I can't give you maximum numbers, but I can tell you that I've flown a Cessna 172 backwards. The headwind was faster than 1.3 times the stall speed so I was trying to land and getting blown backwards away from the airport.
Obviously that's less of a problem when you're flying at Mach 0.85, but the winds up there are also faster. The jetstream has been measured at almost 400 km/hour. That's unusual, but gives you an idea of what winds aloft can do.
The error in GPS-reported speed at reasonable speeds is incredibly small, for what that's worth.
I may be wrong but it's my understanding that in order for an aircraft to be certified for flight into known icing conditions, the pitot tube must be heated. The question is whether the certification testing was sufficiently rigorous; it's possible this Airbus (and, apparently, several others) were flown in conditions that made the pitot tubes unreliable, but weren't encountered during simulations or testing. The amount of heat required to keep something ice-free in icing conditions at near-transonic speed is *enormous*, and doing so while keeping the readings accurate is a pretty serious engineering problem.
The functional word in your post is 'successful'. Early puberty can be successful, based purely on arithmatic: if two individuals have the same number of children, but one is having them 10% faster than the other, after 7 generations, the one that's having kids sooner will represent about 2/3 the total population.
This is why aphids exhibit telescopic pregnancy, where the females are born already pregnant. Within a population, earlier child-bearing tends to increase reproductive success.
There are reproductive strategies that rely on a few children raised carefully (humans, elephants) and reproductive strategies that rely on millions of children with no attempt at raising (salmon, trees.) Both are successful in some niches. But what I'm saying is that within any single population, it's likely that short reproductive cycles will tend to be highly competitive.
A friend of mine claims that it's because of radiation. Very high elevations mean much more solar radiation. His claim is that radiation levels were hundreds of times higher 50 million years ago when animals were evolving defenses to deal with parasites and infection, and that we're not dealing so well with the reduced levels as we move down the half-lives of various radionuclides. He does have a PhD in nuclear physics, for what that's worth.
I personally think it's low humidity, lower oxygen pressure (reducing oxidative damage) and in part selection: people who are sickly don't stay in high-altitude areas because they generally have less specialist medical care. I grew up in one of those little mountain towns in Colorado and older people said "it's hard to breathe: I'm moving to Florida" where they died.
There are *so* many variables that I'd be really reluctant to draw any conclusions. I hate to pull the 'correlation is not causation' card, insofar as my general response is "while it might not be causation, it's a very good place to start looking for causes" but this is a seriously complex case.
In the US, out of some 20,000 counties, eight of the top ten counties for longest lifespan are along the Continental Divide in Colorado, which makes no sense at all from a families-sticking-together mindset -- indeed, the lowest lifespans are seen in counties that have old American Indian reservations where family and community life is both important and preserved.
I think the Japanese do well because they score better on (from the link) "tobacco, alcohol, obesity, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diet and physical inactivity" scale.
But I would like to think that family/community tradition is a part of it.
If I had a social engineering rifle, I'd be going through a lot of ammo... But I think we *have* created an environment that does, by building such intricate communities and engaging so heavily in health care and stuff. There are very, very, very few animals that have longer average lifespans than humans. (Sharks, tortoises, and possibly some parrots, are the only ones that come to mind, and I *believe* those are mostly because those are animals that have little predation in their natural environments, so they have less need to reproduce as quickly as possible.) One thing about evolution that isn't well-understood by the world at large, is that it has to work with what it currently has. Humans aren't likely to develop the ability to see electric fields any time soon, because there's no existing framework. We have trillions of generations of ancestors focussed on reproducing quickly because they lived in environments where that was favored. It's difficult to find a path that diverges from such a strong existing trend: there's very little to work with. Plus, there are a number of different aging mechanisms. It's a weakest-link-of-the-chain sort of situation. The mechanisms tend to all equilibrate at one general area, as a result of neutral genetic drift (if one aging mechanism tends to kill people at 90 and another at 140, the one at 140 has nothing pushing it to stay there so it can drift down to 90 without affecting anything; over time it will probably tend to do this. Repeat with a half-dozen mechanisms that seem to be indicated in aging.)
Which is all a very long way of saying that I'm guessing we're in an ecological niche that does select for longer lifespans, and we're seeing the results of it, but our genes don't give evolution a lot of material to work with so we might not get much more than we currently have.
Another way of looking at aging is that the evolutionary race is to have children, as many as possible, as quickly as possible. Animals who sacrifice their long-term prospects in favor of getting to reproductive age more quickly, are likely to be highly competitive. There are a lot of biologists who claim there isn't any reason humans can't live as long as Galapagos Tortoises (who seem to live 200 or 300 years) but our environment doesn't select for old age. Anything you do after you've had some kids is just noise, as far as evolution is concerned. (Until, as you say, you develop culture and/or spend time caring for relatives' children, which tends to propagate your genes in a more diffuse manner.)
While generally I agree with you -- and more to the point, I *want* to agree with you -- I have to say that when I went to Iceland, the least genetically diverse place in the world (I've read, in multiple places) I could not believe how many amazingly beautiful women I saw. Of course, they all looked nearly identical, but it was a very nice identical.
Since I can't get to the article for whatever reason, I have to speculate. Does the article say that the carbon laminate was intended specifically and primarily to reduce radar signature? Because if I were designing a jet intended to go transonic, using wood, I'd sure put carbon laminate over the leading edge just to keep the wings from falling off. Even primitive carbon laminates available then had superb stiffness per cross-sectional area, and in tension would give an *enormous* amount of stiffness and strength to the wing in exactly the direction it needs it. A majority of modern aircraft designs use a high modulus of elasticity fabric adhered to the surface of a thick layer of low-density material, as their basic system of fuselage and wing construction. That's exactly what this is.
As an aside, the Germans also pioneered use of bubble-filled polyurethane rubber coatings on submarines to reduce their sonar signature by 30 dB, a technology not imitated by either the US or the USSR until the 1970's. <a href="http://www.stormfront.org/forum/showthread.php?t=594958">Here's an article</a> about it. There's a better one on Wikipedia but I can't find it right now.
I'd like to think that. I got a copy of Stardust recently, on DVD. I have libdvdcss2 installed. I also have VLC, Ogle, mplayer, the kmplayer front end, and some other videoplayer that escapes me. None will play Stardust. They'll play the deleted scenes, the additional material, the theatrical trailer, the advertising, but the moment the menu to choose *which* of those things I want to play, or play the main movie, it dies. I can't watch the main movie with any video player I've tried. I'm assuming it's because of menu support, but I can't figure out how to fix it, what else I have to install to get it working. Oh, but wait, you say, maybe the disc is injured (brand new, right out of the box, subsequently played on Windows and on my DVD player.) Well, maybe it's just Stardust. Yeah, that's true. But it's also three or four other discs I have. And the depressing thing was I had a roommate and my girlfriend both hooked on linux until they couldn't play a few of their DVD's. Now they use linux sometimes, when they're browsing the web, but are spending increasing amounts of time in Windows, because it'll do all that and play all their DVD's, too. *sigh*
Go to your local library and find a copy of the annotated version of Jane Austen's Pride And Prejudice. It's this one but you're not allowed to buy it from Amazon. You have to go to libraries and find it. Because that way you'll be going out and talking to people and hanging out in libraries and there are lots of interesting people there. Pride & Prejudice is the uber-chick-lit book, the best of them all. It's intellectual and it's completely apropos to this discussion. First off, if you're walking around working your way through P&P, people are going to notice, and they're going to form some prejudices about what sort of person you are. It's the exact opposite image of an O'Reilly book. Second off, you have something to talk about: the uber-chic-lit book. Thirdly, the book itself is talking about people and their styles of interaction as related to their personal code of morality. Mr. Darcy is a stereotypical libertarian geek: he decides what is Right, and sticks with it no matter what, even when events and evidence indicate his original choice was wrong, and he has to learn why that's a bad idea. Jane is a stereotypical girl: she tries to like everyone and make excuses for anything bad anyone does and ignore evidence that people are cruel and selfish. Elizabeth is somewhere between the two, Jane Austen's version of the nearly ideal woman, and learns how to deal with people, and her own prejudices and impulsiveness, as the book progresses. It's one of the best novels ever written, and if you read it and understand it -- which is why I recommend the annotated version, because the remarks on particularly tricky bits of verbal code are pretty essential to understanding the flow of Austen's program -- you'll have a better understanding of people in general. And, again, you'll impress the people you want to impress far more for being in the process of reading, or having read, P&P, than the latest Linux TCP/IP Stack Code And Documentation book.
A couple weeks ago, a friend wanted to go to a concert, so I volunteered to take care of her two kids, ages 3 and 2, for the evening. We went over to a local park to mess about in fountains and dig holes in dirt. Now, I have a girlfriend -- who, by the way, I met online, by volunteering to help teach people basic bike mechanics and repair for a group of Burning Man enthusiasts who were going on bike rides together but didn't really know how to work on their bikes -- but that's only relevant to the overall thread, not to this response in particular.
So there we are, me and the two kids, tooling around, braiding up dandelion stems into boat-like things and throwing them in the lake. Women *kept* coming up and talking. Scads of them. Oodles, even.
However, I have a vital suggestion if you go down this route: take a box of kleenex or the like. Coz the two kids decided to run in opposite directions at the same time, smashed into each other, and the younger one fell like a drunk, right on his little face, and got a bloody nose and a fat lip, and it apparently really kills every bit of your child-care savoir faire if you're walking around with a kid who has blood all over his face. Like, the conversations with the cute ladies go somewhat like this: "Oh, your kids are SO CUTE! What are their... oh. Uh. What happened?" "Hi, I'm the bad babysitter, I forgot to bring kleenex to clean up messes when kids fall on their faces." "Oh..."
What's funny about this comment, and this whole discussion, is how the American public regards the FDA. I've had this discussion before with other friends who were avidly interested in homeopathic medicine and very upset that the packaging had to include all the weasel words of "this product may reduce (symptoms) but these statements have not been evaluated by the FDA" sort.
The FDA was established in the aftermath of a number of food additive scandals, particularly the publishing of Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle", where he asserted that the meatpacking industry regularly dumped sawdust, talc, and other bulk materials into processed meat, and sometimes left people who'd fallen into meatprocessing machinery go through the processing system and end up in the meat. The US public demanded that the government get into the food regulation business, which neither the food industry nor the government particularly wanted, but after enormous public pressure, the Federal government finally set up the FDA as a regulatory agency rather than just the food chemistry research group it had been formerly.
Once that was in place, the drug industry moved to change how it worked to raise the cost of entry: by working with the FDA to set up very rigorous drug-testing specifications, they made it very difficult for new entrants into the field. So in the 1970's, during the rise of the alternative lifestyle movement, it was basically impossible to get anything in the way of alternative medicines on the market, any market: you couldn't even sell herbs from the trunk of your VW microbus without running the risk of getting arrested.
So, again, there was an enormous amount of public pressure on the Federal government to change how things worked, so Congress changed what the FDA could regulate to create an exemption for alternative medicines, by allowing them to be sold if they used weasel words, essentially: if they were sold as just herbs, with non-binding advice on what they might be useful for treating.
With that established, lots of companies moved into that space, and are still selling things that do have known pharmacological effects, as alternative medicines. But they're doing it under laws that were established by massive public demand, demand that still exists, so it's a sort of no-win situation for the Federal government.
The stuff in question is specifically not marketed as an attempt to cure or prevent disease, it's just marketed as a treatment that may alleviate symptoms or words to that effect. But that's a sham because everyone using it knows that the company intends it to cure or prevent a disease.
If you rigorously force drug manufacturers to show what they're producing are A: safe, and B: effective at doing what they claim, you'll cut out enormous swathes of alternative medicine because it costs too much (and many medicines *aren't* safe, even though they're effective: aspirin wouldn't pass current FDA certification tests.) If you don't force drug manufacturers to live up to those standards, you get what we see here: a drug that has a nasty, dangerous, permanent side-effect. But at the end of the day, most effective drugs *do* have occasional nasty, dangerous, permanent side-effects.
I would like to see more rigorous regulation of the alternative medicine field, because there are some very scary things being sold and used. However, requiring that drugs be safe restricts the market to near-uselessness. (No anti-cancer drug is anything like 'safe'.)
We need something between what we have now, and "safe".
>The challenging part is that yeah, if I have the choice to prevent my future kids from developing life-shortening diseases, I've got to do it.
So that's the problem, then, isn't it: what counts as life-shortening diseases? There's a correlation between being left-handed and dying of accidents. So you'd want to select for a right-handed kid. There's a correlation between height and income: tall people make more. There's a correlation between income and average lifespan. So you'd want to have a tall right-handed kid. You can see where this is going: if you want to, you can justify almost any selection criterion as being life-extending, or at least life-enhancing. There's no good line to draw.
I will. It's tricky because the disc is write-protected by damaging a sector. The boot process attempts to write to that sector and if it succeeds, the boot fails. It's also MFM. I have a description of the location where the damage is, so I can replicate it, but that, in combination with the hardware issues, has led me to be pessimistic about the whole project. But I'll look into the catweasel: thank you.
The Amiga 1000 had a DB25 serial port and a DB25 parallel port right beside each other. Same connector. They thoughtfully provided a bunch of +12V, -12V, and -5V lines on the serial port in case you needed to power external equipment. So, if you mistakenly plugged your parallel printer cable into the serial port you put +/-12v into the input buffer of your printer. A lot of people burnt out a lot of printers that way. The 2000 used the opposite-polarity DB25 and subsequent ones used a DB9, IIRC.
I have a network analyzer that uses a 5 1/2" drive as part of its operating system, so it has to read from the disc every time it boots and every time I do any GPIB access to the machine. The machine can't copy the disc and it's a non-standard drive hardware so it can't easily be read/written in another 5 1/2" drive. Sigh.
>Nevertheless, pseudo-scientists always argue that scientists have some vested interest in preserving the current order (and thus dooming their careers into obscurity when they could have become famous Nobel prize winners). This argument has never made any sense, but that doesn't stop them from making it.
It makes perfect sense from the perspective of history: it's what societies and churches have always done in the past. The idea that science works differently than most of recorded history, that it's not only open to change and contradiction but that's actually what drives it, isn't clear to most people -- including many scientists. Look at how roundly and thoroughly Alfred Wegener was attacked when he first proposed plate tectonics: he died in a snowstorm in the Arctic because he couldn't find a job anywhere else.
>Nobody is saying that the iron itself is magnetic (because then it would be magnetite and not iron anyway).
I'm a little confused by this. There's lots and lots of iron that's magnetic but isn't magnetite. Magnetite and hematite are both iron oxides; magnetite happens to be magnetic, while hematite isn't. (Well, technically, hematite is antiferromagnetic until it's reasonably hot, at which point it's a type of antiferromagnetic that makes it act magnetic, but that's not something you're ever going to notice unless you're a geek with good equipment.)
The more critical point here is the Curie point, the temperature above which iron is non-ferromagnetic. That's way below the temperature of molten iron, and we assume the core of the planet is molten. As such (if the Curie point isn't pressure-sensitive, which I don't know anything about) we can feel pretty confident that the iron core isn't ferromagnetic, but that it has a magnetic field induced by motion.
>no guarantee that it won't peter out like the 1976 fiasco.
The 1976 fiasco was only a fiasco because everyone didn't die. That's the thing with firefighting: if you're lucky it doesn't kill everyone; if you're fast enough at the very beginning it doesn't kill everyone, and if you're neither, it kills everyone. But you have no way, a priori, of knowing whether you're going to be lucky or not, so if you have any sense whatsoever, you react quickly and vigorously. Even if it means that the inoculations kill more people than the disease would have, because the alternative could be 100 million deaths.
Oh, I know -- it's hard for me to believe, too, since I live at 10,000 feet and feel the effects heavily. Here are a bunch of reports about flocks of birds at 25,000-27,000 feet (including flocks of migrating geese.) I can't find an easily linkable cite to the 37,000 foot case, but here's a pdf, from which I quote: "Collision between a vulture and an aircraft at an altitude of 37,000 feet. -- On 29 November 1973, a Ruppell's Griffon (Gyps rueppellii) collided with a commercial aircraft at 37,000 feet ofer Abijan, Ivory Coast, western Africa. The altitude is that recorded by teh pilot shortly after the impact, wichh damaged one of the aircraft's engines and caused it to be shut down. The plane landed safely at Abijian without further incident. The remains of the vulture consisted of five complete and 15 partial feathers from the wings (secondaries, lesser, and underwing coverts), tail, neck and breast."
It goes on to cite other over-25,000 ft collisions and observations.
Canada geese are big. They start at 6 1/2 pounds and go up to just under 20 pounds. And not that this matters too much with a jet, but they're also fairly fast fliers: I've been passed by Canada Geese while taking off in a Cessna, which puts them in the 60 mph range.
Building a vehicle that can handle a 450 mph collision with a 15-20 pound object is intrinsically difficult. Military tanks can do it, but their acceleration over about 60mph is terrible. I don't know of any other vehicles that could handle this sort of impact without getting very bent and broken.
And you can't just use elevation, either: I've read pilot reports of birds seen at 37,000 feet above ground level.
Revolution isn't about justice. Civil war isn't about justice. Sometimes it might be necessary, to remove a regime that has subverted the justice system. But it's still not justice.
And the actions given in the article -- where the vigilantes are anonymous, and stand little or zero risk for their actions -- are *particularly* not justice because they have no perceived risk. The people who ran the American Revolution put their lives on the line, as did the people in Tiananmen Square, and many of them died. That's admirable, even if it's not justice.
But people anonymous-calling someone's job to get that person fired, or putting on white sheets and hanging someone they don't like, is vigilanteism.
And you're right: they don't care what I think about vigilanteism. That doesn't make what they're doing right, or admirable.
This is just an extension of Internet flaming into RL. People who feel passionately about something, and think they have a decent chance of remaining anonymous, have a strong incentive to screw up someone's life. Consider a few months back when someone posted the RL address of a spam king and people promptly flooded his house with tons of mail-order catalogs and magazines. (But most slashdotters seemed to approve of that...)
Justice involves a non-biased judge and written laws. Mobs aren't about justice, even if what they do sometimes seems attractive.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't give you maximum numbers, but I can tell you that I've flown a Cessna 172 backwards. The headwind was faster than 1.3 times the stall speed so I was trying to land and getting blown backwards away from the airport.
Obviously that's less of a problem when you're flying at Mach 0.85, but the winds up there are also faster. The jetstream has been measured at almost 400 km/hour. That's unusual, but gives you an idea of what winds aloft can do.
The error in GPS-reported speed at reasonable speeds is incredibly small, for what that's worth.
I may be wrong but it's my understanding that in order for an aircraft to be certified for flight into known icing conditions, the pitot tube must be heated. The question is whether the certification testing was sufficiently rigorous; it's possible this Airbus (and, apparently, several others) were flown in conditions that made the pitot tubes unreliable, but weren't encountered during simulations or testing.
The amount of heat required to keep something ice-free in icing conditions at near-transonic speed is *enormous*, and doing so while keeping the readings accurate is a pretty serious engineering problem.
Boy do I not want to work for that particular department.
I linked to page 2, which had the bit about the longest-lived counties. Page 1 is here, from whence the quote.
This is why aphids exhibit telescopic pregnancy, where the females are born already pregnant. Within a population, earlier child-bearing tends to increase reproductive success.
There are reproductive strategies that rely on a few children raised carefully (humans, elephants) and reproductive strategies that rely on millions of children with no attempt at raising (salmon, trees.) Both are successful in some niches. But what I'm saying is that within any single population, it's likely that short reproductive cycles will tend to be highly competitive.
I personally think it's low humidity, lower oxygen pressure (reducing oxidative damage) and in part selection: people who are sickly don't stay in high-altitude areas because they generally have less specialist medical care. I grew up in one of those little mountain towns in Colorado and older people said "it's hard to breathe: I'm moving to Florida" where they died.
In the US, out of some 20,000 counties, eight of the top ten counties for longest lifespan are along the Continental Divide in Colorado, which makes no sense at all from a families-sticking-together mindset -- indeed, the lowest lifespans are seen in counties that have old American Indian reservations where family and community life is both important and preserved.
I think the Japanese do well because they score better on (from the link) "tobacco, alcohol, obesity, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diet and physical inactivity" scale.
But I would like to think that family/community tradition is a part of it.
If I had a social engineering rifle, I'd be going through a lot of ammo...
But I think we *have* created an environment that does, by building such intricate communities and engaging so heavily in health care and stuff. There are very, very, very few animals that have longer average lifespans than humans. (Sharks, tortoises, and possibly some parrots, are the only ones that come to mind, and I *believe* those are mostly because those are animals that have little predation in their natural environments, so they have less need to reproduce as quickly as possible.)
One thing about evolution that isn't well-understood by the world at large, is that it has to work with what it currently has. Humans aren't likely to develop the ability to see electric fields any time soon, because there's no existing framework. We have trillions of generations of ancestors focussed on reproducing quickly because they lived in environments where that was favored. It's difficult to find a path that diverges from such a strong existing trend: there's very little to work with.
Plus, there are a number of different aging mechanisms. It's a weakest-link-of-the-chain sort of situation. The mechanisms tend to all equilibrate at one general area, as a result of neutral genetic drift (if one aging mechanism tends to kill people at 90 and another at 140, the one at 140 has nothing pushing it to stay there so it can drift down to 90 without affecting anything; over time it will probably tend to do this. Repeat with a half-dozen mechanisms that seem to be indicated in aging.)
Which is all a very long way of saying that I'm guessing we're in an ecological niche that does select for longer lifespans, and we're seeing the results of it, but our genes don't give evolution a lot of material to work with so we might not get much more than we currently have.
Another way of looking at aging is that the evolutionary race is to have children, as many as possible, as quickly as possible. Animals who sacrifice their long-term prospects in favor of getting to reproductive age more quickly, are likely to be highly competitive. There are a lot of biologists who claim there isn't any reason humans can't live as long as Galapagos Tortoises (who seem to live 200 or 300 years) but our environment doesn't select for old age. Anything you do after you've had some kids is just noise, as far as evolution is concerned. (Until, as you say, you develop culture and/or spend time caring for relatives' children, which tends to propagate your genes in a more diffuse manner.)
While generally I agree with you -- and more to the point, I *want* to agree with you -- I have to say that when I went to Iceland, the least genetically diverse place in the world (I've read, in multiple places) I could not believe how many amazingly beautiful women I saw. Of course, they all looked nearly identical, but it was a very nice identical.
Since I can't get to the article for whatever reason, I have to speculate.
Does the article say that the carbon laminate was intended specifically and primarily to reduce radar signature? Because if I were designing a jet intended to go transonic, using wood, I'd sure put carbon laminate over the leading edge just to keep the wings from falling off. Even primitive carbon laminates available then had superb stiffness per cross-sectional area, and in tension would give an *enormous* amount of stiffness and strength to the wing in exactly the direction it needs it. A majority of modern aircraft designs use a high modulus of elasticity fabric adhered to the surface of a thick layer of low-density material, as their basic system of fuselage and wing construction. That's exactly what this is.
As an aside, the Germans also pioneered use of bubble-filled polyurethane rubber coatings on submarines to reduce their sonar signature by 30 dB, a technology not imitated by either the US or the USSR until the 1970's. <a href="http://www.stormfront.org/forum/showthread.php?t=594958">Here's an article</a> about it. There's a better one on Wikipedia but I can't find it right now.
I'd like to think that.
I got a copy of Stardust recently, on DVD. I have libdvdcss2 installed. I also have VLC, Ogle, mplayer, the kmplayer front end, and some other videoplayer that escapes me.
None will play Stardust. They'll play the deleted scenes, the additional material, the theatrical trailer, the advertising, but the moment the menu to choose *which* of those things I want to play, or play the main movie, it dies. I can't watch the main movie with any video player I've tried. I'm assuming it's because of menu support, but I can't figure out how to fix it, what else I have to install to get it working.
Oh, but wait, you say, maybe the disc is injured (brand new, right out of the box, subsequently played on Windows and on my DVD player.)
Well, maybe it's just Stardust.
Yeah, that's true. But it's also three or four other discs I have. And the depressing thing was I had a roommate and my girlfriend both hooked on linux until they couldn't play a few of their DVD's. Now they use linux sometimes, when they're browsing the web, but are spending increasing amounts of time in Windows, because it'll do all that and play all their DVD's, too. *sigh*
Go to your local library and find a copy of the annotated version of Jane Austen's Pride And Prejudice. It's this one but you're not allowed to buy it from Amazon. You have to go to libraries and find it.
Because that way you'll be going out and talking to people and hanging out in libraries and there are lots of interesting people there.
Pride & Prejudice is the uber-chick-lit book, the best of them all. It's intellectual and it's completely apropos to this discussion.
First off, if you're walking around working your way through P&P, people are going to notice, and they're going to form some prejudices about what sort of person you are. It's the exact opposite image of an O'Reilly book.
Second off, you have something to talk about: the uber-chic-lit book.
Thirdly, the book itself is talking about people and their styles of interaction as related to their personal code of morality. Mr. Darcy is a stereotypical libertarian geek: he decides what is Right, and sticks with it no matter what, even when events and evidence indicate his original choice was wrong, and he has to learn why that's a bad idea. Jane is a stereotypical girl: she tries to like everyone and make excuses for anything bad anyone does and ignore evidence that people are cruel and selfish. Elizabeth is somewhere between the two, Jane Austen's version of the nearly ideal woman, and learns how to deal with people, and her own prejudices and impulsiveness, as the book progresses.
It's one of the best novels ever written, and if you read it and understand it -- which is why I recommend the annotated version, because the remarks on particularly tricky bits of verbal code are pretty essential to understanding the flow of Austen's program -- you'll have a better understanding of people in general.
And, again, you'll impress the people you want to impress far more for being in the process of reading, or having read, P&P, than the latest Linux TCP/IP Stack Code And Documentation book.
A couple weeks ago, a friend wanted to go to a concert, so I volunteered to take care of her two kids, ages 3 and 2, for the evening. We went over to a local park to mess about in fountains and dig holes in dirt.
Now, I have a girlfriend -- who, by the way, I met online, by volunteering to help teach people basic bike mechanics and repair for a group of Burning Man enthusiasts who were going on bike rides together but didn't really know how to work on their bikes -- but that's only relevant to the overall thread, not to this response in particular.
So there we are, me and the two kids, tooling around, braiding up dandelion stems into boat-like things and throwing them in the lake.
Women *kept* coming up and talking. Scads of them. Oodles, even.
However, I have a vital suggestion if you go down this route: take a box of kleenex or the like. Coz the two kids decided to run in opposite directions at the same time, smashed into each other, and the younger one fell like a drunk, right on his little face, and got a bloody nose and a fat lip, and it apparently really kills every bit of your child-care savoir faire if you're walking around with a kid who has blood all over his face. Like, the conversations with the cute ladies go somewhat like this:
"Oh, your kids are SO CUTE! What are their... oh. Uh. What happened?"
"Hi, I'm the bad babysitter, I forgot to bring kleenex to clean up messes when kids fall on their faces."
"Oh..."
What's funny about this comment, and this whole discussion, is how the American public regards the FDA. I've had this discussion before with other friends who were avidly interested in homeopathic medicine and very upset that the packaging had to include all the weasel words of "this product may reduce (symptoms) but these statements have not been evaluated by the FDA" sort.
The FDA was established in the aftermath of a number of food additive scandals, particularly the publishing of Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle", where he asserted that the meatpacking industry regularly dumped sawdust, talc, and other bulk materials into processed meat, and sometimes left people who'd fallen into meatprocessing machinery go through the processing system and end up in the meat. The US public demanded that the government get into the food regulation business, which neither the food industry nor the government particularly wanted, but after enormous public pressure, the Federal government finally set up the FDA as a regulatory agency rather than just the food chemistry research group it had been formerly.
Once that was in place, the drug industry moved to change how it worked to raise the cost of entry: by working with the FDA to set up very rigorous drug-testing specifications, they made it very difficult for new entrants into the field. So in the 1970's, during the rise of the alternative lifestyle movement, it was basically impossible to get anything in the way of alternative medicines on the market, any market: you couldn't even sell herbs from the trunk of your VW microbus without running the risk of getting arrested.
So, again, there was an enormous amount of public pressure on the Federal government to change how things worked, so Congress changed what the FDA could regulate to create an exemption for alternative medicines, by allowing them to be sold if they used weasel words, essentially: if they were sold as just herbs, with non-binding advice on what they might be useful for treating.
With that established, lots of companies moved into that space, and are still selling things that do have known pharmacological effects, as alternative medicines. But they're doing it under laws that were established by massive public demand, demand that still exists, so it's a sort of no-win situation for the Federal government.
The stuff in question is specifically not marketed as an attempt to cure or prevent disease, it's just marketed as a treatment that may alleviate symptoms or words to that effect. But that's a sham because everyone using it knows that the company intends it to cure or prevent a disease.
If you rigorously force drug manufacturers to show what they're producing are A: safe, and B: effective at doing what they claim, you'll cut out enormous swathes of alternative medicine because it costs too much (and many medicines *aren't* safe, even though they're effective: aspirin wouldn't pass current FDA certification tests.) If you don't force drug manufacturers to live up to those standards, you get what we see here: a drug that has a nasty, dangerous, permanent side-effect. But at the end of the day, most effective drugs *do* have occasional nasty, dangerous, permanent side-effects.
I would like to see more rigorous regulation of the alternative medicine field, because there are some very scary things being sold and used. However, requiring that drugs be safe restricts the market to near-uselessness. (No anti-cancer drug is anything like 'safe'.)
We need something between what we have now, and "safe".
>The challenging part is that yeah, if I have the choice to prevent my future kids from developing life-shortening diseases, I've got to do it.
So that's the problem, then, isn't it: what counts as life-shortening diseases?
There's a correlation between being left-handed and dying of accidents. So you'd want to select for a right-handed kid.
There's a correlation between height and income: tall people make more. There's a correlation between income and average lifespan. So you'd want to have a tall right-handed kid.
You can see where this is going: if you want to, you can justify almost any selection criterion as being life-extending, or at least life-enhancing.
There's no good line to draw.
I will. It's tricky because the disc is write-protected by damaging a sector. The boot process attempts to write to that sector and if it succeeds, the boot fails. It's also MFM. I have a description of the location where the damage is, so I can replicate it, but that, in combination with the hardware issues, has led me to be pessimistic about the whole project. But I'll look into the catweasel: thank you.
The Amiga 1000 had a DB25 serial port and a DB25 parallel port right beside each other. Same connector. They thoughtfully provided a bunch of +12V, -12V, and -5V lines on the serial port in case you needed to power external equipment. So, if you mistakenly plugged your parallel printer cable into the serial port you put +/-12v into the input buffer of your printer. A lot of people burnt out a lot of printers that way. The 2000 used the opposite-polarity DB25 and subsequent ones used a DB9, IIRC. I have a network analyzer that uses a 5 1/2" drive as part of its operating system, so it has to read from the disc every time it boots and every time I do any GPIB access to the machine. The machine can't copy the disc and it's a non-standard drive hardware so it can't easily be read/written in another 5 1/2" drive. Sigh.
It makes perfect sense from the perspective of history: it's what societies and churches have always done in the past. The idea that science works differently than most of recorded history, that it's not only open to change and contradiction but that's actually what drives it, isn't clear to most people -- including many scientists. Look at how roundly and thoroughly Alfred Wegener was attacked when he first proposed plate tectonics: he died in a snowstorm in the Arctic because he couldn't find a job anywhere else.
>Nobody is saying that the iron itself is magnetic (because then it would be magnetite and not iron anyway).
I'm a little confused by this.
There's lots and lots of iron that's magnetic but isn't magnetite. Magnetite and hematite are both iron oxides; magnetite happens to be magnetic, while hematite isn't. (Well, technically, hematite is antiferromagnetic until it's reasonably hot, at which point it's a type of antiferromagnetic that makes it act magnetic, but that's not something you're ever going to notice unless you're a geek with good equipment.)
The more critical point here is the Curie point, the temperature above which iron is non-ferromagnetic. That's way below the temperature of molten iron, and we assume the core of the planet is molten. As such (if the Curie point isn't pressure-sensitive, which I don't know anything about) we can feel pretty confident that the iron core isn't ferromagnetic, but that it has a magnetic field induced by motion.
>no guarantee that it won't peter out like the 1976 fiasco.
The 1976 fiasco was only a fiasco because everyone didn't die.
That's the thing with firefighting: if you're lucky it doesn't kill everyone; if you're fast enough at the very beginning it doesn't kill everyone, and if you're neither, it kills everyone. But you have no way, a priori, of knowing whether you're going to be lucky or not, so if you have any sense whatsoever, you react quickly and vigorously. Even if it means that the inoculations kill more people than the disease would have, because the alternative could be 100 million deaths.
Oh, I know -- it's hard for me to believe, too, since I live at 10,000 feet and feel the effects heavily.
Here are a bunch of reports about flocks of birds at 25,000-27,000 feet (including flocks of migrating geese.)
I can't find an easily linkable cite to the 37,000 foot case, but here's a pdf, from which I quote:
"Collision between a vulture and an aircraft at an altitude of 37,000 feet. -- On 29 November 1973, a Ruppell's Griffon (Gyps rueppellii) collided with a commercial aircraft at 37,000 feet ofer Abijan, Ivory Coast, western Africa. The altitude is that recorded by teh pilot shortly after the impact, wichh damaged one of the aircraft's engines and caused it to be shut down. The plane landed safely at Abijian without further incident. The remains of the vulture consisted of five complete and 15 partial feathers from the wings (secondaries, lesser, and underwing coverts), tail, neck and breast."
It goes on to cite other over-25,000 ft collisions and observations.
Canada geese are big. They start at 6 1/2 pounds and go up to just under 20 pounds. And not that this matters too much with a jet, but they're also fairly fast fliers: I've been passed by Canada Geese while taking off in a Cessna, which puts them in the 60 mph range.
Building a vehicle that can handle a 450 mph collision with a 15-20 pound object is intrinsically difficult. Military tanks can do it, but their acceleration over about 60mph is terrible. I don't know of any other vehicles that could handle this sort of impact without getting very bent and broken.
And you can't just use elevation, either: I've read pilot reports of birds seen at 37,000 feet above ground level.
Revolution isn't about justice. Civil war isn't about justice.
Sometimes it might be necessary, to remove a regime that has subverted the justice system.
But it's still not justice.
And the actions given in the article -- where the vigilantes are anonymous, and stand little or zero risk for their actions -- are *particularly* not justice because they have no perceived risk. The people who ran the American Revolution put their lives on the line, as did the people in Tiananmen Square, and many of them died. That's admirable, even if it's not justice.
But people anonymous-calling someone's job to get that person fired, or putting on white sheets and hanging someone they don't like, is vigilanteism.
And you're right: they don't care what I think about vigilanteism. That doesn't make what they're doing right, or admirable.
This is just an extension of Internet flaming into RL. People who feel passionately about something, and think they have a decent chance of remaining anonymous, have a strong incentive to screw up someone's life.
Consider a few months back when someone posted the RL address of a spam king and people promptly flooded his house with tons of mail-order catalogs and magazines. (But most slashdotters seemed to approve of that...)
Justice involves a non-biased judge and written laws. Mobs aren't about justice, even if what they do sometimes seems attractive.