who have moved to colorado just because of pot. That's likewise cited as a primary reason that housing prices have increased recently. I find it hard to believe that people would uproot their lives just for weed, but it appears to be happening. Colorado is making an estimated $1M/day in taxes on pot and that's probably significantly lower than the actual revenue, since because there are virtually no banks (one credit union) that'll deal with marijuana dispensaries, it's a cash-only business so the businesses could in theory only report as much business as they wish, and pocket the rest. If/when more financial institutions start dealing with them, and people feel they can use credit cards to pay for pot, the tax revenues are likely to increase. It's also not clear that the novelty is outweighed by the convenience. There are a lot of people who didn't use pot previously because it was just a hassle to get and there was a bit of risk involved. The people I know who are long-term smokers have stayed with their black-market dealers because they know it's safe and it's cheaper. But people who want to use it occasionally, or don't know/want to deal with black-market stuff, is apparently a huge market. They may overwhelm the local novelty effect.
My wife has one because she can't fit any modern cellphone in her pockets, and her Veer finally died, so the phone lives in her handbag and she uses her watch. She can answer calls, talk, and hang up without (I believe) even having to touch it, and can send texts ("galaxy, send text. next patient has piece of steel stuck in eyeball, will need more lidocane.") which she then previews visually and tells it verbally to send, again without having to touch it. She's pretty thrilled with it. And it tells time. I'm not sure what else I'd want/need in a watch. (I haven't gotten one because I destroy everything I touch so it'd be a waste. But I'm quite envious.)
Slashdot Mirror
Oh I think there are definitely symptoms of homeopathy...
Nooope. You have to use at least abit of it. The smaller it is, the more effective it is. Zero doesn't qualify. So, physics says 10^-26 is like zero, mathematics say 10^-26 is > zero. Homeopathy works differently if you re a math guy or a physics guy.
So let's treat it as a reciprocal. The efficacy of homeopathy is 1/amount used, so as the amount used goes to zero, the efficacy goes to infinity, and... beyond!
(Well, okay, for 'beyond' you'd have to use a negative amount, but that's what happens when you get someone else to use yours, I guess?)
I'd be surprised if LED's are ever as cheap as incandescents, a few year back I bought a bulk pack of bulbs - I paid around 35 cents/bulb, and the 100W bulbs were the same price as the 60W bulbs.
LED's have many more components than a light bulb, and are more difficult to assemble.
One thing to consider is total cost of ownership, and over the lifetime of an LED, you would have bought somewhere between 30 and 100 incandescent bulbs.
Another thing to consider is that the one LED will use about 1/8 the power of those incandescents, so unless your power is free, you're now looking at 240-1000x the total operating cost for incandescents compared to LED's.
My next-door neighbor has very little money, so back in 2009 she bought a big SUV because it was $1200, compared to $3000 for a subcompact... and then couldn't afford the gas to get to work. People are really lousy at looking at anything other than the initial purchase price.
A third thing to consider is that as fewer people buy incandescents, the cost of maintaining tungsten-drawing machinery and other lightbulb-specific manufacturing equipment is going to rise. Vacuum tubes are hard to make well, and while we have a century of experience in doing so, silicon is dirt cheap and getting cheaper.
If they think Homeopathy doesn't work, they're just not using enough.
Or, wait, sorry, they're using too much.
The less homeopathy you use, the stronger it is.
The logical conclusion is that if you use none at all, you'll see the greatest improvement, especially financially.
Nobody else knew it existed, which meant there wasn't a crapflood of angry reviews everywhere. I used it to put hours of operation notes on a bunch of local businesses that didn't list them, and in the case of one oddly-set-up webpage, instructions on how to get it to work. (Trying to get samples from a company that for whatever reason ships to just about every country in the world save the US, and if you email them about it they say oh yeah register as canadian and give a us address, rather than registering with a us address, submitting the sample request, and simply never getting any sort of response at all.)
Sidewiki would have become useless if it had been popular, but as an almost unknown service, it was extremely useful.
We did lose a PT-22, though. Real geeks care about stuff like that more than Hollywood actors. Or should I say nerds.
'Geek' is more the 'script kiddie' version of a nerd. Nerds know what a wire-wrap gun is, even if they're more into grinding lenses for homemade telescopes. Geeks know what's cool right now on websites like Boing Boing.
Geeks make robots. Nerds role-play robots. Dorks dance like robots.
It's entirely possible that plane could be fixed. I've seen much worse aircraft restored, and the PT22 is a particularly simple aircraft. It's an interesting choice for a very, very rich high-time pilot to be flying, in fact: originally without any electrical system at all, implying hand-propping to start it, mechanical flaps, gravity fuel system. Main wingspar made of spruce. It's like someone who can afford a Ferrari choosing to drive a Nash.
Jet engines are an awful candidate. The tolerances and material requirements to not tear themselves apart are tremendous. We're talking about turbine blades spinning at 5k-45k RPM, at temperatures of several hundred degrees, and pressures far above atmospheric, and an airstream a few hundred MPH in velocity.
The inspection process for the individual blades, and then then for their attachment to the mount, to ensure that an imbalance doesn't destroy the engine is tremendously demanding.
On the other hand, there is a case to be made for an aim-for-the-stars strategy. If you can build a turbine blade you can build anything. I would have thought compressor blades would be a much more likely candidate, but if they can get this to work, more power to them. And maybe 3d printing will give them options they would not otherwise have: internal bleed air cooling channels that follow the leading edge along its curvature, for instance. It's possible that given completely different design and manufacturing capabilities, they'll be able to make something that can do the same job with different tradeoffs.
But at some point people will notice that their friends and neighbours are being burnt. The point is that you have to pacify the majority or else they turn on those in power.
In Brave New World, the proles had drugs and sex to keep them happy: it's a much better prediction of the future than 1984 in many ways.
As Martin Niemoller said, in a different context:
"First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist."
and so forth. If they first kill off the homeless, then they kill off the very poor, then they kill off the illegal immigrants, they never have to pacify the majority. They just have to keep them scared enough to not protest.
By the way, Neil Postman wrote an interesting book called "Amusing Ourselves To Death", where he compared the futures predicted by Brave New World and 1984 and talked about why he thought we were heading towards Brave New World. Some of his information is pretty dated -- he totally didn't expect the universal surveillance state we seem to be entering into -- but it's still an excellent exploration of what you're suggesting.
If it costs $1B to get a drug through the FDA approval process, and your prize is $2B, you will only play the game if you think you'll get your first or possibly second try through the approval process. If you have to start half a dozen and have them fail at various points through the approval process, you've already spent the potential prize money without winning it.
We might need to look at how safe drugs have to be before they can be FDA-certified. I've harped on this before but I know people who thought Vioxx was a lifesaver in treating their arthritis, and experienced a very significant change in health and happiness when it was taken off the market because of the harm it did to other people. If we insist on drugs that have statistically significant positive effects, with infinitesimal negative effects, we may run out of options and end up dying the way people did in the middle ages, while the drugs we need sit on a shelf somewhere, waiting for a different regulatory environment.
I'm seriously regretting any anti-bacterial soap I've used over the years right about now.
Don't be. We may breed triclosan-resistant bacteria by using antibacterial soap, but that doesn't mean we're breeding carbapenem-resistant bacteria -- the C in CRE -- by using triclosan. There is very little evidence that developed resistance to one type of antibiotic increases resistance to another completely unrelated antibiotic. Triclosan inhibits fatty acid synthesis, carbapenem inhibits synthesis of the peptidoglycans used in bacterial cell walls.
My understanding of HIV is that when it infects human cells, it hijacks the tRNA (iirc) so that the human cells continue producing more HIV viruses. With the article describing synthetic antibodies binding to HIV, the virus is unable to infect human cells. So this would seem like a race condition where the antibody needs to get to the HIV *before* HIV has a chance to infect a human cell. How can this happen reliably?
Mostly through concentration: making sure there are 100x or more antibodies against HIV present than the cells HIV is targeting.
But it's also helped by binding affinity. When a receptor and a substrate bind, it's generally reversible -- they can join or separate, and there is a measurable equilibrium between the bound and unbound states, which is a function of concentration of both receptor and substrate, and a constant that reflects how well they actually stick together. Generally, antibodies are _vastly_ better at sticking to things because they're designed to be. (Okay, the 'designed to be' is not actually true but for the purposes of this, it's an okay approximation) So if your antibody/HIV binding affinity is 100x better than the HIV/cell binding affinity, and you have 100x more antibodies than target cells, the number of viral/cell bindings is going to be much lower than the number of antibody/viral bindings.
This is interesting, because my diet, such as it is, is almost exactly the opposite. I eat just over 1 gram per kilogram of body weight of protein, and about the same amount of fat, and then fill in the rest with carbs. But I'm a bike racer, so in the winter that may be 3000 calories of 70% carbs, where in mid-summer that sometimes stretches to 6500 calories a day, close to 85% carbs -- and I can't manage to get through the summer without losing 10 kilos, at which point I'm below 6% body fat and health issues start showing up and I have to start adding some fats.
Metabolism is weird.
One of my microbiology professors used to say that he felt humans were giant life support units for mobile ecosystems. He felt that much of what we think and feel is actually manipulated by our bacteria to benefit them and deter invasion from other bacteria.
I have a friend who, in her thirties, just got measles from one of her son's friends, and now she's lost her hearing -- a fairly common, and often permanent, complication of measles. She's trying to sue the parents, on the basis of one of them posting about how they didn't vaccinate their child because they didn't believe in it. She figures that if a person who has AIDS and has unprotected sex with people can be charged with murder -- a criminal act -- she should be able to win a civil judgment for at least negligence.
If it works, it could be an interesting new chapter in the vaccination story, and does raise the question of why AIDS is handled differently than measles.
Scenario: terminatored corn is widely succesful and replaces regular corn. Something bad happens to stop Monsanto from delivering more seends. What will the farmers plant? They can't use seeds from terminatored corn since they're infertile, and they can't plant regular corn seeds since they no longer have any. Mass starvation follows.
Scenario: the bad thing that happens is Monsanto realizes that they have more than 60% market share, and raises the price 20:1, because they'll make an enormous profit. There's nowhere nearly enough regular seed corn to plant, so everyone has to pay the piper. It's a monopoly in the making, and you know Monsanto and many other businesses have already thought of this and are just wriggling with anticipation.
The reason why power companies do not invest in reprocessing and consume fresh fissile material is because by federal law bans it. Remember Jimmy Carter's Non-proliferation deal? Yeah.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...:
"In October 1976,[8] concern of nuclear weapons proliferation (especially after India demonstrated nuclear weapons capabilities using reprocessing technology) led President Gerald Ford to issue a Presidential directive to indefinitely suspend the commercial reprocessing and recycling of plutonium in the U.S. On 7 April 1977, President Jimmy Carter banned the reprocessing of commercial reactor spent nuclear fuel. ... ... the government has yet to find a single customer, despite offers of lucrative subsidies."
President Reagan lifted the ban in 1981, but did not provide the substantial subsidy that would have been necessary to start up commercial reprocessing."
"In March 1999, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) reversed its policy and signed a contract with a consortium of Duke Energy, COGEMA, and Stone & Webster (DCS) to design and operate a mixed oxide (MOX) fuel fabrication facility.
It's nothing to do with the ban on reprocessing that was only in place from 1977 to 1981, and everything to do with reprocessing being completely uneconomical. If we're going to reprocess, the government has to pay for it, as companies won't, but there are no technical or legislative barriers to doing so, as multiple other countries that are already reprocessing their waste demonstrate.
Echoing this thread.
Assessing G+ activity by counting public posts is like assessing a community's sexual activity by looking at marriage licenses.
That would be nuts.
This is a useless thread.
This podcast seems to be about tDCS, while Thync is appearantly "using transcranial pulsed ultrasound (tPU), transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) and other transcranial electrical stimulation (tES) methods".
I dated a woman who was involved in transcranial magnetic stimulation projects. She said it was like someone was flicking the inside of her brain, and similarly to tdcs, it had significant effects on her mental abilities: she'd sometimes be measurably better at math, or measurably worse at coming up with words during conversations. I hadn't heard of tpu before.
Have a patch that doesn't actually apply voltage, but vibrates or something like that. User still feels like he/she is getting some sort of effect, but there's no brain-zapping involved.
In the Radiolab discussion, they were doing tests with the woman who was doing the sniper training, both with and without the system running. She thought her performance was about the same, but the people analyzing it said it was dramatically different, because among the things affected was her perception of time. She felt like she was playing the game until she got killed, which was maybe a matter of a minute or two, but when she was playing really well, she was playing for much longer periods of time and didn't realize it.
As I recall, they specifically compared it to programmers who talk about The Zone, where they're coding very effectively and have reduced perception of the passage of time, and making the claim that the two effects, of heightened efficiency and reduced perception of time passage, may be related.
There was a recent Radiolab about this general technique, that's totally worth listening to: http://www.radiolab.org/story/...
(It's also a lot better-written than the summary.)
The idea is that by applying DC voltages to different parts of your skull, you can affect how your brain works. The theory is that the current passing across part of your brain changes how your brain learns from mistakes, messing with the pattern-acquisition feedback. In the story, they specifically concentrated on a woman training in a sniper video game, who was having to identify attackers vs. civilians, and how much it changed her ability to do that, but they also discussed a big underground scene of people trying this out at home for other purposes or just to learn about what happens. They were moving the contact patches around and then trying things to see what they were or weren't good at. One guy doing this found a spot that left him largely blind for several hours afterwards, so it's not all roses, but the people trying language acquisition and finding it much easier both to acquire and, later, post-treatment, to recall, new languages, really got me interested.
I seriously wonder why RS hasn't embraced the maker culture. It seems to me that they can only last another year trying to compete in consumer products and batteries.
Do you remember TechAmerica, RadioShack's last attempt to embrace the maker culture, in 1996? They opened five stores in major metro areas.
They were wonderful. I could go in and decide which 10-bit A/D I preferred. The guy behind the counter knew what a 74141 was.
They lasted five years. Over the three year lifetime of the Denver store, the electronics section got smaller, the toys and gadget section got larger, and they still didn't manage to make their rent.
After that, is it any surprise that their current maker section consists of half a dozen arduino boards and shields and a shelf of TH resistors in the back? How do you compete with Digikey, if you have to pay rent?
Oh, it can be both.
I'm just waiting for the day when some internet thugs not just encrypt your data, but hold your whole house for ransom until you pay up.
A friend who does hardware security has had to deal with an exploited internet-connected refrigerator that had been hacked into a spam relay.
So: wait until the day when internet thugs encrypt your data, hold your house for ransom, and while doing that, use your devices to attack other people's houses and encrypt their data, plus rent out your house's bandwidth to DDoS farms.
First off, In the late 90's Tektronix made a series of digital oscilloscopes that ran an embedded version of Windows 98.
As far as I know, every current Tek scope has either Windows (higher-end) or embedded Linux running it. All our 4000-series and up scopes have a mix of Win2K and XP, which is for us a disaster since we're not allowed to use them on the corporate network now that there's no longer any OS support for them. Weirdly, the Linux-based systems, which appear to have 2.2-era kernels, are freely allowed on the network and feature integral webservers so you can control them remotely without needing any fancy software.
"Colorado already proved that with the tax revenue they brought in from legalized marijuana"
Colorado probably got significantly increased business from being the first, surrounded by neighbours where it is still illegal. They probably even have increased secondary trade from people travelling in to get marijuana and then buying other stuff. Also, there's probably the effect of the novelty. I'm not saying there isn't a permanent increase, but it will be less if Nebraska and Oklahoma also legalise it.
"Probably even have increased secondary trade" doesn't even begin to cover it. My wife works in ophthalmology and she has four patients who have moved to colorado just because of pot. That's likewise cited as a primary reason that housing prices have increased recently. I find it hard to believe that people would uproot their lives just for weed, but it appears to be happening.
Colorado is making an estimated $1M/day in taxes on pot and that's probably significantly lower than the actual revenue, since because there are virtually no banks (one credit union) that'll deal with marijuana dispensaries, it's a cash-only business so the businesses could in theory only report as much business as they wish, and pocket the rest. If/when more financial institutions start dealing with them, and people feel they can use credit cards to pay for pot, the tax revenues are likely to increase.
It's also not clear that the novelty is outweighed by the convenience. There are a lot of people who didn't use pot previously because it was just a hassle to get and there was a bit of risk involved. The people I know who are long-term smokers have stayed with their black-market dealers because they know it's safe and it's cheaper. But people who want to use it occasionally, or don't know/want to deal with black-market stuff, is apparently a huge market. They may overwhelm the local novelty effect.
My wife has one because she can't fit any modern cellphone in her pockets, and her Veer finally died, so the phone lives in her handbag and she uses her watch. She can answer calls, talk, and hang up without (I believe) even having to touch it, and can send texts ("galaxy, send text. next patient has piece of steel stuck in eyeball, will need more lidocane.") which she then previews visually and tells it verbally to send, again without having to touch it. She's pretty thrilled with it. And it tells time. I'm not sure what else I'd want/need in a watch.
(I haven't gotten one because I destroy everything I touch so it'd be a waste. But I'm quite envious.)