I understand that the phrase "smell-based terrorist sensors" is probably intended to convey the idea of a sensor that exposes people to fear pheromones to "magnify" whatever fear they may already be feeling. People who get super-jittery are assumed to be feeling the fear of suicide-bomb induced death, or perhaps the induction of fear into everyone who passes is supposed to make the terrorists get jittery and slip up.
However, given how ludicrous those ideas are when one considers how many potential sources of fear there are in a person's life as well as the potential for suicide bombers to not actually be feeling any fear OR to not be significantly hampered by feeling extra fear, we are left thinking that the only reasonable explanation for a "smell-based terrorist sensor" is that the sensor goes around smelling people to see if they emit terror pheromones. That is, if we can isolate the human "fear" pheromone, then obviously terrorists, being terrorists, must emit such a pheromone in copious amounts because they are just chock-full of terror. Like a hound sniffing for drugs, we will have machines that sniff for terroristic intents.
I would not put it past some people to construe this sensor to be of just such a type.
Does anyone know of any downside to lopping your legs off below the knee and "installing" a pair of these?
It's hard to write a response to a comment like this. On the one hand, it _seems_ that most people would generally rather prefer to use their original equipment, rather than replacing it. The advantages of their natural legs are many: you're probably used to using them; less likelihood of infection; no phantom-limb problems; fewer strange looks in public; less maintenance beyond what's standard for the rest of your body; and I'm sure there are others. Wiggling your toes.
You can of course point to situations where most of these "advantages" of natural legs can be mitigated without necessarily losing the limb. Some people are more infection-prone to begin with; some people probably get strange looks. Anecdotally, my mother had a leg-stretching device (an Ilizarov device) on her leg for what seemed to me (and I'm sure to her as well) to be a very long time, and she had many of those problems listed above. However, given the choice between fixing her own leg or having it removed and replaced with one of these, I'm positive she would go with the former, even knowing as she does now what it would entail.
Besides that, given that a person has healthy legs to start with, no ethical doctor would remove them just so they could be replaced. And I'm sure people with unhealthy legs or feet would look forward to the day they could have their healthy legs back again, rather than anticipating the day they could replace them with something better. I'm sure, though, that there probably are people who are excited about the potential to adopt developments like these, but I would expect those would be people who are afflicted with congenital conditions or who are otherwise unable to have completely functional "normal" legs. By and large, most of us are probably better off with what we have now.
I always thought it was kinda interesting that a stack of razorblades makes a fair approximation of a blackbody. You can't grow stacks of razorblades on surfaces, natch, but for some applications I imagine you just need a small optical sink and don't want to spend a lot of money. Then again, this could be just trivia more than something that's useful to know.
(Because of the potential for dangerous reflections, please don't shine lasers into a stack of razors trying to test their reflectivity--unless you know what you're doing and, hopefully, have an appropriate pair of laser goggles.)
It's on the list, but let me throw out a good word or two for La-Mulana.
If there are any MSX fans out there, you'll recognize a heavy influence on La-Mulana in the old MSX game "Maze of Galious." For the rest of us (never had an MSX myself) La-Mulana plays a lot like the modern "Metrovania" games: you play a character who platforms his way through a large labyrinth of diverse enemies and environments, searching as you go for items that let you access new areas and give you new abilities. The game's been compared to Cave Story (another excellent Metrovania-like platformer), except that La-Mulana is less linear, emphasizes exploration, and does not have as strong of a plot as Cave Story. Make no mistake that this game is, as it is often described, both hard and unforgiving. Attacking certain parts of the environment, for instance, in a random search for hidden passages or puzzle solutions may well result in your character being struck by lightning for lots of damage. There are many traps in the ruins you're exploring--some will seal off approaches to areas, some will lock you out of weapon upgrades. You can, however, solve just about every puzzle in the game by careful note-taking of the warnings provided by the many monuments in the game, as well as by carefully mapping the ruins. The developers were tired of games that you could finish just by "trying everything" without having to really think. La-Mulana wants you to think like an archaeologist--coincidentally, you play one--and to try to determine what might happen as a result of your actions, rather than just assuming you'll solve the puzzle if you hit all the switches in the room in the right order.
The game's not for everyone. For one, it's very long--probably something like 10-20 hours depending on if you struggle through yourself or have a prior playthrough to think back to. You can expect to spend time backtracking, although the areas aren't all that large and you can get from one to the other very quickly thanks to the handy teleportation system. It's really a game that emphasizes exploration, puzzle-solving, and careful thought. There are, however, a number of video walkthroughs where people throw themselves at the game and break upon its rocky shores (some are downright hilarious). The "Let's Play La Mulana" series on Youtube is the one I know of, and it's worthwhile to watch the last twelve or so videos even if you never intend to play the game--they consist of the commentator/player running through the game's hidden challenge area, and those of you who can indulge in schadenfreude will get a kick out of seeing the guy's reward for actually finishing the challenge.
Anyhow, the link is given in the article, but you can find La Mulana here as well. It comes highly recommended.
As is mentioned in the article, I would take the wild guess that one of the culprits in this situation is probably the collection of good old reactive oxygen species--hydroxyl radicals from peroxides formed via enzymatic transformation of superoxide ions, for instance. Naturally, the guess is worthless without being tested and proven. However, increased free radical production is fairly well implicated in similar DNA damage (base damage, double and single strand breaks, etc.) due to some types of ionizing radiation. You can show that cells in a high-oxygen environment will "respond better" (i.e. be more likely to be "killed" (i.e. transformed in a way that makes them not reproduce)) upon low-LET radiation exposure compared to cells that are poorly oxygenated. This implicates oxygen (and, eventually, reactive oxygen species) as a _partial_ explanation for DNA damage due to ionizing radiation. (This happens to be important when you consider that cells that are closer to the centers of some tumors are poorly oxygenated--not enough that they necessarily die, but enough so that they are not as easily killed as those cells on the periphery.) Similar damage might be caused by similar chemical, if not physical, processes, but my speculation is just that: speculation.
It bears mentioning, though, that much like the picture for radiation, it is just about certain that there is more to the story than just oxygenation. High LET radiation (think alpha particles compared to, say, low-energy x-rays) cause damage that is virtually unaffected by oxygen concentration, so we know there's more to the story.
Given how relatively poorly understood are the biological changes due to ionizing radiation, it's a little surprising to me, at least, that we don't know more about the mechanistics of damage due to "pollution." Many, many more people deal with high doses of pollution than deal with high doses of radiation, and it's a lot easier (usually) to control who gets the radiation as opposed to who breathes in the pollution. Anyhow, I suppose what I'm saying is that it shouldn't be surprising that ROS-es might be fingered as _a_ cause, but it'd be shortsighted to think of them as the only cause--not that it seems that's happened here, fortunately.
My two-minute Pubmed screening (dinner's getting cold) shows that it seems that this guy's more recent papers, at least, are all technical note-like submissions in online journals. He also has some noted conflicts of interest. However, there is one pilot study. I don't know if this link will work without going through Pubmed, but this is a year-old pilot study that is probably not the one referenced in the article. They basically conclude, like so many other pilots, that the treatment is promising but needs more rigorous study.
I forget where I first read this (I think it was one of the Quackwatch articles). Credit to whomever first said it.
Oxygen and hydrogen are explosive and flammable gasses. Water is made of oxygen and hydrogen. It is obviously wrong, though, to posit that drinking water will cause a person to catch fire and explode.
It's not a completely parallel situation, natch, but it's vivid enough an example that people might actually listen.
I used to think this was the kind of thing that could only happen in crappy tech-horror movies like that new "Untraceable" flick. I'm going to get a smarmy "told you so" call from my cousin if she hears about this--I'd told her that no (automobile) control system in the real world would be reachable through standard networking protocols.
I'm betting he meant "multiplayer." I don't think that guy is alone in wanting to see more games with fulfilling single player content, even if it means taking a hit for having no multiplayer options. Take, for instance, STALKER--I don't think anyone would've cried much if the developers had spent their time implementing some of the features that they had to drop, rather than trying to cobble together and then support a workable multiplayer experience. Of course, single-player games don't make Microsoft money via Live, and you can't charge for them by the month.
On the flip side, it'd be _great_ if we could see more cooperative multiplayer games. I'm kinda looking at you again, STALKER. People claim that you can have fun with MMOs if your friends play them, but MMOs have their own problems, natch. I mean, I had fun with FFXI, but my friends are into WoW. It's not like I can reasonably play a little WoW with them, and then they play a little FFXI with me like we can do with, for instance, Ghost Recon 3 and System Shock 2.
Also, it's not as if it's just party games that aren't coming to the PC. For people who care, it took Gears of War quite a while to make it to the PC--same with Halo 2 (and it was Vista-only, if I remember right), and Halo 3's still not here yet. There's also Assassin's Creed and, worst of all, Mass Effect. I could probably come up with a few more (maybe some PS3 games) if I sat and thought for a while--and don't get me started on the whole "consolitis" thing PC gamers make so much fuss about.
Back in the day, you didn't feel too stupid saying "Super Nintendo" or "Super NES" or "ess-ness" because, well, you were probably about 10 and everyone else (all the kids) had to say it in some silly-sounding way, too. You'd have the occasional eye-rolling when someone said their shibboleth differently (for instance, I grew up around Super NES kids, and the ess-ness and--god forbid!--ess-en-ee-ess kids were laughed at), but that was how things went. "Super Nintendo" was long and dorky-sounding, and so were most of the alternatives, but I'll be damned if people didn't stick by THIER saying as the coolest of them all.
The Wii, though, can't really be abbreviated. There's little ambiguity about it being just "Wii", so everyone who wants to go buy one will probably be calling it the "Super Wii" no matter how silly they think it sounds. There's probably something to be said about the unambiguous, unifying name of the Wii standing in stark contrast to the pride-wars waged over the Super NES, and about how it reflects the gregarious character of the console.
Ah, of course, there's always the age-old "mom exception": people out of the loop did and probably will forever call the newest Nintendo console "that new Nintendo."
I have to wonder which isotopes Chalk River produces. We don't talk much about the production side of things here, so I honestly can't say. Following links on the wikipedia page for the reactor, I can say that it produces Mo-99 and Co-60--as I could've guessed. 99m-Tc (made naturally from Mo-99 decay) is literally indispensible to nuclear medicine as we know it today--from what I've seen, if nuclear pharmacists could use 99m-Tc for everything, they would. Co-60 is still important for some applications (Gamma Knife, and some other teletherapy units). So, I would say having a steady supply of these radioisotopes is pretty important.
Anyone know which others? Ir-192 (or precursors?)? Radioactive iodines?
Disclaimer: I'm relying on "big numbers" to make these "statistics" relatively accurate. I've done no actual analysis beyond looking at the numbers.
You can get some insight into the numbers behind the very non-numerical TF2 by inferring from these statistics.
If you look at the "average distance" stats, you notice immediately that the fireaxe appears to have a longer range than other melee weapons--and it appears to be a fairly significant extension, making the axe's averagekilling range nearly as long as that of the flamethrower itself. If we take the engineer's shotgun as representative of the average distance for any non-sniper non-melee individual battle (because it's the engineer's primary weapon, meaning it sees a lot of use, and probably the most generic weapon in TF2), we notice that flamethrowers tend to be lethal at close ranges (closer than that of the shotguns, at least), but the axe is lethal at comparably close ranges. It's an interesting result, since I (at least) wouldn't have assumed any of the melee weapons had longer or shorter ranges.
In the same graph, we can see that either syringe gun tracking is bugged, or that medics have a _very_ hard time aiming with their syringe gun--its average kill distance is just about the same as that of the melee weapons. The remarkable consistency of the melee weapons' ranges, now that I think about it, make me wonder if that's not the center-point-to-center-point distance between two players, and most melee kills are at absolutely point-blank range. When you compare the SMG and the syringe gun, it's easy to believe that people have a much harder time using the syringe gun because it has an arcing projectile, despite having a larger clip than the SMG and also doing slightly more damage-per-hit.
Looking at the critical damages table, it seems that--as this Soldier suspected--the RL gets more criticals than other weapons--except, surprisingly, the GL. Just as surprisingly, it's not as big of a differential as this Soldier suspected. I had the perception that the RL was consistently getting noticably more criticals than most other weapons, but it appears that's not really the case.
As we see from the same graph, the melee weapons all get far more criticals than other weapons. This probably accounts for some melee weapons being so high on the damage-per-hit graph. The highest melee weapons on the latter graph are the ones that inherently do more damage and also get more criticals, since the damage-per-hit graph doesn't appear to be corrected for criticals. It's interesting to note that it doesn't appear that the bonesaw and the bottle are much different in damage-per-hit, even though I feel there's wide perception that the bottle is useless and the bonesaw is the 'best' melee weapon. Offhand, I think the bonesaw swings faster than the bottle, but I don't remember the difference being too great.
Of course, since the SDK has been released I think it's perfectly possible for someone to go gather the coded data for each weapon. Still, it's interesting to dig a little into these statistics and see what ends up happening out in the field.
So this is great for stuff that you can put in subcutaneously. What about intravenous injections? What about intramuscular? Intraperitoneal? What about substances that are made up of large (several micron) particles, such as the sufur colloid injections used by nuclear medicine studies? Those could get stuck in superfine-gauge needles.
I think it's a little premature to say that this patch will replace conventional injections entirely. It might seem obvious that a patch couldn't really hope to deliver injections into the muscles without penetrating all the layers of skin, but I think it at least bears mentioning.
What you're talking about is called "radiation hormesis."
We have more or less only one good epidemiological set of data for various-dose radiation--atomic bomb survivors. Those data are extrapolated to low doses, and that's a large part of the data set from which the current "radiation damage" model (the LNT or "linear-no-threshold" model) is derived (actual survival of cells is predicted by a different model--the LNT model is for radiation effects on a person). Since the LNT model is the most widely-accepted standard in the field as far as I've seen (medical physics student), the hormesis promoters have the burden of proving the protective effect.
The parent is right in that we don't have a good understanding of what goes on at low doses of radiation, and we don't have a model backed by strong empirical observation either. Radiation protection, however, is founded on the principle of keeping doses as small as is reasonably possible, and it's irresponsible to try to wave around that small doses MIGHT not be as harmful as people currently think. I would say that radiation science still basically wants to say that there is no lower threshold for radiation damage, and thus that there is probably not a hormesic (hormestic? I don't know the adjectival form of hormesis) effect. It doesn't really need to be stated that we don't know a lot about low-dose radiation--you start from the assumption that you don't know a lot about it until you can prove that you do. Right now, all we can prove is that it's pretty likely that if damage is linear, then low-doses are bad too.
I would play a game where the hero's main weapon is a telepathic, sentient rifle known as "Gun," being the hero's (and thus the player's) only method of reliably separating good from evil. The game would be a dialog-heavy adventure and involve no direct combat. Even better: make the player take on the role of Gun, being toted around by a high-functioning psychotic with no inherent sense of rationality or morality; the player's job is to instill in the hero these senses, saving him from his mental deficiencies while destroying those who mean to exploit him or do him harm. It'd play like Wonder Project J meets Mass Effect, only the player character is a rifle.
Would the city/county/state arrest the property owner for 'destruction of government property', 'obstructing justice', or 'interfering with a criminal investigation' even if there is no clear-cut 'crimes' being committed and no warrants issued at the time of the overflight?
Well, they could call it interfereing with an investigation--as soon as you shot it down, you committed a crime by shooting down the first investigator to respond to the scene of the crime you just committed. That's government logic.
I remember a Matlab demo we did in one of my ECE courses. We took the fourier transform of an image of Batman--I think it was an FFT--and after some other processing played it as a wav file. Pretty awesome song, actually.
Although, to be fair, the image was made for the demo. Still, it was a fair likeness of Batman considering.
Of course, some new whizbang gadget could appear that negates the entire argument, or some law could be passed, or the entire human race could gain common sense--what I mean, however, is that as time goes on, people who were alive and socially active before widespread cell phone usage will be dying. Gradually, people will forget that people once got along without cellphones. Pretty soon, we might have a generation that's never seen a (working) payphone. This will, eventually, become another perennial nuisance like sneezes-openly-on-subway-sick-guy and pisses-on-the-seat-bathroom-guy(-or-gal); the arguments and appeals to older times, you'd think, would carry less weight over time.
Of course, for one reason or another, people probably won't be discussing this question eighty years from now, anyhow.
OK, so I'll admit I have a cruddy memory, but haven't the games for big-name consoles--mostly--been priced at right around $50 since the NES was released? Major commercial PC games, I'm pretty sure, have come up in price--I can't remember any solid figures, unfortunately.
If you ask me, this is a lame attempt to appeal to the "casual" gamer that's cropping up and changing the face of the video game industry. Perhaps these casual gamers, if driven by price alone, are the people who're buying all those DS-es, whose games are priced usually at around $30? If there are really so many casual gamers out there, though, then why do games that fall into the sub-AAA level fail to be wildly popular despite their bargain price point? It is obvious that casual gamers are emerging and/or being recognized more nowadays--however, you'd be hard pressed to convince me that casual gamers have the Wal-mart spendthrift mentality: "entertainment" is a purely luxury item, and I don't think anyone reasonably expects to find valu-priced entertainment that "tastes close enough" to brand-name but costs 60 cents less per 12-pack. Do people buy abridged versions of classic literature in an attempt to save money?
You know, when you've read as many science fiction books as I have, this shit is a liiiitle creepy.
Why? These are usually research reactors, from what I understand. They're not meant to power cities; they're not meant to run at a profit. They're meant to generate some types of isotopes for nuclear medicine students, and to give the nuclear engineers something to do.
I've read a lot of science facts, and that's why this shit doesn't feel that creepy at all. I don't mean to single you out, of course, and there are plenty of valid security and OSHA-like concerns at pretty much any nuclear facility; the public's allergy to anything remotely involving the word "radiation," however, is something that could stand a lot of improvment. The dangers of nuclear science are more to do with mismanagement and a lazy operating culture--which are thankfully not fundamental physical issues but rather human ones that can potentially be fixed.
And, frankly, I'd rather the public learn about nuclear science from scientists rather than science fiction authors.
OK, so shooting games, where you traditionally need to move as erratically and unpredictably as possible to stay alive and kill effectively, are well predicted by dead reckoning; MMOs, where you generally move directly from one beast to the next waiting for your skills to kick in, are not?
If I had to guess, the real problem is probably that commercial, hugely-trafficked MMO servers don't want to send as much data to each client as some guy's dedicated server in his basement that's only visited by thirty-two clients at a time. This probably results in the player and server updating each other less frequently.
Still, since in the MMO there are usually pretty predictable things the player will be going to next (the item on the ground, the nearby mob, the NPC in his path), maybe this will work well after all.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not saying this is a dupe, but I have the weirdest feeling that I've read this same summary with the same comments, even, a few years ago.
I understand that the phrase "smell-based terrorist sensors" is probably intended to convey the idea of a sensor that exposes people to fear pheromones to "magnify" whatever fear they may already be feeling. People who get super-jittery are assumed to be feeling the fear of suicide-bomb induced death, or perhaps the induction of fear into everyone who passes is supposed to make the terrorists get jittery and slip up.
However, given how ludicrous those ideas are when one considers how many potential sources of fear there are in a person's life as well as the potential for suicide bombers to not actually be feeling any fear OR to not be significantly hampered by feeling extra fear, we are left thinking that the only reasonable explanation for a "smell-based terrorist sensor" is that the sensor goes around smelling people to see if they emit terror pheromones. That is, if we can isolate the human "fear" pheromone, then obviously terrorists, being terrorists, must emit such a pheromone in copious amounts because they are just chock-full of terror. Like a hound sniffing for drugs, we will have machines that sniff for terroristic intents.
I would not put it past some people to construe this sensor to be of just such a type.
Does anyone know of any downside to lopping your legs off below the knee and "installing" a pair of these?
It's hard to write a response to a comment like this. On the one hand, it _seems_ that most people would generally rather prefer to use their original equipment, rather than replacing it. The advantages of their natural legs are many: you're probably used to using them; less likelihood of infection; no phantom-limb problems; fewer strange looks in public; less maintenance beyond what's standard for the rest of your body; and I'm sure there are others. Wiggling your toes.
You can of course point to situations where most of these "advantages" of natural legs can be mitigated without necessarily losing the limb. Some people are more infection-prone to begin with; some people probably get strange looks. Anecdotally, my mother had a leg-stretching device (an Ilizarov device) on her leg for what seemed to me (and I'm sure to her as well) to be a very long time, and she had many of those problems listed above. However, given the choice between fixing her own leg or having it removed and replaced with one of these, I'm positive she would go with the former, even knowing as she does now what it would entail.
Besides that, given that a person has healthy legs to start with, no ethical doctor would remove them just so they could be replaced. And I'm sure people with unhealthy legs or feet would look forward to the day they could have their healthy legs back again, rather than anticipating the day they could replace them with something better. I'm sure, though, that there probably are people who are excited about the potential to adopt developments like these, but I would expect those would be people who are afflicted with congenital conditions or who are otherwise unable to have completely functional "normal" legs. By and large, most of us are probably better off with what we have now.
I always thought it was kinda interesting that a stack of razorblades makes a fair approximation of a blackbody. You can't grow stacks of razorblades on surfaces, natch, but for some applications I imagine you just need a small optical sink and don't want to spend a lot of money. Then again, this could be just trivia more than something that's useful to know.
(Because of the potential for dangerous reflections, please don't shine lasers into a stack of razors trying to test their reflectivity--unless you know what you're doing and, hopefully, have an appropriate pair of laser goggles.)
It's on the list, but let me throw out a good word or two for La-Mulana.
If there are any MSX fans out there, you'll recognize a heavy influence on La-Mulana in the old MSX game "Maze of Galious." For the rest of us (never had an MSX myself) La-Mulana plays a lot like the modern "Metrovania" games: you play a character who platforms his way through a large labyrinth of diverse enemies and environments, searching as you go for items that let you access new areas and give you new abilities. The game's been compared to Cave Story (another excellent Metrovania-like platformer), except that La-Mulana is less linear, emphasizes exploration, and does not have as strong of a plot as Cave Story. Make no mistake that this game is, as it is often described, both hard and unforgiving. Attacking certain parts of the environment, for instance, in a random search for hidden passages or puzzle solutions may well result in your character being struck by lightning for lots of damage. There are many traps in the ruins you're exploring--some will seal off approaches to areas, some will lock you out of weapon upgrades. You can, however, solve just about every puzzle in the game by careful note-taking of the warnings provided by the many monuments in the game, as well as by carefully mapping the ruins. The developers were tired of games that you could finish just by "trying everything" without having to really think. La-Mulana wants you to think like an archaeologist--coincidentally, you play one--and to try to determine what might happen as a result of your actions, rather than just assuming you'll solve the puzzle if you hit all the switches in the room in the right order.
The game's not for everyone. For one, it's very long--probably something like 10-20 hours depending on if you struggle through yourself or have a prior playthrough to think back to. You can expect to spend time backtracking, although the areas aren't all that large and you can get from one to the other very quickly thanks to the handy teleportation system. It's really a game that emphasizes exploration, puzzle-solving, and careful thought. There are, however, a number of video walkthroughs where people throw themselves at the game and break upon its rocky shores (some are downright hilarious). The "Let's Play La Mulana" series on Youtube is the one I know of, and it's worthwhile to watch the last twelve or so videos even if you never intend to play the game--they consist of the commentator/player running through the game's hidden challenge area, and those of you who can indulge in schadenfreude will get a kick out of seeing the guy's reward for actually finishing the challenge.
Anyhow, the link is given in the article, but you can find La Mulana here as well. It comes highly recommended.
As is mentioned in the article, I would take the wild guess that one of the culprits in this situation is probably the collection of good old reactive oxygen species--hydroxyl radicals from peroxides formed via enzymatic transformation of superoxide ions, for instance. Naturally, the guess is worthless without being tested and proven. However, increased free radical production is fairly well implicated in similar DNA damage (base damage, double and single strand breaks, etc.) due to some types of ionizing radiation. You can show that cells in a high-oxygen environment will "respond better" (i.e. be more likely to be "killed" (i.e. transformed in a way that makes them not reproduce)) upon low-LET radiation exposure compared to cells that are poorly oxygenated. This implicates oxygen (and, eventually, reactive oxygen species) as a _partial_ explanation for DNA damage due to ionizing radiation. (This happens to be important when you consider that cells that are closer to the centers of some tumors are poorly oxygenated--not enough that they necessarily die, but enough so that they are not as easily killed as those cells on the periphery.) Similar damage might be caused by similar chemical, if not physical, processes, but my speculation is just that: speculation.
It bears mentioning, though, that much like the picture for radiation, it is just about certain that there is more to the story than just oxygenation. High LET radiation (think alpha particles compared to, say, low-energy x-rays) cause damage that is virtually unaffected by oxygen concentration, so we know there's more to the story.
Given how relatively poorly understood are the biological changes due to ionizing radiation, it's a little surprising to me, at least, that we don't know more about the mechanistics of damage due to "pollution." Many, many more people deal with high doses of pollution than deal with high doses of radiation, and it's a lot easier (usually) to control who gets the radiation as opposed to who breathes in the pollution. Anyhow, I suppose what I'm saying is that it shouldn't be surprising that ROS-es might be fingered as _a_ cause, but it'd be shortsighted to think of them as the only cause--not that it seems that's happened here, fortunately.
My two-minute Pubmed screening (dinner's getting cold) shows that it seems that this guy's more recent papers, at least, are all technical note-like submissions in online journals. He also has some noted conflicts of interest. However, there is one pilot study. I don't know if this link will work without going through Pubmed, but this is a year-old pilot study that is probably not the one referenced in the article. They basically conclude, like so many other pilots, that the treatment is promising but needs more rigorous study.
I forget where I first read this (I think it was one of the Quackwatch articles). Credit to whomever first said it.
Oxygen and hydrogen are explosive and flammable gasses. Water is made of oxygen and hydrogen. It is obviously wrong, though, to posit that drinking water will cause a person to catch fire and explode.
It's not a completely parallel situation, natch, but it's vivid enough an example that people might actually listen.
I used to think this was the kind of thing that could only happen in crappy tech-horror movies like that new "Untraceable" flick. I'm going to get a smarmy "told you so" call from my cousin if she hears about this--I'd told her that no (automobile) control system in the real world would be reachable through standard networking protocols.
I'm betting he meant "multiplayer." I don't think that guy is alone in wanting to see more games with fulfilling single player content, even if it means taking a hit for having no multiplayer options. Take, for instance, STALKER--I don't think anyone would've cried much if the developers had spent their time implementing some of the features that they had to drop, rather than trying to cobble together and then support a workable multiplayer experience. Of course, single-player games don't make Microsoft money via Live, and you can't charge for them by the month.
On the flip side, it'd be _great_ if we could see more cooperative multiplayer games. I'm kinda looking at you again, STALKER. People claim that you can have fun with MMOs if your friends play them, but MMOs have their own problems, natch. I mean, I had fun with FFXI, but my friends are into WoW. It's not like I can reasonably play a little WoW with them, and then they play a little FFXI with me like we can do with, for instance, Ghost Recon 3 and System Shock 2.
Also, it's not as if it's just party games that aren't coming to the PC. For people who care, it took Gears of War quite a while to make it to the PC--same with Halo 2 (and it was Vista-only, if I remember right), and Halo 3's still not here yet. There's also Assassin's Creed and, worst of all, Mass Effect. I could probably come up with a few more (maybe some PS3 games) if I sat and thought for a while--and don't get me started on the whole "consolitis" thing PC gamers make so much fuss about.
Back in the day, you didn't feel too stupid saying "Super Nintendo" or "Super NES" or "ess-ness" because, well, you were probably about 10 and everyone else (all the kids) had to say it in some silly-sounding way, too. You'd have the occasional eye-rolling when someone said their shibboleth differently (for instance, I grew up around Super NES kids, and the ess-ness and--god forbid!--ess-en-ee-ess kids were laughed at), but that was how things went. "Super Nintendo" was long and dorky-sounding, and so were most of the alternatives, but I'll be damned if people didn't stick by THIER saying as the coolest of them all.
The Wii, though, can't really be abbreviated. There's little ambiguity about it being just "Wii", so everyone who wants to go buy one will probably be calling it the "Super Wii" no matter how silly they think it sounds. There's probably something to be said about the unambiguous, unifying name of the Wii standing in stark contrast to the pride-wars waged over the Super NES, and about how it reflects the gregarious character of the console.
Ah, of course, there's always the age-old "mom exception": people out of the loop did and probably will forever call the newest Nintendo console "that new Nintendo."
I have to wonder which isotopes Chalk River produces. We don't talk much about the production side of things here, so I honestly can't say. Following links on the wikipedia page for the reactor, I can say that it produces Mo-99 and Co-60--as I could've guessed. 99m-Tc (made naturally from Mo-99 decay) is literally indispensible to nuclear medicine as we know it today--from what I've seen, if nuclear pharmacists could use 99m-Tc for everything, they would. Co-60 is still important for some applications (Gamma Knife, and some other teletherapy units). So, I would say having a steady supply of these radioisotopes is pretty important.
Anyone know which others? Ir-192 (or precursors?)? Radioactive iodines?
Disclaimer: I'm relying on "big numbers" to make these "statistics" relatively accurate. I've done no actual analysis beyond looking at the numbers.
You can get some insight into the numbers behind the very non-numerical TF2 by inferring from these statistics.
If you look at the "average distance" stats, you notice immediately that the fireaxe appears to have a longer range than other melee weapons--and it appears to be a fairly significant extension, making the axe's averagekilling range nearly as long as that of the flamethrower itself. If we take the engineer's shotgun as representative of the average distance for any non-sniper non-melee individual battle (because it's the engineer's primary weapon, meaning it sees a lot of use, and probably the most generic weapon in TF2), we notice that flamethrowers tend to be lethal at close ranges (closer than that of the shotguns, at least), but the axe is lethal at comparably close ranges. It's an interesting result, since I (at least) wouldn't have assumed any of the melee weapons had longer or shorter ranges.
In the same graph, we can see that either syringe gun tracking is bugged, or that medics have a _very_ hard time aiming with their syringe gun--its average kill distance is just about the same as that of the melee weapons. The remarkable consistency of the melee weapons' ranges, now that I think about it, make me wonder if that's not the center-point-to-center-point distance between two players, and most melee kills are at absolutely point-blank range. When you compare the SMG and the syringe gun, it's easy to believe that people have a much harder time using the syringe gun because it has an arcing projectile, despite having a larger clip than the SMG and also doing slightly more damage-per-hit.
Looking at the critical damages table, it seems that--as this Soldier suspected--the RL gets more criticals than other weapons--except, surprisingly, the GL. Just as surprisingly, it's not as big of a differential as this Soldier suspected. I had the perception that the RL was consistently getting noticably more criticals than most other weapons, but it appears that's not really the case.
As we see from the same graph, the melee weapons all get far more criticals than other weapons. This probably accounts for some melee weapons being so high on the damage-per-hit graph. The highest melee weapons on the latter graph are the ones that inherently do more damage and also get more criticals, since the damage-per-hit graph doesn't appear to be corrected for criticals. It's interesting to note that it doesn't appear that the bonesaw and the bottle are much different in damage-per-hit, even though I feel there's wide perception that the bottle is useless and the bonesaw is the 'best' melee weapon. Offhand, I think the bonesaw swings faster than the bottle, but I don't remember the difference being too great.
Of course, since the SDK has been released I think it's perfectly possible for someone to go gather the coded data for each weapon. Still, it's interesting to dig a little into these statistics and see what ends up happening out in the field.
So this is great for stuff that you can put in subcutaneously. What about intravenous injections? What about intramuscular? Intraperitoneal? What about substances that are made up of large (several micron) particles, such as the sufur colloid injections used by nuclear medicine studies? Those could get stuck in superfine-gauge needles.
I think it's a little premature to say that this patch will replace conventional injections entirely. It might seem obvious that a patch couldn't really hope to deliver injections into the muscles without penetrating all the layers of skin, but I think it at least bears mentioning.
What you're talking about is called "radiation hormesis."
We have more or less only one good epidemiological set of data for various-dose radiation--atomic bomb survivors. Those data are extrapolated to low doses, and that's a large part of the data set from which the current "radiation damage" model (the LNT or "linear-no-threshold" model) is derived (actual survival of cells is predicted by a different model--the LNT model is for radiation effects on a person). Since the LNT model is the most widely-accepted standard in the field as far as I've seen (medical physics student), the hormesis promoters have the burden of proving the protective effect.
The parent is right in that we don't have a good understanding of what goes on at low doses of radiation, and we don't have a model backed by strong empirical observation either. Radiation protection, however, is founded on the principle of keeping doses as small as is reasonably possible, and it's irresponsible to try to wave around that small doses MIGHT not be as harmful as people currently think. I would say that radiation science still basically wants to say that there is no lower threshold for radiation damage, and thus that there is probably not a hormesic (hormestic? I don't know the adjectival form of hormesis) effect. It doesn't really need to be stated that we don't know a lot about low-dose radiation--you start from the assumption that you don't know a lot about it until you can prove that you do. Right now, all we can prove is that it's pretty likely that if damage is linear, then low-doses are bad too.
I would play a game where the hero's main weapon is a telepathic, sentient rifle known as "Gun," being the hero's (and thus the player's) only method of reliably separating good from evil. The game would be a dialog-heavy adventure and involve no direct combat. Even better: make the player take on the role of Gun, being toted around by a high-functioning psychotic with no inherent sense of rationality or morality; the player's job is to instill in the hero these senses, saving him from his mental deficiencies while destroying those who mean to exploit him or do him harm. It'd play like Wonder Project J meets Mass Effect, only the player character is a rifle.
Would the city/county/state arrest the property owner for 'destruction of government property', 'obstructing justice', or 'interfering with a criminal investigation' even if there is no clear-cut 'crimes' being committed and no warrants issued at the time of the overflight?
Well, they could call it interfereing with an investigation--as soon as you shot it down, you committed a crime by shooting down the first investigator to respond to the scene of the crime you just committed. That's government logic.
I remember a Matlab demo we did in one of my ECE courses. We took the fourier transform of an image of Batman--I think it was an FFT--and after some other processing played it as a wav file. Pretty awesome song, actually.
Although, to be fair, the image was made for the demo. Still, it was a fair likeness of Batman considering.
The gunman has apparently died of his wounds. At least that's the last needless death we can expect to come from this particular saga.
Wait, wait. I thought you couldn't make a post in all-caps on /.?
THE MONTY PYTHON REFERENCES.
Of course, some new whizbang gadget could appear that negates the entire argument, or some law could be passed, or the entire human race could gain common sense--what I mean, however, is that as time goes on, people who were alive and socially active before widespread cell phone usage will be dying. Gradually, people will forget that people once got along without cellphones. Pretty soon, we might have a generation that's never seen a (working) payphone. This will, eventually, become another perennial nuisance like sneezes-openly-on-subway-sick-guy and pisses-on-the-seat-bathroom-guy(-or-gal); the arguments and appeals to older times, you'd think, would carry less weight over time.
Of course, for one reason or another, people probably won't be discussing this question eighty years from now, anyhow.
OK, so I'll admit I have a cruddy memory, but haven't the games for big-name consoles--mostly--been priced at right around $50 since the NES was released? Major commercial PC games, I'm pretty sure, have come up in price--I can't remember any solid figures, unfortunately.
If you ask me, this is a lame attempt to appeal to the "casual" gamer that's cropping up and changing the face of the video game industry. Perhaps these casual gamers, if driven by price alone, are the people who're buying all those DS-es, whose games are priced usually at around $30? If there are really so many casual gamers out there, though, then why do games that fall into the sub-AAA level fail to be wildly popular despite their bargain price point? It is obvious that casual gamers are emerging and/or being recognized more nowadays--however, you'd be hard pressed to convince me that casual gamers have the Wal-mart spendthrift mentality: "entertainment" is a purely luxury item, and I don't think anyone reasonably expects to find valu-priced entertainment that "tastes close enough" to brand-name but costs 60 cents less per 12-pack. Do people buy abridged versions of classic literature in an attempt to save money?
You know, when you've read as many science fiction books as I have, this shit is a liiiitle creepy.
Why? These are usually research reactors, from what I understand. They're not meant to power cities; they're not meant to run at a profit. They're meant to generate some types of isotopes for nuclear medicine students, and to give the nuclear engineers something to do.
I've read a lot of science facts, and that's why this shit doesn't feel that creepy at all. I don't mean to single you out, of course, and there are plenty of valid security and OSHA-like concerns at pretty much any nuclear facility; the public's allergy to anything remotely involving the word "radiation," however, is something that could stand a lot of improvment. The dangers of nuclear science are more to do with mismanagement and a lazy operating culture--which are thankfully not fundamental physical issues but rather human ones that can potentially be fixed.
And, frankly, I'd rather the public learn about nuclear science from scientists rather than science fiction authors.
OK, so shooting games, where you traditionally need to move as erratically and unpredictably as possible to stay alive and kill effectively, are well predicted by dead reckoning; MMOs, where you generally move directly from one beast to the next waiting for your skills to kick in, are not?
If I had to guess, the real problem is probably that commercial, hugely-trafficked MMO servers don't want to send as much data to each client as some guy's dedicated server in his basement that's only visited by thirty-two clients at a time. This probably results in the player and server updating each other less frequently.
Still, since in the MMO there are usually pretty predictable things the player will be going to next (the item on the ground, the nearby mob, the NPC in his path), maybe this will work well after all.