Modern vehicles have to pass a 5mph crash test with no damage. Rolling into someone at a light should be fine.
This is only applicable if your bumpers line up. I have a 2001 Subaru -- bumper lower than knee height. I was sitting at a stoplight when the lady behind me yakking on her phone rolled her Lexus SUV into the back of my car. The bottom of her bumper was 10 cm above the top of mine, so it crumpled the hatchback lift door. That wasn't cheap.
Who would not consent to be an organ donor? I'm curious. I want to know what kind of person says, "No, I don't want any of my parts used to save anyone's life after I die."
Is it a superstitious thing or something? I'm not joking or trying to provoke. I cannot grasp not being willing to donate one's organs after death.
There are religious groups that discourage it. It's an area of active argument in Judaism. Here's an article that discusses some different religious opposition. Generally speaking, a lot of religions that posit an afterlife, have individuals within that religion who come to the conclusion that they'll be reincarnated missing their body parts, even though apparently no religions actually say anything like that.
But it's my belief the main reason is because people think maybe a miracle will happen and they'll recover from the coma/brain death/whatever but that instead they'll have life support switched off to have their organs removed.
Extremely contagious, quick, and deadly diseases like Ebola Zaire often go too quickly for their own good. They can kill everyone so fast...
I don't understand how such deadly diseases can evolve... kill everything, including itself, and then outbreaks can reoccur once this has happened.
I'm skipping over a lot of material here, but diseases that infect within a species tend to get less virulent over time because they spread more that way, like colds. The ideal within-species disease would be unnoticeable because then you'd go wandering around spreading it everywhere. It's likely thousands of these exist and we've never bothered to discover them.
Diseases between species are different. Diseases that need two species to complete their lifestyle, like malaria, want you as nearly dead as possible so you're lying there for days on end while mosquitos work you over and catch the disease, so it can go on to its next host. There's a bit of pressure to keep the host alive, but not a lot, and there's lots of pressure to immobilize the host, so you get these awful things that leave you incapacitated.
And the worst is diseases that are accidentally in humans: they come visiting, so to speak. They don't care about us because they probably can't use us in their lifecycle. We're a dead end. Those diseases have extremely high mortality, and ebola is one of those diseases. There's no pressure to moderate lethality since there's no mechanism to select for survival over time.
There are diseases like cholera that spread person-to-person in some situations, and are by-mistake-in-people-mostly-in-snails in other situations, and we see evolution occurring: cholera in the people-to-people scenario gets less lethal over time, while the estuary/snail-based cholera keeps just obliterating its human victims.
And, by the way, nobody thinks biology is simple. If there's a Moore's Law for biological research, the doubling time is probably in the dozen year range rather than the 18 month range, which is why we've seen computers progress so vastly much faster than medicine and genetic engineering.
Your source was probably listing the average working vocabulary of people: 10,000-20,000 words is a fairly typical working vocabulary. People who worry about such things usually claim that English has significantly more words in it than any other language, estimates ranging up to a million words, while many other languages have estimates closer to 100,000 words. (If the people talking about it can stop arguing about what counts as a word for long enough to agree on something: German mashes together nouns into single words; Mohican can jam the subject, the object, the verb, the tense, and a declination all into a single word.) Within the context of this discussion, people are only going to use words from their working vocabularies or maybe a little bit more -- it's likely most people recognize the word susurration and might use it as an obscure password, but would never use it in speech or writing otherwise -- but someone trying to brute-force a password would have a lousy return on investment in trying to decide what a core 15,000 word vocabularly would be, to only use those words in the brute-force attempt.
TFA says they train the rat to recognize the odor of the explosives in the soil. Wouldn't it be easy to enclose the explosive in a hermetically sealed wrapper to keep any such odor in the mine?
Pot-sniffing dogs regularly detect pot that's been sealed in one bag, that sealed in a second bag, and that in a waterproof plastic container. Small volatile compounds penetrate through solid material, and explosives are chock-full of small volatile compounds. Plus, the factories where these are made have those same compounds all over everything, so all the materials used in construction have trace compounds all over the insides and outsides.
there are 15,222 words in the english language according to oxford english dictionary.
This is off by more than an order of magnitude: the Oxford English Dictionary claims it has 171,476 words in it and point out that this is an underestimate of how many base words are in the English language -- probably more like 250,000 -- and that doesn't begin to cover compound or specialist words.
I'm in complete agreement that kids should be engaged and care about what they're learning, and be actively learning it. But at the same time, not all kids are going to love making rockets. Some would love working with animals, or arguing about literature. Making those kids build rockets isn't much better than making them study 17th century geography or cram for a stupid standardized test. Ideally we'd figure out what kids want to learn, and help them learn those things, with some encouragement for them to learn things that benefit society as a whole. A problem is we don't all agree on what benefits society as a whole. Standardized testing is a reaction to a widespread perception that kids were learning stuff that wasn't useful (by some scrupulously unspecified definition of useful.) So, trying to get all, or even most, kids interested in subject Y is going to involve lots of bored kids, and trying to facilitate kids' interest is going to get big chunks of the community at large upset that Kids These Days Are Just Wasting Time In School Learning About whatever this week's bogeyman is, be it vocational education, renaissance literature, sculpture, or evolutionary biology. Which is to say: he's totally right, but he's not addressing the root cause of the problem he's trying to solve.
It's likely that George Welch purposely and repeatedly exceeded the speed of sound in testing the F86, several weeks before Yeager's X1 flight. The F86 airframe was capable of supersonic flight in a dive, he knew it, and people who knew about the idea of supersonic flight heard what they identified as sonic booms when he was flying. There are contradictory claims about whether the test engine in his airframe was capable of producing the thrust necessary, but there are also claims that flight radar confirms the supersonic claims.
You can drag and drop an image from your desktop onto the Google image search. I was amazed at how fast and accurate it is. It looks like it doesn't even need to be an exact match.
I searched for a photo of a piece of graffiti from a wall outside of San Francisco and Google found a few other people that had taken a photo of the same wall.
It doesn't even have to be particularly close. There's a picture of me riding my bike up a cliff, that has been on my webpage since like 1996. The other day, a friend at work uploaded an avatar image for our bike racing team that was my old picture, which I thought was amazing. I asked him how he'd found it and he had no idea it was me: he'd found it on some Cuban website of amazing bike pictures. It's cropped, resized, and left-to-right reversed, but Google Images recognizes them as the same picture. They're doing some pretty sophisticated image processing stuff. Some friends have been playing with this on G+, seeing how long porn pictures last before getting caught/filtered/blocked, and seeing how long it takes for processed pictures to get caught/blocked. It's sometimes possible to get a picture that's cropped back to just the face of the person blocked if it's a large part of the original picture.
If, on the other hand, you intelligently realize that most American's are actually fairly close in terms of political view
Do you think so? I personally know Americans who think the US should be run under Old Testament of the Bible law -- including stoning adulterers -- and people who think that churches should be outlawed. I know people who own 100,000 rounds of ammunition and people who think guns should be banned. People who think sick people who can't pay medical bills should be dumped out on the street to die and people who think the government should provide free unlimited healthcare. People who think the Federal government should do nothing more than fund and run the military, and people who would like to see the government nationalize many large corporations and run them. I don't actually know anyone who argues that women shouldn't have the right to vote, but I've seen them talk. I do know people who think anyone who doesn't believe in the christian god should not be allowed to hold public office. That's a pretty wide spectrum of ideas, spanning from Saudi Arabian to Maoist to anarcholibertarian. I'm sure other countries have as broad a swath of ideas: I'm not claiming american exceptionalism as regards political leanings. However, I haven't seen much evidence of other countries having much broader political views.
I always suggested that TV channel execs get outfitted with an electroshock machine that activates when at least a given number of people press the "FUCK THAT SHIT"-button on their remote.
Anyone out there remember the mid-70's Dr. Who episode about this, where the president of whateverworld got hooked to an electric chair on live TV for every no confidence vote? It was one of the Tom Baker/Lalla Ward ones, but I can't remember the title.
First Mover Advantage is why. It's not like people are going to stop building new houses/warehouses/malls. If you're the equivalent of AT&T in 1920, you don't need to worry that your repeat customers are sparse.
I can't answer for every dimmable LED on the market, but the dimmable LED's that use the chips we make can dim 5000:1, which is better than incandescents can do. We have a bank of about 30 different triac dimmers, from the crappiest ones imaginable up through the electronic ones (cheap ones generally delay when the AC turns on after the waveform crosses zero, while fancy electronic ones clip at the back end of the cycle -- and putting together an ic that can detect and deal with both those situations is a pain) and we don't release a reference circuit that can't handle every single one of those dimmers. Pretty much everyone that works here cruises the aisles of hardware stores and home improvement places, picking up dimmers we don't recognize and adding them to the bank of cheap dimmers. (At this point it looks like an evil genius control center.) So: no guarantees, maybe you've found one we haven't, but they do pretty good, and most of the newer stuff adds automatic power factor correction to help the efficiency. As for color, you probably want to see one in action. There are a broad spectrum, so to speak, of color temperatures available, and right soonish now the market will be flooded with ones that can deliver adjustable color temperatures. There are still some issues: what looks good to your eye might not look good to a camera. But the reference designs we're doing have CRI's above 90. That's not perfect, obviously, but it's pretty good for having 5-20x the efficiency of an incandescent.
I recently read the (wholly excellent) book "Sex On Six Legs" about sexuality in insects. (Which can be really seriously bizarre, as a side-note.) The author, a biology teacher, said she was often asked about homosexuality in animals and whether it existed. Her analysis of the people asking was that half of them thought homosexuality didn't happen among animals, and was therefore unnatural, and the other half thought homosexuality did happen among animals, and was therefore bestial. It's a bad-both-ways argument.
A side-note: in the late 1930's and early 1940's, being gay was considered by a lot of people as a matter of choice, specifically because a certain madman was rounding up gays and killing them, with the express intent of removing them from the gene pool. If it was a choice no amount of killing people would make it go away. Now, we're viewing it as a fundamental attribute because we have fewer madmen with legions of henchmen. (I personally happen to think it *is* a fundamental attribute, by the way. I was just adding historical color.)
You do realize that the land lines connect outside the house. It is trivial to disconect the telephone service to a residence (and internet for people like me). Most thieves may be too uneducated to notice, but I would not invest in any security system that relied on something so easily disabled.
FWIW the burglar alarm system I had installed on my previous house, ten years ago, had a cellphone integrated into it that checked for dialtone on the landline, and if it lost that, it sent out a call to that effect, meaning the people with whom I had the contract then tried to contact me on my cellphone to see what was happening. At that point, they claimed that every system worth installing had a wireless callout.
As more candidates get burned by IP issues, they ARE going to wake up to how bad the system has become. Since it affects them individually, you know they're going to want to fix the system. Mostly so they can use whatever they want royalty-free. Romney and Newt both have been burned by copyright issues in this season. If a multi-million-dollar presidential candidate can't get this shit right, you think an average Joe has any chance? So yeah, keep picking on the candidates. We'll see how long those pesky laws remain on the books...
I seem to remember that when Jackson Browne sued John McCain for copyright violation over McCain's use of "Running On Empty", McCain's first response was to propose legislation exempting political ads from copyright law (although a quick google search just shows lots of results on him losing the fight with Browne and settling out of court.) So my suspicion is that we'd see the same thing: politicians would exempt themselves but leave the rest of us in the same situation we're currently in.
To expand: National Semiconductor has Webench (which I've worked on to some extent) and it allows you to set up a schematic, runs simulations, produces a bill of materials for you, produces a layout, produces gerbers, shows you which parts are in stock and how much they cost, and will even fab the boards and send you a bag of parts to put on your boards. That's really amazingly useful... as long as you want to use a National Semiconductor part. Not so great if you want to do something new or build a complex circuit outside of their limited repertoire. If these guys could do even a subset of that -- note I don't expect automated layout, because that's not within AI's reach, yet -- but produce a BOM with links to Digikey and Newark so I could check parts in stock/datasheets/verify footprints, and most critically produce a netlist so *I* can do the layout, well, then, that'd be very convenient indeed. But if I'm pretty much stuck with their partslist and admiring my schematic as it sits trapped in their garden, that's still cool (and it's a neat tool to use) but I'm going to end up re-entering the schematic in something that has a layout backend and most likely a simulator and library editing functionality, and at that point I don't get much from this aside from the convenience of being able to enter schematics when I'm hanging out at an internet cafe or something.
From FAQ: "Can I export my CircuitLab schematics out to another tool? Not at this time." This could be an awesome tool if it were easy to create (and share!) new parts, and get a netlist out, so we could import it into layout in Eagle, Kicad, gEDA PCB, Altium, whatever floats your boat. But since all the circuits I create go into layout and get turned into boards, this doesn't provide me much that existing tools don't already provide.
Google should advertise that if you switch to G+, your grandmother, talkative aunt, and your mother probably wont find you again for at least another year or two.
So entirely true. My religious conservative family and coworkers are all over Facebook. Most of them don't even know what G+ *is*. Which suits me just fine: I post a bubblegum update on Facebook about once a month, while I spend an hour or two a day on G+ having actual discussions.
Not that this is worth much, but I stop at stopsigns when nobody's there -- in my car and on my bike -- because I'm not omniscient and might have missed someone who was in fact there. I've avoided being hit once because of this habit. It has the side-effect that people do see me doing this and maybe they remember that at least some bicyclists don't run stopsigns. (Once I was in a fairly low-income part of town, trackstanding (balancing, feet on pedals, at a stop) waiting for the light to change with no cars in any directions for as far as the eye could see, and an elderly black lady sitting at the bus stop said "son, what are you DOING? Ain't nobody coming!" I explained the bit about not pissing off drivers by running lights, and she shook her head and said that cyclists were all crazy... so maybe it's not doing exactly what I want.)
If it's dangerous for the mother, think of the child in the womb
Babies born by older mothers have much higher chances of having being born with many types of defects. Down syndrome is just one of them.
But you have completely missed the reason. It is because of the old eggs. If a 45yo woman is pregnant using a donor egg from a young woman, all those risks go away.
Actually, there's extensive evidence that it isn't because of old eggs: it's because as a woman gets closer to menopause her body spontaneously aborts less often, so she'll bear children with defects, that when she was in her twenties her body would've dumped. Tim Birkhead in "Promiscuity: the evolution of sperm competition" discusses this quite a bit. The theory is that when she's younger her body wants to focus its resources on only the best offspring, and as she approaches menopause, it's more important to just have kids to pass on her genes, than it is to be selective.
Any good LED lighting solution is intelligent: they talk to each other and drop to 20% lighting when there's no roadway activity, then go back to full power when the next one over detects a car coming along. (At least, that's what my company, and the competitors I know about, are building for the outdoor area lighting market.) Also, Cree's over 230 lumens per watt experimentally.
The TSA was created to comfort passengers after 9/11 by providing a highly visible change to the airport security measures through inconveniencing all passengers as much as possible.
...
These are psychological steps that accomplish virtually nothing to improve our security, but only raise the perception of safety.
Another interpretation is that it's an enormous CYA activity: when, not if, the next awful terrorist attack happens and people are snorting and yelling about "why couldn't you tell that these 10 goons who, in a country of 300 million people all doing strange things, happened to take classes on how to fly but not how to land: how much more obvious could their plot have been?!!?" the authorities can say "dude, we're making people take off their shoes, groping old ladies, and making three year olds strip: how much more could we have done?" Which is much harder to counter than mere security theater (because the people instituting these measures think their jobs are on the line) and theoretically unlimited in scope because they can always come up with another scenario in which they could get in trouble for perceived negligence.
I want to know: at what point do TSA regulations apply?
Suppose I own an airplane. If I want to take my friend Bob up in my Cessna, I doubt the TSA is going to want to look up his butt or make him take his shoes off. Hell, I imagine I don't even have to let them know -- I just file a flight plan with my local airport and go.
Now, what if Bob pays me $50 to take him from one place to another. Then does the TSA have to look up his butt?
What if I make a point of giving anybody who pays me $50 a ride in my airplane?
What if I have a bigger airplane and carry people around ten at the time?
When do they start insisting on me following their rules?
For the record, the TSA does have some presence at local airports (although right now it's mostly only fences/locked gates and such so unauthorized people can't get to aircraft, although they appear to be very keen on increasing that presence.) However, if you have a private pilot certificate, you are not allowed to fly for pay. (You can split the cost of the flight, but no more than that.) You have to get a commercial certificate to fly for pay, and even then you can't fly people, on schedule, for pay: for that you need an airline transport certificate. So while there's not a law against you flying Bob for $50, there are regulations that will end up in you losing your flight certificate if you do so and get caught. Chartered commercial aircraft still have some wiggle room around this, which is why politicians and businessmen tend to like them so much, but there are efforts to bring them into the same general scope of regulation that commercial aircraft have. But generally, if an individual can afford the airplane, it's probably too small to have the sort of destructive possibilities that really get the TSA excited. Exceptions (John Travolta) exist, but are rare.
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Modern vehicles have to pass a 5mph crash test with no damage. Rolling into someone at a light should be fine.
This is only applicable if your bumpers line up. I have a 2001 Subaru -- bumper lower than knee height. I was sitting at a stoplight when the lady behind me yakking on her phone rolled her Lexus SUV into the back of my car. The bottom of her bumper was 10 cm above the top of mine, so it crumpled the hatchback lift door. That wasn't cheap.
Who would not consent to be an organ donor? I'm curious. I want to know what kind of person says, "No, I don't want any of my parts used to save anyone's life after I die."
Is it a superstitious thing or something? I'm not joking or trying to provoke. I cannot grasp not being willing to donate one's organs after death.
There are religious groups that discourage it. It's an area of active argument in Judaism. Here's an article that discusses some different religious opposition. Generally speaking, a lot of religions that posit an afterlife, have individuals within that religion who come to the conclusion that they'll be reincarnated missing their body parts, even though apparently no religions actually say anything like that.
But it's my belief the main reason is because people think maybe a miracle will happen and they'll recover from the coma/brain death/whatever but that instead they'll have life support switched off to have their organs removed.
Extremely contagious, quick, and deadly diseases like Ebola Zaire often go too quickly for their own good. They can kill everyone so fast...
I don't understand how such deadly diseases can evolve... kill everything, including itself, and then outbreaks can reoccur once this has happened.
I'm skipping over a lot of material here, but diseases that infect within a species tend to get less virulent over time because they spread more that way, like colds. The ideal within-species disease would be unnoticeable because then you'd go wandering around spreading it everywhere. It's likely thousands of these exist and we've never bothered to discover them.
Diseases between species are different. Diseases that need two species to complete their lifestyle, like malaria, want you as nearly dead as possible so you're lying there for days on end while mosquitos work you over and catch the disease, so it can go on to its next host. There's a bit of pressure to keep the host alive, but not a lot, and there's lots of pressure to immobilize the host, so you get these awful things that leave you incapacitated.
And the worst is diseases that are accidentally in humans: they come visiting, so to speak. They don't care about us because they probably can't use us in their lifecycle. We're a dead end. Those diseases have extremely high mortality, and ebola is one of those diseases. There's no pressure to moderate lethality since there's no mechanism to select for survival over time.
There are diseases like cholera that spread person-to-person in some situations, and are by-mistake-in-people-mostly-in-snails in other situations, and we see evolution occurring: cholera in the people-to-people scenario gets less lethal over time, while the estuary/snail-based cholera keeps just obliterating its human victims.
And, by the way, nobody thinks biology is simple. If there's a Moore's Law for biological research, the doubling time is probably in the dozen year range rather than the 18 month range, which is why we've seen computers progress so vastly much faster than medicine and genetic engineering.
Your source was probably listing the average working vocabulary of people: 10,000-20,000 words is a fairly typical working vocabulary. People who worry about such things usually claim that English has significantly more words in it than any other language, estimates ranging up to a million words, while many other languages have estimates closer to 100,000 words. (If the people talking about it can stop arguing about what counts as a word for long enough to agree on something: German mashes together nouns into single words; Mohican can jam the subject, the object, the verb, the tense, and a declination all into a single word.) Within the context of this discussion, people are only going to use words from their working vocabularies or maybe a little bit more -- it's likely most people recognize the word susurration and might use it as an obscure password, but would never use it in speech or writing otherwise -- but someone trying to brute-force a password would have a lousy return on investment in trying to decide what a core 15,000 word vocabularly would be, to only use those words in the brute-force attempt.
TFA says they train the rat to recognize the odor of the explosives in the soil. Wouldn't it be easy to enclose the explosive in a hermetically sealed wrapper to keep any such odor in the mine?
Pot-sniffing dogs regularly detect pot that's been sealed in one bag, that sealed in a second bag, and that in a waterproof plastic container. Small volatile compounds penetrate through solid material, and explosives are chock-full of small volatile compounds. Plus, the factories where these are made have those same compounds all over everything, so all the materials used in construction have trace compounds all over the insides and outsides.
there are 15,222 words in the english language according to oxford english dictionary.
This is off by more than an order of magnitude: the Oxford English Dictionary claims it has 171,476 words in it and point out that this is an underestimate of how many base words are in the English language -- probably more like 250,000 -- and that doesn't begin to cover compound or specialist words.
I'm in complete agreement that kids should be engaged and care about what they're learning, and be actively learning it. But at the same time, not all kids are going to love making rockets. Some would love working with animals, or arguing about literature. Making those kids build rockets isn't much better than making them study 17th century geography or cram for a stupid standardized test.
Ideally we'd figure out what kids want to learn, and help them learn those things, with some encouragement for them to learn things that benefit society as a whole. A problem is we don't all agree on what benefits society as a whole. Standardized testing is a reaction to a widespread perception that kids were learning stuff that wasn't useful (by some scrupulously unspecified definition of useful.) So, trying to get all, or even most, kids interested in subject Y is going to involve lots of bored kids, and trying to facilitate kids' interest is going to get big chunks of the community at large upset that Kids These Days Are Just Wasting Time In School Learning About whatever this week's bogeyman is, be it vocational education, renaissance literature, sculpture, or evolutionary biology.
Which is to say: he's totally right, but he's not addressing the root cause of the problem he's trying to solve.
It's likely that George Welch purposely and repeatedly exceeded the speed of sound in testing the F86, several weeks before Yeager's X1 flight. The F86 airframe was capable of supersonic flight in a dive, he knew it, and people who knew about the idea of supersonic flight heard what they identified as sonic booms when he was flying. There are contradictory claims about whether the test engine in his airframe was capable of producing the thrust necessary, but there are also claims that flight radar confirms the supersonic claims.
You can drag and drop an image from your desktop onto the Google image search. I was amazed at how fast and accurate it is. It looks like it doesn't even need to be an exact match.
I searched for a photo of a piece of graffiti from a wall outside of San Francisco and Google found a few other people that had taken a photo of the same wall.
It doesn't even have to be particularly close. There's a picture of me riding my bike up a cliff, that has been on my webpage since like 1996. The other day, a friend at work uploaded an avatar image for our bike racing team that was my old picture, which I thought was amazing. I asked him how he'd found it and he had no idea it was me: he'd found it on some Cuban website of amazing bike pictures. It's cropped, resized, and left-to-right reversed, but Google Images recognizes them as the same picture. They're doing some pretty sophisticated image processing stuff. Some friends have been playing with this on G+, seeing how long porn pictures last before getting caught/filtered/blocked, and seeing how long it takes for processed pictures to get caught/blocked. It's sometimes possible to get a picture that's cropped back to just the face of the person blocked if it's a large part of the original picture.
If, on the other hand, you intelligently realize that most American's are actually fairly close in terms of political view
Do you think so? I personally know Americans who think the US should be run under Old Testament of the Bible law -- including stoning adulterers -- and people who think that churches should be outlawed. I know people who own 100,000 rounds of ammunition and people who think guns should be banned. People who think sick people who can't pay medical bills should be dumped out on the street to die and people who think the government should provide free unlimited healthcare. People who think the Federal government should do nothing more than fund and run the military, and people who would like to see the government nationalize many large corporations and run them. I don't actually know anyone who argues that women shouldn't have the right to vote, but I've seen them talk. I do know people who think anyone who doesn't believe in the christian god should not be allowed to hold public office. That's a pretty wide spectrum of ideas, spanning from Saudi Arabian to Maoist to anarcholibertarian. I'm sure other countries have as broad a swath of ideas: I'm not claiming american exceptionalism as regards political leanings. However, I haven't seen much evidence of other countries having much broader political views.
I always suggested that TV channel execs get outfitted with an electroshock machine that activates when at least a given number of people press the "FUCK THAT SHIT"-button on their remote.
Anyone out there remember the mid-70's Dr. Who episode about this, where the president of whateverworld got hooked to an electric chair on live TV for every no confidence vote? It was one of the Tom Baker/Lalla Ward ones, but I can't remember the title.
First Mover Advantage is why. It's not like people are going to stop building new houses/warehouses/malls. If you're the equivalent of AT&T in 1920, you don't need to worry that your repeat customers are sparse.
Can they be dimmed using a *standard* inexpensive dimmer? Besides, aren't some LEDs very narrow in their color range (and too cold too)?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-emitting_diode#White_light
I can't answer for every dimmable LED on the market, but the dimmable LED's that use the chips we make can dim 5000:1, which is better than incandescents can do. We have a bank of about 30 different triac dimmers, from the crappiest ones imaginable up through the electronic ones (cheap ones generally delay when the AC turns on after the waveform crosses zero, while fancy electronic ones clip at the back end of the cycle -- and putting together an ic that can detect and deal with both those situations is a pain) and we don't release a reference circuit that can't handle every single one of those dimmers. Pretty much everyone that works here cruises the aisles of hardware stores and home improvement places, picking up dimmers we don't recognize and adding them to the bank of cheap dimmers. (At this point it looks like an evil genius control center.) So: no guarantees, maybe you've found one we haven't, but they do pretty good, and most of the newer stuff adds automatic power factor correction to help the efficiency.
As for color, you probably want to see one in action. There are a broad spectrum, so to speak, of color temperatures available, and right soonish now the market will be flooded with ones that can deliver adjustable color temperatures. There are still some issues: what looks good to your eye might not look good to a camera. But the reference designs we're doing have CRI's above 90. That's not perfect, obviously, but it's pretty good for having 5-20x the efficiency of an incandescent.
I recently read the (wholly excellent) book "Sex On Six Legs" about sexuality in insects. (Which can be really seriously bizarre, as a side-note.) The author, a biology teacher, said she was often asked about homosexuality in animals and whether it existed. Her analysis of the people asking was that half of them thought homosexuality didn't happen among animals, and was therefore unnatural, and the other half thought homosexuality did happen among animals, and was therefore bestial. It's a bad-both-ways argument.
A side-note: in the late 1930's and early 1940's, being gay was considered by a lot of people as a matter of choice, specifically because a certain madman was rounding up gays and killing them, with the express intent of removing them from the gene pool. If it was a choice no amount of killing people would make it go away. Now, we're viewing it as a fundamental attribute because we have fewer madmen with legions of henchmen. (I personally happen to think it *is* a fundamental attribute, by the way. I was just adding historical color.)
and have a land-line
You do realize that the land lines connect outside the house. It is trivial to disconect the telephone service to a residence (and internet for people like me). Most thieves may be too uneducated to notice, but I would not invest in any security system that relied on something so easily disabled.
FWIW the burglar alarm system I had installed on my previous house, ten years ago, had a cellphone integrated into it that checked for dialtone on the landline, and if it lost that, it sent out a call to that effect, meaning the people with whom I had the contract then tried to contact me on my cellphone to see what was happening. At that point, they claimed that every system worth installing had a wireless callout.
Aliquot (proportional) wasn't a surprise to me either. It is a mostly legal term, though.
It's a term used daily in any chemistry lab, and regularly in chemistry classes, as well.
As more candidates get burned by IP issues, they ARE going to wake up to how bad the system has become. Since it affects them individually, you know they're going to want to fix the system. Mostly so they can use whatever they want royalty-free. Romney and Newt both have been burned by copyright issues in this season. If a multi-million-dollar presidential candidate can't get this shit right, you think an average Joe has any chance? So yeah, keep picking on the candidates. We'll see how long those pesky laws remain on the books...
I seem to remember that when Jackson Browne sued John McCain for copyright violation over McCain's use of "Running On Empty", McCain's first response was to propose legislation exempting political ads from copyright law (although a quick google search just shows lots of results on him losing the fight with Browne and settling out of court.) So my suspicion is that we'd see the same thing: politicians would exempt themselves but leave the rest of us in the same situation we're currently in.
To expand: National Semiconductor has Webench (which I've worked on to some extent) and it allows you to set up a schematic, runs simulations, produces a bill of materials for you, produces a layout, produces gerbers, shows you which parts are in stock and how much they cost, and will even fab the boards and send you a bag of parts to put on your boards. That's really amazingly useful... as long as you want to use a National Semiconductor part. Not so great if you want to do something new or build a complex circuit outside of their limited repertoire.
If these guys could do even a subset of that -- note I don't expect automated layout, because that's not within AI's reach, yet -- but produce a BOM with links to Digikey and Newark so I could check parts in stock/datasheets/verify footprints, and most critically produce a netlist so *I* can do the layout, well, then, that'd be very convenient indeed. But if I'm pretty much stuck with their partslist and admiring my schematic as it sits trapped in their garden, that's still cool (and it's a neat tool to use) but I'm going to end up re-entering the schematic in something that has a layout backend and most likely a simulator and library editing functionality, and at that point I don't get much from this aside from the convenience of being able to enter schematics when I'm hanging out at an internet cafe or something.
From FAQ:
"Can I export my CircuitLab schematics out to another tool?
Not at this time."
This could be an awesome tool if it were easy to create (and share!) new parts, and get a netlist out, so we could import it into layout in Eagle, Kicad, gEDA PCB, Altium, whatever floats your boat. But since all the circuits I create go into layout and get turned into boards, this doesn't provide me much that existing tools don't already provide.
Google should advertise that if you switch to G+, your grandmother, talkative aunt, and your mother probably wont find you again for at least another year or two.
So entirely true. My religious conservative family and coworkers are all over Facebook. Most of them don't even know what G+ *is*. Which suits me just fine: I post a bubblegum update on Facebook about once a month, while I spend an hour or two a day on G+ having actual discussions.
Not that this is worth much, but I stop at stopsigns when nobody's there -- in my car and on my bike -- because I'm not omniscient and might have missed someone who was in fact there. I've avoided being hit once because of this habit. It has the side-effect that people do see me doing this and maybe they remember that at least some bicyclists don't run stopsigns.
(Once I was in a fairly low-income part of town, trackstanding (balancing, feet on pedals, at a stop) waiting for the light to change with no cars in any directions for as far as the eye could see, and an elderly black lady sitting at the bus stop said "son, what are you DOING? Ain't nobody coming!" I explained the bit about not pissing off drivers by running lights, and she shook her head and said that cyclists were all crazy... so maybe it's not doing exactly what I want.)
If it's dangerous for the mother, think of the child in the womb
Babies born by older mothers have much higher chances of having being born with many types of defects. Down syndrome is just one of them.
But you have completely missed the reason. It is because of the old eggs. If a 45yo woman is pregnant using a donor egg from a young woman, all those risks go away.
Actually, there's extensive evidence that it isn't because of old eggs: it's because as a woman gets closer to menopause her body spontaneously aborts less often, so she'll bear children with defects, that when she was in her twenties her body would've dumped. Tim Birkhead in "Promiscuity: the evolution of sperm competition" discusses this quite a bit. The theory is that when she's younger her body wants to focus its resources on only the best offspring, and as she approaches menopause, it's more important to just have kids to pass on her genes, than it is to be selective.
Any good LED lighting solution is intelligent: they talk to each other and drop to 20% lighting when there's no roadway activity, then go back to full power when the next one over detects a car coming along. (At least, that's what my company, and the competitors I know about, are building for the outdoor area lighting market.) Also, Cree's over 230 lumens per watt experimentally.
The TSA was created to comfort passengers after 9/11 by providing a highly visible change to the airport security measures through inconveniencing all passengers as much as possible.
...
These are psychological steps that accomplish virtually nothing to improve our security, but only raise the perception of safety.
Another interpretation is that it's an enormous CYA activity: when, not if, the next awful terrorist attack happens and people are snorting and yelling about "why couldn't you tell that these 10 goons who, in a country of 300 million people all doing strange things, happened to take classes on how to fly but not how to land: how much more obvious could their plot have been?!!?" the authorities can say "dude, we're making people take off their shoes, groping old ladies, and making three year olds strip: how much more could we have done?"
Which is much harder to counter than mere security theater (because the people instituting these measures think their jobs are on the line) and theoretically unlimited in scope because they can always come up with another scenario in which they could get in trouble for perceived negligence.
I want to know: at what point do TSA regulations apply?
Suppose I own an airplane. If I want to take my friend Bob up in my Cessna, I doubt the TSA is going to want to look up his butt or make him take his shoes off. Hell, I imagine I don't even have to let them know -- I just file a flight plan with my local airport and go.
Now, what if Bob pays me $50 to take him from one place to another. Then does the TSA have to look up his butt?
What if I make a point of giving anybody who pays me $50 a ride in my airplane?
What if I have a bigger airplane and carry people around ten at the time?
When do they start insisting on me following their rules?
For the record, the TSA does have some presence at local airports (although right now it's mostly only fences/locked gates and such so unauthorized people can't get to aircraft, although they appear to be very keen on increasing that presence.) However, if you have a private pilot certificate, you are not allowed to fly for pay. (You can split the cost of the flight, but no more than that.) You have to get a commercial certificate to fly for pay, and even then you can't fly people, on schedule, for pay: for that you need an airline transport certificate. So while there's not a law against you flying Bob for $50, there are regulations that will end up in you losing your flight certificate if you do so and get caught. Chartered commercial aircraft still have some wiggle room around this, which is why politicians and businessmen tend to like them so much, but there are efforts to bring them into the same general scope of regulation that commercial aircraft have. But generally, if an individual can afford the airplane, it's probably too small to have the sort of destructive possibilities that really get the TSA excited. Exceptions (John Travolta) exist, but are rare.