Weirdness. I have exactly the opposite reaction: Newark's search makes sense to me and Digikey's doesn't. How does THAT happen?
What I'd really like, in both cases, is a search-for-similar or a one-up kind of search system. If I enter a part number that's discontinued or wrong, it'll show me similar part numbers and let me get into the parametric search screens from that point. Maybe it's possible, but all I've ever managed is to find the exact part number, click on it, and go to the exact part number detail pages. If I'm looking for a 50 pin D-SUB that they no longer make, I'd like to be able to see other 50 pin D-SUB's, and above that, other 50-pin D-SUBs with different pin configurations (right-hand, solder-cup), and above that, all the other D-SUBs... sigh. Probably everyone else wants a different search system, too, but they all want DIFFERENT different search systems.
Digikey's search system drives me craaazy. Most of the time I just get a.pdf of the page. I could do that with my paper copy of the catalog. I tend to shop at Mouser and Newark just because it's easier for me to get into and use the filtering parameter tables, and Jameco (on the off-chance they carry a given part) because they're cheaper. Which pains me to say because I like Digikey as a company.
As I recall, you need a pretty good telescope to see Pluto when you know where it is. 6x as far means it'll be 200 times dimmer (roughly?) *and* you don't have a nice convenient nearby source of light to illuminate it since they're both swinging around out on their own. I think you'd have to be lucky indeed.
I'm no expert (obviously) but I think I've been told by multiple people that all federal crimes are, by definition, felonies, that misdemeanors only exist at state/local level. I'll go read about it and see if I can find another answer.
It's extremely hard to believe that they got, are getting, or expect to get authorization from the copyright holders -- but that has more to do with my prejudices on the issue than anything else. I'm convinced the main point of the DMCA and DRM is to get us to buy new copies of everything every time someone comes out with a new physical medium or, if possible, every time our media players die and we have to replace them. This makes for an interesting test case: if they're trying to stop copying, per se, the Circuit City copy seems neutral to them. If they're trying to make sure we all buy new copies for every media player we have, then the copy seems like a threat to their business model.
Interesting. They told me that nobody could do the work on private houses other than the owners; that companies who did professional removal only worked on government/commercial properties, not ones where people were living there. Sounds like they were smoking something.
Obviously I'm not a lawyer, or an expert in this. I didn't realize there was any provision for a valid decryption license to be used for mass decrypting, as opposed to individual device licenses, although I guess there could be.
>If it's legal for me to do something, why would it be illegal for me to pay someone to do something for me?
Asbestos removal. You're free to rip out asbestos tiles, insulation, refractories, what have you, in your home, because it's your home and one assumes you'll be doing it once and then it'll be gone. However, you cannot legally hire a service to do it because there are OSHA laws about asbestos removal and companies are not allowed to let their employees have repeated exposure to asbestos-containing products. I know that's an edge case and not what you're talking about, but I've been told that it's actually illegal to write a contract for commercial asbestos removal (and I was told that by a company I called asking if they'd do it, so I figure they'd know.)
That's too naked. What they're doing is illegal. They can't just pay someone off without making it blatantly clear that the DMCA is a tax-generating system for the MPAA et al. And, more basically, they can't just pay someone to break a law. US law doesn't (yet) work that way, even though we treat it as if it does. To the best of my knowledge, they're violating a federal law, which means it's a felony. (I may be wrong: this is just what I've been told.) Either the law goes or they do.
Make no mistake: I think it's a cool idea and if publicized will make a lot of waves when people think "huh, gee, that makes sense: everyone should be able to do that." If it gets publicized before it gets shut down, it's very very bad press for the MPAA. But I don't believe that it will actually happen.
The news that there are circumstances under which radioactive decay rates might not be constant under all conditions will surely give ammo to the creationist contention that carbon-dating is inaccurate. They've been looking for evidence for this for decades -- oops, I mean years.
Your body produces stuff like triplet oxygen and other weird strongly oxidizing antimicrobials (precisely to kill bacteria) that make ozone look like Diet Sprite. I'm not saying to go start snorting ozone. I'm saying that we have systems intended to deal with oxygen radicals and the like, and they work pretty well.
Like DerekLyons said: neutron activation. Out at Hanford they've buried many, many entire trains because they're so neutron-activated they'll be hot for generations. In one of my intro radiochemistry classes we used a fast neutron source (in an *enormous* wax container half the size of the room) to neutron-activate pennies and then measure what we'd done to them. It's nasty stuff.
Yeah, and they're always slamming people's servers as well. Two days ago they posted a link to a current limiter for a stepper motor and within five minutes the server was offline, which it still is. sigh.
I was helping in an elementary school physics program: we made crazy things and took them to the local elementary schools to get kids involved in science. One of the coolest demos we did was to dump about 4 pounds of cornstarch (which IS dilatantic) and the appropriate amount of water into a giant Tupperware and then lifted up a kid and told him "stomp your feet as fast as you can!" and he could stand on the surface. As soon as he stopped he sank -- and when we grabbed him and tried to lift him out rapidly the tupperware came up with him and we could wave him and it around for a moment before it dropped off again. Pretty visual demo.
It's a little sad to know that 'rheopectic' is a word because it's the opposite of thixotropy and I've always secretly called that 'thinotropy' coz it seemed appropriate.
Well, clearly I should go reread my college textbooks... But I thought that tRNA and mtRNA, while certainly coiled into an enzyme-like shape, were not double-stranded so much as held together by short runs of complimentary sequences. I know, that's splitting hairs, but my understanding was that 80% or so of the structure was held together by 20% or so of complimentary runs, and that's not going to be very useful for proofreading. Now, viral dsRNA is entirely new to me. Do you know if there's any evidence of proofreading enzymes that can work with it? It'd be an interesting tactic to use the host cell polymerases to fix your RNA. I also seem to remember that the proofreading enzymes rely on methylation of the ribose/phospates to decide which strand to trust for mismatches (aside from obvious errors like thymine dimers and uracils.) Would this hold with RNA? Are there RNA phosphorylases to even provide this functionality? I'm in areas I don't remember well enough.
I've read a lot of good science that indicates that mitochondrial ageing might be a major driving force for ageing in general. It's not like there's just one thing that makes us age, and as (I believe) JSB Haldane pointed out (and provided mathematical support for), evolution will tend to make all ageing mechanisms run their course at the same pace. But with that said, it's my memory that mitochondria do not have particularly good DNA replication accuracy, and they're also the site of some of the nastiest, most damaging chemistry in the body (ATP synthases and the like) so they undergo irreparable damage fairly quickly. It would be interesting to see what mitochondrial replacement therapy would do.
I didn't know that Boyer actually made it to the Tour! That's awesome. AFAIK George didn't ride in the Tour, so Boyer is a better candidate for cracking open that door.
I wonder sometimes if women's racing in Europe was helped or harmed by Jeannie Longo's unbelievable string of victories. Sometimes it seemed like there wasn't any point to even holding the races, when you could just send the trophies directly to her and save all the hard work.
I wish I could find a web ref, but a communcation published in the journal of biologic chemistry a few years back indicated that... okay, let me back up. There are twenty (ish) proteins making up people. For sake of brevity, they've been assigned one-letter names. Since the human genome is now known, we can read all possible proteins that would be produced by the DNA. So the aforementioned communication said that "ELVIS" appears many times, but "LIVES" very few.
Case in point: the HIV virus. It's an RNA virus. Most enzymes cells use for replicating DNA (called DNA polymerases) have a proofreading skill: if they detect that what they're reading is incorrect they'll rip it out and try again. Most RNA polymerases lack proofreading skill (because it's expensive: it takes a lot of energy, and RNA is, in the grand scheme of things, considered throwaway material, a transition from the data storage system to the actual machinery.) So, the viruses that rely on RNA as their data storage have a much higher rate of mutation. The result is that they have a vastly higher rate of nonviable viral particles, and a small number of extremely viable particles, which have found, by chance, better ways of evading host immune response. It's a main reason that HIV is so difficult to treat or cure. Here is some information about reverse transcriptase error rates. In contrast, here is some for one of the DNApolymerases. As I recall, in eukaryotes there are three DNA polymerases, and only DNApolyIII has bidirectional proofreading ability (I may be wrong) so only it can scan finished DNA, but all three can scan DNA while it's being built. In contrast, I don't believe there are any enzymes that can scan finished RNA (since it's not, to my knowledge, found double-stranded in anything we've found, and you'd have no way of determining that there was an error) so the best you can hope for is really good DNA->RNA fidelity, and as I said earlier, there's not much evolutionary pressure FOR that in the rest of nature, while there's some evolutionary pressure AGAINST it (because it's expensive) so if it were to exist, it would only exist in things that would benefit from it, those being small RNA viruses that are much less likely to have either the history, the machinery, or the overhead to afford proofreading replication enzymes. Besides which, if their gain (number of viruses produced for each cell infected) is high enough, they A: don't care about individual viral particle loss from bad fidelity, and B: actually benefit from high mutation rate because of its help in evading host response. whew. that was wordy. sorry.
To expand on that a little, mitochondria in animals seem very likely to be bacteria that have been engulfed and now form a symbiotic relationship with the cell, since mitochondria have their own DNA (and a slightly different code for converting DNA -> RNA -> protein) and reproduce themselves independently of the cell's nuclear DNA (hence the discussion of 'maternal DNA' since you only get maternal mitochondria.)
In plants, chloroplasts have similar characteristics, and *also* so do the plant mitochondria.
In other words, bacteria have one source of DNA (or RNA...), animals have two DNA repositories, and plants have three.
And Greg was building on the americans-in-europe tradition that George Mount had kicked up in '75-78, when he was racing in the Giro. I *think* he was the first American since the '30's to show up in European pro cycling.
I take a little issue with some of the things you're saying (but not much.) There have always been massive, massive crowds showing up at the Tour. When the US Postal Office was trying to decide whether to sponsor a team, their research indicated more people go to a single day of the Tour than the total number of people who watch one or more NFL games (or AFL games, but not quite enough to say "more than watch football".) So it's pretty crowded. And for some reason, that whole filling-the-course behavior seems to be endemic. If you watch old '70's movies of rally racing, where they were driving in 600 horsepower cars, you saw the same exact behavior: drivers doing full-speed down a road into a crowd, trusting that they'd move. There have been Tours where angry fans have blocked, hit, pushed over, and in some cases gotten in fights with racers. Racers have accidentally collided with spectators. Spectators routinely throw things at the racers -- mostly flower petals or spray from water, but sometimes cans, bottles, and rocks.
Now the issues. Road bike brakes are stronger than they need to be, by which I mean at any point you can lock the front wheel (and go over the handlebars.) If you can brake hard enough to lock the front wheel, more braking power is useless. And, when you're racing in a pack, unless you're on a fairly steep downhill you do not use the brakes because people behind you will plough into you. You back off on pedalling, and if that's not enough you sit up to increase your wind resistance. Other riders will kick your ass if you start hitting the brakes in a pack. By which I mean you'll find yourself shoved into a curb and out of the race. First they yell at someone for doing something stupid like that, and if the person does it again everyone clears out from behind that racer and then something happens and suddenly the racer's down, skidding on pavement. They don't take kindly to misbehavior in the pack because it's their collarbones that are gonna get broken if someone gets squirrely.
In the 1930's, a common military/engineering slang term for the smallest possible unit of adjustment was an "RCH", alternatively in the US a red (pubic) hair, and in England a royal (pubic) hair. If you look for it, you'll see it in old engineering articles, or, for instance, in H. Beam Piper's old scifi books, only they say "move it a red hair clockwise!" So measuring things by hairwidth has a good foundation in the sciences, as well as in popular news sources.
Slashdot Mirror
Weirdness. I have exactly the opposite reaction: Newark's search makes sense to me and Digikey's doesn't. How does THAT happen?
What I'd really like, in both cases, is a search-for-similar or a one-up kind of search system. If I enter a part number that's discontinued or wrong, it'll show me similar part numbers and let me get into the parametric search screens from that point. Maybe it's possible, but all I've ever managed is to find the exact part number, click on it, and go to the exact part number detail pages. If I'm looking for a 50 pin D-SUB that they no longer make, I'd like to be able to see other 50 pin D-SUB's, and above that, other 50-pin D-SUBs with different pin configurations (right-hand, solder-cup), and above that, all the other D-SUBs... sigh. Probably everyone else wants a different search system, too, but they all want DIFFERENT different search systems.
Digikey's search system drives me craaazy. Most of the time I just get a .pdf of the page. I could do that with my paper copy of the catalog. I tend to shop at Mouser and Newark just because it's easier for me to get into and use the filtering parameter tables, and Jameco (on the off-chance they carry a given part) because they're cheaper. Which pains me to say because I like Digikey as a company.
Yeah, as I've said in other comments, apparently the companies I talked to were full of it.
Apparently that's actually the case and the companies I talked to were just unwilling to either do it or tell me about other companies that would.
As I recall, you need a pretty good telescope to see Pluto when you know where it is. 6x as far means it'll be 200 times dimmer (roughly?) *and* you don't have a nice convenient nearby source of light to illuminate it since they're both swinging around out on their own. I think you'd have to be lucky indeed.
I'm no expert (obviously) but I think I've been told by multiple people that all federal crimes are, by definition, felonies, that misdemeanors only exist at state/local level. I'll go read about it and see if I can find another answer.
It's extremely hard to believe that they got, are getting, or expect to get authorization from the copyright holders -- but that has more to do with my prejudices on the issue than anything else. I'm convinced the main point of the DMCA and DRM is to get us to buy new copies of everything every time someone comes out with a new physical medium or, if possible, every time our media players die and we have to replace them. This makes for an interesting test case: if they're trying to stop copying, per se, the Circuit City copy seems neutral to them. If they're trying to make sure we all buy new copies for every media player we have, then the copy seems like a threat to their business model.
Interesting.
They told me that nobody could do the work on private houses other than the owners; that companies who did professional removal only worked on government/commercial properties, not ones where people were living there.
Sounds like they were smoking something.
Obviously I'm not a lawyer, or an expert in this. I didn't realize there was any provision for a valid decryption license to be used for mass decrypting, as opposed to individual device licenses, although I guess there could be.
>If it's legal for me to do something, why would it be illegal for me to pay someone to do something for me?
Asbestos removal. You're free to rip out asbestos tiles, insulation, refractories, what have you, in your home, because it's your home and one assumes you'll be doing it once and then it'll be gone. However, you cannot legally hire a service to do it because there are OSHA laws about asbestos removal and companies are not allowed to let their employees have repeated exposure to asbestos-containing products. I know that's an edge case and not what you're talking about, but I've been told that it's actually illegal to write a contract for commercial asbestos removal (and I was told that by a company I called asking if they'd do it, so I figure they'd know.)
>strike an arrangement to kick back to the MPAA
That's too naked. What they're doing is illegal. They can't just pay someone off without making it blatantly clear that the DMCA is a tax-generating system for the MPAA et al. And, more basically, they can't just pay someone to break a law. US law doesn't (yet) work that way, even though we treat it as if it does. To the best of my knowledge, they're violating a federal law, which means it's a felony. (I may be wrong: this is just what I've been told.) Either the law goes or they do.
Make no mistake: I think it's a cool idea and if publicized will make a lot of waves when people think "huh, gee, that makes sense: everyone should be able to do that." If it gets publicized before it gets shut down, it's very very bad press for the MPAA. But I don't believe that it will actually happen.
The news that there are circumstances under which radioactive decay rates might not be constant under all conditions will surely give ammo to the creationist contention that carbon-dating is inaccurate. They've been looking for evidence for this for decades -- oops, I mean years.
Your body produces stuff like triplet oxygen and other weird strongly oxidizing antimicrobials (precisely to kill bacteria) that make ozone look like Diet Sprite. I'm not saying to go start snorting ozone. I'm saying that we have systems intended to deal with oxygen radicals and the like, and they work pretty well.
Like DerekLyons said: neutron activation. Out at Hanford they've buried many, many entire trains because they're so neutron-activated they'll be hot for generations. In one of my intro radiochemistry classes we used a fast neutron source (in an *enormous* wax container half the size of the room) to neutron-activate pennies and then measure what we'd done to them. It's nasty stuff.
Yeah, and they're always slamming people's servers as well. Two days ago they posted a link to a current limiter for a stepper motor and within five minutes the server was offline, which it still is. sigh.
It sounds to me more like it's rheopectic.
I was helping in an elementary school physics program: we made crazy things and took them to the local elementary schools to get kids involved in science. One of the coolest demos we did was to dump about 4 pounds of cornstarch (which IS dilatantic) and the appropriate amount of water into a giant Tupperware and then lifted up a kid and told him "stomp your feet as fast as you can!" and he could stand on the surface. As soon as he stopped he sank -- and when we grabbed him and tried to lift him out rapidly the tupperware came up with him and we could wave him and it around for a moment before it dropped off again. Pretty visual demo.
It's a little sad to know that 'rheopectic' is a word because it's the opposite of thixotropy and I've always secretly called that 'thinotropy' coz it seemed appropriate.
From places like, oh, say, the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo you don't even need binoculars. I was there last weekend. It's a lovely place.
Well, clearly I should go reread my college textbooks...
But I thought that tRNA and mtRNA, while certainly coiled into an enzyme-like shape, were not double-stranded so much as held together by short runs of complimentary sequences. I know, that's splitting hairs, but my understanding was that 80% or so of the structure was held together by 20% or so of complimentary runs, and that's not going to be very useful for proofreading.
Now, viral dsRNA is entirely new to me. Do you know if there's any evidence of proofreading enzymes that can work with it? It'd be an interesting tactic to use the host cell polymerases to fix your RNA.
I also seem to remember that the proofreading enzymes rely on methylation of the ribose/phospates to decide which strand to trust for mismatches (aside from obvious errors like thymine dimers and uracils.) Would this hold with RNA? Are there RNA phosphorylases to even provide this functionality? I'm in areas I don't remember well enough.
I've read a lot of good science that indicates that mitochondrial ageing might be a major driving force for ageing in general. It's not like there's just one thing that makes us age, and as (I believe) JSB Haldane pointed out (and provided mathematical support for), evolution will tend to make all ageing mechanisms run their course at the same pace. But with that said, it's my memory that mitochondria do not have particularly good DNA replication accuracy, and they're also the site of some of the nastiest, most damaging chemistry in the body (ATP synthases and the like) so they undergo irreparable damage fairly quickly. It would be interesting to see what mitochondrial replacement therapy would do.
I didn't know that Boyer actually made it to the Tour! That's awesome. AFAIK George didn't ride in the Tour, so Boyer is a better candidate for cracking open that door.
I wonder sometimes if women's racing in Europe was helped or harmed by Jeannie Longo's unbelievable string of victories. Sometimes it seemed like there wasn't any point to even holding the races, when you could just send the trophies directly to her and save all the hard work.
I wish I could find a web ref, but a communcation published in the journal of biologic chemistry a few years back indicated that... okay, let me back up. There are twenty (ish) proteins making up people. For sake of brevity, they've been assigned one-letter names. Since the human genome is now known, we can read all possible proteins that would be produced by the DNA. So the aforementioned communication said that "ELVIS" appears many times, but "LIVES" very few.
Case in point: the HIV virus. It's an RNA virus. Most enzymes cells use for replicating DNA (called DNA polymerases) have a proofreading skill: if they detect that what they're reading is incorrect they'll rip it out and try again. Most RNA polymerases lack proofreading skill (because it's expensive: it takes a lot of energy, and RNA is, in the grand scheme of things, considered throwaway material, a transition from the data storage system to the actual machinery.) So, the viruses that rely on RNA as their data storage have a much higher rate of mutation. The result is that they have a vastly higher rate of nonviable viral particles, and a small number of extremely viable particles, which have found, by chance, better ways of evading host immune response. It's a main reason that HIV is so difficult to treat or cure.
Here is some information about reverse transcriptase error rates. In contrast, here is some for one of the DNApolymerases. As I recall, in eukaryotes there are three DNA polymerases, and only DNApolyIII has bidirectional proofreading ability (I may be wrong) so only it can scan finished DNA, but all three can scan DNA while it's being built. In contrast, I don't believe there are any enzymes that can scan finished RNA (since it's not, to my knowledge, found double-stranded in anything we've found, and you'd have no way of determining that there was an error) so the best you can hope for is really good DNA->RNA fidelity, and as I said earlier, there's not much evolutionary pressure FOR that in the rest of nature, while there's some evolutionary pressure AGAINST it (because it's expensive) so if it were to exist, it would only exist in things that would benefit from it, those being small RNA viruses that are much less likely to have either the history, the machinery, or the overhead to afford proofreading replication enzymes. Besides which, if their gain (number of viruses produced for each cell infected) is high enough, they A: don't care about individual viral particle loss from bad fidelity, and B: actually benefit from high mutation rate because of its help in evading host response.
whew. that was wordy. sorry.
To expand on that a little, mitochondria in animals seem very likely to be bacteria that have been engulfed and now form a symbiotic relationship with the cell, since mitochondria have their own DNA (and a slightly different code for converting DNA -> RNA -> protein) and reproduce themselves independently of the cell's nuclear DNA (hence the discussion of 'maternal DNA' since you only get maternal mitochondria.)
In plants, chloroplasts have similar characteristics, and *also* so do the plant mitochondria.
In other words, bacteria have one source of DNA (or RNA...), animals have two DNA repositories, and plants have three.
And Greg was building on the americans-in-europe tradition that George Mount had kicked up in '75-78, when he was racing in the Giro. I *think* he was the first American since the '30's to show up in European pro cycling.
I take a little issue with some of the things you're saying (but not much.)
There have always been massive, massive crowds showing up at the Tour. When the US Postal Office was trying to decide whether to sponsor a team, their research indicated more people go to a single day of the Tour than the total number of people who watch one or more NFL games (or AFL games, but not quite enough to say "more than watch football".) So it's pretty crowded. And for some reason, that whole filling-the-course behavior seems to be endemic. If you watch old '70's movies of rally racing, where they were driving in 600 horsepower cars, you saw the same exact behavior: drivers doing full-speed down a road into a crowd, trusting that they'd move.
There have been Tours where angry fans have blocked, hit, pushed over, and in some cases gotten in fights with racers. Racers have accidentally collided with spectators. Spectators routinely throw things at the racers -- mostly flower petals or spray from water, but sometimes cans, bottles, and rocks.
Now the issues. Road bike brakes are stronger than they need to be, by which I mean at any point you can lock the front wheel (and go over the handlebars.) If you can brake hard enough to lock the front wheel, more braking power is useless. And, when you're racing in a pack, unless you're on a fairly steep downhill you do not use the brakes because people behind you will plough into you. You back off on pedalling, and if that's not enough you sit up to increase your wind resistance. Other riders will kick your ass if you start hitting the brakes in a pack. By which I mean you'll find yourself shoved into a curb and out of the race. First they yell at someone for doing something stupid like that, and if the person does it again everyone clears out from behind that racer and then something happens and suddenly the racer's down, skidding on pavement. They don't take kindly to misbehavior in the pack because it's their collarbones that are gonna get broken if someone gets squirrely.
In the 1930's, a common military/engineering slang term for the smallest possible unit of adjustment was an "RCH", alternatively in the US a red (pubic) hair, and in England a royal (pubic) hair. If you look for it, you'll see it in old engineering articles, or, for instance, in H. Beam Piper's old scifi books, only they say "move it a red hair clockwise!" So measuring things by hairwidth has a good foundation in the sciences, as well as in popular news sources.