For both the audience that the media is writing for, and for the media themselves, a PC *is* Windows. They understand that. When I tell people that my computers (all linux or BSD) have never gotten any viruses, that they've never (to my knowledge) gotten taken over or infected with anything, that I don't have to run antivirus programs, they look at me like I have something wrong in my head unless they already know a lot about computers. The general public has accepted viruses and trojans as the cost of doing business with Windows.
The lens design is necessary. Meeting the triggering criteria is necessary. Possession of the fissile material is necessary. Which of those sounds like the easiest one? You either have the fissile material or you don't, but you never know if you have a good lens design until it works.
And that's just for fission bombs. Fusion bombs are an order of magnitude harder, says my friend with the PhD in designing such things.
I won't say that all Libertarians have a (single) classic weakness (aside from the normal ones all humans have.) I'm rapidly starting to consider myself a libertarian, after all. It's just that I meet a lot of people who come swinging out of the first couple years of college, are smart and independent, and decide that a quick read of some Ayn Rand and a few hours of thinking about why the world is the way it is, answers all their questions, and then decide that they've realized the Great Truths and everyone else is stupid and irrational and only they have the Great Truths. A large number of those people are drawn to libertarianism. That's more a critique of those people, than libertarianism. I think it was Locke who said that only some conservatives are stupid, but most stupid people are conservative: same thing here.
>The only logical conclusion is that people want fascism.
Ya know, this is a classic example of why more people don't vote Libertarian. There are *lots* of other logical conclusions. *Most people don't know about Libertarian goals. *Many people think that voting for a small party is throwing their vote away. *Some people wouldn't vote Libertarian if you pointed a gun at them because they think Libertarians would do more harm than good.
Every one of those points is a logical conclusion based on the premises. I think it's a classic weakness of Libertarians, that they don't acknowledge there are other logical conclusions than the one that they've come up with. (Which is basically reason #3 above.)
Not everyone thinks exactly like you do. Other people come to different conclusions, and unfortunately many of them will vote for Democrats on Tuesday, and even worse, many of them will vote for Republicans. Reaching those people and explaining to them why there's another way -- or many, many, many other ways -- is critical. Telling them that the only logical conclusion is that they want fascism is a great way to piss them all off and make them stop listening to you.
An ex-boss of mine said "the difference between seduction and rape is salesmanship." In a similar manner, there are many ways to change people's minds, and telling them that they're stupid sheep is just about the worst one.
A more precise way of putting what they're thinking is "since 1950, in the First World, among people who have access to decent medical care, this is A PLIGHT HUMANITY HAS NEVER SUFFERED BEFORE! OMG!" It's just that because the people saying that are, invariably, limited in their memories to post-antibiotic good medical care, they think it's completely unprecedented. People are unbelievably parochial. There are still leper colonies. My grandparents, and, hell, my *mother*, remember before antibiotics, when stepping on a nail could be an unavoidable death sentence. And yeah, in the early 1500's, syphilis tore across Europe very like the plague, only more disgusting. But people only pay attention to the suffering that they, personally, are presently seeing.
(there's evidence that the human brain, maybe to compress information, remembers only two things about an event: the best/worst and what it was like at the end. I suspect we do something similar with history: the major events and what's just happened in the last 20 years, and all the rest might as well not have happened.)
Hospital infections, for your vocabulary experience of the day, are called nosocomial diseases. Impress people! Or just betray your geekiness.
It's a hard call which are scarier. Multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis is likely to be this decade's AIDS: slowly but inescapably lethal. Some of the most horrible, quick diseases are also bacterial: necrotizing fasciitis, pneumonic plague. But there are also some seriously horrible viral diseases. In all honesty, we should still call AIDS 99% fatal, and hantavirus is pretty lethal. Ebolavirus is appallingly horrible, and lassa is pretty awful.
However, I have to say that my own personal nightmares are mostly parasitic: river blindness, Chagas' disease, trypanosomiasis, stuff like that. Particularly river blindness: I've read that the mortality rate is something like 60% and it's almost entirely suicide. EEEEEEEEeeeeugh.
There are no antibiotic-resistant flu strains
on
Timely Book On Bird Flu
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Antibiotics work on bacteria, not on viruses. This new virus is not stopped by the current vaccine, although the reason for that is unclear.
Flu has something somewhat like chromosomes: different strands of genetic material that can mix and recombine. As a result there are many, many subvarieties of influenza. The way vaccination works (currently and for the forseeable future) is it presents parts of the virus to your immune system so your immune system can subsequently recognize them and fight them off. We can't present every single possible viral coat in one shot (mostly because we haven't ever encountered most of them so we don't have any way of making them to put into the shot) so what we do is take the viruses that are currently active in China, put those in the shot, and give those to suseptible populations. It's a different mix every single year, and it sounds like now this one has changed enough it's time for another mix, just like every other year.
A reason that flu is particularly worrisome is that it's shared between pigs, chickens, and humans, which is somewhat unusual; in many places in the world people, pigs, and chickens live in close contact, which makes cross-infection easy; and when a person, pig or chicken catches two different varieties of flu, they can recombine (because of the multiple strands of genetic material) and create a whole new variety that is unlike anything seen before. The new variety will suddenly have a whole world of unprepared immune systems to go attack, so it'll do very well indeed for a while.
No matter how hard you try to stay clean...
on
Dirtiest Jobs in Science
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
In our chemistry department, we had a lot of controls on exposure to chemicals: hoods, materials handling procedures, that kind of stuff. The prof who did tin chemistry, and almost all his grad students, had gray hair: a sign of tin poisoning.
I worked in the microbiology department, in a pathogen lab, doing research on mycobacteria, specifically tuberculosis. Every semester we had to get tested for antibodies to TB (indicating that we'd been exposed) and every semester at least one researcher had.
My best friend works as a clinical technician in a lab doing human tissue sample analysis. Pathology lab, basically. About a week ago they had a patient that was *really* sick with a bunch of nasty things, and they were working through samples, and one of my friend's coworkers started screaming because one of the stool samples *moved*. The patient had serious tapeworms, among other problems.
We're thinking about going back to school and becoming art critics.
I've always wanted to find a fulgurite, or failing that, make one, but the latter option seems a little bit risky.
I'm wearing a raw iron bracelet I've had for about 15 years. It does okay: the only time I notice rusting or skin-staining is when I go swimming in the ocean or spend time in a particularly sulphury spring (at which point the surface turns into fools' gold, a nice mustard color, then later reverts to rust.) It'll be rusty for about a week and go back to being raw-iron-looking after that. It's not bad at all. (I live in desert conditions, so that might help.)
The people I was working with/for did several custom ti rings, and went through ActionTec out in California, who were/are mostly a mountain bike custom component shop, but did rings on the side. I don't know if they're still in business, but they were very nice and quite prompt. I haven't ever dealt with Boone. Should you be interested, you can get some wonderful, exotic raw materials from Reactive Metals Supply down in Arizona. Take a look at mokume-gane (my current project) for some breathtakingly beautiful rings and jewelry in general.
My company gave me one. I bought a Creative for my girlfriend. The Creative's hardware interface is better, and it's trivial to transfer mp3's to it from the linux and bsd boxes. The iPod's interface is just annoying. A year later and I still have to think about how to get to a particular song. I've never learned how to delete files from it. amaroK and gtkpod can *sort* of work with it, if I don't transfer too many songs at once, and iTunes is one of the most needy, annoying, controlling pieces of software I've ever dealt with. My ipod's a fifth generation model, so after five years and five revs of working on them, it still blows chunks compared to the second generation Creative. Mind you, the Creative software is startlingly hideous, but since I don't need it, I haven't ever used it past the first awe-struck, horrified five minutes.
Maybe not all the predictions were correct, but anyone who said it was deficient, and lagged behind its competitors, deserves to be retroactively modded up.
I may have been misreading the OP's intent, but what I inferred was: he thought fluorescence was the glow you see after you turn the light off.
As you say, a nanosecond is a comparatively long time, but not as regards human vision. I might be wrong, but my understanding of the mechanisms indicates that the only light human eyes will see after turning of the excitation source, would be the product of phosphorescent decay. It's possible there are metastable states that have fluorescent decays that take 100uS but if there are I don't know of them.
EM Forester once said, a story is "The King died, then the Queen died." A plot is: "The King died, then the Queen died of grief." That's always given me chills.
There are a bunch of possibilities, should you still want to get her an interesting ring some day. Tektites are generally believed to be glasses formed in the wake of meteor impacts. Many obsidians cool while falling through the air after a volcanic explosion. (Both are basically glass, and not very strong.) A decent machinist could cut a ring out of a chunk of nickel-iron meteorite, or it would be fairly easy to make a ring yourself by buying an existing gold wedding band and soldering a cabochon bezel setting onto it, and setting a cut and etched piece of nickel-iron meteorite in it. (I've done the latter a couple of times and they can be beautiful.)
As any jeweler will tell you: offer a woman a 1 ct. diamond, or for the same price a 5 ct. diamond that's indistinguishable from a natural one to any person she will ever meet, and ask her which one she wants. 95% of the time it'll be the big rock, without even talking about the ethical considerations.
Your summary is great but I have to pick a bone with your use of 'fluoresce.' There are two different phenomena. One is fluorescence, the other phosphorescence. Fluorescence is seen in rubies -- it's why they make good lasers. It's where a molecule absorbs a photon, and (very nearly instantaneously, within picoseconds) releases another photon, of longer wavelength. In the case of ruby, it absorbs in the blue and UV, and releases in the red -- so it's UltraRed. Phosphorescence is where a molecule absorbs a photon, kicking an electron up into a higher energy state (just like fluorescence) but the energy state it's in has different quantum characteristics than the ground energy state and it can't just emit a photon: it has to reverse its spin or some complicated thing like that. As a result, it gets stuck in this excited state for a long (milliseconds to as long as hours) time because the only way to drop back into its normal state is by kinetically unfavorable mechanisms (called 'forbidden transitions') which take a long time to happen. Wikipedia's version of the above. I'm not arguing with what you're saying, I'm just clarifying. Fluorescence is a very fast, continuous process, happening basically as fast as the illumination, so you don't have to, nor can you, switch the light off to observe it happening. Phosphorescence is a slow, continuous process, so while it's happening with the light on, you can see it much better once the light turns off. I believe, from what I've read, that the nitrogen shine in diamond, is fluorescence.
I've said this before, and no doubt I'll say it again: if you have a friend whose boss yells at her and openly flirts with her, should she stand up and do something about it, or should she just quit and go somewhere else? if you have a friend whose gun-happy husband beats her, should she stand up and do something about it, or should she just leave? if you have a friend who is living in a country that has decided it can kidnap its own citizens, revoke their citizenship, secretly accuse them of crimes they can't defend against, torture them, try and execute them secretly, should they stand up and do something about it, or should they just leave?
The ideal person should, indeed, stand up to it, but actual people will know that they will personally lose far more than they'd gain. Just like how you don't walk out into a crosswalk when a speeding semi is racing towards you, even though the law says they have to yield to you, you don't start a fight you're going to lose with very significant personal harm, just because it'll make the world a better place.
Even better: they've started to assign custom part numbers based on not only region but even retailer. So, if Target advertises "we will beat any price on this product!" and you bring in an ad from WalMart, turns out that they're not the same product, because one is an (for example) Olympus 340DL digital camera part number AO56789-123, and the other is an Olympus 340DL digital camera part number AO56789-456. WalMart actively pressures its suppliers to do this, I've read. Nice, huh?
I have a friend who is spending four life sentences in the Florence, Colorado Supermax for molesting a boy that he was fostering, despite A: being physically incapable of doing so (that's why he's fostering, not fathering) and B: the boy in question having accused his previous four foster parents of exactly the same thing, neither of which facts were allowed as evidence at the trial. Sucks muchly. I, and most of the other people who know this guy, have subsequently refused to have anything to do with children, be alone with them, volunteer for children's organizations, or, obviously, foster children. That sucks, too, but it's not worth the risk.
I don't agree. The reason -- let's take smelting, for example -- it took so long to learn was because they didn't know what was going on, and they didn't know how to optimize it intelligently. They had no idea that they were doing, for instance, Fe2O3 + C -> Fe + CO2, nor did they know what a flux was or why it was useful. If you know the chemistry, you know where to concentrate your optimization research. Take another example: case-hardening steel. It doesn't *matter* if you use bone from only oxen raised on milk, or just charcoal. They did all this "research" on different sources of carbon, when all that mattered was carbon, temperature, and time. You can forge-weld steel using sand as flux. Once you know that, you don't have to screw around trying to find good fluxes. You learn the basics from books: what metals are found as oxides and what as sulphides (and what can't be reclaimed at all using carbon but will require electricity instead.) Same thing holds for farming, for designing windmills and waterwheels, for 95% of the pre-1850 knowledge. The things that are *really* difficult are things like: if you don't have a chemical industry, how do you make insulation for wire used for transformer or motor wirings? or do the chemical separations required to get molybdenum and cobalt for use in alloying? or get molds to crank out useful quantities of penicillin? No matter how much knowledge you have, whether book-learning or experience in the field, those are all problems that require an existing, stable, reliable source of processed materials, and that's not going to be possible to replace. In the old desert-island scenario, just *finding* raw ore would take a lifetime, much less being able to make threaded fasteners like screws. But if we assume a societal collapse, there'll be enough screwed stuff (ha! ha!) to last for decades. Getting medicines back into production, however, is going to be impossible without a massive, existing manufacturing base.
You didn't read what he said. You're right: the US was a second-rate or worse power prior to WWII. But *in* *Pearl* *Harbor*, we were the dominant power. We were the ones with an aircraft carrier, a bunch of destroyers, buttloads of P-40's, and 4000+ soldiers.
>Tapeworms are *very* common in some areas of the world.
Yeah, like the US. One of my best friends is a medtech in the Denver area, not known for its barrios or ghettos. The other day her lab received a stool sample from someone who was pretty ill, and the tech who was supposed to do the analysis on it promptly fainted when it moved. The patient had more than tapeworms, as it turned out, but it was a hatched egg that had moved.
Your idea is great. I started my serious online addiction playing LambdaMOO in about 1993. To sum up, it's a textual VR set in the then-house of Pavel Curtis, who created Lambda (and ncurses and other big unixy things) and you wandered around and played with things. One of the things was a computer, and if you could get it to boot (find the power switch, plug in the monitor, find the boot disc -- this was '93, after all) you could play games on the computer. As I recall, Adventure was on there, and I think there was a mini-version of Lambda, establishing recursion.
I know you're just being funny, but you could be completely right. There's an amazing book called "Complications" by Atul Gawande, a doctor, about different aspects of doctoring. One section is about obesity and gastric bypass surgery, and he talks about people who have head injuries that impair their memory. One bit was about a guy who had literally no short-term memory, like Memento, and researchers could walk into a room with him, say "it's time for lunch!" and give him a nice lunch, clean up, walk out, walk right back in, say "it's time for lunch!" and so forth, like four times in a row before he'd say "I'm not feeling very hungry." Since he didn't remember that he was full, he decided he was hungry and just kept eating. Which, if you think about it, is a very successful survival strategy: eat whenever you can, as much as you can.
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For both the audience that the media is writing for, and for the media themselves, a PC *is* Windows. They understand that. When I tell people that my computers (all linux or BSD) have never gotten any viruses, that they've never (to my knowledge) gotten taken over or infected with anything, that I don't have to run antivirus programs, they look at me like I have something wrong in my head unless they already know a lot about computers. The general public has accepted viruses and trojans as the cost of doing business with Windows.
I wish I had mod points for you.
The lens design is necessary. Meeting the triggering criteria is necessary. Possession of the fissile material is necessary. Which of those sounds like the easiest one? You either have the fissile material or you don't, but you never know if you have a good lens design until it works.
And that's just for fission bombs. Fusion bombs are an order of magnitude harder, says my friend with the PhD in designing such things.
I won't say that all Libertarians have a (single) classic weakness (aside from the normal ones all humans have.) I'm rapidly starting to consider myself a libertarian, after all. It's just that I meet a lot of people who come swinging out of the first couple years of college, are smart and independent, and decide that a quick read of some Ayn Rand and a few hours of thinking about why the world is the way it is, answers all their questions, and then decide that they've realized the Great Truths and everyone else is stupid and irrational and only they have the Great Truths. A large number of those people are drawn to libertarianism. That's more a critique of those people, than libertarianism. I think it was Locke who said that only some conservatives are stupid, but most stupid people are conservative: same thing here.
>The only logical conclusion is that people want fascism.
Ya know, this is a classic example of why more people don't vote Libertarian.
There are *lots* of other logical conclusions.
*Most people don't know about Libertarian goals.
*Many people think that voting for a small party is throwing their vote away.
*Some people wouldn't vote Libertarian if you pointed a gun at them because they think Libertarians would do more harm than good.
Every one of those points is a logical conclusion based on the premises. I think it's a classic weakness of Libertarians, that they don't acknowledge there are other logical conclusions than the one that they've come up with. (Which is basically reason #3 above.)
Not everyone thinks exactly like you do. Other people come to different conclusions, and unfortunately many of them will vote for Democrats on Tuesday, and even worse, many of them will vote for Republicans. Reaching those people and explaining to them why there's another way -- or many, many, many other ways -- is critical. Telling them that the only logical conclusion is that they want fascism is a great way to piss them all off and make them stop listening to you.
An ex-boss of mine said "the difference between seduction and rape is salesmanship." In a similar manner, there are many ways to change people's minds, and telling them that they're stupid sheep is just about the worst one.
A more precise way of putting what they're thinking is "since 1950, in the First World, among people who have access to decent medical care, this is A PLIGHT HUMANITY HAS NEVER SUFFERED BEFORE! OMG!" It's just that because the people saying that are, invariably, limited in their memories to post-antibiotic good medical care, they think it's completely unprecedented. People are unbelievably parochial. There are still leper colonies. My grandparents, and, hell, my *mother*, remember before antibiotics, when stepping on a nail could be an unavoidable death sentence.
And yeah, in the early 1500's, syphilis tore across Europe very like the plague, only more disgusting. But people only pay attention to the suffering that they, personally, are presently seeing.
(there's evidence that the human brain, maybe to compress information, remembers only two things about an event: the best/worst and what it was like at the end. I suspect we do something similar with history: the major events and what's just happened in the last 20 years, and all the rest might as well not have happened.)
Hospital infections, for your vocabulary experience of the day, are called nosocomial diseases. Impress people! Or just betray your geekiness.
It's a hard call which are scarier. Multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis is likely to be this decade's AIDS: slowly but inescapably lethal. Some of the most horrible, quick diseases are also bacterial: necrotizing fasciitis, pneumonic plague. But there are also some seriously horrible viral diseases. In all honesty, we should still call AIDS 99% fatal, and hantavirus is pretty lethal. Ebolavirus is appallingly horrible, and lassa is pretty awful.
However, I have to say that my own personal nightmares are mostly parasitic: river blindness, Chagas' disease, trypanosomiasis, stuff like that. Particularly river blindness: I've read that the mortality rate is something like 60% and it's almost entirely suicide. EEEEEEEEeeeeugh.
Antibiotics work on bacteria, not on viruses. This new virus is not stopped by the current vaccine, although the reason for that is unclear.
Flu has something somewhat like chromosomes: different strands of genetic material that can mix and recombine. As a result there are many, many subvarieties of influenza. The way vaccination works (currently and for the forseeable future) is it presents parts of the virus to your immune system so your immune system can subsequently recognize them and fight them off. We can't present every single possible viral coat in one shot (mostly because we haven't ever encountered most of them so we don't have any way of making them to put into the shot) so what we do is take the viruses that are currently active in China, put those in the shot, and give those to suseptible populations. It's a different mix every single year, and it sounds like now this one has changed enough it's time for another mix, just like every other year.
A reason that flu is particularly worrisome is that it's shared between pigs, chickens, and humans, which is somewhat unusual; in many places in the world people, pigs, and chickens live in close contact, which makes cross-infection easy; and when a person, pig or chicken catches two different varieties of flu, they can recombine (because of the multiple strands of genetic material) and create a whole new variety that is unlike anything seen before. The new variety will suddenly have a whole world of unprepared immune systems to go attack, so it'll do very well indeed for a while.
>5) Show me a piece of software with no memory leak issues.
ELIZA.
In our chemistry department, we had a lot of controls on exposure to chemicals: hoods, materials handling procedures, that kind of stuff. The prof who did tin chemistry, and almost all his grad students, had gray hair: a sign of tin poisoning.
I worked in the microbiology department, in a pathogen lab, doing research on mycobacteria, specifically tuberculosis. Every semester we had to get tested for antibodies to TB (indicating that we'd been exposed) and every semester at least one researcher had.
My best friend works as a clinical technician in a lab doing human tissue sample analysis. Pathology lab, basically. About a week ago they had a patient that was *really* sick with a bunch of nasty things, and they were working through samples, and one of my friend's coworkers started screaming because one of the stool samples *moved*. The patient had serious tapeworms, among other problems.
We're thinking about going back to school and becoming art critics.
I've always wanted to find a fulgurite, or failing that, make one, but the latter option seems a little bit risky.
I'm wearing a raw iron bracelet I've had for about 15 years. It does okay: the only time I notice rusting or skin-staining is when I go swimming in the ocean or spend time in a particularly sulphury spring (at which point the surface turns into fools' gold, a nice mustard color, then later reverts to rust.) It'll be rusty for about a week and go back to being raw-iron-looking after that. It's not bad at all. (I live in desert conditions, so that might help.)
The people I was working with/for did several custom ti rings, and went through ActionTec out in California, who were/are mostly a mountain bike custom component shop, but did rings on the side. I don't know if they're still in business, but they were very nice and quite prompt. I haven't ever dealt with Boone. Should you be interested, you can get some wonderful, exotic raw materials from Reactive Metals Supply down in Arizona. Take a look at mokume-gane (my current project) for some breathtakingly beautiful rings and jewelry in general.
My company gave me one. I bought a Creative for my girlfriend. The Creative's hardware interface is better, and it's trivial to transfer mp3's to it from the linux and bsd boxes. The iPod's interface is just annoying. A year later and I still have to think about how to get to a particular song. I've never learned how to delete files from it. amaroK and gtkpod can *sort* of work with it, if I don't transfer too many songs at once, and iTunes is one of the most needy, annoying, controlling pieces of software I've ever dealt with. My ipod's a fifth generation model, so after five years and five revs of working on them, it still blows chunks compared to the second generation Creative.
Mind you, the Creative software is startlingly hideous, but since I don't need it, I haven't ever used it past the first awe-struck, horrified five minutes.
Maybe not all the predictions were correct, but anyone who said it was deficient, and lagged behind its competitors, deserves to be retroactively modded up.
I may have been misreading the OP's intent, but what I inferred was: he thought fluorescence was the glow you see after you turn the light off.
As you say, a nanosecond is a comparatively long time, but not as regards human vision. I might be wrong, but my understanding of the mechanisms indicates that the only light human eyes will see after turning of the excitation source, would be the product of phosphorescent decay. It's possible there are metastable states that have fluorescent decays that take 100uS but if there are I don't know of them.
EM Forester once said, a story is "The King died, then the Queen died." A plot is: "The King died, then the Queen died of grief."
That's always given me chills.
Brevity *is* wit.
There are a bunch of possibilities, should you still want to get her an interesting ring some day.
Tektites are generally believed to be glasses formed in the wake of meteor impacts. Many obsidians cool while falling through the air after a volcanic explosion. (Both are basically glass, and not very strong.) A decent machinist could cut a ring out of a chunk of nickel-iron meteorite, or it would be fairly easy to make a ring yourself by buying an existing gold wedding band and soldering a cabochon bezel setting onto it, and setting a cut and etched piece of nickel-iron meteorite in it. (I've done the latter a couple of times and they can be beautiful.)
As any jeweler will tell you: offer a woman a 1 ct. diamond, or for the same price a 5 ct. diamond that's indistinguishable from a natural one to any person she will ever meet, and ask her which one she wants. 95% of the time it'll be the big rock, without even talking about the ethical considerations.
Your summary is great but I have to pick a bone with your use of 'fluoresce.'
There are two different phenomena. One is fluorescence, the other phosphorescence.
Fluorescence is seen in rubies -- it's why they make good lasers. It's where a molecule absorbs a photon, and (very nearly instantaneously, within picoseconds) releases another photon, of longer wavelength. In the case of ruby, it absorbs in the blue and UV, and releases in the red -- so it's UltraRed.
Phosphorescence is where a molecule absorbs a photon, kicking an electron up into a higher energy state (just like fluorescence) but the energy state it's in has different quantum characteristics than the ground energy state and it can't just emit a photon: it has to reverse its spin or some complicated thing like that. As a result, it gets stuck in this excited state for a long (milliseconds to as long as hours) time because the only way to drop back into its normal state is by kinetically unfavorable mechanisms (called 'forbidden transitions') which take a long time to happen.
Wikipedia's version of the above.
I'm not arguing with what you're saying, I'm just clarifying. Fluorescence is a very fast, continuous process, happening basically as fast as the illumination, so you don't have to, nor can you, switch the light off to observe it happening. Phosphorescence is a slow, continuous process, so while it's happening with the light on, you can see it much better once the light turns off.
I believe, from what I've read, that the nitrogen shine in diamond, is fluorescence.
Oh, you say that now, secretly imagining it's going to be Christina Aguilera, but what happens when you realize you drew Celine Dion or Warrant?
I've said this before, and no doubt I'll say it again: if you have a friend whose boss yells at her and openly flirts with her, should she stand up and do something about it, or should she just quit and go somewhere else? if you have a friend whose gun-happy husband beats her, should she stand up and do something about it, or should she just leave? if you have a friend who is living in a country that has decided it can kidnap its own citizens, revoke their citizenship, secretly accuse them of crimes they can't defend against, torture them, try and execute them secretly, should they stand up and do something about it, or should they just leave?
The ideal person should, indeed, stand up to it, but actual people will know that they will personally lose far more than they'd gain. Just like how you don't walk out into a crosswalk when a speeding semi is racing towards you, even though the law says they have to yield to you, you don't start a fight you're going to lose with very significant personal harm, just because it'll make the world a better place.
Even better: they've started to assign custom part numbers based on not only region but even retailer. So, if Target advertises "we will beat any price on this product!" and you bring in an ad from WalMart, turns out that they're not the same product, because one is an (for example) Olympus 340DL digital camera part number AO56789-123, and the other is an Olympus 340DL digital camera part number AO56789-456.
WalMart actively pressures its suppliers to do this, I've read. Nice, huh?
I have a friend who is spending four life sentences in the Florence, Colorado Supermax for molesting a boy that he was fostering, despite A: being physically incapable of doing so (that's why he's fostering, not fathering) and B: the boy in question having accused his previous four foster parents of exactly the same thing, neither of which facts were allowed as evidence at the trial. Sucks muchly. I, and most of the other people who know this guy, have subsequently refused to have anything to do with children, be alone with them, volunteer for children's organizations, or, obviously, foster children. That sucks, too, but it's not worth the risk.
I don't agree. The reason -- let's take smelting, for example -- it took so long to learn was because they didn't know what was going on, and they didn't know how to optimize it intelligently. They had no idea that they were doing, for instance, Fe2O3 + C -> Fe + CO2, nor did they know what a flux was or why it was useful. If you know the chemistry, you know where to concentrate your optimization research. Take another example: case-hardening steel. It doesn't *matter* if you use bone from only oxen raised on milk, or just charcoal. They did all this "research" on different sources of carbon, when all that mattered was carbon, temperature, and time.
You can forge-weld steel using sand as flux. Once you know that, you don't have to screw around trying to find good fluxes. You learn the basics from books: what metals are found as oxides and what as sulphides (and what can't be reclaimed at all using carbon but will require electricity instead.)
Same thing holds for farming, for designing windmills and waterwheels, for 95% of the pre-1850 knowledge. The things that are *really* difficult are things like: if you don't have a chemical industry, how do you make insulation for wire used for transformer or motor wirings? or do the chemical separations required to get molybdenum and cobalt for use in alloying? or get molds to crank out useful quantities of penicillin? No matter how much knowledge you have, whether book-learning or experience in the field, those are all problems that require an existing, stable, reliable source of processed materials, and that's not going to be possible to replace.
In the old desert-island scenario, just *finding* raw ore would take a lifetime, much less being able to make threaded fasteners like screws. But if we assume a societal collapse, there'll be enough screwed stuff (ha! ha!) to last for decades. Getting medicines back into production, however, is going to be impossible without a massive, existing manufacturing base.
You didn't read what he said. You're right: the US was a second-rate or worse power prior to WWII. But *in* *Pearl* *Harbor*, we were the dominant power. We were the ones with an aircraft carrier, a bunch of destroyers, buttloads of P-40's, and 4000+ soldiers.
>Tapeworms are *very* common in some areas of the world.
Yeah, like the US. One of my best friends is a medtech in the Denver area, not known for its barrios or ghettos. The other day her lab received a stool sample from someone who was pretty ill, and the tech who was supposed to do the analysis on it promptly fainted when it moved. The patient had more than tapeworms, as it turned out, but it was a hatched egg that had moved.
by the way, apparently people sold diet pills including tapeworm eggs.
Your idea is great.
I started my serious online addiction playing LambdaMOO in about 1993. To sum up, it's a textual VR set in the then-house of Pavel Curtis, who created Lambda (and ncurses and other big unixy things) and you wandered around and played with things. One of the things was a computer, and if you could get it to boot (find the power switch, plug in the monitor, find the boot disc -- this was '93, after all) you could play games on the computer. As I recall, Adventure was on there, and I think there was a mini-version of Lambda, establishing recursion.
I know you're just being funny, but you could be completely right. There's an amazing book called "Complications" by Atul Gawande, a doctor, about different aspects of doctoring. One section is about obesity and gastric bypass surgery, and he talks about people who have head injuries that impair their memory. One bit was about a guy who had literally no short-term memory, like Memento, and researchers could walk into a room with him, say "it's time for lunch!" and give him a nice lunch, clean up, walk out, walk right back in, say "it's time for lunch!" and so forth, like four times in a row before he'd say "I'm not feeling very hungry." Since he didn't remember that he was full, he decided he was hungry and just kept eating. Which, if you think about it, is a very successful survival strategy: eat whenever you can, as much as you can.