One-time pad encryption is unbreakable. Provably so. Other modern algorithms like Blowfish may be breakable if you throw enough computers at them, but nobody has any idea how to break them, even if you had the entire world's computational hardware running for a thousand years. There is no known break (yet.)
The problem is that we're making rapid advances in strong cryptography, which is good for anonymity and secure online communication, but when companies use that same cryptography to protect their software, we're as hosed as any other wiretapper. They have more resources than we do, so they can afford the very best, and the very best is *very* good.
It's silly to try to explain everything 100%. People who already know the material aren't building things from MAKE: they're building their own stuff. People who don't know the material aren't going to sit through the re-presentation of "The Art Of Electronics", all 1125 pages (including index) of it. Learn by doing. So it becomes a jumping-off point, like Wikipedia: a gateway to learning, with the added advantage of highlighting specific projects, pointing people in specific directions that they would be unlikely to find or actually play with.
It's *hard* to try and carve out a niche where they are. On the one side you have Nuts&Volts, on the other Popular Mechanics. What they're aiming at is a group of people who *want* to experiment with interesting science/technology, but own a screwdriver and a closet full of obsolete servers. I look at it as a transitional magazine, trying to wean the Popular Mechanics crowd and turn them into the Home Shop Machinist crowd: people who actually can make things.
But there is a big wide swath of creation that isn't addressed by many other magazines, particularly not mainstream magazines, and that's the hardware/software overlap area where MAKE is working: robotics, automation, and to some extent, art/technology (like Leah Buechley's sweaters knitted with conductive wiring and LED's soldered in so they can become wearable displays, or hardcore art cars). The question is: does it make sense, in light of the Internet, to have a magazine that covers this? The material's available on the Internet.
I think the answer to that is similar to the answer of why do record companies still exist: because it's a way of connecting consumers to producers. You can't Google for things you don't know about, and most people, with TV mentality, just sit in front of the Internet and read about the same things they always have. MAKE brings up brand new things, shows (in some cases) how to build them, and introduces people to stuff they never would have tried. I would never have actually considered making pulsejets, actual thrust-producing, red-hot ones, if I hadn't seen the MAKE jam-jar pulsejet. Likewise I would never have considered actually machining Stirling engines if I hadn't seen the (Dean Kaman-designed?) pop-can Stirling they published. I'd read about both, thought they were cool, but actually seeing a step-by-step on how to build them, was motivational.
It's easy to dismiss MAKE as kitsch. But the thing is: what's kitsch to YOU is something new and exciting to someone else who hasn't ever built anything more unconventional than a custom PC.
Gladwell's excellent. I recommend "Blink" and "Outliers" as both being excellent books, chock-full of learning.
*I* think companies shouldn't advertise safety features. They should include them as stock items. That way people wouldn't buy things thinking that they'd be safer, and then use up that same safety by driving harder. But that's not really realistic. It's likely that because people don't know how well antirollover systems work, they don't use it all up, but I'll bet you they do indeed drive it harder. That's what they've done in the past.
There's a great Malcolm Gladwell article on exactly this: how the American public accepts a certain amount of risk in driving subconsciously, so every advance in automotive safety is then matched by changes in driving habits to maximize driving speed, rather than minimizing risk.
And, additional, because I'm stupid and hit 'submit' rather than preview, Cree announces 161 lumens/watt in a high-power R&D white LED. This is in the range where it's viable for LED's to compete in every market with CFL's, particularly ones involving rapid cycling (bathrooms, refrigerators) and ones that *could* involve rapid cycling but traditionally haven't (security lights, parking lot illumination.)
>I would love to have LEDs. But they need to raise their efficiency. They don't generate heat as such, but AC->DC conversion does,
For the record, the rectification conversion is in the 90% range, and the LED driver is also 85-95% efficient. LED's *do* produce *gobs* of heat, but they conduct it rather than radiating it -- the silicon die is *blisteringly* hot. The ones we're working with are bonded to copper blocks with socket-A fans on the back side and they're still reallllly hot. I've gotten burnt working with them. One model of headlight replacement for cars was advertised as being ice-proof because the fans on it, blowing the heat out, would melt ice and snow. (These are much brighter than the ones they use in stoplights, which have exactly the opposite problem.) LED's intended for illumination are blazingly hot. Most of the commercial incandescent replacement LED bulbs are 98% heatsink and 2% LED.
White LED phosphors are blue-heavy with a yellow peak. People build them that way because they're cheap. Now that everyone's getting pissed because they look cheap, any LED module designer worth twenty cents is designing systems that have roughly 3 white to 2 red LED's to bring the spectrum down. However, every lighting designer I've talked to, when we suggest making multiple color LED fixtures, especially ones with adjustable color spectra, say "the customers *say* they want that but they won't pay for it." They say the public has almost no interest in LED lighting in general, and particularly not in premium color solutions: price drives lighting.
They make single, huge LED's. Look at the Lumileds TP120. It's a 30 amp LED intended to replace projector bulbs. The problem is they're EXPENSIVE and they have a lot of heat build-up problems so you have to bond them to massive chunks of copper or aluminum to get the heat out of the silicon. Small LED's are much cheaper and can be built in individual reflective pits to help with directionality of the LED. Doped silicon is *expensive* compared to tungsten, glass, aluminum, and even gold.
Writing them out as 'one' does help a lot. She's rather stubborn, though, and is still convinced that she can manage to force herself to be able to use numerals the same way the rest of the world does (hence her taking algebra four times.) Using icons would be interesting: maybe we'll try that. Apparently, according to Steven Pinker, the brain stores the idea of a single object, or two objects, and so on, in a different area than the part of the brain that deals with '1' and '2', and those in a different place than the concepts 'one' and 'two'. I don't know about '-' and '=' (my best ASCII representations of 'ichi' and 'ni') but it would be interesting to see how it works.
It's both painful and frustrating watching my girlfriend try and deal with numbers. She can read words *extremely* rapidly, with perfect comprehension, and with some proofreading she can type fairly well. But if I tell her an address, say, 3448 Harlan, she'll write down "3884" and look at it and say "that's wrong" and write down "3848" and say "that's wrong too" and write down "3448" and say "I just can't write this down right" and erase the correct one and try again. She says the numbers actually wiggle into different forms while she's watching them. She's completely unable to tell whether the number she wrote down is the same as another number she's looking at. (not *completely*, as it happens: as in my example, she gets the first digit right about 80% of the time or more. But past that it's close to random, although they're often the correct digits, interchanged, and only sometimes completely different numbers.)
Like the other person who replied to you, my gf has taken algebra, and failed it, four times. She understands the concepts. She understands the concepts of calculus because I've explained them. But it is physically impossible for her to correctly read or write numbers. Sucks, coz she's an incredibly bright person, and she would've been a good engineer. As it is, she's getting a degree in communications.
My gf was taking statistics last semester, her first math class in 10 years. She's dyslexic, particularly with respect to numbers, and was terrified of the class and I figured the book might help. Both of us found the format and presentation to be more distracting than informational. If you think statistics is boring, maybe this will make it interesting. If you think statistics is *difficult*, this probably won't do anything for you that a conventional stats book, except provide pretty pictures. And, since story problems don't seem to make people learn better than just learning the basic math using abstract variable names, why not just do that?
The problem with the so-called dead zone is that there isn't enough air pressure to force oxygen into your blood, across the lung cells. You can have all the red blood cells you want, but if they can't get oxygen in, you have a problem. The ValSalva Maneuver is a way of coping with this, to some extent: you suck in air and then compress your lungs like you're a kid trying to make your face red. That increases the air pressure.
There are different kinds of hypoxia. One is not having enough red blood cells (or poisoned red blood cells, as seen in smokers or cyanide victims.) Another is not having enough oxygen pressure to get air into those cells. Epo treats the wrong problem here. Bicyclists are running into limits getting oxygen from the air jammed through their blood and into their muscles, and epo helps with that. (However a little bit of dehydration and your blood turns to jello -- something like half the Dutch national cycling team died in two consecutive years back in the early '90's because they were overdosing on epo and having heart attacks from blood cells jamming up their capillaries.)
Antacids. The people teaching the wilderness medicine courses I've taken have said "I don't know if that would work" when I've told them my method of dealing with altitude sickness: lots and lots of Tums. They're calcium carbonate. They dissolve and get absorbed. That carbonate has to be going somewhere. I haven't ever gone up high enough to get altitude sickness, taken a bunch, then kept going up -- because that would be STUPID -- but I and my friends always take antacids and when we start experiencing the first symptoms of hypoxic hypoxia (there are four general types of hypoxia, caused by different things: cyanide poisoning, for instance, is a type of hypoxia that isn't caused by low atmospheric oxygen) we eat a bunch of them and start heading back down. The headache and dizziness goes away within a minute of eating the bicarb/antacids, even though I'm still at the same elevation, coz I can't walk that far in a minute. It takes about five or ten minutes for the onset of symptoms, so you're well into the symptomatic altitude range, and the relief is almost immediate once I take antacids. YMMV but I'd be interested in hearing if anyone else has tried this.
One of the many things I found interesting about that book was his matter-of-fact description of just how hallucinatory and out-of-touch everyone was, including him. He wrote (as I recall) about being caught in the blizzard and talking to one of the other climbers for twenty minutes, and the next day when he was down lower, realized that the other climber he'd been talking to hadn't been there -- he'd either imagined the entire conversation or he'd been talking to someone completely different than he thought he was speaking to. He had no idea what had actually happened during that time, in other words, and at the time he felt fine, if scared.
I'm a pilot and I've seen video of people who are deeply hypoxic, and completely unaware of what they're doing. They're talking nonsense or thrashing around, without any signs of consciousness. There is a very creepy video of some people filming themselves on a mountain flight, and going increasingly loopy and losing touch with reality, before the plane crashes into a mountain. They never have a clue that they've all gone completely crazy.
Have you ever read about how kimberlite tubes are probably formed? It sounds very exciting. The initial magma burst upwards is only hasty by geologic terms, but the final burst of gas and magma out of the surface of the earth is at supersonic velocities. People have claimed it's possible some of the material is moving at beyond escape velocity and gets shot into space. So while I'd love to discover a kimberlite tube, I'd rather it wasn't on MY property.
Mythbusters also busted the myth that pop cans can explode when left in a car in bright sunlight. I think they busted it twice. Which makes me dubious about Mythbusters, given that I've had this happen 4 times, either to my car (once) my mom's car (twice) or my girlfriend's car (once). It's *possible* that someone broke into all our cars, sprayed them with ginger ale, diet sprite, and diet coke, and replaced the majority of the pop cans with ones that were emptied, with bulged-out bottoms and tops and splits along the pour cutout. And somehow arranged to have one can rigged to go off just as I grabbed the cardboard box that contained them, spraying all over while I was taking it out of the car. But it's more likely that the Mythbusters are sometimes wrong. I don't know if they're right or wrong on the powerline issue: I haven't done any research. They cast a lot of doubt on it. I just know that their authoritative statements are not actually authoritative.
People who live near (under) high-voltage cross-country power lines can tell you about harvesting electric fields. People have been known to run wires through their attics, parallel to adjacent high-voltage lines, and run lights off them. It's considered power theft, which I think is a shame, because it helps make the rest of the house a little more liveable, with fewer shocks from touching light switches or heating vents. In Moab, Utah, there's a popular bike trail with the parking area right under a major power line. There are audible snapping and popping sounds coming from bikes on car-top racks. I keep meaning to wire up a capacitor bank and see how far it charges up while I'm out on a ride, but I haven't had time yet to build that.
>Anybody here old enough to remember the candidates talking about what they were going to do with the budget surplus, back in 2000? Or is that just some forgotten ancient history?
Oh, I remember. I'm old enough to remember when one of the core planks of the Republican platform was "Balance The Budget!" and every Republican mentioned that repeatedly in their campaign literature. Right up until it became obvious that Bill Clinton was going to be the one to balance the budget and actually establish a surplus. Suddenly, that plank vanished as if it had never existed, and last eight years, we have almost doubled our budget deficit, from $5.7T to $10T.
>I think, anyone who thinks and acts in the long term nowadays, will rule them all in the future.
But they won't because they will have been outcompeted by short-term interests.
This is a fundamental problem with relying on amplification systems. The same thing is seen in evolution: the organisms or systems which reproduce with the highest gain overwhelm everything else.
Your investor wants to make the highest income per unit time. That is the investor's only quality metric, and that's pretty much as it should be. Your company wants as many investors as possible so it has to give back the best return per unit time. Again, that's as it should be. The result is that long-term planning is not a natural result of marketplace action. As such it is probably the domain of government -- hence space programs being nationally funded. It doesn't matter how smart you are. If you're slow, you will be crushed.
In my opinion, China isn't slow, at all, and their government is thinking long-term, directing all the short-term companies. That's a recipe for success.
But it doesn't make sense to criticize companies for acting in their short-term interests. It is, unfortunately, the only rational way for them to behave.
Depends on the virus. There's some interesting research done on this. If the host is the target system for the virus (as in the AIDS virus) it wants the host to live as long as possible, with as little incapacitation as possible, to spread as widely as possible. This is also the route seen with colds and influenza. If the host is just a stepping stone along the viral pathway, it doesn't care, and sometimes will even benefit from the host being as sick as possible for as long as possible, as seen in eg yellow fever, where having the person near death is an advantage because the person isn't moving or able to fend off mosquitos, which are what the virus actually wants. There are some infections, like cholera (which isn't a virus, directly, but the mode of infection follows similar pathways) where different areas have different routes of transmission, and in areas where the route of transmission is human-to-human dependent, cholera gets milder over time, but in the areas where it isn't, cholera gets more deadly over time because all it is trying to do is maximize its output, at the cost of its host.
Chapstick. Stay out of the sun (or use sunblock chapstick.) Foods high in lysine or lysine suppliments, and if you can, avoid foods with lots of arginine. Here is a list of foods to choose and to avoid. Abreva is a not-stunningly-expensive OTC that reduces symptom duration. If you're having it that often you can probably get prescribed Acyclovir, since there's a chance of Bell's Palsy every time you have an outbreak, and boy does that suck.
I was in a lawsuit that involved needing to serve papers to someone who had disappeared. After hiring people to try and find him and waiting a month, the court decided it would be adequate to serve papers to his parents, as he'd listed his residence there at one point.
It's possible that's what happened here: they served papers to her parents, and they didn't get the information to her for whatever reason.
I'm using a Vishay PolarPAK -- astoundingly low Rdson, great power-handling, but a bear to solder. I'm working with switching boost and buck controllers, so these are the FETs they're controlling.
Paralleling works, but then you have higher gate capacitance, and that brings its own problems. Grumble.
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One-time pad encryption is unbreakable. Provably so.
Other modern algorithms like Blowfish may be breakable if you throw enough computers at them, but nobody has any idea how to break them, even if you had the entire world's computational hardware running for a thousand years. There is no known break (yet.)
The problem is that we're making rapid advances in strong cryptography, which is good for anonymity and secure online communication, but when companies use that same cryptography to protect their software, we're as hosed as any other wiretapper. They have more resources than we do, so they can afford the very best, and the very best is *very* good.
It's silly to try to explain everything 100%. People who already know the material aren't building things from MAKE: they're building their own stuff. People who don't know the material aren't going to sit through the re-presentation of "The Art Of Electronics", all 1125 pages (including index) of it. Learn by doing.
So it becomes a jumping-off point, like Wikipedia: a gateway to learning, with the added advantage of highlighting specific projects, pointing people in specific directions that they would be unlikely to find or actually play with.
It's my favorite mag. Thanks for making it.
It's *hard* to try and carve out a niche where they are. On the one side you have Nuts&Volts, on the other Popular Mechanics.
What they're aiming at is a group of people who *want* to experiment with interesting science/technology, but own a screwdriver and a closet full of obsolete servers.
I look at it as a transitional magazine, trying to wean the Popular Mechanics crowd and turn them into the Home Shop Machinist crowd: people who actually can make things.
But there is a big wide swath of creation that isn't addressed by many other magazines, particularly not mainstream magazines, and that's the hardware/software overlap area where MAKE is working: robotics, automation, and to some extent, art/technology (like Leah Buechley's sweaters knitted with conductive wiring and LED's soldered in so they can become wearable displays, or hardcore art cars).
The question is: does it make sense, in light of the Internet, to have a magazine that covers this? The material's available on the Internet.
I think the answer to that is similar to the answer of why do record companies still exist: because it's a way of connecting consumers to producers. You can't Google for things you don't know about, and most people, with TV mentality, just sit in front of the Internet and read about the same things they always have. MAKE brings up brand new things, shows (in some cases) how to build them, and introduces people to stuff they never would have tried. I would never have actually considered making pulsejets, actual thrust-producing, red-hot ones, if I hadn't seen the MAKE jam-jar pulsejet. Likewise I would never have considered actually machining Stirling engines if I hadn't seen the (Dean Kaman-designed?) pop-can Stirling they published. I'd read about both, thought they were cool, but actually seeing a step-by-step on how to build them, was motivational.
It's easy to dismiss MAKE as kitsch. But the thing is: what's kitsch to YOU is something new and exciting to someone else who hasn't ever built anything more unconventional than a custom PC.
Gladwell's excellent. I recommend "Blink" and "Outliers" as both being excellent books, chock-full of learning.
*I* think companies shouldn't advertise safety features. They should include them as stock items. That way people wouldn't buy things thinking that they'd be safer, and then use up that same safety by driving harder. But that's not really realistic.
It's likely that because people don't know how well antirollover systems work, they don't use it all up, but I'll bet you they do indeed drive it harder. That's what they've done in the past.
There's a great Malcolm Gladwell article on exactly this: how the American public accepts a certain amount of risk in driving subconsciously, so every advance in automotive safety is then matched by changes in driving habits to maximize driving speed, rather than minimizing risk.
And, additional, because I'm stupid and hit 'submit' rather than preview,
Cree announces 161 lumens/watt in a high-power R&D white LED.
This is in the range where it's viable for LED's to compete in every market with CFL's, particularly ones involving rapid cycling (bathrooms, refrigerators) and ones that *could* involve rapid cycling but traditionally haven't (security lights, parking lot illumination.)
>I would love to have LEDs. But they need to raise their efficiency. They don't generate heat as such, but AC->DC conversion does,
For the record, the rectification conversion is in the 90% range, and the LED driver is also 85-95% efficient. LED's *do* produce *gobs* of heat, but they conduct it rather than radiating it -- the silicon die is *blisteringly* hot. The ones we're working with are bonded to copper blocks with socket-A fans on the back side and they're still reallllly hot. I've gotten burnt working with them. One model of headlight replacement for cars was advertised as being ice-proof because the fans on it, blowing the heat out, would melt ice and snow. (These are much brighter than the ones they use in stoplights, which have exactly the opposite problem.)
LED's intended for illumination are blazingly hot. Most of the commercial incandescent replacement LED bulbs are 98% heatsink and 2% LED.
White LED phosphors are blue-heavy with a yellow peak.
People build them that way because they're cheap.
Now that everyone's getting pissed because they look cheap, any LED module designer worth twenty cents is designing systems that have roughly 3 white to 2 red LED's to bring the spectrum down.
However, every lighting designer I've talked to, when we suggest making multiple color LED fixtures, especially ones with adjustable color spectra, say "the customers *say* they want that but they won't pay for it." They say the public has almost no interest in LED lighting in general, and particularly not in premium color solutions: price drives lighting.
They make single, huge LED's. Look at the Lumileds TP120. It's a 30 amp LED intended to replace projector bulbs. The problem is they're EXPENSIVE and they have a lot of heat build-up problems so you have to bond them to massive chunks of copper or aluminum to get the heat out of the silicon. Small LED's are much cheaper and can be built in individual reflective pits to help with directionality of the LED.
Doped silicon is *expensive* compared to tungsten, glass, aluminum, and even gold.
There were optical telegraph towers in France in 1795. They had a network of 500 stations that covered much of the country, and used them for military communications for 70 years.
Writing them out as 'one' does help a lot. She's rather stubborn, though, and is still convinced that she can manage to force herself to be able to use numerals the same way the rest of the world does (hence her taking algebra four times.)
Using icons would be interesting: maybe we'll try that.
Apparently, according to Steven Pinker, the brain stores the idea of a single object, or two objects, and so on, in a different area than the part of the brain that deals with '1' and '2', and those in a different place than the concepts 'one' and 'two'. I don't know about '-' and '=' (my best ASCII representations of 'ichi' and 'ni') but it would be interesting to see how it works.
It's both painful and frustrating watching my girlfriend try and deal with numbers. She can read words *extremely* rapidly, with perfect comprehension, and with some proofreading she can type fairly well.
But if I tell her an address, say, 3448 Harlan, she'll write down "3884" and look at it and say "that's wrong" and write down "3848" and say "that's wrong too" and write down "3448" and say "I just can't write this down right" and erase the correct one and try again.
She says the numbers actually wiggle into different forms while she's watching them. She's completely unable to tell whether the number she wrote down is the same as another number she's looking at.
(not *completely*, as it happens: as in my example, she gets the first digit right about 80% of the time or more. But past that it's close to random, although they're often the correct digits, interchanged, and only sometimes completely different numbers.)
Like the other person who replied to you, my gf has taken algebra, and failed it, four times. She understands the concepts. She understands the concepts of calculus because I've explained them. But it is physically impossible for her to correctly read or write numbers.
Sucks, coz she's an incredibly bright person, and she would've been a good engineer. As it is, she's getting a degree in communications.
My gf was taking statistics last semester, her first math class in 10 years. She's dyslexic, particularly with respect to numbers, and was terrified of the class and I figured the book might help.
Both of us found the format and presentation to be more distracting than informational.
If you think statistics is boring, maybe this will make it interesting. If you think statistics is *difficult*, this probably won't do anything for you that a conventional stats book, except provide pretty pictures. And, since story problems don't seem to make people learn better than just learning the basic math using abstract variable names, why not just do that?
The problem with the so-called dead zone is that there isn't enough air pressure to force oxygen into your blood, across the lung cells. You can have all the red blood cells you want, but if they can't get oxygen in, you have a problem.
The ValSalva Maneuver is a way of coping with this, to some extent: you suck in air and then compress your lungs like you're a kid trying to make your face red. That increases the air pressure.
There are different kinds of hypoxia. One is not having enough red blood cells (or poisoned red blood cells, as seen in smokers or cyanide victims.) Another is not having enough oxygen pressure to get air into those cells. Epo treats the wrong problem here. Bicyclists are running into limits getting oxygen from the air jammed through their blood and into their muscles, and epo helps with that. (However a little bit of dehydration and your blood turns to jello -- something like half the Dutch national cycling team died in two consecutive years back in the early '90's because they were overdosing on epo and having heart attacks from blood cells jamming up their capillaries.)
Antacids.
The people teaching the wilderness medicine courses I've taken have said "I don't know if that would work" when I've told them my method of dealing with altitude sickness: lots and lots of Tums. They're calcium carbonate. They dissolve and get absorbed. That carbonate has to be going somewhere. I haven't ever gone up high enough to get altitude sickness, taken a bunch, then kept going up -- because that would be STUPID -- but I and my friends always take antacids and when we start experiencing the first symptoms of hypoxic hypoxia (there are four general types of hypoxia, caused by different things: cyanide poisoning, for instance, is a type of hypoxia that isn't caused by low atmospheric oxygen) we eat a bunch of them and start heading back down. The headache and dizziness goes away within a minute of eating the bicarb/antacids, even though I'm still at the same elevation, coz I can't walk that far in a minute. It takes about five or ten minutes for the onset of symptoms, so you're well into the symptomatic altitude range, and the relief is almost immediate once I take antacids. YMMV but I'd be interested in hearing if anyone else has tried this.
One of the many things I found interesting about that book was his matter-of-fact description of just how hallucinatory and out-of-touch everyone was, including him. He wrote (as I recall) about being caught in the blizzard and talking to one of the other climbers for twenty minutes, and the next day when he was down lower, realized that the other climber he'd been talking to hadn't been there -- he'd either imagined the entire conversation or he'd been talking to someone completely different than he thought he was speaking to. He had no idea what had actually happened during that time, in other words, and at the time he felt fine, if scared.
I'm a pilot and I've seen video of people who are deeply hypoxic, and completely unaware of what they're doing. They're talking nonsense or thrashing around, without any signs of consciousness. There is a very creepy video of some people filming themselves on a mountain flight, and going increasingly loopy and losing touch with reality, before the plane crashes into a mountain. They never have a clue that they've all gone completely crazy.
Have you ever read about how kimberlite tubes are probably formed? It sounds very exciting. The initial magma burst upwards is only hasty by geologic terms, but the final burst of gas and magma out of the surface of the earth is at supersonic velocities. People have claimed it's possible some of the material is moving at beyond escape velocity and gets shot into space.
So while I'd love to discover a kimberlite tube, I'd rather it wasn't on MY property.
Mythbusters also busted the myth that pop cans can explode when left in a car in bright sunlight. I think they busted it twice.
Which makes me dubious about Mythbusters, given that I've had this happen 4 times, either to my car (once) my mom's car (twice) or my girlfriend's car (once). It's *possible* that someone broke into all our cars, sprayed them with ginger ale, diet sprite, and diet coke, and replaced the majority of the pop cans with ones that were emptied, with bulged-out bottoms and tops and splits along the pour cutout. And somehow arranged to have one can rigged to go off just as I grabbed the cardboard box that contained them, spraying all over while I was taking it out of the car.
But it's more likely that the Mythbusters are sometimes wrong.
I don't know if they're right or wrong on the powerline issue: I haven't done any research. They cast a lot of doubt on it. I just know that their authoritative statements are not actually authoritative.
People who live near (under) high-voltage cross-country power lines can tell you about harvesting electric fields. People have been known to run wires through their attics, parallel to adjacent high-voltage lines, and run lights off them. It's considered power theft, which I think is a shame, because it helps make the rest of the house a little more liveable, with fewer shocks from touching light switches or heating vents.
In Moab, Utah, there's a popular bike trail with the parking area right under a major power line. There are audible snapping and popping sounds coming from bikes on car-top racks. I keep meaning to wire up a capacitor bank and see how far it charges up while I'm out on a ride, but I haven't had time yet to build that.
>Anybody here old enough to remember the candidates talking about what they were going to do with the budget surplus, back in 2000? Or is that just some forgotten ancient history?
Oh, I remember.
I'm old enough to remember when one of the core planks of the Republican platform was "Balance The Budget!" and every Republican mentioned that repeatedly in their campaign literature.
Right up until it became obvious that Bill Clinton was going to be the one to balance the budget and actually establish a surplus.
Suddenly, that plank vanished as if it had never existed, and last eight years, we have almost doubled our budget deficit, from $5.7T to $10T.
>I think, anyone who thinks and acts in the long term nowadays, will rule them all in the future.
But they won't because they will have been outcompeted by short-term interests.
This is a fundamental problem with relying on amplification systems. The same thing is seen in evolution: the organisms or systems which reproduce with the highest gain overwhelm everything else.
Your investor wants to make the highest income per unit time. That is the investor's only quality metric, and that's pretty much as it should be. Your company wants as many investors as possible so it has to give back the best return per unit time. Again, that's as it should be. The result is that long-term planning is not a natural result of marketplace action. As such it is probably the domain of government -- hence space programs being nationally funded.
It doesn't matter how smart you are. If you're slow, you will be crushed.
In my opinion, China isn't slow, at all, and their government is thinking long-term, directing all the short-term companies. That's a recipe for success.
But it doesn't make sense to criticize companies for acting in their short-term interests. It is, unfortunately, the only rational way for them to behave.
Depends on the virus. There's some interesting research done on this. If the host is the target system for the virus (as in the AIDS virus) it wants the host to live as long as possible, with as little incapacitation as possible, to spread as widely as possible. This is also the route seen with colds and influenza. If the host is just a stepping stone along the viral pathway, it doesn't care, and sometimes will even benefit from the host being as sick as possible for as long as possible, as seen in eg yellow fever, where having the person near death is an advantage because the person isn't moving or able to fend off mosquitos, which are what the virus actually wants.
There are some infections, like cholera (which isn't a virus, directly, but the mode of infection follows similar pathways) where different areas have different routes of transmission, and in areas where the route of transmission is human-to-human dependent, cholera gets milder over time, but in the areas where it isn't, cholera gets more deadly over time because all it is trying to do is maximize its output, at the cost of its host.
Chapstick. Stay out of the sun (or use sunblock chapstick.)
Foods high in lysine or lysine suppliments, and if you can, avoid foods with lots of arginine.
Here is a list of foods to choose and to avoid.
Abreva is a not-stunningly-expensive OTC that reduces symptom duration.
If you're having it that often you can probably get prescribed Acyclovir, since there's a chance of Bell's Palsy every time you have an outbreak, and boy does that suck.
I was in a lawsuit that involved needing to serve papers to someone who had disappeared. After hiring people to try and find him and waiting a month, the court decided it would be adequate to serve papers to his parents, as he'd listed his residence there at one point.
It's possible that's what happened here: they served papers to her parents, and they didn't get the information to her for whatever reason.
I'm using a Vishay PolarPAK -- astoundingly low Rdson, great power-handling, but a bear to solder. I'm working with switching boost and buck controllers, so these are the FETs they're controlling.
Paralleling works, but then you have higher gate capacitance, and that brings its own problems. Grumble.