I don't know about battery, but in Colorado we had to pass a special law, commonly referred to as the Good Samaritan law, that prevents people from sueing people who injure them while saving their lives, in medical circumstances -- break ribs during CPR, infections resulting from emergency tracheotomy. Frighteningly enough, it was necessary to pass this law because people were indeed sueing other people for *saving* their *lives*.
I think it's clearly not going to be safe, but the more difficult part of the problem is that the issues we'd face would be issues we would be much less likely to even think of because they're not within our entire history. This is classic out-of-the-box thinking: the immune system is tuned to fight off threats that are very like us and there are whole classes of molecules that it can't do anything about. Likewise, as you say, big things with teeth. My point was: if we were to encounter pathogens that are very similar to us, that could infect us the way ours do, they will be unlikely to be wildly devastating because they would be likely to destroy themselves. If we are to encounter pathogens that are wildly different, we might not be edible or useful to them -- we'd be useless as food to a silicon-based lifeform. But that doesn't even begin to address all the other things that could be out there. I suspect we'd find so much difficulty with inorganic or simple organic molecules that we wouldn't live long enough to have to worry about pathogens: an atmosphere less than 10% or greater than 35% oxygen, greater than a few ppm of CO, HCN, NH3, or a raft of other simple, common molecules, and humans are in a lot of trouble.
If you want chemical farms, rather than make a whole bacterium, why not just make the enzyme or enzyme train that produces the chemical from a set of precursors, and then stick those into the DNA of a given bacterial species, in a sequence that will be strongly expressed? That's what we've been doing since the '80's, in bacteria and in animals. A friend of mine designed a cow that produced interferon in the cow's milk when fed zinc-rich foods, and it worked. Now, interferon isn't a new chemical. But the system for production of a new chemical as, essentially, a waste product, is a fairly well-understood process. The big question is modelling an enzyme surface to get the right transition topology to get the reactant->product working correctly.
>It's not terribly likely that alien pathogens could harm us.
I agree, but not because of the reasoning you use. As I said in another bit of this thread: a digestive system is required to not digest the system's owner. Anything else is fair game. If we ran into a pathogen that could digest proteins readily, into something it could eat, we'd be pretty screwed. For an example, see necrotizing fasciitis, which can consume a person's entire leg in 12 hours (according to a doctor friend who has treated it, via amputation.)
The immune system has several components. The cell-mediated stuff might or might not recognize invaders: there are things that are just invisible to it, and others that can kill the individual macrophages and t-cells. (That's one way asbestos is nasty, is that it physically tears macrophages apart, releasing their cell-killing chemicals to the surrounding tissues, and damaging them.) We have a zillion flavors of antibody: we seem to form antibodies against everything we will ever encounter, so at least that should work.
The main thing going in our favor is that the digestive system of a predator -- which a pathogen is, in a way -- is going to be tuned for its prey, and it's likely that the predator and prey will be similar, unless life came from two fundamentally different processes on a given planet (which is unlikely to be long-term stable.) As such, any predator that can usefully digest humans will probably be similar enough to humans to not be able to just dissolve them nigh-instantaneously, as something that exuded massive quantities of protein-digesting and lipid-digesting enzymes could.
Viral particles are pretty specific, because they rely on the host to do a lot of the heavy lifting for them: the host supplies most of the DNA replication and protein synthesis equipment and all the natural resources.
Bacteria, in contrast, do 80-100% of the work themselves. They can actively invade -- move in a directed manner -- and can physically attach themselves to cells and start doing damage. Helicobacter pylori, for instance (the bacterium that causes many ulcers) is shaped like a screw and physically screws itself into soft tissue, where it begins digesting them. Some bacteria can attack any animal that has an open wound, or others, like Clostridium perfringins, that causes gas gangrene, can do the same with any deep wound, regardless of species. I don't know of anything that can eat both plants and animals, but I wouldn't be surprised to find out about one.
Anyway, all this misses a prime point: you need a digestive system that doesn't digest you. If it digests something entirely different, you're completely safe. An alien life form that doesn't use amino acid polymers for the structure of its digestive system, but can (for some reason) digest them into something it can eat, would dissolve humans, or any animals, like salt on slugs.
If I had mod points, I'd give them to you. Napier's quote is one of the best analyses of culture clash I've ever heard, and I was madly searching for it when I saw you'd already found it.
The point when I think I'm old, is when I remember my first desktop used an audio cassette tape as its non-volatile storage. I think it could store a dozen kilobytes, but hey, that beat the system memory. HP 9830, circa 1972, for the record.
1. They don't have much of a choice: battery voltage is dictated by the chemical reaction going on, as determined by the respective electronegativities of the different species. Here is some more discussion. So if you have a relatively large voltage, you might be able to get there by different series combinations: a 12 volt car battery is 8 1.5V lead-acid cells in series, but could also be 10 1.2 volt batteries in series.
2. But they're dealing with the tyranny of chemistry by using dc-dc converters that turn one voltage into another -- either reducing or increasing the voltage, at fairly high (80-90%) efficiency.
I don't know the complete history of the use of abbreviations for humor, but it's pretty old. There are lots of writers from the 1920's who did this (PG Wodehouse and James Thurber spring to mind, particularly Wodehouse) and I think I recall it being very in vogue in the 1830's for a while, as well, when "OK" started getting used.
Sunlight is less of a problem. There's an *enormous* amount of IR coming off ovens and stuff. Regardless of that, my girlfriend the opthamologist says everyone should wear something with UV and IR protection when they're outside during daytime, because glassblower cataracts might show up when you're 30 but exposure to sunlight -- esp if on water or skiing -- could cause cataracts to show up when you're 60. Cataract surgery is pretty trivial these days, but if you don't have to, you shouldn't. Or at least put it off as long as possible because they're beginning to produce replacement lenses that are flexible, so at some point you'll be able to get your lens replaced with one that's better than it was when you were 20 -- no more reading glasses.
Yeah, long days on boats when you don't want to be there kind of suck.
Other people have answered, referencing blood doping, but nobody has pointed out quite how deadly this is. This article claims a dozen Dutch pro racers died of probable blood-doping-related heart issues in the late 1980's; through the pro racing grapevine people have claimed that the numbers were much higher than that.
I've only dealt with scr/triacs -- I'm sure the CFL's are a mess. Thankfully, we don't have to deal with that stuff. I've built a couple arc-energized gas lasers in my time, and when they fire up, I suspect the entire neighborhood loses its TV reception.
Turns out it's not just microwaves that'll curdle your lens and/or cornea: heavy IR (young-onset cataracts used to be known as glassblower blindness) and even radiation can do it. Of course, you have worse problems than cataracts if you're exposed to that much radiation...
Zowie, you know your stuff. Slope compensation is used. I don't know the specifics of the circuit, and I'm not sure he does either: he said that was possible but he thought it was unlikely. (I've had to design stuff to measure whether our slope compensation works correctly when new silicon comes back, which isn't so easy to do.)
I'm curious: what OBDII setup do you use? I just built a hardware rs232-OBDII converter but it looks like I'm going to have to buy a software package to troubleshoot the sourceforge OBDII software, before I can build a bunch for my friends, so I'm looking for suggestions on good commercial packages.
To the best of my knowledge, in many states, it is required that you buy a casket, and in most states it is required that you buy *some* sort of container, even if it's just a little cardboard box like an ice-cream container for the ashes. Luckily, those are cheap, comparatively, like $20 or so. My dad's ashes are still sitting in that little box, 6 years later, on my mom's clothesdryer. (Not a real sentimental family, but boy we have procrastination down to a science.)
And if he were still around, he'd be pissed, coz he always said he wanted to be composted.
It *is* legal to bury a human body on your property, although it's very difficult -- easier if there's any evidence there was a pre-existing graveyard there already -- but there are requirements for depth and containment that make nutrient-recovery difficult.
I personally plan on chugging a quart of nitroglycerine and jumping off a building (if my heart lasts long enough to get to the edge.)
For what it's worth, microwave radiation leads to cataracts -- opacity of the lens, not the vitreous humor. Glaucoma is a different disease, where movement of liquid from inside the eye through the pupil to the outside of the eye is blocked, often from debris clogging the fine network of holes, so pressure accumulates within the eye, leading to nerve damage and blindness.
Also: I've found most lamp dimmers to be reasonably quiet, EMI-wise, especially the newer electronic ones that switch on partway through the phase and switch off at zero-crossing. Really cheap triacs with no snubbers are pretty loud, though, and anything driving reactive loads by chopping is appallingly noisy.
I just walked down the hall and asked the guy who designed about 70% of the switchers for the various ipods, and he said they run at "about 600 KHz" fwiw. I bet it's not them.
I agree with the direction of your post, but there are some... let's call them clarifications.
1. Joseph Smith, not John, was the one with the hat. 1a. It wasn't the hat that was magic, it was a stone, that he dug up and PUT in the hat, and then he'd stick his face in the hat and the stone would talk to him and he'd say what the stone told him to, so that his loyal amanuensis could write it all down.
2. Most Quakers these days aren't so into the crazies. Shakers were but they're mostly extinct. Likewise, most Southern Baptists and their crowd don't do the shaking and speaking-in-tongues (glossolalia, it's called) and handling snakes and other weird things like that: many consider those to be sinful. Pentecostals, however, are WAY into the shaking and the gibbering.
A lot of religious Christian types absolutely do believe in big, world-affecting miracles, at least in the past: many of them will tell you earnestly that NASA had to repeatedly recalibrate the Apollo landings to account for a missing day -- but not quite a full day, because two different time-stop miracles are described in the Bible. They're thorough, even if the whole idea of weird time issues thousands of years ago would have any relevance whatsoever on the Earth/Moon system being ludicrious. (Of course, it's not ludicrous if there was a defined start time, at which the Earth and Moon were created like they are -- which they believe -- but it is if the E/M system is a few billion years old and doesn't really have a discernable start.)
A lot of people have proposed and built sleeve-valve and rotary-valve engines. The most powerful and longest-lasting aircraft engines of WWII were all sleeve-valve-based, and many snowmobile and some light aircraft engines still use them. I think the planetary-driven Aspin valve looks superb: there is very little valve-opening or valve-closing time, since the sleeve isn't moving at a constant speed.
The snag with solenoids is basically that they fail. So do cams, granted, but if you have 64 valves on your engine, that's four cams, driven by two belts, but 64 electromechanical solenoids -- a considerably higher mechanical count. I think piston-ported turbo diesel seems like a much better idea, since there's no valve train at all.
Then at least he'll have the people who will smash this into little bitty smoking pieces feeling a bit conflicted. Unless they're clowns, in which case it'll just encourage them.
I personally thought the problem with DRM was that it's impossible to implement, and here all along it was just the wrong name. Silly me.
I agree. I just find it unnerving that the Church itself has paid a good chunk of money to purchase documents, whether forged or not, that have problematic material in them, while it hasn't, to the best of my knowledge, ever spent money on buying documents about property taxes or payroll documents from their time in Nauvoo, for instance. When an organized group is spending big money buying up only the potentially bad public relations parts of their history, it's worth noting. As I said, I generally have no problem with the Church and I don't think it's a hideous den of vile nogoodniks, unlike Scientology. But it does seem to be trying to expunge its history.
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I don't know about battery, but in Colorado we had to pass a special law, commonly referred to as the Good Samaritan law, that prevents people from sueing people who injure them while saving their lives, in medical circumstances -- break ribs during CPR, infections resulting from emergency tracheotomy. Frighteningly enough, it was necessary to pass this law because people were indeed sueing other people for *saving* their *lives*.
I think it's clearly not going to be safe, but the more difficult part of the problem is that the issues we'd face would be issues we would be much less likely to even think of because they're not within our entire history. This is classic out-of-the-box thinking: the immune system is tuned to fight off threats that are very like us and there are whole classes of molecules that it can't do anything about. Likewise, as you say, big things with teeth.
My point was: if we were to encounter pathogens that are very similar to us, that could infect us the way ours do, they will be unlikely to be wildly devastating because they would be likely to destroy themselves. If we are to encounter pathogens that are wildly different, we might not be edible or useful to them -- we'd be useless as food to a silicon-based lifeform.
But that doesn't even begin to address all the other things that could be out there. I suspect we'd find so much difficulty with inorganic or simple organic molecules that we wouldn't live long enough to have to worry about pathogens: an atmosphere less than 10% or greater than 35% oxygen, greater than a few ppm of CO, HCN, NH3, or a raft of other simple, common molecules, and humans are in a lot of trouble.
If you want chemical farms, rather than make a whole bacterium, why not just make the enzyme or enzyme train that produces the chemical from a set of precursors, and then stick those into the DNA of a given bacterial species, in a sequence that will be strongly expressed? That's what we've been doing since the '80's, in bacteria and in animals. A friend of mine designed a cow that produced interferon in the cow's milk when fed zinc-rich foods, and it worked. Now, interferon isn't a new chemical. But the system for production of a new chemical as, essentially, a waste product, is a fairly well-understood process. The big question is modelling an enzyme surface to get the right transition topology to get the reactant->product working correctly.
>It's not terribly likely that alien pathogens could harm us.
I agree, but not because of the reasoning you use. As I said in another bit of this thread: a digestive system is required to not digest the system's owner. Anything else is fair game. If we ran into a pathogen that could digest proteins readily, into something it could eat, we'd be pretty screwed. For an example, see necrotizing fasciitis, which can consume a person's entire leg in 12 hours (according to a doctor friend who has treated it, via amputation.)
The immune system has several components. The cell-mediated stuff might or might not recognize invaders: there are things that are just invisible to it, and others that can kill the individual macrophages and t-cells. (That's one way asbestos is nasty, is that it physically tears macrophages apart, releasing their cell-killing chemicals to the surrounding tissues, and damaging them.) We have a zillion flavors of antibody: we seem to form antibodies against everything we will ever encounter, so at least that should work.
The main thing going in our favor is that the digestive system of a predator -- which a pathogen is, in a way -- is going to be tuned for its prey, and it's likely that the predator and prey will be similar, unless life came from two fundamentally different processes on a given planet (which is unlikely to be long-term stable.) As such, any predator that can usefully digest humans will probably be similar enough to humans to not be able to just dissolve them nigh-instantaneously, as something that exuded massive quantities of protein-digesting and lipid-digesting enzymes could.
Viral particles are pretty specific, because they rely on the host to do a lot of the heavy lifting for them: the host supplies most of the DNA replication and protein synthesis equipment and all the natural resources.
Bacteria, in contrast, do 80-100% of the work themselves. They can actively invade -- move in a directed manner -- and can physically attach themselves to cells and start doing damage. Helicobacter pylori, for instance (the bacterium that causes many ulcers) is shaped like a screw and physically screws itself into soft tissue, where it begins digesting them. Some bacteria can attack any animal that has an open wound, or others, like Clostridium perfringins, that causes gas gangrene, can do the same with any deep wound, regardless of species. I don't know of anything that can eat both plants and animals, but I wouldn't be surprised to find out about one.
Anyway, all this misses a prime point: you need a digestive system that doesn't digest you. If it digests something entirely different, you're completely safe. An alien life form that doesn't use amino acid polymers for the structure of its digestive system, but can (for some reason) digest them into something it can eat, would dissolve humans, or any animals, like salt on slugs.
If I had mod points, I'd give them to you. Napier's quote is one of the best analyses of culture clash I've ever heard, and I was madly searching for it when I saw you'd already found it.
Government owns most of the libraries, but the content of the books belongs to all humanity. This is no different.
The point when I think I'm old, is when I remember my first desktop used an audio cassette tape as its non-volatile storage. I think it could store a dozen kilobytes, but hey, that beat the system memory.
HP 9830, circa 1972, for the record.
I think I have a 6.2M drive on my Amiga 2000 -- which still isn't full.
Wire you so revolting? You could've composed a joule-like response, but you'd rather choke us with terrible puns. Go hohm.
1. They don't have much of a choice: battery voltage is dictated by the chemical reaction going on, as determined by the respective electronegativities of the different species. Here is some more discussion. So if you have a relatively large voltage, you might be able to get there by different series combinations: a 12 volt car battery is 8 1.5V lead-acid cells in series, but could also be 10 1.2 volt batteries in series.
2. But they're dealing with the tyranny of chemistry by using dc-dc converters that turn one voltage into another -- either reducing or increasing the voltage, at fairly high (80-90%) efficiency.
>>Nothing excessive use of Duct tape cant fix.
>For example, you can use duct tape to muffle fan noise...
I do that, but it gets stuck in their hair and they stop coming to my gigs.
I don't know the complete history of the use of abbreviations for humor, but it's pretty old. There are lots of writers from the 1920's who did this (PG Wodehouse and James Thurber spring to mind, particularly Wodehouse) and I think I recall it being very in vogue in the 1830's for a while, as well, when "OK" started getting used.
Sunlight is less of a problem. There's an *enormous* amount of IR coming off ovens and stuff. Regardless of that, my girlfriend the opthamologist says everyone should wear something with UV and IR protection when they're outside during daytime, because glassblower cataracts might show up when you're 30 but exposure to sunlight -- esp if on water or skiing -- could cause cataracts to show up when you're 60. Cataract surgery is pretty trivial these days, but if you don't have to, you shouldn't. Or at least put it off as long as possible because they're beginning to produce replacement lenses that are flexible, so at some point you'll be able to get your lens replaced with one that's better than it was when you were 20 -- no more reading glasses.
Yeah, long days on boats when you don't want to be there kind of suck.
Other people have answered, referencing blood doping, but nobody has pointed out quite how deadly this is. This article claims a dozen Dutch pro racers died of probable blood-doping-related heart issues in the late 1980's; through the pro racing grapevine people have claimed that the numbers were much higher than that.
I've only dealt with scr/triacs -- I'm sure the CFL's are a mess. Thankfully, we don't have to deal with that stuff. I've built a couple arc-energized gas lasers in my time, and when they fire up, I suspect the entire neighborhood loses its TV reception.
Turns out it's not just microwaves that'll curdle your lens and/or cornea: heavy IR (young-onset cataracts used to be known as glassblower blindness) and even radiation can do it. Of course, you have worse problems than cataracts if you're exposed to that much radiation...
Zowie, you know your stuff. Slope compensation is used. I don't know the specifics of the circuit, and I'm not sure he does either: he said that was possible but he thought it was unlikely.
(I've had to design stuff to measure whether our slope compensation works correctly when new silicon comes back, which isn't so easy to do.)
I'm curious: what OBDII setup do you use? I just built a hardware rs232-OBDII converter but it looks like I'm going to have to buy a software package to troubleshoot the sourceforge OBDII software, before I can build a bunch for my friends, so I'm looking for suggestions on good commercial packages.
To the best of my knowledge, in many states, it is required that you buy a casket, and in most states it is required that you buy *some* sort of container, even if it's just a little cardboard box like an ice-cream container for the ashes. Luckily, those are cheap, comparatively, like $20 or so. My dad's ashes are still sitting in that little box, 6 years later, on my mom's clothesdryer. (Not a real sentimental family, but boy we have procrastination down to a science.)
And if he were still around, he'd be pissed, coz he always said he wanted to be composted.
It *is* legal to bury a human body on your property, although it's very difficult -- easier if there's any evidence there was a pre-existing graveyard there already -- but there are requirements for depth and containment that make nutrient-recovery difficult.
I personally plan on chugging a quart of nitroglycerine and jumping off a building (if my heart lasts long enough to get to the edge.)
For what it's worth, microwave radiation leads to cataracts -- opacity of the lens, not the vitreous humor. Glaucoma is a different disease, where movement of liquid from inside the eye through the pupil to the outside of the eye is blocked, often from debris clogging the fine network of holes, so pressure accumulates within the eye, leading to nerve damage and blindness.
Also: I've found most lamp dimmers to be reasonably quiet, EMI-wise, especially the newer electronic ones that switch on partway through the phase and switch off at zero-crossing. Really cheap triacs with no snubbers are pretty loud, though, and anything driving reactive loads by chopping is appallingly noisy.
I just walked down the hall and asked the guy who designed about 70% of the switchers for the various ipods, and he said they run at "about 600 KHz" fwiw. I bet it's not them.
I agree with the direction of your post, but there are some ... let's call them clarifications.
1. Joseph Smith, not John, was the one with the hat. 1a. It wasn't the hat that was magic, it was a stone, that he dug up and PUT in the hat, and then he'd stick his face in the hat and the stone would talk to him and he'd say what the stone told him to, so that his loyal amanuensis could write it all down.
2. Most Quakers these days aren't so into the crazies. Shakers were but they're mostly extinct. Likewise, most Southern Baptists and their crowd don't do the shaking and speaking-in-tongues (glossolalia, it's called) and handling snakes and other weird things like that: many consider those to be sinful. Pentecostals, however, are WAY into the shaking and the gibbering.
A lot of religious Christian types absolutely do believe in big, world-affecting miracles, at least in the past: many of them will tell you earnestly that NASA had to repeatedly recalibrate the Apollo landings to account for a missing day -- but not quite a full day, because two different time-stop miracles are described in the Bible. They're thorough, even if the whole idea of weird time issues thousands of years ago would have any relevance whatsoever on the Earth/Moon system being ludicrious. (Of course, it's not ludicrous if there was a defined start time, at which the Earth and Moon were created like they are -- which they believe -- but it is if the E/M system is a few billion years old and doesn't really have a discernable start.)
A lot of people have proposed and built sleeve-valve and rotary-valve engines. The most powerful and longest-lasting aircraft engines of WWII were all sleeve-valve-based, and many snowmobile and some light aircraft engines still use them. I think the planetary-driven Aspin valve looks superb: there is very little valve-opening or valve-closing time, since the sleeve isn't moving at a constant speed.
The snag with solenoids is basically that they fail. So do cams, granted, but if you have 64 valves on your engine, that's four cams, driven by two belts, but 64 electromechanical solenoids -- a considerably higher mechanical count. I think piston-ported turbo diesel seems like a much better idea, since there's no valve train at all.
Then at least he'll have the people who will smash this into little bitty smoking pieces feeling a bit conflicted.
Unless they're clowns, in which case it'll just encourage them.
I personally thought the problem with DRM was that it's impossible to implement, and here all along it was just the wrong name. Silly me.
I agree. I just find it unnerving that the Church itself has paid a good chunk of money to purchase documents, whether forged or not, that have problematic material in them, while it hasn't, to the best of my knowledge, ever spent money on buying documents about property taxes or payroll documents from their time in Nauvoo, for instance. When an organized group is spending big money buying up only the potentially bad public relations parts of their history, it's worth noting.
As I said, I generally have no problem with the Church and I don't think it's a hideous den of vile nogoodniks, unlike Scientology. But it does seem to be trying to expunge its history.