Very unlikely. Humans have one fewer pair of chromosomes than any of the other primates (because two of their chromosomes fused to form one of ours) and a bunch of chromosomes have long sequences that are inverted compared to other primates' sequences. That's not to say it couldn't happen: horses and mules have a 1pair difference, and manage to produce (mostly sterile) offspring regularly, but that's rare. And, as someone else said and is discussed in more detail in the wholly wonderful book Elephants On Acid, scientists in the old Soviet Union tried repeatedly to make human/chimp hybrids using artificial insemination in volunteers, and never had any success. There have been documented cases of primates raping humans, as well, but again, no documented offspring. (There's a very creepy scene in -- I believe -- Farley Mowat's Woman In The Mists where he describes a woman researcher working for Diane Fossey being raped by a chimp while other researchers stood and watched. I know it was her group, but I don't remember if it was his book that discussed it.)
Re:hybrid nitrous oxide and rubber rocket engine-W
on
White Knight Two Unveiled
·
· Score: 2, Informative
If you look up "hybrid rocket" what you'll see is a lot of similar systems. Traditionally, rockets were either liquid fuel, where you mixed two liquids (oxygen and kerosine, oxygen and hydrogen, for example) or one block of solid fuel like the Thiokol system on the Space Shuttle boosters -- which is, itself, commonly referred to as rubber. A hybrid system uses a solid fuel and a liquid or gaseous oxidizer. Nitrous oxide works well. One interesting thing about it is that you can use just about anything that contains carbon as the solid fuel: rubber, a big stack of paper soaked in wax, or even the infamous Salami Rocket. ("That's what SHE said.") People who build big model rockets often use stacked wax paper discs because they hold up better than salami, and are easier to make than thiokol-type stuff (and they seem to burn more cleanly as well, compared to home-made polymer-type fuels.)
Who's the fscking idiot who thought having \0 indicate end-of-string was a good idea??!!?
I'm honestly curious, since I don't know enough about the problem to do more than ask questions: don't you need an end-of-string indicator of some type? Wouldn't any other end-of-string indicator do exactly the same thing? In other words, isn't this about the (bad) assumptions being made by the browser's URL parser, rather than about the inherent evil of a specific end-of-string delimiter?
>I've always found it sadly hypocritical that/. geeks who have so little patience with people making mistakes on technical issues, when said mistakes can easily be corrected by a little bit of reading, are comfortable making similarly blatantly wrong statements about the US Patent system, when said mistakes can easily be corrected my reading the freely available Manual of Patent Examination Procedure.
It's been my experience that people with the absolute worst case of pointy-hair-boss syndrome, the "if it's not part of my job it's probably trivially easy to do" mindset, are very smart people who are largely self-taught, and those people tend to go into engineering and computer science. I work in a building full of incredibly bright engineers who say the most amazing things. "Why on earth are granite countertops so expensive? It's just rock." "I can't believe how much kitchen cabinets cost. Anyone with a tablesaw and some plywood could make them just as good." "Artists are all overpaid: they just put some paint on a canvas, how hard is that?" I've actually heard my coworkers say every one of those things. They're right, too: it isn't that hard... if you want to spend most of your time over a period of six years, you, too, can learn art or cabinetry or how to be a lawyer. But it takes six years of hard work, and that's the part they conveniently forget in their haste to assure themselves that it must be easy.
The sad part is, as you say, that then those same people turn around and get irritated or offended when someone else says "oh, {engineering|programming} is just pushing around some numbers and typing some stuff." One of my English teachers once said "there's no real progress in computers: it's just typing up some simple instructions." She was just as right as an engineer who says "oh, there's nothing new in English literature: it's just some people talking about people."
To be fair, "I no longer care" is shorthand for the closely related "I no longer care enough to put up with the criticism" which is just a statement of cost/benefit analysis. He does care, but not enough to keep going, and that roughly approximates "I don't care".
>This often causes them to stop short, or to stop short, realize it, and then pull up to the light.
I truly don't get this. It's not dangerous, it doesn't really slow traffic down, but it confuses me more than almost any other traffic behavior. It also irritates me, I guess just because I think it's annoying. I'm talking specifically about the people who pull up to a red light and stop five or six carlengths behind the car ahead of them, sit there for a few seconds, then creep forward roughly half the distance, stop again, then creep forward again half the distance, until they're finally half a carlength behind the car ahead of them where they should (in my opinion) have stopped in the first place. Stopping short makes sense, sort of. Stopping short then pulling forward makes vague sense, if you squint. But creep/stop/creep/stop? What the hell? As I said up front: it's not dangerous, it doesn't slow things down. It's just *weird*.
You take an oxy-acetylene torch, adjust it to a fuel-rich flame, and point it at a big piece of metal, then scrape off the stuff deposited on the metal and separate out the diamonds from the buckminsterfullerine from the soot. Here's a journal article and here's one of the many patents.
>you can't fire someone because of race, sex, etc. even in an at-will state
While true, that's also irrelevant, because:
>It also means you can be fired without a reason.
So if they decide to fire you because of race, sex, etc., they merely fire you without a reason. You may have been fired because you're black, female, whatever, but as long as they're smart enough to not say so, they can indeed fire you because of your race or sex.
Calvary was a hill in Jerusalem where the Romans killed people. Cavalry is a bunch of angry gun-toting army dudes on horses, that ride in at the last moment to save the hero from a bad situation. I think you need the cavalry.
All the gravity-related sources of energy harvesting currently in use (at least that I'm aware of), which is to say hydroelectric power, rely on the same solar evaporation -> pure water running downstream process. They just extract it directly through turbines rather than through osmotic pressure. But it's still solar energy doing the heavy lifting, so to speak.
My understanding of the fresh water/salt water system is that there is negligible temperature differential, that they're relying entirely on the entropy of osmotic pressure, so I think the whole discussion of temperature is off-topic. TFA says nothing about temperature differential, only a sort of ion membrane system.
It's osmotic pressure. You have salty water and pure water, and there's a force produced when they contact, because the ions in the saltier water are driven by entropy into the less-salty water.
The energy you're stealing is solar power: the sun heats the salty water, evaporating out pure water, that goes up into the clouds and then rains, forming the rivers of pure water.
This is just a convoluted solar power system. But then again, so is everything else: wind, gravity, and more distantly, nuclear and oil.
The main environmental issue would be interfering with fish migration, for the many (very economically valuable) fish that live in the sea but spawn in rivers, like salmon. Which, by the way, are near miracles from a biochemistry standpoint, since they live part of their lives in the sea, where they're fighting to keep those same ions out of themselves because sea water has about twice the ion concentration as animal tissue so they have to maintain a more pure internal environment, and then they swim into fresh water, where they have to fight to keep from bleeding all their ions out, since many streams have about 1/2 or less the ion concentration as animal tissue. There aren't that many animals that can manage it.
>have you ever heard, even second-hand, of anyone doing that?
Yes. Robert Kearns, who invented the variable-speed windshield wiper and then spent the next 30 years sueing every automotive company in existence because he went to each one, explained his idea, tried to get them interested, and then saw every single one of them start using his idea within two years.
With that said, that is by far the exception. 99% of the time (probably more like 99.99%) you're exactly right: people don't care about new ideas because they know ideas are cheap and development is expensive and they're willing to wait until the inventor has shown the idea to be marketable and shown there to be a demand. The problem the poster is facing is that many inventors know about the very rare situations like Robert Kearns, and think their ideas are as brilliant as his and as ripe to be grabbed, because people routinely overestimate how talented and innovative they are and routinely underestimate how difficult it is to move a good idea to market.
Aphid babies. Because aphids are born pregnant (it's called telescopic pregnancy) so your generation time is *truly* short. 'course bacteria have a generation time of about 20 minutes, but I dunno if that counts, since the offspring aren't babies in any meaningful sense of the term.
The other plus of aphid babies is they pack to higher density than kittens unless you use a hydraulic compactor or something. (And if you do that, you have to make sure you don't have any snakes or stormtroopers in your compactor every time you run it, which is a drag.)
You joke, but my ex-gf used to wash her sandals in the dishwasher. I drew the "no, that's a BAD IDEA" line when we'd spent the day using liquid paint stripper on woodwork and scraping off all this goopy paint stripper/lead paint junk, then stepping in it, and she wanted to run her sandals through with a load of dishes. (My degree is in chemistry, hers was in mechanical engineering, so we had some differences of opinion on some issues.)
What, all those links, and you don't mention the Krupp earthmover, the largest piece of moving machinery in the world?
I'm also very surprised by this article. When my former company contracted to have a vacuum chamber built, that could fit a semi truck and trailer inside it, and transported from Minnesota to Colorado, we already knew the route they'd take before the vacuum chamber had finished constructing, because we knew its external dimensions and weight and the riggers who were going to move it had lists of all the roads it could and couldn't take. It was well-known information, and was required to get the interstate permits we needed to allow us to start the process of actually moving it. In other words, we were not allowed to ship something cross-country without a known-good and pre-approved route. So how do these guys get themselves in trouble, anyway?
Read about Planck's Law. It predicts the distribution of photons by frequency dependent on temperature. The scale is from wavelength = 0 to wavelength = inf, but the distribution is an asymmetric peak that goes to shorter wavelengths as the temperature increases. The extremely large majority of photons emitted by an object at 293K will be in the infrared, but a few will be visible, ultraviolet, and x-ray.
Mushroom cloud over Las Vegas, NV, from the university of las vegas photo collection. Here's another that's actually a photograph instead of a heavily retouched/colorized picture. These are from November, 1951.
In case anyone is wondering about real-world performance of megasquirt (which has always sounded to me like a bad porn movie title) my ex-boss built a megasquirt system for his 1985 Jeep. It took him over a year to get it working because he had a lot of problems getting the new mass air flow sensor to accurately measure the airflow (positioning it was fairly critical) but once he managed that, the system works beautifully. He's been using it for 5 years, including several cross-country drives and a lot of very serious offroading. He comes back from trips with the roof of his jeep bashed in -- that kind of offroading. It's given him better than 10% improvement on fuel economy, a little more power (hard to measure) and vastly better reliability, particularly in rough offroad conditions. Anyone who has ever done serious offroading in a stock carbureted '70's or '80's jeep knows about how poorly they can perform when the float starts sticking and the engine starts going into fuel starvation.
Anyway. He loves it and thinks it's the coolest thing ever.
>Power pilots make them regardless of whether there is any traffic
I make them because there might be traffic I don't see. I've flown into airports that had cropduster traffic, where the duster was doing straight-in landings from low altitude and didn't have a radio, but the guy manning the refuelling truck had a scanner and a handheld, so he let me know that there was someone already on final 4 km out, when I called turning onto base 500 meters off the end of the runway. Or when those idiots in their fancy KingAir were filing IFR and didn't bother to check local traffic, so I was on short final and suddenly there's a twin pulling out on the runway pointing right at me while other people on the CTAF, who knew where I was from my prior calls, started yelling. So there's some value to nattering on constantly on CTAF. (I try and keep it to a call at each turn of the pattern, fwiw.)
With all that said, I agree with your general opinion. We're talking about flying on the radio, and more specifically we're talking about what we're doing, because we are letting other people know for our and their safety. That's entirely different than having arguments about what's for dinner via cellphone while driving -- conversations that are both wholly unrelated to driving, taking a lot of extra thought, and often involving emotions that further distract.
I'd like to see cellphones restricted to only being able to call 911 if their location is moving more than 20 kph. Yeah, that'd inconvenience passengers, but we've gotten along for 150,000 years without being able to talk to each other every second of the day, and people who are driving should only be driving.
My then-gf made an ultrasound transducer -- as in physically assembled, as well as partly designing -- that was about 11mm long by 2mm in diameter. It was designed to be inserted into a (conscious) person's femoral artery, and run up inside the heart, through the valve into the atrium or ventricle. It could simultaneously image the inside of the heart and use ultrasound to locally fry parts of the heart that were contributing to fibrillations. Apparently after a heart attack sometimes there are sections of the heart that are damaged or isolated, so they can still contract but they don't do it at the right time. (Heart cells are somewhere between muscle and nerve: they have porous cell membranes and exchange ions with neighboring cells, which is how the heart does smooth contractions: one spot starts and then all the adjacent cells contract and the wave moves across the whole heart. If some sections can't communicate correctly, they just start contracting spontaneously at the wrong time.)
Apparently it wasn't particularly painful to the people receiving the treatment. But with that said, I got a couple massive transfusions of chilled blood one time after a car crash and I can tell you for sure that you can feel the inside of your heart when ice water hits it. It is not a good feeling.
Well, to be more precise, when you're flying you make your radio calls when *you* need to. I talk on the radio all the time while taking off and landing, since I fly out of uncontrolled airports, so I make a call as I turn onto final, to tell everyone that I'm, y'know, on the final approach path, and another when I've slowed down and am pulling off the runway, leaving it available for someone else. Likewise I make a call when I'm pulling onto the runway, and when I'm taking off and have gotten to 500 feet off the runway to let everyone know I'm clear of it. It would be rude, dangerous, and a bad idea to *not* do those.
But those are all about letting people know what I'm doing, which is in line with what I'm doing: they don't take much mental effort and I can sequence them for when I have time and attention. If something was wrong and I'd declared an emergency, I wouldn't be nattering on about my tail number, my location with respect to the runway, and who I was addressing, like I do when I'm flying the pattern: I'd be flying the airplane and only talking if I needed to tell the emergency people on the other end of the radio something vitally important.
Thing is -- religion *is* under attack, because it used to control everything, and now it doesn't. That's why it's under attack: it is slowly losing its power over people, governments, and countries. And unless/until it controls everything again, they'll keep on about how it's under attack. From their viewpoint, they're right. It's just that from the viewpoint of many religious people, not believing in God in the same way that they do, should be a crime.
Religion is under attack, and I say more power to the attackers.
>if the Government is going to mandate insurance, then it should also offer a base insurance program, at cost.
>Just one that covers the minimum insurance levels. If you want more, then you can buy more from an insurance company.
.
Almost nobody wants more insurance. In fact, almost nobody except for people who drive late-model expensive cars want *any* insurance. You buy insurance on behalf of the people you don't think you're ever going to hit, which is why the government requires it. If they didn't, nobody would get insurance. I remember the 1970's, where (in the area I live) the majority of accidents had at least one, and roughly a quarter of the time both, drivers uninsured. That meant subsequent lawsuits and oftentimes lousy post-emergency room medical care.
I think requiring insurance, and not offering a base insurance program, is seen as a way of keeping lousy drivers off the road: they can't get insurance any more. Of course, the alternate version of that is you have people driving without insurance because they can't get insurance, and that's right back into the bad old days. But at least it's illegal and they know it, so it might reduce the incidence somewhat.
Apoptosis, programmed cell death, is very easy to turn on, and very hard to turn off, because the body's usual mode of operation is to just make another cell. They're cheap. So you want them to die off if there's any doubt at all whether they're healthy. So if a cell suffers almost any damage, it just kills itself rather than risk cancer.
In the case of radiation poisoning, the problem is that so many cells die, that you die. If you can prevent them all dying, you can maybe handle the cancer issues from cells that were damaged such that they've become precancerous, later.
Slashdot Mirror
Very unlikely. Humans have one fewer pair of chromosomes than any of the other primates (because two of their chromosomes fused to form one of ours) and a bunch of chromosomes have long sequences that are inverted compared to other primates' sequences. That's not to say it couldn't happen: horses and mules have a 1pair difference, and manage to produce (mostly sterile) offspring regularly, but that's rare. And, as someone else said and is discussed in more detail in the wholly wonderful book Elephants On Acid , scientists in the old Soviet Union tried repeatedly to make human/chimp hybrids using artificial insemination in volunteers, and never had any success. There have been documented cases of primates raping humans, as well, but again, no documented offspring. (There's a very creepy scene in -- I believe -- Farley Mowat's Woman In The Mists where he describes a woman researcher working for Diane Fossey being raped by a chimp while other researchers stood and watched. I know it was her group, but I don't remember if it was his book that discussed it.)
If you look up "hybrid rocket" what you'll see is a lot of similar systems. Traditionally, rockets were either liquid fuel, where you mixed two liquids (oxygen and kerosine, oxygen and hydrogen, for example) or one block of solid fuel like the Thiokol system on the Space Shuttle boosters -- which is, itself, commonly referred to as rubber. A hybrid system uses a solid fuel and a liquid or gaseous oxidizer. Nitrous oxide works well. One interesting thing about it is that you can use just about anything that contains carbon as the solid fuel: rubber, a big stack of paper soaked in wax, or even the infamous Salami Rocket. ("That's what SHE said.") People who build big model rockets often use stacked wax paper discs because they hold up better than salami, and are easier to make than thiokol-type stuff (and they seem to burn more cleanly as well, compared to home-made polymer-type fuels.)
Who's the fscking idiot who thought having \0 indicate end-of-string was a good idea??!!?
I'm honestly curious, since I don't know enough about the problem to do more than ask questions: don't you need an end-of-string indicator of some type? Wouldn't any other end-of-string indicator do exactly the same thing? In other words, isn't this about the (bad) assumptions being made by the browser's URL parser, rather than about the inherent evil of a specific end-of-string delimiter?
>I've always found it sadly hypocritical that /. geeks who have so little patience with people making mistakes on technical issues, when said mistakes can easily be corrected by a little bit of reading, are comfortable making similarly blatantly wrong statements about the US Patent system, when said mistakes can easily be corrected my reading the freely available Manual of Patent Examination Procedure.
It's been my experience that people with the absolute worst case of pointy-hair-boss syndrome, the "if it's not part of my job it's probably trivially easy to do" mindset, are very smart people who are largely self-taught, and those people tend to go into engineering and computer science. I work in a building full of incredibly bright engineers who say the most amazing things. "Why on earth are granite countertops so expensive? It's just rock." "I can't believe how much kitchen cabinets cost. Anyone with a tablesaw and some plywood could make them just as good." "Artists are all overpaid: they just put some paint on a canvas, how hard is that?" I've actually heard my coworkers say every one of those things. They're right, too: it isn't that hard... if you want to spend most of your time over a period of six years, you, too, can learn art or cabinetry or how to be a lawyer. But it takes six years of hard work, and that's the part they conveniently forget in their haste to assure themselves that it must be easy.
The sad part is, as you say, that then those same people turn around and get irritated or offended when someone else says "oh, {engineering|programming} is just pushing around some numbers and typing some stuff." One of my English teachers once said "there's no real progress in computers: it's just typing up some simple instructions." She was just as right as an engineer who says "oh, there's nothing new in English literature: it's just some people talking about people."
To be fair, "I no longer care" is shorthand for the closely related "I no longer care enough to put up with the criticism" which is just a statement of cost/benefit analysis. He does care, but not enough to keep going, and that roughly approximates "I don't care".
Actually, the number of flying cars I've seen up to now was very low. :-)
I've seen two and been in one. Unless the car was specifically designed to fly, I can very, very strongly recommend against trying it.
>This often causes them to stop short, or to stop short, realize it, and then pull up to the light.
I truly don't get this. It's not dangerous, it doesn't really slow traffic down, but it confuses me more than almost any other traffic behavior. It also irritates me, I guess just because I think it's annoying. I'm talking specifically about the people who pull up to a red light and stop five or six carlengths behind the car ahead of them, sit there for a few seconds, then creep forward roughly half the distance, stop again, then creep forward again half the distance, until they're finally half a carlength behind the car ahead of them where they should (in my opinion) have stopped in the first place. Stopping short makes sense, sort of. Stopping short then pulling forward makes vague sense, if you squint. But creep/stop/creep/stop? What the hell? As I said up front: it's not dangerous, it doesn't slow things down. It's just *weird*.
You take an oxy-acetylene torch, adjust it to a fuel-rich flame, and point it at a big piece of metal, then scrape off the stuff deposited on the metal and separate out the diamonds from the buckminsterfullerine from the soot. Here's a journal article and here's one of the many patents.
>you can't fire someone because of race, sex, etc. even in an at-will state
While true, that's also irrelevant, because:
>It also means you can be fired without a reason.
So if they decide to fire you because of race, sex, etc., they merely fire you without a reason. You may have been fired because you're black, female, whatever, but as long as they're smart enough to not say so, they can indeed fire you because of your race or sex.
> calvary-needed-no-questions-asked dept.
Calvary was a hill in Jerusalem where the Romans killed people. Cavalry is a bunch of angry gun-toting army dudes on horses, that ride in at the last moment to save the hero from a bad situation. I think you need the cavalry.
All the gravity-related sources of energy harvesting currently in use (at least that I'm aware of), which is to say hydroelectric power, rely on the same solar evaporation -> pure water running downstream process. They just extract it directly through turbines rather than through osmotic pressure. But it's still solar energy doing the heavy lifting, so to speak.
My understanding of the fresh water/salt water system is that there is negligible temperature differential, that they're relying entirely on the entropy of osmotic pressure, so I think the whole discussion of temperature is off-topic. TFA says nothing about temperature differential, only a sort of ion membrane system.
It's osmotic pressure. You have salty water and pure water, and there's a force produced when they contact, because the ions in the saltier water are driven by entropy into the less-salty water.
The energy you're stealing is solar power: the sun heats the salty water, evaporating out pure water, that goes up into the clouds and then rains, forming the rivers of pure water.
This is just a convoluted solar power system. But then again, so is everything else: wind, gravity, and more distantly, nuclear and oil.
The main environmental issue would be interfering with fish migration, for the many (very economically valuable) fish that live in the sea but spawn in rivers, like salmon. Which, by the way, are near miracles from a biochemistry standpoint, since they live part of their lives in the sea, where they're fighting to keep those same ions out of themselves because sea water has about twice the ion concentration as animal tissue so they have to maintain a more pure internal environment, and then they swim into fresh water, where they have to fight to keep from bleeding all their ions out, since many streams have about 1/2 or less the ion concentration as animal tissue. There aren't that many animals that can manage it.
>have you ever heard, even second-hand, of anyone doing that?
Yes. Robert Kearns, who invented the variable-speed windshield wiper and then spent the next 30 years sueing every automotive company in existence because he went to each one, explained his idea, tried to get them interested, and then saw every single one of them start using his idea within two years.
With that said, that is by far the exception. 99% of the time (probably more like 99.99%) you're exactly right: people don't care about new ideas because they know ideas are cheap and development is expensive and they're willing to wait until the inventor has shown the idea to be marketable and shown there to be a demand. The problem the poster is facing is that many inventors know about the very rare situations like Robert Kearns, and think their ideas are as brilliant as his and as ripe to be grabbed, because people routinely overestimate how talented and innovative they are and routinely underestimate how difficult it is to move a good idea to market.
Aphid babies. Because aphids are born pregnant (it's called telescopic pregnancy) so your generation time is *truly* short. 'course bacteria have a generation time of about 20 minutes, but I dunno if that counts, since the offspring aren't babies in any meaningful sense of the term.
The other plus of aphid babies is they pack to higher density than kittens unless you use a hydraulic compactor or something. (And if you do that, you have to make sure you don't have any snakes or stormtroopers in your compactor every time you run it, which is a drag.)
You joke, but my ex-gf used to wash her sandals in the dishwasher. I drew the "no, that's a BAD IDEA" line when we'd spent the day using liquid paint stripper on woodwork and scraping off all this goopy paint stripper/lead paint junk, then stepping in it, and she wanted to run her sandals through with a load of dishes. (My degree is in chemistry, hers was in mechanical engineering, so we had some differences of opinion on some issues.)
What, all those links, and you don't mention the Krupp earthmover, the largest piece of moving machinery in the world?
I'm also very surprised by this article. When my former company contracted to have a vacuum chamber built, that could fit a semi truck and trailer inside it, and transported from Minnesota to Colorado, we already knew the route they'd take before the vacuum chamber had finished constructing, because we knew its external dimensions and weight and the riggers who were going to move it had lists of all the roads it could and couldn't take. It was well-known information, and was required to get the interstate permits we needed to allow us to start the process of actually moving it. In other words, we were not allowed to ship something cross-country without a known-good and pre-approved route. So how do these guys get themselves in trouble, anyway?
Read about Planck's Law. It predicts the distribution of photons by frequency dependent on temperature. The scale is from wavelength = 0 to wavelength = inf, but the distribution is an asymmetric peak that goes to shorter wavelengths as the temperature increases. The extremely large majority of photons emitted by an object at 293K will be in the infrared, but a few will be visible, ultraviolet, and x-ray.
Mushroom cloud over Las Vegas, NV, from the university of las vegas photo collection. Here's another that's actually a photograph instead of a heavily retouched/colorized picture. These are from November, 1951.
In case anyone is wondering about real-world performance of megasquirt (which has always sounded to me like a bad porn movie title) my ex-boss built a megasquirt system for his 1985 Jeep. It took him over a year to get it working because he had a lot of problems getting the new mass air flow sensor to accurately measure the airflow (positioning it was fairly critical) but once he managed that, the system works beautifully. He's been using it for 5 years, including several cross-country drives and a lot of very serious offroading. He comes back from trips with the roof of his jeep bashed in -- that kind of offroading. It's given him better than 10% improvement on fuel economy, a little more power (hard to measure) and vastly better reliability, particularly in rough offroad conditions. Anyone who has ever done serious offroading in a stock carbureted '70's or '80's jeep knows about how poorly they can perform when the float starts sticking and the engine starts going into fuel starvation.
Anyway. He loves it and thinks it's the coolest thing ever.
>Power pilots make them regardless of whether there is any traffic
I make them because there might be traffic I don't see. I've flown into airports that had cropduster traffic, where the duster was doing straight-in landings from low altitude and didn't have a radio, but the guy manning the refuelling truck had a scanner and a handheld, so he let me know that there was someone already on final 4 km out, when I called turning onto base 500 meters off the end of the runway. Or when those idiots in their fancy KingAir were filing IFR and didn't bother to check local traffic, so I was on short final and suddenly there's a twin pulling out on the runway pointing right at me while other people on the CTAF, who knew where I was from my prior calls, started yelling. So there's some value to nattering on constantly on CTAF. (I try and keep it to a call at each turn of the pattern, fwiw.)
With all that said, I agree with your general opinion. We're talking about flying on the radio, and more specifically we're talking about what we're doing, because we are letting other people know for our and their safety. That's entirely different than having arguments about what's for dinner via cellphone while driving -- conversations that are both wholly unrelated to driving, taking a lot of extra thought, and often involving emotions that further distract.
I'd like to see cellphones restricted to only being able to call 911 if their location is moving more than 20 kph. Yeah, that'd inconvenience passengers, but we've gotten along for 150,000 years without being able to talk to each other every second of the day, and people who are driving should only be driving.
My then-gf made an ultrasound transducer -- as in physically assembled, as well as partly designing -- that was about 11mm long by 2mm in diameter. It was designed to be inserted into a (conscious) person's femoral artery, and run up inside the heart, through the valve into the atrium or ventricle. It could simultaneously image the inside of the heart and use ultrasound to locally fry parts of the heart that were contributing to fibrillations. Apparently after a heart attack sometimes there are sections of the heart that are damaged or isolated, so they can still contract but they don't do it at the right time. (Heart cells are somewhere between muscle and nerve: they have porous cell membranes and exchange ions with neighboring cells, which is how the heart does smooth contractions: one spot starts and then all the adjacent cells contract and the wave moves across the whole heart. If some sections can't communicate correctly, they just start contracting spontaneously at the wrong time.)
Apparently it wasn't particularly painful to the people receiving the treatment. But with that said, I got a couple massive transfusions of chilled blood one time after a car crash and I can tell you for sure that you can feel the inside of your heart when ice water hits it. It is not a good feeling.
Well, to be more precise, when you're flying you make your radio calls when *you* need to. I talk on the radio all the time while taking off and landing, since I fly out of uncontrolled airports, so I make a call as I turn onto final, to tell everyone that I'm, y'know, on the final approach path, and another when I've slowed down and am pulling off the runway, leaving it available for someone else. Likewise I make a call when I'm pulling onto the runway, and when I'm taking off and have gotten to 500 feet off the runway to let everyone know I'm clear of it. It would be rude, dangerous, and a bad idea to *not* do those.
But those are all about letting people know what I'm doing, which is in line with what I'm doing: they don't take much mental effort and I can sequence them for when I have time and attention. If something was wrong and I'd declared an emergency, I wouldn't be nattering on about my tail number, my location with respect to the runway, and who I was addressing, like I do when I'm flying the pattern: I'd be flying the airplane and only talking if I needed to tell the emergency people on the other end of the radio something vitally important.
Religion is under attack, and I say more power to the attackers.
>Just one that covers the minimum insurance levels. If you want more, then you can buy more from an insurance company.
Almost nobody wants more insurance. In fact, almost nobody except for people who drive late-model expensive cars want *any* insurance. You buy insurance on behalf of the people you don't think you're ever going to hit, which is why the government requires it. If they didn't, nobody would get insurance. I remember the 1970's, where (in the area I live) the majority of accidents had at least one, and roughly a quarter of the time both, drivers uninsured. That meant subsequent lawsuits and oftentimes lousy post-emergency room medical care.
I think requiring insurance, and not offering a base insurance program, is seen as a way of keeping lousy drivers off the road: they can't get insurance any more. Of course, the alternate version of that is you have people driving without insurance because they can't get insurance, and that's right back into the bad old days. But at least it's illegal and they know it, so it might reduce the incidence somewhat.
In the case of radiation poisoning, the problem is that so many cells die, that you die. If you can prevent them all dying, you can maybe handle the cancer issues from cells that were damaged such that they've become precancerous, later.
The other thing that's interesting about this, to me, is that there are indications that people who have had heart attacks or hypothermia don't die from those, but from a massive wave of programmed cell death as a result of, essentially, misinterpreting the results of the heart attack/hypothermia: big fluctuations in oxygen levels and ion concentrations, that make the cells all think they're individually damaged and cause them to die en masse. If this could be used to stop that process, it could save millions of lives every year, not just the very few people who have radiation poisoning.