A: my dumb reply shows the importance of actually reading what 'preview' presents. (It originally talked about how 199 out of every 200 abductions is by family members, not strangers; abduction rates by strangers are an order of magnitude lower than car deaths.)
B: I agree, but at what point do you draw the line -- educating your kid about nuclear annihilation, meteor strikes, getting run through by unicorn horns? I have a fairly good idea of what the top 20 causes of death/injury are, and anything that isn't on that list is pretty difficult to justify spending a lot of time on.
But at the same time, courts don't have to make their rulings based on any sense of 'truth'. They don't even have to make them based on best scientific research, and there are many historical cases where they haven't. In Michael Shermer's book "The Borderlands Of Science" he talks about the widespread belief in the 1920's-1950's that local injury caused cancer. While there may be a relationship between injury repair and apperance of cancer, it's pretty weak, but in the '30's people regularly sued their employers for getting hit in the ankle and later developing cancer in the other foot -- and they won. In some cases, the courts even went so far as to say that despite there being no scientific evidence to support these claims, because it was a generally held belief that there was a relationship, they decided in favor of the injured worker. So, as I said, I *like* the court's decision, but I don't delude myself that they're Correct. They're just making a decision based on what has influenced the judges the most, and we can all hope that the decision turns out to be a good one.
>it even seems to create more tolerant adults that is less likely to be ignorant of sexual themes.
Ding! You've uncovered one of the actual motivations for this (along with vote-gathering.) Everybody knows that what the kids experience now, is what society will be in 20 years. Education and childhood experience has always been the most fertile ground for people who want to convert society to their belief system. (For good and for bad: witness teaching creationism and the fights over 'one nation under God'/school prayer in US school systems.)
>I am so happy using Webshield because I don't have to worry about what the children are doing, passwords or anything. I was constantly keeping tabs on things before, but now I know Webshield is doing it for me.
Hahahahaaaaaa! oh that's beautiful. Here's the most interesting thing about bad security: it makes you *less* secure because you think you're okay so you stop paying attention. When those kids find a way through, David from South Australia won't know, because he isn't constantly keeping tabs on things. False positives suck for people who are trying to look up information on breast cancer. False negatives suck even more, when parents are incorrectly thinking that their kids are being kept safe from that kangaroo bestiality video that's been making the rounds.
>The brutal truth of the matter is that what ever you can _easily_ find on the web via http is far less dangerous than Predators lurking on Friend face
You joke, but this general problem has come up in the past. Back in the old days when trains were the major form of transportation, there were snowblower engines called Elliot-Jull rotary snowplows that looked pretty much like the compressor sections of jet engines. The blades spun like mad and they cut paths through deep snow. Sometimes the snow would actually be 8 meters deep when they finally got a rotary to it, so they were just smashing into a wall of snow (literally: they'd put three or four engines behind one of these and get up a head of steam (the origin of the term) and smash into a snowfield.) The problem was that often the railroad bed was sheltered, because they'd cut it through a hill, so a herd of cattle or deer would take cover in the shelter and get buried alive by the snowfall, and then the rotary would come through and run into them.
A flock of seagulls, or even canada geese, is nothing compared to 200 head of cattle, chopped into fragments and then frozen again when the rotary stalled on the debris. They'd have to tow it into the nearest shop and break out the blowtorches, and basically rebuild the entire front of the engine.
To add to your comments about the C5 -- it can actually partially retract the landing gear on the ground squat down to truckload height, as well as drop a ramp for drive-on loading. details here. Though they no longer have this capability, when they were first built they could caster the mainwheels up to 18 degrees for crosswind capability: the aircraft could take off at an 18 degree angle to the runway. That must've looked incredible. Castering mains was a big fad in the 1940's and many commercial aircraft had it, but the complexity and uncertain ground-handling characteristics (they tended to break loose when taxiing) meant that the C5 was the last major airframe to have them, and even it lost them when upgrading to the new (now! with less cracks!) wings used on the -B model.
>they don't *believe in* natural selection, they *believe that natural selection is an useful model they can use*.
Michael Shermer, in his book Why Darwin Matters, uses 'accept' rather than 'believe' for exactly this reason. He says that people believe in the Bible, but he accepts that evolution is responsible for the diversity in life that we observe. It's a quibble over definitions, but arguments are won or lost over framing, so I think his distinction is a good one.
See, here's the thing. I *know* there are better programs than MS Paint. I know there are programs that do more, and do things better. I use IrfanView and ImageMagick and The GIMP and lots of other programs on a regular basis.
But to convert a.tiff to a.jpg with Paint takes two clicks. Click on it to open it, click on 'save as', type in a file name. There *is* *no* *way* for a program to be easier to use, no matter what else it can do, until such time as the computer can read my mind. lightscreen, imagemagick, all these others, may be *as efficient* but they are not *more efficient* and as such, if I don't need their extra functionality why would I spend any extra time downloading or using them?
Laziness -- one of the cardinal virtues. Simplicity should be one, too.
I use desktop linux at home but have to use Windows at work. I use Paint constantly. Not for drawing, but because there are so many programs that only produce.bmp or.tiff or.jpg and I need one of the others, and Paint does that. Sure, there are other programs that do a better job, but this works, so why bother? From that standpoint, Paint is amazingly useful. Likewise, it's far faster to take a screenshot of an IC layout and send it to an engineer than try to explain what I'm doing or walk the engineer through the layout program on a remote computer. Again, Paint is great: paste a screenshot, save it, send it. I think it's a really superb program. It does exactly what I need in two clicks. It and Excel are the only things I miss at home, and OOo mostly cures my Excel itch.
It was Adolf Hitler who first discussed the idea and he attributed it to "the Jews" in Mein Kampf, as discussed here. Goebbles just popularized the idea.
Sasha Frere of The New Yorker wrote an article on this several months ago. It's here and talks about the place that autotune has in modern music and how it's being used and misused. Among other things discussed in the article is the zero-time adjustment setting, which is often referred to as the Cher setting, based on her use of it in her 1998 hit "Believe". It's a better read, in MY opinion, than TFA.
Agreed. I spend time in the Colorado mountains and I can say that it takes at least -10F before you breathe out and the exhaled water freezes on your (scarf|beard.) I've been in -25F a number of times and even then it wasn't cold enough to freeze a droplet of water that was large enough to separate under its own weight (about 1/20 of a ml, if I remember right.) That's for pure water, too; I don't know what the osmolarity of tears is but it's probably high enough to lower the freezing point even further.
I'm not going to argue with you since you probably know 908376 times more about this than I do. But I'm wondering: why have a directory system in which you store your saved state? If you stored it as, essentially, an image -- this is what's on the screen -- that would get rid of the directory system (and substitute a single monster humongous file: a dubious improvement.) Likewise, you could communicate data between files either with cut-and-paste or by including some sort of scripting hooks that allowed you to build pipes between applications. The Amiga had something similar to this, using an implementation of the rexx scripting languate, that allowed you to move arbitrary code or data between well-written apps. That, of course, relies on 'well-written' and your various app suppliers' willingness to adhere to your standards. Essentially I wonder if they're talking about something sufficiently different that many of the problems people are listing are mostly irrelevant to their environment.
So very complicated. Iced tea isn't okay because it's still tea. But Doctrine & Covenants 89:9 specifically says "And again, hot drinks are not for the body or belly." Cold tea isn't listed: it's been included by association with hot tea. But at the same time, Doctrine & Covenants 89:12 says "Yea, flesh also of beasts and of the fowls of the air, I, the Lord, have ordained for the use of man with thanksgiving; nevertheless they are to be used sparingly" -- and you try and find a vegetarian Mormon movement, or even a leaning that way in Utah.
I guess all religions are masses of selective enforcement (look at mainstream Christianity's dismissal of homosexuality, while they ignore similar prohibitions against cutting their hair) but the Latter Day Saints have some particularly odd-looking bits of rulemaking, at least to my eyes.
In Utah is Moab. Near Moab is Slickrock. If you're a mountain biker, that's Mecca. A hajj is required of all mountain bikers: if you don't go, they take away your bike and make you ride a balloon-tire cruiser.
More seriously, Utah's a beautiful state in a parched way. (Well, obviously, multiple parched ways.) It gets a lot of money from tourism. You may have heard of the Sundance film festival. That's in Utah. You may have heard of the Bonneville Salt Flats where people race and set world land speed records. Utah. You may have heard of the Great Salt Lake, the largest salt lake in this half of the world. Or Bryce Canyon National Park or Zion National Park or the weirdness that is Natural Bridges National Monument. Or Lake Powell. Or even people going to see that weird Mormon Tabernacle and its choir, or hang out near the Hill Air Force Base and take pictures of the strange undocumented experimental military aircraft flying out of it. And that's not to mention the best skiing in the US.
That wasn't a great discussion of the flood. When I drove up the canyon that afternoon, before the flood, I stopped and took pictures of 5 of the dams, flood control structures, and diversions in the canyon, and talked to the guy who lived at Viestenz-Smith hydroelectric power plant about running big power-generating equipment. The next day they were all gone: the entire canyon was about a meter wider and two meters deeper than it had been. The only thing left of the power plant was two of the generator magnets and the concrete beneath them. As I recall, the guy I talked to, his body was identified by the fingerprints on one hand, because that arm was all the body they found. I can't find any good pictures anywhere online, though.
So what they learned was: the big dam in Estes, above the canyon, survived, because it was big enough to absorb the surge of water from one watershed involved. All the structures below that were overwhelmed by water from other watersheds, and what that ended up doing was turning a fairly rapid increase of water, into a moving dam, essentially, with the waterfront restrained by all the crap it had ripped out. It would slam into the next dam/flood control structure, fill it, overtop it, pour over the lip, and erode it extremely quickly, adding to the pulse nature of the flood. When it exited the mouth of the canyon, a house hung up on and ripped out an aqueduct more than 30 feet above the riverbed. Since that time, they've only rebuilt one dam and they built it a lot bigger. The idea is: you better know you can contain the whole flood (and if you can't your structure better fail gracefully rather than catastrophically.) There's a great book called The Control Of Nature, by John McPhee, that has a chapter (1/3 of the book) about flood control on the lower Mississippi and how much more complicated it is than just building dams: how a dam here can mean more flooding over there, or worse flooding over there, or NO flooding over there. It's just hard to know without excellent modelling and a good historical record. Hence the cautionary principle: it's usually better to do nothing, and keep people from living in the area, than to build something that you *think* can prevent disasters and then find out you're wrong. Of course, if people are already living there, it's a lot trickier. China doesn't have a problem just displacing large groups of people, so it's easier for them.
>What's to keep the virus from mutating and avoiding the CCR5 requirement it currently has?
The virus uses the CCR5 receptor as its binding and entry point into the cell. There are other receptors it might/may use, but CCR5 is the predominant one, especially early in the infection. As such, it's the gateway: if you can block it, that massively reduces the viral effectiveness. The process of developing a treatment for a disease is finding something the disease absolutely needs and targeting that. This is very difficult with HIV because, as you say, it has a high rate of mutation, but (as the wikipedia article says) at least in lab tests if you block CCR5, HIV infection drops by orders of magnitude -- so apparently, finding another route of entry is sufficiently complicated that it's highly unlikely that an otherwise viable mutation will evade this requirement.
>Dams prevent catastrophic, uncontrolled flooding by buffering the surge in a lake and letting it out slowly.
As long as they're big enough. If they're not, a rapidly increasing flood of water, that if left uncontrolled might rise at 2 feet an hour, flooding many houses, could be turned into a 20 foot high wall of water, debris, and rock from washed-out dams that kills 145 people rather than just destroying a bunch of houses. Every "flood control structure" on that river got ripped out. A flood that had almost the same rainfall 40 years earlier didn't kill anyone because it took two hours to go from heavy runoff to full flood. My friends that were down in the canyon in the 1976 flood said the front wave of the flood was moving at about 60mph and consisted mostly of a mass of mobile homes (with the occupants still in them.)
Hah. Our conference rooms are named after Colorado's national forests, since we don't have enough to justify naming them after the peaks. So there.
On-topic, our previous IT person had a system for computer naming that I've never understood. dairc, amst, jipran. Our new IT person has named subsequent lab workstations joe, fred, bob. It's schizophrenic. We get to name our own desk workstations and again, pretty schizophrenic: I see rushlimbaugh and wildhorsebreaker along with fredlaptop and bobsmachine. I can't see it as being more useful than numbers, but I don't know.
Anything that's going to be on the market and commercially viable in the next 10 years is going to be designed for standard wiring. There just isn't enough market to justify anything else. Nobody's even talking about how to wire for LED's because of the chicken-and-egg problem. My guess is that either it'll be what I was on about earlier, with intelligent dimmers sending interesting info up the power lines, muxed with the power itself, or short-range radio integrated into the power switch and the led driver chip. Thing is: the LED's will draw less power than your current lights, so wire for incandescents and these things will have plenty of safety overhead.
By the way, having rewired several houses in my time, I'm a big proponent of putting the lighting on a separate circuit from the room outlets, so you don't end up in a dark room if you pop a breaker. I rewired my last house completely, including replacing the breaker box, and it was *perfect*. (I even ran a separate set of romex, one outlet in each room, that all terminated at a single point so I could put in a whole-house UPS.) And I wired Cat5 to each room. It was beautiful. Then I moved into a house that has a lot of nonaccessible wiring, sighed, and instituted wireless. Bah.
I dunno why that posted as anonymous. Oh well. For some reason slashdot seems to be dithering my comments half-anonymous, half-attributed of late, and of course I never bother to actually, y'know, read that bit before I hit 'submit'.
Anyway. I was going to say that the other thing that sucks about CRI as a quantifier of illumination quality is that it's designed to measure how people see several defined colors under illumination. So it doesn't deal with (as I covered earlier) fluorescent or phosphorescent components, which are surprisingly common. "whiter than white" used to be a sales slogan for clothing detergent full of UV dyes, that converted UV light to blue, to counteract the tendency of clothing to yellow over time. They wiped out the yellow by down-converting light to balance it. This may not work at all with LED lights, and isn't measured in CRI. Likewise, just because we can fool puny human eyes by mixing red, blue, green, and phosphor-converted UV, photographs of stuff under LED lights could well look just appalling, and that's an issue because LED manufacturers are aggressively trying to move into replacing flash lamps with LED's. They're way faster, they don't require much or any charge time, and they're way more controllable, and you don't have to include a high-voltage power supply in your camera. But what if the light looks rotten? and what if the CCD can't deal with the LED's color spectrum, because it's been optimized for sunlight, which is basically an incandescent-like source?
Problem is: any recommendation I make is going to be based on the LED's we have, and most of those are either not for sale yet, or are stupidly expensive. I honestly don't know what commonly available lightbulbs have which LED's, either, because only a few LED's intended for general illumination are easy to recognize. I can tell you that I have great respect for Philips LumiLEDs, Osram Dragons, and most of the stuff Cree makes. I've worked with all those extensively and they're beautiful. A white/red combo might look okay. It's good for general illumination but still not particularly great for really good color rendition. The problem is that color rendering is dependent on a *lot* of weird stuff. (For instance, part of the reason a ruby is so red is because it's absorbing shorter-frequency light, and re-emitting it as red light, so even if you have a good red source that's lacking in the short-wavelength area, the ruby will look dead. Fish have lots of fluorescent/iridescent coloration, so a standard color rendering index (CRI) test might not tell you what you want to know: will this light look good with this situation?)
With the li-ion, they'll burst into flame, so the manufacturers *have* to put in good charge-controller circuitry. LED's are currently like cars in 1910: you can make anything that sort of vaguely works, and someone will buy it. It's no secret that the LED crowd are hoping so many people will buy them just because they're cool, that they'll jump the early adopter chasm before they've realized that they've mostly bought turkeys.
All the stuff we work with does, essentially, some sort of rectification, then dc-dc conversion, either buck, boost, or SEPIC, and ends up as a constant-current supply for the LED. We (and I'm sure a bunch of other people) have made drivers for really good dimming using standard triacs (ours is just about to hit the market) and they work *amazingly* well. You're limited in part by how well the triac works: a lot of the ones I've worked with have such crappy triggering circuits that the best you could ever get is roughly 60% dimming -- as in, you turn it on, keep coming up, and suddenly the light comes on at 40% brightness. You can then finesse it down to maybe 20%, but it's a pain. Thing is: we can digitize that and do clever stuff in software and come up with something that can essentially accommodate for the crappy triac, learn what it's doing (by sensing how it's chopping the AC) and produce a fabulous dimmer. We have one setup that can dim 10,000:1. If you get 5:1 out of a so-called dimmable compact fluorescent you're lucky. A good dimmer with an incandescent can do something similar: it can start producing heat before there's visible light coming off the filament. But I think only our (and similar) driver can get good performance out of cheap triacs. With all that said, a cheap triac dimmer driving a cheap unregulated LED will work, but they're (in my opinion) objectionably flickery. A triac dimmer driving a good switching converter (without any detection stuff to try and decode what the dimmer's trying to send) will still dim because you end up starving the switcher when the power's off, but it's icky-looking. In my experience it's even more non-linear than just the cheap triac: when there's enough power it drives well (but as you say at full current/full brightness), and when there's no power it turns off, and in the between situation it thrashes. Most LED driver chips have dim pins so you can apply an external dim signal derived somehow from the signal if you want to add a bunch of external circuitry. (We're building stuff that integrates all that junk into the chip.)
>the idea that you're trying to keep the LEDs at the peak of their efficiency, it seems like a no-brainer.
It is. But very few people will actually *pay* for better circuitry, apparently. So instead we have to add bullet-point functionality to justify more research, and then add in good current regulation and the like as a side-effect of (say) cold-we
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A: my dumb reply shows the importance of actually reading what 'preview' presents. (It originally talked about how 199 out of every 200 abductions is by family members, not strangers; abduction rates by strangers are an order of magnitude lower than car deaths.)
B: I agree, but at what point do you draw the line -- educating your kid about nuclear annihilation, meteor strikes, getting run through by unicorn horns? I have a fairly good idea of what the top 20 causes of death/injury are, and anything that isn't on that list is pretty difficult to justify spending a lot of time on.
I dunno: I haven't actually seen his notebooks. People who have looked at them, claim he misrepresented his data.
The London Times says so.
Here's their data.
But hey thanks for calling me a dirty liar when you know even less about it than I do.
I think this is a ruling I like, because, among other things, the scientist who wrote the original vaccination/autism link paper misrepresented his data using selective data inclusion or exclusion to support his hypothesis.
But at the same time, courts don't have to make their rulings based on any sense of 'truth'. They don't even have to make them based on best scientific research, and there are many historical cases where they haven't. In Michael Shermer's book "The Borderlands Of Science" he talks about the widespread belief in the 1920's-1950's that local injury caused cancer. While there may be a relationship between injury repair and apperance of cancer, it's pretty weak, but in the '30's people regularly sued their employers for getting hit in the ankle and later developing cancer in the other foot -- and they won. In some cases, the courts even went so far as to say that despite there being no scientific evidence to support these claims, because it was a generally held belief that there was a relationship, they decided in favor of the injured worker.
So, as I said, I *like* the court's decision, but I don't delude myself that they're Correct. They're just making a decision based on what has influenced the judges the most, and we can all hope that the decision turns out to be a good one.
>it even seems to create more tolerant adults that is less likely to be ignorant of sexual themes.
Ding! You've uncovered one of the actual motivations for this (along with vote-gathering.) Everybody knows that what the kids experience now, is what society will be in 20 years. Education and childhood experience has always been the most fertile ground for people who want to convert society to their belief system. (For good and for bad: witness teaching creationism and the fights over 'one nation under God'/school prayer in US school systems.)
>I am so happy using Webshield because I don't have to worry about what the children are doing, passwords or anything. I was constantly keeping tabs on things before, but now I know Webshield is doing it for me.
Hahahahaaaaaa! oh that's beautiful.
Here's the most interesting thing about bad security: it makes you *less* secure because you think you're okay so you stop paying attention. When those kids find a way through, David from South Australia won't know, because he isn't constantly keeping tabs on things.
False positives suck for people who are trying to look up information on breast cancer. False negatives suck even more, when parents are incorrectly thinking that their kids are being kept safe from that kangaroo bestiality video that's been making the rounds.
>The brutal truth of the matter is that what ever you can _easily_ find on the web via http is far less dangerous than Predators lurking on Friend face
Also a far over-rated danger. I don't know the numbers for Australia but in the US, in . Your kid is more likely to be killed in a car crash.
You joke, but this general problem has come up in the past.
Back in the old days when trains were the major form of transportation, there were snowblower engines called Elliot-Jull rotary snowplows that looked pretty much like the compressor sections of jet engines. The blades spun like mad and they cut paths through deep snow. Sometimes the snow would actually be 8 meters deep when they finally got a rotary to it, so they were just smashing into a wall of snow (literally: they'd put three or four engines behind one of these and get up a head of steam (the origin of the term) and smash into a snowfield.)
The problem was that often the railroad bed was sheltered, because they'd cut it through a hill, so a herd of cattle or deer would take cover in the shelter and get buried alive by the snowfall, and then the rotary would come through and run into them.
A flock of seagulls, or even canada geese, is nothing compared to 200 head of cattle, chopped into fragments and then frozen again when the rotary stalled on the debris. They'd have to tow it into the nearest shop and break out the blowtorches, and basically rebuild the entire front of the engine.
To add to your comments about the C5 -- it can actually partially retract the landing gear on the ground squat down to truckload height, as well as drop a ramp for drive-on loading.
details here.
Though they no longer have this capability, when they were first built they could caster the mainwheels up to 18 degrees for crosswind capability: the aircraft could take off at an 18 degree angle to the runway. That must've looked incredible. Castering mains was a big fad in the 1940's and many commercial aircraft had it, but the complexity and uncertain ground-handling characteristics (they tended to break loose when taxiing) meant that the C5 was the last major airframe to have them, and even it lost them when upgrading to the new (now! with less cracks!) wings used on the -B model.
>they don't *believe in* natural selection, they *believe that natural selection is an useful model they can use*.
Michael Shermer, in his book Why Darwin Matters, uses 'accept' rather than 'believe' for exactly this reason. He says that people believe in the Bible, but he accepts that evolution is responsible for the diversity in life that we observe. It's a quibble over definitions, but arguments are won or lost over framing, so I think his distinction is a good one.
See, here's the thing. I *know* there are better programs than MS Paint. I know there are programs that do more, and do things better. I use IrfanView and ImageMagick and The GIMP and lots of other programs on a regular basis.
But to convert a .tiff to a .jpg with Paint takes two clicks. Click on it to open it, click on 'save as', type in a file name. There *is* *no* *way* for a program to be easier to use, no matter what else it can do, until such time as the computer can read my mind. lightscreen, imagemagick, all these others, may be *as efficient* but they are not *more efficient* and as such, if I don't need their extra functionality why would I spend any extra time downloading or using them?
Laziness -- one of the cardinal virtues. Simplicity should be one, too.
>MS Paint is next to useless.
I use desktop linux at home but have to use Windows at work. I use Paint constantly. Not for drawing, but because there are so many programs that only produce .bmp or .tiff or .jpg and I need one of the others, and Paint does that. Sure, there are other programs that do a better job, but this works, so why bother? From that standpoint, Paint is amazingly useful.
Likewise, it's far faster to take a screenshot of an IC layout and send it to an engineer than try to explain what I'm doing or walk the engineer through the layout program on a remote computer. Again, Paint is great: paste a screenshot, save it, send it.
I think it's a really superb program. It does exactly what I need in two clicks. It and Excel are the only things I miss at home, and OOo mostly cures my Excel itch.
It was Adolf Hitler who first discussed the idea and he attributed it to "the Jews" in Mein Kampf, as discussed here. Goebbles just popularized the idea.
Sasha Frere of The New Yorker wrote an article on this several months ago. It's here and talks about the place that autotune has in modern music and how it's being used and misused.
Among other things discussed in the article is the zero-time adjustment setting, which is often referred to as the Cher setting, based on her use of it in her 1998 hit "Believe". It's a better read, in MY opinion, than TFA.
>One day I'd like to see a collection of music charts sorted by author rather than by performer and see if there are any interesting patterns...
You'd see Linda Perry all over the place, for one thing.
Agreed. I spend time in the Colorado mountains and I can say that it takes at least -10F before you breathe out and the exhaled water freezes on your (scarf|beard.) I've been in -25F a number of times and even then it wasn't cold enough to freeze a droplet of water that was large enough to separate under its own weight (about 1/20 of a ml, if I remember right.) That's for pure water, too; I don't know what the osmolarity of tears is but it's probably high enough to lower the freezing point even further.
I'm not going to argue with you since you probably know 908376 times more about this than I do.
But I'm wondering: why have a directory system in which you store your saved state? If you stored it as, essentially, an image -- this is what's on the screen -- that would get rid of the directory system (and substitute a single monster humongous file: a dubious improvement.)
Likewise, you could communicate data between files either with cut-and-paste or by including some sort of scripting hooks that allowed you to build pipes between applications. The Amiga had something similar to this, using an implementation of the rexx scripting languate, that allowed you to move arbitrary code or data between well-written apps. That, of course, relies on 'well-written' and your various app suppliers' willingness to adhere to your standards.
Essentially I wonder if they're talking about something sufficiently different that many of the problems people are listing are mostly irrelevant to their environment.
>then screwed up by ordering an iced tea.
So very complicated.
Iced tea isn't okay because it's still tea. But Doctrine & Covenants 89:9 specifically says "And again, hot drinks are not for the body or belly." Cold tea isn't listed: it's been included by association with hot tea. But at the same time, Doctrine & Covenants 89:12 says "Yea, flesh also of beasts and of the fowls of the air, I, the Lord, have ordained for the use of man with thanksgiving; nevertheless they are to be used sparingly" -- and you try and find a vegetarian Mormon movement, or even a leaning that way in Utah.
I guess all religions are masses of selective enforcement (look at mainstream Christianity's dismissal of homosexuality, while they ignore similar prohibitions against cutting their hair) but the Latter Day Saints have some particularly odd-looking bits of rulemaking, at least to my eyes.
In Utah is Moab. Near Moab is Slickrock. If you're a mountain biker, that's Mecca. A hajj is required of all mountain bikers: if you don't go, they take away your bike and make you ride a balloon-tire cruiser.
More seriously, Utah's a beautiful state in a parched way. (Well, obviously, multiple parched ways.) It gets a lot of money from tourism.
You may have heard of the Sundance film festival. That's in Utah.
You may have heard of the Bonneville Salt Flats where people race and set world land speed records. Utah.
You may have heard of the Great Salt Lake, the largest salt lake in this half of the world.
Or Bryce Canyon National Park or Zion National Park or the weirdness that is Natural Bridges National Monument. Or Lake Powell. Or even people going to see that weird Mormon Tabernacle and its choir, or hang out near the Hill Air Force Base and take pictures of the strange undocumented experimental military aircraft flying out of it. And that's not to mention the best skiing in the US.
Utah's tourism industry is huge.
You joke, I know, but aphids are born pregnant. Although there's no sex involved, so your statement stands.
That wasn't a great discussion of the flood. When I drove up the canyon that afternoon, before the flood, I stopped and took pictures of 5 of the dams, flood control structures, and diversions in the canyon, and talked to the guy who lived at Viestenz-Smith hydroelectric power plant about running big power-generating equipment. The next day they were all gone: the entire canyon was about a meter wider and two meters deeper than it had been. The only thing left of the power plant was two of the generator magnets and the concrete beneath them. As I recall, the guy I talked to, his body was identified by the fingerprints on one hand, because that arm was all the body they found.
I can't find any good pictures anywhere online, though.
So what they learned was: the big dam in Estes, above the canyon, survived, because it was big enough to absorb the surge of water from one watershed involved. All the structures below that were overwhelmed by water from other watersheds, and what that ended up doing was turning a fairly rapid increase of water, into a moving dam, essentially, with the waterfront restrained by all the crap it had ripped out. It would slam into the next dam/flood control structure, fill it, overtop it, pour over the lip, and erode it extremely quickly, adding to the pulse nature of the flood. When it exited the mouth of the canyon, a house hung up on and ripped out an aqueduct more than 30 feet above the riverbed.
Since that time, they've only rebuilt one dam and they built it a lot bigger. The idea is: you better know you can contain the whole flood (and if you can't your structure better fail gracefully rather than catastrophically.)
There's a great book called The Control Of Nature, by John McPhee, that has a chapter (1/3 of the book) about flood control on the lower Mississippi and how much more complicated it is than just building dams: how a dam here can mean more flooding over there, or worse flooding over there, or NO flooding over there. It's just hard to know without excellent modelling and a good historical record. Hence the cautionary principle: it's usually better to do nothing, and keep people from living in the area, than to build something that you *think* can prevent disasters and then find out you're wrong.
Of course, if people are already living there, it's a lot trickier. China doesn't have a problem just displacing large groups of people, so it's easier for them.
>What's to keep the virus from mutating and avoiding the CCR5 requirement it currently has?
The virus uses the CCR5 receptor as its binding and entry point into the cell. There are other receptors it might/may use, but CCR5 is the predominant one, especially early in the infection. As such, it's the gateway: if you can block it, that massively reduces the viral effectiveness.
The process of developing a treatment for a disease is finding something the disease absolutely needs and targeting that. This is very difficult with HIV because, as you say, it has a high rate of mutation, but (as the wikipedia article says) at least in lab tests if you block CCR5, HIV infection drops by orders of magnitude -- so apparently, finding another route of entry is sufficiently complicated that it's highly unlikely that an otherwise viable mutation will evade this requirement.
>Dams prevent catastrophic, uncontrolled flooding by buffering the surge in a lake and letting it out slowly.
As long as they're big enough. If they're not, a rapidly increasing flood of water, that if left uncontrolled might rise at 2 feet an hour, flooding many houses, could be turned into a 20 foot high wall of water, debris, and rock from washed-out dams that kills 145 people rather than just destroying a bunch of houses.
Every "flood control structure" on that river got ripped out. A flood that had almost the same rainfall 40 years earlier didn't kill anyone because it took two hours to go from heavy runoff to full flood. My friends that were down in the canyon in the 1976 flood said the front wave of the flood was moving at about 60mph and consisted mostly of a mass of mobile homes (with the occupants still in them.)
Hah. Our conference rooms are named after Colorado's national forests, since we don't have enough to justify naming them after the peaks. So there.
On-topic, our previous IT person had a system for computer naming that I've never understood. dairc, amst, jipran. Our new IT person has named subsequent lab workstations joe, fred, bob. It's schizophrenic. We get to name our own desk workstations and again, pretty schizophrenic: I see rushlimbaugh and wildhorsebreaker along with fredlaptop and bobsmachine. I can't see it as being more useful than numbers, but I don't know.
Anything that's going to be on the market and commercially viable in the next 10 years is going to be designed for standard wiring. There just isn't enough market to justify anything else. Nobody's even talking about how to wire for LED's because of the chicken-and-egg problem.
My guess is that either it'll be what I was on about earlier, with intelligent dimmers sending interesting info up the power lines, muxed with the power itself, or short-range radio integrated into the power switch and the led driver chip.
Thing is: the LED's will draw less power than your current lights, so wire for incandescents and these things will have plenty of safety overhead.
By the way, having rewired several houses in my time, I'm a big proponent of putting the lighting on a separate circuit from the room outlets, so you don't end up in a dark room if you pop a breaker. I rewired my last house completely, including replacing the breaker box, and it was *perfect*. (I even ran a separate set of romex, one outlet in each room, that all terminated at a single point so I could put in a whole-house UPS.) And I wired Cat5 to each room. It was beautiful. Then I moved into a house that has a lot of nonaccessible wiring, sighed, and instituted wireless. Bah.
I dunno why that posted as anonymous. Oh well. For some reason slashdot seems to be dithering my comments half-anonymous, half-attributed of late, and of course I never bother to actually, y'know, read that bit before I hit 'submit'.
Anyway. I was going to say that the other thing that sucks about CRI as a quantifier of illumination quality is that it's designed to measure how people see several defined colors under illumination. So it doesn't deal with (as I covered earlier) fluorescent or phosphorescent components, which are surprisingly common. "whiter than white" used to be a sales slogan for clothing detergent full of UV dyes, that converted UV light to blue, to counteract the tendency of clothing to yellow over time. They wiped out the yellow by down-converting light to balance it. This may not work at all with LED lights, and isn't measured in CRI. Likewise, just because we can fool puny human eyes by mixing red, blue, green, and phosphor-converted UV, photographs of stuff under LED lights could well look just appalling, and that's an issue because LED manufacturers are aggressively trying to move into replacing flash lamps with LED's. They're way faster, they don't require much or any charge time, and they're way more controllable, and you don't have to include a high-voltage power supply in your camera. But what if the light looks rotten? and what if the CCD can't deal with the LED's color spectrum, because it's been optimized for sunlight, which is basically an incandescent-like source?
Problem is: any recommendation I make is going to be based on the LED's we have, and most of those are either not for sale yet, or are stupidly expensive. I honestly don't know what commonly available lightbulbs have which LED's, either, because only a few LED's intended for general illumination are easy to recognize. I can tell you that I have great respect for Philips LumiLEDs, Osram Dragons, and most of the stuff Cree makes. I've worked with all those extensively and they're beautiful.
A white/red combo might look okay. It's good for general illumination but still not particularly great for really good color rendition. The problem is that color rendering is dependent on a *lot* of weird stuff. (For instance, part of the reason a ruby is so red is because it's absorbing shorter-frequency light, and re-emitting it as red light, so even if you have a good red source that's lacking in the short-wavelength area, the ruby will look dead. Fish have lots of fluorescent/iridescent coloration, so a standard color rendering index (CRI) test might not tell you what you want to know: will this light look good with this situation?)
With the li-ion, they'll burst into flame, so the manufacturers *have* to put in good charge-controller circuitry. LED's are currently like cars in 1910: you can make anything that sort of vaguely works, and someone will buy it. It's no secret that the LED crowd are hoping so many people will buy them just because they're cool, that they'll jump the early adopter chasm before they've realized that they've mostly bought turkeys.
All the stuff we work with does, essentially, some sort of rectification, then dc-dc conversion, either buck, boost, or SEPIC, and ends up as a constant-current supply for the LED. We (and I'm sure a bunch of other people) have made drivers for really good dimming using standard triacs (ours is just about to hit the market) and they work *amazingly* well. You're limited in part by how well the triac works: a lot of the ones I've worked with have such crappy triggering circuits that the best you could ever get is roughly 60% dimming -- as in, you turn it on, keep coming up, and suddenly the light comes on at 40% brightness. You can then finesse it down to maybe 20%, but it's a pain. Thing is: we can digitize that and do clever stuff in software and come up with something that can essentially accommodate for the crappy triac, learn what it's doing (by sensing how it's chopping the AC) and produce a fabulous dimmer. We have one setup that can dim 10,000:1. If you get 5:1 out of a so-called dimmable compact fluorescent you're lucky. A good dimmer with an incandescent can do something similar: it can start producing heat before there's visible light coming off the filament. But I think only our (and similar) driver can get good performance out of cheap triacs.
With all that said, a cheap triac dimmer driving a cheap unregulated LED will work, but they're (in my opinion) objectionably flickery. A triac dimmer driving a good switching converter (without any detection stuff to try and decode what the dimmer's trying to send) will still dim because you end up starving the switcher when the power's off, but it's icky-looking. In my experience it's even more non-linear than just the cheap triac: when there's enough power it drives well (but as you say at full current/full brightness), and when there's no power it turns off, and in the between situation it thrashes. Most LED driver chips have dim pins so you can apply an external dim signal derived somehow from the signal if you want to add a bunch of external circuitry. (We're building stuff that integrates all that junk into the chip.)
>the idea that you're trying to keep the LEDs at the peak of their efficiency, it seems like a no-brainer.
It is. But very few people will actually *pay* for better circuitry, apparently. So instead we have to add bullet-point functionality to justify more research, and then add in good current regulation and the like as a side-effect of (say) cold-we