Jim Fixx, author, runner, had the same problem. His father also died at an early age of a heart attack. Jim Fixx wrote the famous 1970s book, "The Complete Runner." He was in magnificent shape. He dropped dead of a massive heart attack while running one day. Genetic blockage of the arteries. Probably very high cholesteral levels. There are drugs for that today though, so there is hope.
Nature is not an idiot. She did not spend 4 billion years or so evolving homo sapiens just to overlook stem cells as the source of repair for all our medical problems. She has intimate knowledge of stem cells. If she doesn't use them, they don't work. It's not like she doesn't care. She's built, laboriously, a magnificent immune and repair system.
Stem cells are one of the biggest frauds the scientific-industrial-complex has come up with in years. Already, debt-burdened California has been convinced to fund 3 billion dollars for embryonic stem-cell "research." After much breathless reportage on how stem cells would solve all our medical problems, Proposition 71 passed in November of 2005. http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/nov 2004/tc20041115_9013_tc024.htm
I bet the gray-haired boys and girls of science are patting each other on the back over this one and guzzling Glenlivet while smoking Cuban cigars.
"It's academic and research institutions like Stanford University, the University of California, and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego. Between them, they're expected to receive the lion's share of California's funding plan."
I put stem cell research right up there with atom smashers, fusion power, and a manned trip to Mars as worthless "busyscience" endeavors designed to drain the public purse and steal standard-of-living from the taxpayer.
News media, stop the scientist worship or we'll end up funding a multi-trillion dollar perpetual motion machine built in the middle of some one of the world's major oceans.
Whether it is Yahoo helping the Chinese Communist government oppress its own people by turning them over for imprisonment for comments posted on websites, or companies like Intel, who set worldwide standards for connection and communication being acted against over their standards, the force of the massively growing Chinese economy is shaking freedom and rights worldwide. Even if China somehow doesn't come to set worldwide standards (it will) companies will make capitalistic decisions not to maintain two standards, one western and free, the other Chinese and destructive of rights. The Chinese standard will probably prevail due to the extent of their market and greed. This "blowback" from dealing with China is very disturbing.
I suggest that those who complain about how "unfairly" China is being treated in this kind of discussion may be Chinese. Not all of course, but I have to wonder about someone who equates anti-communism with "racism."
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists should advance its Doomsday Clock toward midnight. The cheaper enrichment of nuclear bomb isotopes just advances the entropic spread of nuclear weapons and increases the likelihood of a nuclear detonation or war.
It is ironically funny that they all justify what they are doing as being for power production. Anyone out of diapers knows it is nuclear bomb technology whether it is being developed by Iran or Australia.
The boys of science at NASA have put the cart before the horse in my opinion. Before the rovers, they should have put up a power station that would have allowed ranging vehicles to dock and recharge their power systems. These can be either batteries or perhaps fuel for a fuel cell. A web of nuclear base stations on Mars would allow wide-ranging exploration of Mars by robot vehicle far into the future. Perhaps even a small nuclear base station in orbit of Mars could beam down power to robots using a microwave beam.
A power base station may not be a source of sexy space photos, but it is the kind of actual science and engineering that the current space program has decided to eschew in favor of photo ops.
Fine, let's stripmine the moon for oxygen and small amounts of water using equipment transported from Earth at immense expense just to prove we can place a few gravity-maimed individuals on a Moon base or "colony" there.
The moon is a desert. It it a desert like no desert on the face of the Earth. We know that. Let's not engage in senseless activities just because we can. Let's not rape the public purse to satisfy bored scientists or political ego.
You speak sense. And I stand corrected about the vote. I haven't checked it yet, but I assume you would not state it if it were not the case. I share your growing anger.
"Not wearing your seatbelt affects more than just you."
All rights cost others. It is for this reason that they are controversial. If rights and freedoms did not cost others, we would have rights and freedoms too many to count. Why not? They would be innocuous.
"If you really don't want to wear your seatbelt, don't. The cops can't stop you for not wearing your seatbelt - they can only fine you for not wearing it if they pull you over for another infraction and then catch you not wearing it."
In Massachusetts, USA, they passed a "bridge law" saying they would not pull over citizens for seatbelt infractions. They would only be cited for not wearing a seatbelt if pulled over for another reason. Then, a few years later, just recently, they passed a law saying they can pull a citizen over for not wearing a seatbelt. A bridge law is a law you pass on the way to the law you really want. If you don't have enough support for a law, get passed what you can get passed with the intent to modify it later when passions have subsided. It is a sneaky and cheap way to destroy rights and freedoms. Look out for it.
"Comparing seatbelt laws with say executive orders that allow a US citizen to be detained without right to concil, family, challenges to his detention, and without being charged with a crime is an entirely different ballgame."
There are no small infringements on rights. Avalanches start with small pebbles.
The cost of freedom and rights is paid not just on the battlefields of the wars we fight, but in our everyday lives. When we become so weak that we cannot accept that cost, then we cannot have rights and freedoms.
In Massachusetts, USA, we now have State Police on television, threatening the citizens of the State over seatbelt use. In the mad desire to save the last life, our government and police oppress and threaten not murderers or rapists, not armed robbers or burglars, but citizens commuting to work, mothers doing shopping, and old people on the way to bingo.
You can be sure that the requirement to hold all ISP information on individuals will extend from 2 years to 5 to 10. Then there will be a lifetime requirement on all communication by an individual.
They justify these incroachments on rights and freedoms by saying they are fighting crime and saving lives. We have to be strong enough to accept the consequences of our freedom to chose in our lives and tell them we are not mere cells in the body of society. We must tell them that we are not all "uncaught criminals" who must be monitored and spied upon by the government for our own good. We must tell them to go to hell.
How about the national personality of Americans? We are a nation of risk-takers. All immigrant. Uprooters. Destroyers and builders on the ruins. You can't replicate that in Europe. Change your laws. Throw money around. But that is one of, no doubt, the many x factors involved. Greece during the rise of Athens. Italy during the Renaissance. Books are written on why and how they arose. None satisfy entirely. Paradigm shifts occur. Never can they be replicated deliberately. Success in other parts of the world? No. Where are their shifts?
The problem with the idea of computer patents in my mind is that computer programs are not really part of the universe of physical laws that determine devices and processes that can be created. Computers define a very small sub-universe in which hardware and software severely constrict that which is possible and actually make everything almost obvious once the problem to be solved is clearly stated.
Selecting from the limited possibilities determined not by the general laws of the universe, but by the severely restricted rules of the particular software and hardware being used does not constitute patentable creativity in my mind.
In the severely restricted environment of the hardware and software of the human being, picking one's nose to remove a booger should not be patentable. Neither should "one-click-buying", or "double-clicking" be patentable in the computer sub-universe.
The real problem with patents is one that I would call "lawyer-shock." The extremely egotistical and conservative legal profession was caught by surprise by the explosion of technology and has struggle ever since to deny that computer technology has created an environment in which patent law is, essentially, obsolete. In a mad attempt to assert that what it has created over the centuries need not be modified and therefore the superiority in a valid, overarching, abstraction of the law, and lawyers, is maintained, lawyers have caused absurdities and distortions in science and technology.
Support for my point: "Few lawyers are going to master technology. Instead, they will lecture and write about computer law, relying on 'normal' law and stating vociferously that that is all one needs to know to become an expert. One of the more hilarious events is to attend a prestigious seminar on 'computer law' and sit through two days of people speaking about nothing." Lawrens R. Schwartz, "What You Aren't Supposed to Know About the Legal Profession", Shapolsky Publishers, Inc. 1991. I doubt that much has changed.
Every person with an area of expertise thinks his or her area is not taught deeply enough to the rest of humanity. But the truth is, I suspect, that we all sit here vastly overeducated for the positions we eventually occupy in life. The same with computers.
Literacy is incorrectly applied to computers. The term "computer literacy" is applied to computers to make the knowledge of computers seem to be as fundamental, as essential, as the knowledge of reading and writing. This causes many more computers to be sold than necessary. It causes many expensive training programs to be created at massive expense. That is the goal of "computer literacy" -- making money.
What do children actually NEED to know about computers? Very little I suspect. How to turn them on and how to type, basically. The rest comes over time naturally as needed.
The main piece said they were doing it to find drugs, not preserve the reefs. Also, once they find new deep-sea reefs, the information will probably be public and it will serve to target those previously-unknown deep-sea reefs for commercial fisheries.
How can we be expected to destroy them if we don't know where they are? Let's put more money into hunting down these "reef" things so we can pit-mine them for a solution to athlete's foot.
Or, maybe we can just leave them the hell alone. How about it scientists? Just a thought.
Seems the white-haired children of the scientific-industrial-complex are at it again. Teflon has been found to be in the blood of practically everyone since that bright idea made it into cooking ware. Entropy tells us that these posionous balls will end up in every cell of the human body. What happens when depleted balls start sucking the hydrogen out of your lung cells? What would say, palladium oxide or nitrates of palladium (if these are real compounds) do to living creatures? Haven't we banned lead from gasoline? And MTE? And a tank of palladium-ball hydrogen for 30,000 dollars a fillup in a 500,000 dollar car is hardly a solution to the energy problem. (Conservative amounts?)
In amateur radio the old timers still insist that Morse code should be required of beginners. In a time when you can run your worldwide packet radio communications from a laptop while you sip a latte at Starbucks or connect through an orbiting satellite, oldsters still insist on new arrivals learning dots and dashes as if it were 1930. True, they want the requirement to be reduced to 5 WPM instead of 13, but, still, it is the requirement of an ancient skill that is no longer needed. It's more like a fraternity initiation than a practical need. It is an impediment to learning about what counts in amateur radio today.
Likewise, teachers who insist on today's programming students learning to program using the command line, like they did in the 1980s, are merely taking great enjoyment in torturing their students in order to extend the life span of their own rapidly obsolescing skill base. Wrestling with the computer is not programming. Programming is solving programming problems using a particular programming language, not spending hours figuring out which switch to use to correctly compile your pgm on this or that particular machine using who knows what compiler.
Today there are many powerful--even free--advanced tools to help students. IDEs like Dev-C++ and MPLAB and Eclipse make the underlying complexities disappear and correctly so. Compiler development is a specialty and programmers don't really need to understand what happens at that level.
Oldsters, stop torturing your students to extend the life of your rapidly obsolescing skill base. Keep up with and accept change. You don't need to learn how to make a flint axe before you learn how to drive.
Until the chubby-fingered children of science-- clapping their hands delightedly at shiny objects-- can find a balancing "bad" for all the "good" they project from fusion power they just cannot have it. Not in this universe. There is no perpetual motion energy source. Thus, the target date will continue to recede.
For the vast order we create by the burning of fossil fuels we pay with greenhouse gases and pollution. There is also the uncounted number of BTUs created by millions of barrels of oil burned every day in the world--not to mention those from wood and coal burning. Where is the balancing "bad" for fusion energy? Where is the price we pay for our "clean" power? NO ENERGY SOURCE IS FREE. Get real.
German industry came to regret its self-centered, coreless, characterless, purely capitalistic financial support for Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. Suppression of labor unions seemed like it would be good for business and increase profits. As we know, Hitler engulfed, looted, and eventually sought to utterly destroy all German industry. Microsoft cannot appease or attempt to use the new criminal communist capitalism and expect to prosper long term.
Point two:
The fear of words on the part of the chinese communist government is pathetic. Their real problem is the 250 million internet illiterate chinese peasants who are estimated to move to the cities of China in the next 10 years or so seeking jobs and a better life. Ideology -- words -- as a cause of revolution is the darling of historians and intelligent and educated people, but revolutions are the result of discontent in the masses, not words. And China is sitting on a ticking hydrogen bomb of growing discontent right now. The chinese will fiddle with the Internet and censorship and fear contamination from the outside world while China burns from within. It should be an interesting next few decades.
Slashdot Mirror
Jim Fixx, author, runner, had the same problem. His father also died at an early age of a heart attack. Jim Fixx wrote the famous 1970s book, "The Complete Runner." He was in magnificent shape. He dropped dead of a massive heart attack while running one day. Genetic blockage of the arteries. Probably very high cholesteral levels. There are drugs for that today though, so there is hope.
Nature is not an idiot. She did not spend 4 billion years or so evolving homo sapiens just to overlook stem cells as the source of repair for all our medical problems. She has intimate knowledge of stem cells. If she doesn't use them, they don't work. It's not like she doesn't care. She's built, laboriously, a magnificent immune and repair system.
Stem cells are one of the biggest frauds the scientific-industrial-complex has come up with in years. Already, debt-burdened California has been convinced to fund 3 billion dollars for embryonic stem-cell "research." After much breathless reportage on how stem cells would solve all our medical problems, Proposition 71 passed in November of 2005. http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/nov 2004/tc20041115_9013_tc024.htm
I bet the gray-haired boys and girls of science are patting each other on the back over this one and guzzling Glenlivet while smoking Cuban cigars.
"It's academic and research institutions like Stanford University, the University of California, and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego. Between them, they're expected to receive the lion's share of California's funding plan."
I put stem cell research right up there with atom smashers, fusion power, and a manned trip to Mars as worthless "busyscience" endeavors designed to drain the public purse and steal standard-of-living from the taxpayer.
News media, stop the scientist worship or we'll end up funding a multi-trillion dollar perpetual motion machine built in the middle of some one of the world's major oceans.
Whether it is Yahoo helping the Chinese Communist government oppress its own people by turning them over for imprisonment for comments posted on websites, or companies like Intel, who set worldwide standards for connection and communication being acted against over their standards, the force of the massively growing Chinese economy is shaking freedom and rights worldwide. Even if China somehow doesn't come to set worldwide standards (it will) companies will make capitalistic decisions not to maintain two standards, one western and free, the other Chinese and destructive of rights. The Chinese standard will probably prevail due to the extent of their market and greed. This "blowback" from dealing with China is very disturbing.
I suggest that those who complain about how "unfairly" China is being treated in this kind of discussion may be Chinese. Not all of course, but I have to wonder about someone who equates anti-communism with "racism."
Sounds like the laser fusion project. Aren't we the only ones (USA) doing that? hmmm....
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists should advance its Doomsday Clock toward midnight. The cheaper enrichment of nuclear bomb isotopes just advances the entropic spread of nuclear weapons and increases the likelihood of a nuclear detonation or war.
It is ironically funny that they all justify what they are doing as being for power production. Anyone out of diapers knows it is nuclear bomb technology whether it is being developed by Iran or Australia.
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists site: http://www.thebulletin.org/doomsday_clock/timeline .htm
The boys of science at NASA have put the cart before the horse in my opinion. Before the rovers, they should have put up a power station that would have allowed ranging vehicles to dock and recharge their power systems. These can be either batteries or perhaps fuel for a fuel cell. A web of nuclear base stations on Mars would allow wide-ranging exploration of Mars by robot vehicle far into the future. Perhaps even a small nuclear base station in orbit of Mars could beam down power to robots using a microwave beam.
A power base station may not be a source of sexy space photos, but it is the kind of actual science and engineering that the current space program has decided to eschew in favor of photo ops.
Fine, let's stripmine the moon for oxygen and small amounts of water using equipment transported from Earth at immense expense just to prove we can place a few gravity-maimed individuals on a Moon base or "colony" there.
The moon is a desert. It it a desert like no desert on the face of the Earth. We know that. Let's not engage in senseless activities just because we can. Let's not rape the public purse to satisfy bored scientists or political ego.
Just how much are we supposed to have to know in order to do anything at all? Give it a rest.
The street-trash hip hop cuture pg "gangstas," pimps, drug dealers and whores strikes again. Learning stuff is for geeks and nerds.
You speak sense. And I stand corrected about the vote. I haven't checked it yet, but I assume you would not state it if it were not the case. I share your growing anger.
All rights cost others. It is for this reason that they are controversial. If rights and freedoms did not cost others, we would have rights and freedoms too many to count. Why not? They would be innocuous.
"If you really don't want to wear your seatbelt, don't. The cops can't stop you for not wearing your seatbelt - they can only fine you for not wearing it if they pull you over for another infraction and then catch you not wearing it."
In Massachusetts, USA, they passed a "bridge law" saying they would not pull over citizens for seatbelt infractions. They would only be cited for not wearing a seatbelt if pulled over for another reason. Then, a few years later, just recently, they passed a law saying they can pull a citizen over for not wearing a seatbelt. A bridge law is a law you pass on the way to the law you really want. If you don't have enough support for a law, get passed what you can get passed with the intent to modify it later when passions have subsided. It is a sneaky and cheap way to destroy rights and freedoms. Look out for it.
"Comparing seatbelt laws with say executive orders that allow a US citizen to be detained without right to concil, family, challenges to his detention, and without being charged with a crime is an entirely different ballgame."
There are no small infringements on rights. Avalanches start with small pebbles.
The cost of freedom and rights is paid not just on the battlefields of the wars we fight, but in our everyday lives. When we become so weak that we cannot accept that cost, then we cannot have rights and freedoms.
In Massachusetts, USA, we now have State Police on television, threatening the citizens of the State over seatbelt use. In the mad desire to save the last life, our government and police oppress and threaten not murderers or rapists, not armed robbers or burglars, but citizens commuting to work, mothers doing shopping, and old people on the way to bingo.
You can be sure that the requirement to hold all ISP information on individuals will extend from 2 years to 5 to 10. Then there will be a lifetime requirement on all communication by an individual.
They justify these incroachments on rights and freedoms by saying they are fighting crime and saving lives. We have to be strong enough to accept the consequences of our freedom to chose in our lives and tell them we are not mere cells in the body of society. We must tell them that we are not all "uncaught criminals" who must be monitored and spied upon by the government for our own good. We must tell them to go to hell.
Perhaps British risk-taking lies in Flanders.
How about the national personality of Americans? We are a nation of risk-takers. All immigrant. Uprooters. Destroyers and builders on the ruins. You can't replicate that in Europe. Change your laws. Throw money around. But that is one of, no doubt, the many x factors involved. Greece during the rise of Athens. Italy during the Renaissance. Books are written on why and how they arose. None satisfy entirely. Paradigm shifts occur. Never can they be replicated deliberately. Success in other parts of the world? No. Where are their shifts?
The problem with the idea of computer patents in my mind is that computer programs are not really part of the universe of physical laws that determine devices and processes that can be created. Computers define a very small sub-universe in which hardware and software severely constrict that which is possible and actually make everything almost obvious once the problem to be solved is clearly stated.
Selecting from the limited possibilities determined not by the general laws of the universe, but by the severely restricted rules of the particular software and hardware being used does not constitute patentable creativity in my mind.
In the severely restricted environment of the hardware and software of the human being, picking one's nose to remove a booger should not be patentable. Neither should "one-click-buying", or "double-clicking" be patentable in the computer sub-universe.
The real problem with patents is one that I would call "lawyer-shock." The extremely egotistical and conservative legal profession was caught by surprise by the explosion of technology and has struggle ever since to deny that computer technology has created an environment in which patent law is, essentially, obsolete. In a mad attempt to assert that what it has created over the centuries need not be modified and therefore the superiority in a valid, overarching, abstraction of the law, and lawyers, is maintained, lawyers have caused absurdities and distortions in science and technology.
Support for my point: "Few lawyers are going to master technology. Instead, they will lecture and write about computer law, relying on 'normal' law and stating vociferously that that is all one needs to know to become an expert. One of the more hilarious events is to attend a prestigious seminar on 'computer law' and sit through two days of people speaking about nothing." Lawrens R. Schwartz, "What You Aren't Supposed to Know About the Legal Profession", Shapolsky Publishers, Inc. 1991. I doubt that much has changed.
Every person with an area of expertise thinks his or her area is not taught deeply enough to the rest of humanity. But the truth is, I suspect, that we all sit here vastly overeducated for the positions we eventually occupy in life. The same with computers.
Literacy is incorrectly applied to computers. The term "computer literacy" is applied to computers to make the knowledge of computers seem to be as fundamental, as essential, as the knowledge of reading and writing. This causes many more computers to be sold than necessary. It causes many expensive training programs to be created at massive expense. That is the goal of "computer literacy" -- making money.
What do children actually NEED to know about computers? Very little I suspect. How to turn them on and how to type, basically. The rest comes over time naturally as needed.
The main piece said they were doing it to find drugs, not preserve the reefs. Also, once they find new deep-sea reefs, the information will probably be public and it will serve to target those previously-unknown deep-sea reefs for commercial fisheries.
Good point. However, does it actually have to win the competition for hydrogen to have a deleterious effect on lung cell chemistry?
How can we be expected to destroy them if we don't know where they are? Let's put more money into hunting down these "reef" things so we can pit-mine them for a solution to athlete's foot.
Or, maybe we can just leave them the hell alone. How about it scientists? Just a thought.
Seems the white-haired children of the scientific-industrial-complex are at it again. Teflon has been found to be in the blood of practically everyone since that bright idea made it into cooking ware. Entropy tells us that these posionous balls will end up in every cell of the human body. What happens when depleted balls start sucking the hydrogen out of your lung cells? What would say, palladium oxide or nitrates of palladium (if these are real compounds) do to living creatures? Haven't we banned lead from gasoline? And MTE? And a tank of palladium-ball hydrogen for 30,000 dollars a fillup in a 500,000 dollar car is hardly a solution to the energy problem. (Conservative amounts?)
In my never-humble-opinion, yours is the way to do a modern programming course.
In amateur radio the old timers still insist that Morse code should be required of beginners. In a time when you can run your worldwide packet radio communications from a laptop while you sip a latte at Starbucks or connect through an orbiting satellite, oldsters still insist on new arrivals learning dots and dashes as if it were 1930. True, they want the requirement to be reduced to 5 WPM instead of 13, but, still, it is the requirement of an ancient skill that is no longer needed. It's more like a fraternity initiation than a practical need. It is an impediment to learning about what counts in amateur radio today.
Likewise, teachers who insist on today's programming students learning to program using the command line, like they did in the 1980s, are merely taking great enjoyment in torturing their students in order to extend the life span of their own rapidly obsolescing skill base. Wrestling with the computer is not programming. Programming is solving programming problems using a particular programming language, not spending hours figuring out which switch to use to correctly compile your pgm on this or that particular machine using who knows what compiler.
Today there are many powerful--even free--advanced tools to help students. IDEs like Dev-C++ and MPLAB and Eclipse make the underlying complexities disappear and correctly so. Compiler development is a specialty and programmers don't really need to understand what happens at that level.
Oldsters, stop torturing your students to extend the life of your rapidly obsolescing skill base. Keep up with and accept change. You don't need to learn how to make a flint axe before you learn how to drive.
Until the chubby-fingered children of science-- clapping their hands delightedly at shiny objects-- can find a balancing "bad" for all the "good" they project from fusion power they just cannot have it. Not in this universe. There is no perpetual motion energy source. Thus, the target date will continue to recede.
For the vast order we create by the burning of fossil fuels we pay with greenhouse gases and pollution. There is also the uncounted number of BTUs created by millions of barrels of oil burned every day in the world--not to mention those from wood and coal burning. Where is the balancing "bad" for fusion energy? Where is the price we pay for our "clean" power? NO ENERGY SOURCE IS FREE. Get real.
German industry came to regret its self-centered, coreless, characterless, purely capitalistic financial support for Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. Suppression of labor unions seemed like it would be good for business and increase profits. As we know, Hitler engulfed, looted, and eventually sought to utterly destroy all German industry. Microsoft cannot appease or attempt to use the new criminal communist capitalism and expect to prosper long term.
Point two: The fear of words on the part of the chinese communist government is pathetic. Their real problem is the 250 million internet illiterate chinese peasants who are estimated to move to the cities of China in the next 10 years or so seeking jobs and a better life. Ideology -- words -- as a cause of revolution is the darling of historians and intelligent and educated people, but revolutions are the result of discontent in the masses, not words. And China is sitting on a ticking hydrogen bomb of growing discontent right now. The chinese will fiddle with the Internet and censorship and fear contamination from the outside world while China burns from within. It should be an interesting next few decades.