Re:Positively fantastic news
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Growing Insulin
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· Score: 1
the fact that the price the consumer pays for insulin is not controlled by the cost of production, and will not drop just because of a drop in the cost of production.
Ah, well, it's the end of serious conversation if you're going to assert a "fact" like this. To the best of my knowledge, all of modern economic history disagrees with you, and with the Marxists, who assert much the same silly thing. Except in unusual circumstances -- which never last -- the price of everything is controlled by its cost of production, and when the cost of production of anything drops, the price drops, sooner or later. Always. If we can't agree on this, there's nothing more to say.
Re:Positively fantastic news
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Growing Insulin
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· Score: 1
I don't understand why people continue to insist that there will be a cheaper new version.
Er, because that's the point of the original article?
Next time you see your doctor, walk in and ask the doctor what insurance you have...Most doctors figure that the billing and money aspects are not their concern....[whine, whine]
Good grief, man, don't you have any pride? I sure do. I'm an able-bodied man over the age of 21. I don't feel the slightest need to have mommy or daddy keeping track of my financial affairs to make sure I don't hurt myself. When I hire service professionals, like doctors -- or car mechanics, or cable TV installers, or plumbers -- I expect them to just give me the best damn advice in whatever their field of specialty is, and shut up. I'll take it from there. I'll be deciding whether and how to take their advice, and I'll be deciding whether I can afford it, and how to pay for it. Indeed, I'd be right offended if any service professional started fussing about whether I could afford stuff before they gave me advice. The Lexus salesman refusing to show me their top model because something about my shoes tells him I can't afford the machine? The cable TV company asking me to verify I'm saving enough every month for retirement before they'll let me subscribe to ESPN? Blech.
If I needed insulin, I'd find out about the available options myself. Then I'd ask my doctor's advice. If he thought I should buy the high-priced stuff, I'd listen very carefully to why he thought I should. If I agreed, I'd do it. If I didn't agree, I'd tell him to write me a prescription for the cheaper stuff. And if he refused -- why, I'd fire him and go get another doctor who'd do what I said. And if every doctor I talked to said I should take the high-priced stuff, I'd start to ask myself whether it was me that had my head up my ass. As the old saying goes, when three people tell you you're drunk, you should sit down.
It's not complicated. It's the same way we behave when we shop for computers, cars, real estate or college degrees. Why shopping for medical care should be any different is beyond me. We're the consumer. It's our adult responsibility to get informed, spend our money wisely, be appropriately skeptical of sales claims, and otherwise make the best choices for ourselves. The most we should expect from any professionals selling us their services is that they give us honest and complete advice, and that they be upfront about what the various options cost.
Re:Positively fantastic news
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Growing Insulin
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· Score: 1
Ooookay, so x% of doctors, being evil and corrupt and in the pay of big pharma, pointlessly continue to write prescriptions specifying the form of insulin people are buying right now, while (100 - x)% of doctors start to write prescriptions for the cheaper new version, or which allow substitution by the pharmacist of the cheaper "generic," because they actually give a damn about their patients, or their patients ask them to, or the HMO that employs them says they should.
Net result, average price drops. What's your point again?
Well...it's kind of like the fact that I don't mind that my local cop carries a loaded.38, but I wouldn't be at all happy if the local 14-year-old gangbanger with a crystal meth problem carried one.
You make a good point, but there are maybe a few qualifications to the calculations. The lithium metal in a lithium-ion battery is only a small part of the mass of the battery. A typical electrolyte component might be LiPF_6. Only about 4% of the mass of this compound is lithium metal. Then there's the mass of the solvent, the electrodes, casing, et cetera -- all of which contribute to that 200 W-h/kg figure. Probably your final figure of lithium required for a 10% fleet replacement is 60-100 times too high.
Of course, that doesn't change your point that batteries generally are an expensive and inefficient way to store energy. Storing energy in chemical fuels is far cheaper and more efficient, and that's why it became the preferred energy-storage method for automobiles. It's not that way because our engineer ancestors were idiots, didn't understand batteries and electric motors, or because gasoline at the turn of the 20th century was as cheap and widely-available as it is now.
Re:How can this work?
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Growing Insulin
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Well, they're in Canada in a cell. Molecules inside a cell can survive for decades unchanged (e.g. your DNA). They can certainly manage it for a few months between planting and the harvest. Inside the cell they're coddled in exactly the right environment. But bring 'em out and put them in a bottle -- expose them to oxygen, light and varying temperatures -- and they start to decay.
the chemistry involved in converting oils harvested from a plant into polypeptide chains
I don't there is any such chemistry. I don't think the most brilliant chemist could synthesize a protein from an oil. Where would he get all the nitrogen atoms, for example?
Re:Positively fantastic news
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Growing Insulin
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· Score: 1
Most likely they'll charge the exact same as everyone else...
Then why would anyone buy it from them? They're a new company, and while the product is chemically identical to the products from established companies, it's made in a new way, with the possibility of unforeseen new types of trace contaminants, et cetera.
No one is going to change suppliers from the established companies to the new company unless they have a reason, and the only possible reason this new company can give them -- since the product is identical -- is a lower price.
Nonsense. The obvious way to create, alter or remove entanglement would be altering the many-body wavefunction through some kind of interaction with photons. You can do that as fast as you can switch the field -- gigahertz at least. Moving the atoms is about as clumsy and screwball a method for changing a wavefunction as I can imagine. You might as well turn your car around by stopping it by the side of the road, dismantling it piece by piece, and rebuilding it facing the other direction. Pfui.
I'm damned if I can see how this is jumping an "important" hurdle along the way to a quantum computer. I don't think anyone is going to build a quantum computer with moving parts, i.e. with laser "conveyor belts" and "tweezers" that are constantly shuffling atoms around (and at a mere 0.5 sort operations per second at that).
I'm guessing the hurdle jumped here has something to do with construction techniques. But...there are already many ways to get atoms perfectly lined up with each other. Using a crystal, or part of one, would be one rather obvious idea. Indeed, the impression that the article gives that it's somehow a triumph to get atoms "perfectly" lined up with each other is silly: atoms naturally line up "perfectly" with each other, especially metal atoms like the caesium in the article. It's quite hard to get metal atoms not to "perfectly" line up together, i.e. to make amorphous (glassy) metallic materials.
Anyway, it's a nice little bit of single-atom manipulation, yes. One more trick you can do with laser cooling and tweezers, which may be interesting from the research perspective. But I don't see how it has anything very directly to do with quantum computing.
Well, you read more about murders and heart attacks and snakes (ha ha) when they happen on airplanes, too. For very similar reasons.
The sulfuric acid (or really the sulfate anion) is indeed part of the chemistry of the lead-acid battery. If its purpose were to merely lower the resistance of the electrolyte, there would be a lot safer materials to use, e.g. plain table salt.
I don't think one would vent a battery to accomodate the small amount of differential thermal expansion in its solid or liquid components. You generally don't want battery components exposed to atmospheric oxygen, which is electrochemically active and can change your chemistry significantly.
Of course current Li-ion batteries explode elsewhere. Here's and example random story on it. Doesn't mention airplanes.
Yes, but human respiration is very sensitive to pressure. First of all, it depends on the rate at which gases (O2 and CO2) dissolve in liquids (i.e. blood), and the solubility of gases in liquids at low pressures (that is around 1 atm) happens to be quite dependent on pressure. Furthermore, our normal operating conditions are very close to our lungs' maximum capabilities. Stop our breathing for even a short time, or reduce its efficiency even a little bit, and we have major problems. No engineer would design a product with such slim safety margins.
So from the point of view of mechanical engineering, it's a very small change. Even your flimsy plastic soda bottle, or generic toothpaste tube, would easily stand up to the change. Hard to imagine anyone would design a battery case that wouldn't. Look at it this way: it's the same amount of pressure rise something would experience being taken to the bottom of your average swimming pool (down 10 feet or so). You'd have to be an compleat idiot to engineer something that couldn't stand up to that kind of mild pressure. Now if a battery depended in some way on a delicate gas exchange with the atmosphere, like lungs, an argument could be made. But batteries don't.
Very well said! Both here and in the original post.
An additional factor (besides the highly inelastic demand people have for life) that gives us such rapidly rising health care costs is shared with many other service industries: the cost of the services is not rising so much as the cost of manufactured goods and food is falling. That is, it's not so much that going to the doctor is getting way more expensive than buying a loaf of bread, or a new car, but that the real cost of a loaf of bread or a new car has fallen very steeply in the last century or so. We spend a much larger fraction of our income on health care largely because we are able to spend a much smaller fraction of our income on basic needs like food, clothes, transportation et cetera than our grandparents did. We can afford to buy more healthcare -- so we do.
An interesting anecdote bears on this: I recall some years ago reading a newspaper article on a farmer in Urbana, Illinois, who had just retired after 50 years farming corn. He remarked that it so happened the nominal (not accounting for inflation) price of a bushel of corn was the same on the day he retired as it was when he started farming 50 years earlier. Mechanization, improvements in seed genetics, crop management, and weather prediction had all so hugely improved the productivity (per man-hour) of farming that the real price of corn had plummeted. Similar things have happened in most manufacturing and agricultural sectors. Technology makes the productivity of each employee soar. I think the modern steel industry, for example, has a productivity of nearly 1000 tons of steel per employee, and that probably counts secretaries and floor sweepers...
Medicine is different. Technology just can't increase the productivity per employee very much. You still need a human physician to make initial diagnoses, however much technologically-gained information he might have at hand, and he still needs some modest fraction of an hour per patient to do it. Technology can't let him diagnose hundreds or even thousands of patients per hour, because it can't multiply the speed of his trained thought processes. In fact, technology may make things worse, because it causes a need for larger teams of trained experts to use it. If you fell and knocked yourself unconscious 50 years ago, the doc would check your pupil diameter with a pocket flashlight, evaluate your speech, et cetera, to decide whether you'd cracked your skull. Now he's going to send you for a head CT, maybe an MRI, and while that's more definitive, it also means you need to pay for the time of half a dozen more trained experts to build, maintain and operate the fancy machinery you're using.
Now that computers should be able to handle that task easily, I rarely hear anything about it anymore.
Nooo, I'd say you don't hear so much about it anymore because (1) the idea is no longer new, and (2) it isn't working out as well as we'd first hoped, and perhaps (3) you're not in the field. We've a loooong way to go before rational drug design in silico becomes truly routine. At the moment it's a big help to the trained chemist, but that's it.
A couple of problems remain:
(1) Often enough, the molecular structure of drug targets are a mystery. Most often, it's a mystery clinically, in the sense that no one knows the target molecule or even the target biochemical pathway. How do you fight the development of atherosclerotic plaques in the coronary arteries? Given that we have incomplete knowledge of how it happens, it's very hard to identify a target for drug therapy. Here genomics and proteomics, e.g. the correlation of the expression of certain proteins with certain clinical conditions will undoubtably help.
Even in cases where a target is known, it may well be a mystery physically. It's very difficult to crystallize proteins to determine their 3D structure. I think good labs can do maybe 3 or 4 a year. More vexing is the fact that probably a lot of useful targets are on cell membranes, and membrane-bound proteins are usually impossible to crystallize at all.
(2) The solvent has a profound influence on the interaction between macromolecules and possible ligands, so computer simulation of these systems has to take good account of the solvent. But the solvent (water) is small and moves on a femtosecond time-scale, while the interactions of interest are maybe 5 to 10 orders of magnitude slower. That means your computer spends essentially all of its time simulating (useless) solvent behaviour, and very little simulating interesting protein/ligand behaviour. The problem grows exponentially with the size of the system of interest, so it can't be solved even by Moore's Law. Better theoretical models of solvent are needed.
(3) The interactions that govern the dynamics of these systems are strongly many-body, but the calculation of true many-body dynamics is prohibitively expensive. Inevitably simplifying approximations are made, but that tends to reduce the utility of the methods, because the approximations must be validated in a system not too dissimilar from your target system. That means you have to have some independent means of knowing the behaviour of a system not too far from your target system to validate your computer model. That makes them less generalizable and useful than one would hope.
That said, it's an area of vigorous research and much progress. There have been some noteable successes. But the idea in the 80s that by now we'd be routinely designing drugs by computer simulation is sort of like the idea in the 60s that by 2000 we'd have moon colonies and be routinely sending manned spacecraft to Mars. The future is arriving more slowly than we'd hoped. As it always does, except maybe around April 15.
I don't think the modest pressure drop (from 14.7 psi at sea level to 9.5 psi at 3500 m) is going to cause accidents. I think the only reason the airplane angle is important in these situations is that the accident is happening in an enclosed space filled with flammable materials, and people can't run outside to get away from the smoke or call the FD to put out the flames, et cetera.
Lead-acid batteries can produce hydrogen by electrolysis of the water in them when they are charged. If I had to guess, I'd say this is because if the battery is thoroughly discharged, and not, perhaps, very well designed, then so much sulfate is taken out of the electrolyte (sulfuric acid) solution as lead sulfate that the resistance of the solution rises. Then, when current is applied to charge the battery, instead of the formation of sulfate anions, some of the current electrolyzes the water, producing H2 and O2. I would assume that careful design of your battery and reasonable charging conditions minimize this problem. Note that H2 production is not a normal and necessary result of charging a lead-acid battery.
The chemistry of Li-ion batteries is totally different. IIRC, there isn't any water in their electrolyte, it's some organic solvent in which a lithium salt dissolves. (I don't think there's any lithium metal in there, either, so the reactivity of lithium with water mentioned above somewhere would seem doubly irrelevant.)
I think all you need to do is (1) avoid damaging your batteries by abusing them physically, and (2) avoid abusing them electrically, by charging and discharging them in the manner for which they were designed.
Mmmm, well, you have about 2 square meters of surface area, but in order to prevent drowning when under water you only need to protect a few critical square inches -- your mouth and nose. The moral being: not all lengths of boundary are equal. Some parts of any border are far more important than others.
While the US border is certainly long, in practise this means little, since almost everybody crosses it at a major airport, through those long Border Patrol lines. So if you secure the airports, you've actually done quite a lot to secure the borders.
Can nasty people still sneak across the Sonoran desert like illegals from Mexico? Or wade through mosquito-infested swamps along the Minnesota border? Or walk across the North Dakota border and hike 50 miles through badlands to the nearest highway? Sure. But all of these things are nontrivially harder than just flying into Miami International on Air Qatar with a bogus passport, and that means there's one more noxious obstacle in their path. Have to bring not only your bomb materials, but also a compass, GPS, good hiking shoes, several liters of water, bug spray...as I said originally, national defense is a layered kind of thing, like computer network defense. You throw obstacles in the bad guys' tracks. No one silver bullet is going to perfectly secure the border, but a half-dozen rusty old steel ones might do quite a good job.
I don't think it really occomplishes anything.
You might be right. But you're arguing from pure theory (unless you're a border agent incognito). The State Department is arguing at least in part from actual experience. Why not give them the benefit of the doubt, give it a try, and see what happens? It's not like it would be hard to reverse if it proves worthless, or could do some weird permanent damage to the Republic.
I've heard the argument made that one of its purposes is an evolved defense against viruses. The real genetic data (the exons) are scattered amongst garbage data (the introns), and when it's needed the exons are extracted and spliced together, with the introns just being thrown away.
The use of splicing is a defence against viral attack because the virus would need to be sure to insert its DNA into an exon. If it inserts its DNA into an intron, it will just get thrown away. If it inserts it half into an exon, half into an intron, it will get snipped in half, so the assembled mRNA becomes garbage and doesn't get translated into an active protein. Furthermore, by keeping the size of the exons down, you put a hard upper limit on the size of viral DNA that can be inserted.
I think the influence the war against the viruses has had on our genetic evolution is perhaps underappreciated.
Muhammed al-Boom is not going to try to enter the country legitimately...
Don't be silly. All of the 9/11 hijackers did. The guy nabbed in Canada in the "Millenium Plot" was trying to. If you're trying to do secret stuff that could get you sent to the gas chamber if caught, it's not smart to risk calling attention to yourself by sneaking across the border illegally in the dead of night. Much better to walk in with a firm step and a three-piece suit on, looking like you belong, courtesy of a passport stolen from a clueless American college student abroad.
And if new security features mean the only reasonable way to get into the country when you're up to no good is to walk across the Sonoran desert for a day and a half and then hitchhike 500 miles to your destination -- why, that sounds like a net plus to me. National security is little different from computer network security: it has to be a many-layered defense, with no one layer guaranteeing complete security, but each layer making it just a bit harder for the bad guys to penetrate.
If he is worth worrying about, he will lose the beard.
No doubt. But he'll have a harder time losing the extra 3" of height, or changing his facial features to look Asian or Caucasian.
fake passports are far from the biggest border security issue.
And so? Must the State Department only address issues in strict order of their priority? They can't implement a cheap 'n' easy solution to moderately-important problem Y because no one's yet thought of a solution to big and nasty problem X? Like, we shouldn't try to develop vaccines against influenza because we haven't cured cancer yet?
In principle the benefits are that if you're Muhammed al-Boom -- male, age 27, height 5' 10", weight 165, scruffy beard -- trying to enter the country with a stolen US passport, the biometric data that pops up on the screen when you swipe the passport -- female, Asian, age 65, height 5' 2", weight 140, wearing thick glasses -- will suggest something odd to even the most harried, incompetent or distracted border agent, who will then be inclined to take you aside and ask you to open that curiously heavy briefcase you're carrying.
I can only reach the conclusion that rfid passports are being pushed as a way for the government to ultimately track people in general.
What makes you think government gives a damn about tracking people in general? Why would it? What's in it for them? Maybe you've been reading too many X-Men comics, wherein bad guys want to rule the world and monitor every soul in it just to...uh, well, rule the world. Some kind of hard-wired genetic urge, I guess.
Actual politicians and real civil servants care about Joe Citizen in only two ways: first and foremost, they want to know that he's paying his taxes, so government salaries can continue to be paid. Not very coincidentally, you'll notice that the government already keeps very careful track of your income through your Social Security account and numerous requirements on employers. That way they can collect your taxes right from your employer before you even see the money, and they can nail you easily if you wiggle out of a few dollars here and there through artful accounting. The IRS enjoys intrusive powers of inspection into your wallet that the State or Justice Departments, or NSA, can only dream of.
Secondly, of course, politicians and civil servants care that you vote the right way -- to re-elect the incumbent, and to expand government programs that require the employment of civil servants. Does this involve trying to track your movements? Hardly. Of what use would that be? The useful trick would be something like making it harder for grassroots organizations of citizens to financially support challengers to the incumbent, by...oh, let's say, limiting the amount of money each individual could contribute to the cause of electing somebody, setting up onerous requirements that political contributions be reported to the Federal Government, limiting the amount of money a challenger can spend advertising his challenge, or even requiring that independent groups trying to help out a challenger can't coordinate strategy with the candidate....all of which should sound kinda familiar.
As always, they can usually count on the "watchdogs" of citizen privacy and independence barking fiercely at distracting shadows (NSA data-mining, RFID chips in passports) while the true threats of citizen disenfranchisement (McCain-Feingold, requiring SSNs and tax withholding to work at all) slide silently into place.
TFA is light on detail, what a surprise, but I am guessing the novelty here is that you can in some cases get the advantage of multiple-binding cooperativity without having to custom-design the molecular backbone "scaffold" that holds the binding sites in the correct relationship. By just changing the density of peptides on the surface of the liposome, they can more or less continuously "tune" the distance between the binding sites. So, in principle, the advantage to this kind of approach would be that you could rapidly and cheaply create many different antagonists for many different poisons. It's hugely cheaper to just vary the density of peptide binding sites on your liposome than it is to synthesize a whole range of molecular backbones to hold the peptide groups in different arrangements.
Also...a biochemist may want to correct me, but TFA says that these buggers bind toxins "thousands" of time better than free peptides. But to be seriously effective, wouldn't you need hundreds of thousands or even millions of times better binding? After all, you don't want to have to feed your patient as much of the antagonist as they gave these poor rats: 500 mg for a 300 g rat is a dosage of 1.7 grams/kilo of body weight! A normal man (65 kg) would have to have over 100 grams of the stuff injected into him. That's an absurd amount of medicine and is bound to have deleterious side effects.
...the question is whether he can do so successfully. That is, whether the judge will rule in his favor.
I don't think "common law" means at all the same thing as an explicit statute, where Congress has set down in writing what the rule is. In those cases, the court is bound to enforce the law as written, regardless of whether or not it's the way things are usually done. Statute can break entirely new ground, make things illegal which were legal before (e.g. cocaine) or legal which were illegal before (e.g. abortion).
Not so with common law. I believe "common law" just translates to "what we've always mostly done." It's just a short way to imply that what people have almost always done, on their own, spontaneously, in response to a given situation should, after a long enough time, acquire much the force of written law. Especially when "what the people have done" has been ratified by repeated and consistent judicial decisions that agree with the tradition.
It's a way to recognize that all law derives ultimately from the will of the people, and in certain situations people have expressed that will directly, without the need for legislaturely lawyers to write it down on parchment in curly script. Hence, the idea of "common law" is a constraint on the judiciary, telling them that, in the absence of explicit written law, they can't just decide cases before them on the basis of their personal whim. They can't just say: well, there's no written law here, so I'll rule as I see fit. Instead, they are obliged to recognize as law that "law" which is merely implied in long social traditions and the body of prior related judicial decisions.
So from this POV could a lawyer successfully argue that English common law supercedes the Constitution? Of course not. Written statute always trumps unwritten common law. Common law is only used when there is no written law to provide guidance.
Could a lawyer successfully argue that English common law supercedes post-1776 American common law? Not any more than he could argue that the speed limit on highways should still be 55 MPH because the 1970s era 55-MPH laws predate the later laws allowing the speed limit to be higher. The later law always controls, even when it's common law.
So what's left? Only that a lawyer could successfully argue that in the absence of any relevant written statute, and the absence of any unique post-1776 American tradition, the court should consider the traditions in England prior to the Revolution. That doesn't sound very scary, or unreasonable.
If you are thinking that it is possible to sue the Department of Defense in civilian court like any random citizen, you should check out the definition of sovereign immunity.
TFA sounds a lot like the early descriptions of the Phalanx Close-In Weapons System for defense of ships against low-flying antiship missiles like the infamous Exocet. I recall the Phalanx being described around the time of the Falklands War as throwing up a "wall" of bullets in front of an incoming missile through its extremely high rate of fire (up to 75 rounds per second). The widget in TFA may do much the same with a "force field" of fragments from the explosion of a shaped charge.
That is, I surmise "force field" is a metaphor here. Marketspeak, to forcefully (as it were) convey the impression of how the device works.
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the fact that the price the consumer pays for insulin is not controlled by the cost of production, and will not drop just because of a drop in the cost of production.
Ah, well, it's the end of serious conversation if you're going to assert a "fact" like this. To the best of my knowledge, all of modern economic history disagrees with you, and with the Marxists, who assert much the same silly thing. Except in unusual circumstances -- which never last -- the price of everything is controlled by its cost of production, and when the cost of production of anything drops, the price drops, sooner or later. Always. If we can't agree on this, there's nothing more to say.
I don't understand why people continue to insist that there will be a cheaper new version.
Er, because that's the point of the original article?
Next time you see your doctor, walk in and ask the doctor what insurance you have...Most doctors figure that the billing and money aspects are not their concern....[whine, whine]
Good grief, man, don't you have any pride? I sure do. I'm an able-bodied man over the age of 21. I don't feel the slightest need to have mommy or daddy keeping track of my financial affairs to make sure I don't hurt myself. When I hire service professionals, like doctors -- or car mechanics, or cable TV installers, or plumbers -- I expect them to just give me the best damn advice in whatever their field of specialty is, and shut up. I'll take it from there. I'll be deciding whether and how to take their advice, and I'll be deciding whether I can afford it, and how to pay for it. Indeed, I'd be right offended if any service professional started fussing about whether I could afford stuff before they gave me advice. The Lexus salesman refusing to show me their top model because something about my shoes tells him I can't afford the machine? The cable TV company asking me to verify I'm saving enough every month for retirement before they'll let me subscribe to ESPN? Blech.
If I needed insulin, I'd find out about the available options myself. Then I'd ask my doctor's advice. If he thought I should buy the high-priced stuff, I'd listen very carefully to why he thought I should. If I agreed, I'd do it. If I didn't agree, I'd tell him to write me a prescription for the cheaper stuff. And if he refused -- why, I'd fire him and go get another doctor who'd do what I said. And if every doctor I talked to said I should take the high-priced stuff, I'd start to ask myself whether it was me that had my head up my ass. As the old saying goes, when three people tell you you're drunk, you should sit down.
It's not complicated. It's the same way we behave when we shop for computers, cars, real estate or college degrees. Why shopping for medical care should be any different is beyond me. We're the consumer. It's our adult responsibility to get informed, spend our money wisely, be appropriately skeptical of sales claims, and otherwise make the best choices for ourselves. The most we should expect from any professionals selling us their services is that they give us honest and complete advice, and that they be upfront about what the various options cost.
Ooookay, so x% of doctors, being evil and corrupt and in the pay of big pharma, pointlessly continue to write prescriptions specifying the form of insulin people are buying right now, while (100 - x)% of doctors start to write prescriptions for the cheaper new version, or which allow substitution by the pharmacist of the cheaper "generic," because they actually give a damn about their patients, or their patients ask them to, or the HMO that employs them says they should.
Net result, average price drops. What's your point again?
Well...it's kind of like the fact that I don't mind that my local cop carries a loaded .38, but I wouldn't be at all happy if the local 14-year-old gangbanger with a crystal meth problem carried one.
You make a good point, but there are maybe a few qualifications to the calculations. The lithium metal in a lithium-ion battery is only a small part of the mass of the battery. A typical electrolyte component might be LiPF_6. Only about 4% of the mass of this compound is lithium metal. Then there's the mass of the solvent, the electrodes, casing, et cetera -- all of which contribute to that 200 W-h/kg figure. Probably your final figure of lithium required for a 10% fleet replacement is 60-100 times too high.
Of course, that doesn't change your point that batteries generally are an expensive and inefficient way to store energy. Storing energy in chemical fuels is far cheaper and more efficient, and that's why it became the preferred energy-storage method for automobiles. It's not that way because our engineer ancestors were idiots, didn't understand batteries and electric motors, or because gasoline at the turn of the 20th century was as cheap and widely-available as it is now.
Well, they're in Canada in a cell. Molecules inside a cell can survive for decades unchanged (e.g. your DNA). They can certainly manage it for a few months between planting and the harvest. Inside the cell they're coddled in exactly the right environment. But bring 'em out and put them in a bottle -- expose them to oxygen, light and varying temperatures -- and they start to decay.
It was a dumfuk title, indeed.
But you mention:
the chemistry involved in converting oils harvested from a plant into polypeptide chains
I don't there is any such chemistry. I don't think the most brilliant chemist could synthesize a protein from an oil. Where would he get all the nitrogen atoms, for example?
Most likely they'll charge the exact same as everyone else...
Then why would anyone buy it from them? They're a new company, and while the product is chemically identical to the products from established companies, it's made in a new way, with the possibility of unforeseen new types of trace contaminants, et cetera.
No one is going to change suppliers from the established companies to the new company unless they have a reason, and the only possible reason this new company can give them -- since the product is identical -- is a lower price.
Nonsense. The obvious way to create, alter or remove entanglement would be altering the many-body wavefunction through some kind of interaction with photons. You can do that as fast as you can switch the field -- gigahertz at least. Moving the atoms is about as clumsy and screwball a method for changing a wavefunction as I can imagine. You might as well turn your car around by stopping it by the side of the road, dismantling it piece by piece, and rebuilding it facing the other direction. Pfui.
I'm damned if I can see how this is jumping an "important" hurdle along the way to a quantum computer. I don't think anyone is going to build a quantum computer with moving parts, i.e. with laser "conveyor belts" and "tweezers" that are constantly shuffling atoms around (and at a mere 0.5 sort operations per second at that).
I'm guessing the hurdle jumped here has something to do with construction techniques. But...there are already many ways to get atoms perfectly lined up with each other. Using a crystal, or part of one, would be one rather obvious idea. Indeed, the impression that the article gives that it's somehow a triumph to get atoms "perfectly" lined up with each other is silly: atoms naturally line up "perfectly" with each other, especially metal atoms like the caesium in the article. It's quite hard to get metal atoms not to "perfectly" line up together, i.e. to make amorphous (glassy) metallic materials.
Anyway, it's a nice little bit of single-atom manipulation, yes. One more trick you can do with laser cooling and tweezers, which may be interesting from the research perspective. But I don't see how it has anything very directly to do with quantum computing.
Well, you read more about murders and heart attacks and snakes (ha ha) when they happen on airplanes, too. For very similar reasons.
The sulfuric acid (or really the sulfate anion) is indeed part of the chemistry of the lead-acid battery. If its purpose were to merely lower the resistance of the electrolyte, there would be a lot safer materials to use, e.g. plain table salt.
I don't think one would vent a battery to accomodate the small amount of differential thermal expansion in its solid or liquid components. You generally don't want battery components exposed to atmospheric oxygen, which is electrochemically active and can change your chemistry significantly.
Of course current Li-ion batteries explode elsewhere. Here's and example random story on it. Doesn't mention airplanes.
Yes, but human respiration is very sensitive to pressure. First of all, it depends on the rate at which gases (O2 and CO2) dissolve in liquids (i.e. blood), and the solubility of gases in liquids at low pressures (that is around 1 atm) happens to be quite dependent on pressure. Furthermore, our normal operating conditions are very close to our lungs' maximum capabilities. Stop our breathing for even a short time, or reduce its efficiency even a little bit, and we have major problems. No engineer would design a product with such slim safety margins.
So from the point of view of mechanical engineering, it's a very small change. Even your flimsy plastic soda bottle, or generic toothpaste tube, would easily stand up to the change. Hard to imagine anyone would design a battery case that wouldn't. Look at it this way: it's the same amount of pressure rise something would experience being taken to the bottom of your average swimming pool (down 10 feet or so). You'd have to be an compleat idiot to engineer something that couldn't stand up to that kind of mild pressure. Now if a battery depended in some way on a delicate gas exchange with the atmosphere, like lungs, an argument could be made. But batteries don't.
Very well said! Both here and in the original post.
An additional factor (besides the highly inelastic demand people have for life) that gives us such rapidly rising health care costs is shared with many other service industries: the cost of the services is not rising so much as the cost of manufactured goods and food is falling. That is, it's not so much that going to the doctor is getting way more expensive than buying a loaf of bread, or a new car, but that the real cost of a loaf of bread or a new car has fallen very steeply in the last century or so. We spend a much larger fraction of our income on health care largely because we are able to spend a much smaller fraction of our income on basic needs like food, clothes, transportation et cetera than our grandparents did. We can afford to buy more healthcare -- so we do.
An interesting anecdote bears on this: I recall some years ago reading a newspaper article on a farmer in Urbana, Illinois, who had just retired after 50 years farming corn. He remarked that it so happened the nominal (not accounting for inflation) price of a bushel of corn was the same on the day he retired as it was when he started farming 50 years earlier. Mechanization, improvements in seed genetics, crop management, and weather prediction had all so hugely improved the productivity (per man-hour) of farming that the real price of corn had plummeted. Similar things have happened in most manufacturing and agricultural sectors. Technology makes the productivity of each employee soar. I think the modern steel industry, for example, has a productivity of nearly 1000 tons of steel per employee, and that probably counts secretaries and floor sweepers...
Medicine is different. Technology just can't increase the productivity per employee very much. You still need a human physician to make initial diagnoses, however much technologically-gained information he might have at hand, and he still needs some modest fraction of an hour per patient to do it. Technology can't let him diagnose hundreds or even thousands of patients per hour, because it can't multiply the speed of his trained thought processes. In fact, technology may make things worse, because it causes a need for larger teams of trained experts to use it. If you fell and knocked yourself unconscious 50 years ago, the doc would check your pupil diameter with a pocket flashlight, evaluate your speech, et cetera, to decide whether you'd cracked your skull. Now he's going to send you for a head CT, maybe an MRI, and while that's more definitive, it also means you need to pay for the time of half a dozen more trained experts to build, maintain and operate the fancy machinery you're using.
Now that computers should be able to handle that task easily, I rarely hear anything about it anymore.
Nooo, I'd say you don't hear so much about it anymore because (1) the idea is no longer new, and (2) it isn't working out as well as we'd first hoped, and perhaps (3) you're not in the field. We've a loooong way to go before rational drug design in silico becomes truly routine. At the moment it's a big help to the trained chemist, but that's it.
A couple of problems remain:
(1) Often enough, the molecular structure of drug targets are a mystery. Most often, it's a mystery clinically, in the sense that no one knows the target molecule or even the target biochemical pathway. How do you fight the development of atherosclerotic plaques in the coronary arteries? Given that we have incomplete knowledge of how it happens, it's very hard to identify a target for drug therapy. Here genomics and proteomics, e.g. the correlation of the expression of certain proteins with certain clinical conditions will undoubtably help.
Even in cases where a target is known, it may well be a mystery physically. It's very difficult to crystallize proteins to determine their 3D structure. I think good labs can do maybe 3 or 4 a year. More vexing is the fact that probably a lot of useful targets are on cell membranes, and membrane-bound proteins are usually impossible to crystallize at all.
(2) The solvent has a profound influence on the interaction between macromolecules and possible ligands, so computer simulation of these systems has to take good account of the solvent. But the solvent (water) is small and moves on a femtosecond time-scale, while the interactions of interest are maybe 5 to 10 orders of magnitude slower. That means your computer spends essentially all of its time simulating (useless) solvent behaviour, and very little simulating interesting protein/ligand behaviour. The problem grows exponentially with the size of the system of interest, so it can't be solved even by Moore's Law. Better theoretical models of solvent are needed.
(3) The interactions that govern the dynamics of these systems are strongly many-body, but the calculation of true many-body dynamics is prohibitively expensive. Inevitably simplifying approximations are made, but that tends to reduce the utility of the methods, because the approximations must be validated in a system not too dissimilar from your target system. That means you have to have some independent means of knowing the behaviour of a system not too far from your target system to validate your computer model. That makes them less generalizable and useful than one would hope.
That said, it's an area of vigorous research and much progress. There have been some noteable successes. But the idea in the 80s that by now we'd be routinely designing drugs by computer simulation is sort of like the idea in the 60s that by 2000 we'd have moon colonies and be routinely sending manned spacecraft to Mars. The future is arriving more slowly than we'd hoped. As it always does, except maybe around April 15.
I don't think the modest pressure drop (from 14.7 psi at sea level to 9.5 psi at 3500 m) is going to cause accidents. I think the only reason the airplane angle is important in these situations is that the accident is happening in an enclosed space filled with flammable materials, and people can't run outside to get away from the smoke or call the FD to put out the flames, et cetera.
Lead-acid batteries can produce hydrogen by electrolysis of the water in them when they are charged. If I had to guess, I'd say this is because if the battery is thoroughly discharged, and not, perhaps, very well designed, then so much sulfate is taken out of the electrolyte (sulfuric acid) solution as lead sulfate that the resistance of the solution rises. Then, when current is applied to charge the battery, instead of the formation of sulfate anions, some of the current electrolyzes the water, producing H2 and O2. I would assume that careful design of your battery and reasonable charging conditions minimize this problem. Note that H2 production is not a normal and necessary result of charging a lead-acid battery.
The chemistry of Li-ion batteries is totally different. IIRC, there isn't any water in their electrolyte, it's some organic solvent in which a lithium salt dissolves. (I don't think there's any lithium metal in there, either, so the reactivity of lithium with water mentioned above somewhere would seem doubly irrelevant.)
I think all you need to do is (1) avoid damaging your batteries by abusing them physically, and (2) avoid abusing them electrically, by charging and discharging them in the manner for which they were designed.
Mmmm, well, you have about 2 square meters of surface area, but in order to prevent drowning when under water you only need to protect a few critical square inches -- your mouth and nose. The moral being: not all lengths of boundary are equal. Some parts of any border are far more important than others.
While the US border is certainly long, in practise this means little, since almost everybody crosses it at a major airport, through those long Border Patrol lines. So if you secure the airports, you've actually done quite a lot to secure the borders.
Can nasty people still sneak across the Sonoran desert like illegals from Mexico? Or wade through mosquito-infested swamps along the Minnesota border? Or walk across the North Dakota border and hike 50 miles through badlands to the nearest highway? Sure. But all of these things are nontrivially harder than just flying into Miami International on Air Qatar with a bogus passport, and that means there's one more noxious obstacle in their path. Have to bring not only your bomb materials, but also a compass, GPS, good hiking shoes, several liters of water, bug spray...as I said originally, national defense is a layered kind of thing, like computer network defense. You throw obstacles in the bad guys' tracks. No one silver bullet is going to perfectly secure the border, but a half-dozen rusty old steel ones might do quite a good job.
I don't think it really occomplishes anything.
You might be right. But you're arguing from pure theory (unless you're a border agent incognito). The State Department is arguing at least in part from actual experience. Why not give them the benefit of the doubt, give it a try, and see what happens? It's not like it would be hard to reverse if it proves worthless, or could do some weird permanent damage to the Republic.
Ah...your point is a little too subtle for me to grasp, sorry.
I've heard the argument made that one of its purposes is an evolved defense against viruses. The real genetic data (the exons) are scattered amongst garbage data (the introns), and when it's needed the exons are extracted and spliced together, with the introns just being thrown away.
The use of splicing is a defence against viral attack because the virus would need to be sure to insert its DNA into an exon. If it inserts its DNA into an intron, it will just get thrown away. If it inserts it half into an exon, half into an intron, it will get snipped in half, so the assembled mRNA becomes garbage and doesn't get translated into an active protein. Furthermore, by keeping the size of the exons down, you put a hard upper limit on the size of viral DNA that can be inserted.
I think the influence the war against the viruses has had on our genetic evolution is perhaps underappreciated.
Muhammed al-Boom is not going to try to enter the country legitimately...
Don't be silly. All of the 9/11 hijackers did. The guy nabbed in Canada in the "Millenium Plot" was trying to. If you're trying to do secret stuff that could get you sent to the gas chamber if caught, it's not smart to risk calling attention to yourself by sneaking across the border illegally in the dead of night. Much better to walk in with a firm step and a three-piece suit on, looking like you belong, courtesy of a passport stolen from a clueless American college student abroad.
And if new security features mean the only reasonable way to get into the country when you're up to no good is to walk across the Sonoran desert for a day and a half and then hitchhike 500 miles to your destination -- why, that sounds like a net plus to me. National security is little different from computer network security: it has to be a many-layered defense, with no one layer guaranteeing complete security, but each layer making it just a bit harder for the bad guys to penetrate.
If he is worth worrying about, he will lose the beard.
No doubt. But he'll have a harder time losing the extra 3" of height, or changing his facial features to look Asian or Caucasian.
fake passports are far from the biggest border security issue.
And so? Must the State Department only address issues in strict order of their priority? They can't implement a cheap 'n' easy solution to moderately-important problem Y because no one's yet thought of a solution to big and nasty problem X? Like, we shouldn't try to develop vaccines against influenza because we haven't cured cancer yet?
In principle the benefits are that if you're Muhammed al-Boom -- male, age 27, height 5' 10", weight 165, scruffy beard -- trying to enter the country with a stolen US passport, the biometric data that pops up on the screen when you swipe the passport -- female, Asian, age 65, height 5' 2", weight 140, wearing thick glasses -- will suggest something odd to even the most harried, incompetent or distracted border agent, who will then be inclined to take you aside and ask you to open that curiously heavy briefcase you're carrying.
I can only reach the conclusion that rfid passports are being pushed as a way for the government to ultimately track people in general.
What makes you think government gives a damn about tracking people in general? Why would it? What's in it for them? Maybe you've been reading too many X-Men comics, wherein bad guys want to rule the world and monitor every soul in it just to...uh, well, rule the world. Some kind of hard-wired genetic urge, I guess.
Actual politicians and real civil servants care about Joe Citizen in only two ways: first and foremost, they want to know that he's paying his taxes, so government salaries can continue to be paid. Not very coincidentally, you'll notice that the government already keeps very careful track of your income through your Social Security account and numerous requirements on employers. That way they can collect your taxes right from your employer before you even see the money, and they can nail you easily if you wiggle out of a few dollars here and there through artful accounting. The IRS enjoys intrusive powers of inspection into your wallet that the State or Justice Departments, or NSA, can only dream of.
Secondly, of course, politicians and civil servants care that you vote the right way -- to re-elect the incumbent, and to expand government programs that require the employment of civil servants. Does this involve trying to track your movements? Hardly. Of what use would that be? The useful trick would be something like making it harder for grassroots organizations of citizens to financially support challengers to the incumbent, by...oh, let's say, limiting the amount of money each individual could contribute to the cause of electing somebody, setting up onerous requirements that political contributions be reported to the Federal Government, limiting the amount of money a challenger can spend advertising his challenge, or even requiring that independent groups trying to help out a challenger can't coordinate strategy with the candidate....all of which should sound kinda familiar.
As always, they can usually count on the "watchdogs" of citizen privacy and independence barking fiercely at distracting shadows (NSA data-mining, RFID chips in passports) while the true threats of citizen disenfranchisement (McCain-Feingold, requiring SSNs and tax withholding to work at all) slide silently into place.
TFA is light on detail, what a surprise, but I am guessing the novelty here is that you can in some cases get the advantage of multiple-binding cooperativity without having to custom-design the molecular backbone "scaffold" that holds the binding sites in the correct relationship. By just changing the density of peptides on the surface of the liposome, they can more or less continuously "tune" the distance between the binding sites. So, in principle, the advantage to this kind of approach would be that you could rapidly and cheaply create many different antagonists for many different poisons. It's hugely cheaper to just vary the density of peptide binding sites on your liposome than it is to synthesize a whole range of molecular backbones to hold the peptide groups in different arrangements.
Also...a biochemist may want to correct me, but TFA says that these buggers bind toxins "thousands" of time better than free peptides. But to be seriously effective, wouldn't you need hundreds of thousands or even millions of times better binding? After all, you don't want to have to feed your patient as much of the antagonist as they gave these poor rats: 500 mg for a 300 g rat is a dosage of 1.7 grams/kilo of body weight! A normal man (65 kg) would have to have over 100 grams of the stuff injected into him. That's an absurd amount of medicine and is bound to have deleterious side effects.
...the question is whether he can do so successfully. That is, whether the judge will rule in his favor.
I don't think "common law" means at all the same thing as an explicit statute, where Congress has set down in writing what the rule is. In those cases, the court is bound to enforce the law as written, regardless of whether or not it's the way things are usually done. Statute can break entirely new ground, make things illegal which were legal before (e.g. cocaine) or legal which were illegal before (e.g. abortion).
Not so with common law. I believe "common law" just translates to "what we've always mostly done." It's just a short way to imply that what people have almost always done, on their own, spontaneously, in response to a given situation should, after a long enough time, acquire much the force of written law. Especially when "what the people have done" has been ratified by repeated and consistent judicial decisions that agree with the tradition.
It's a way to recognize that all law derives ultimately from the will of the people, and in certain situations people have expressed that will directly, without the need for legislaturely lawyers to write it down on parchment in curly script. Hence, the idea of "common law" is a constraint on the judiciary, telling them that, in the absence of explicit written law, they can't just decide cases before them on the basis of their personal whim. They can't just say: well, there's no written law here, so I'll rule as I see fit. Instead, they are obliged to recognize as law that "law" which is merely implied in long social traditions and the body of prior related judicial decisions.
So from this POV could a lawyer successfully argue that English common law supercedes the Constitution? Of course not. Written statute always trumps unwritten common law. Common law is only used when there is no written law to provide guidance.
Could a lawyer successfully argue that English common law supercedes post-1776 American common law? Not any more than he could argue that the speed limit on highways should still be 55 MPH because the 1970s era 55-MPH laws predate the later laws allowing the speed limit to be higher. The later law always controls, even when it's common law.
So what's left? Only that a lawyer could successfully argue that in the absence of any relevant written statute, and the absence of any unique post-1776 American tradition, the court should consider the traditions in England prior to the Revolution. That doesn't sound very scary, or unreasonable.
If you are thinking that it is possible to sue the Department of Defense in civilian court like any random citizen, you should check out the definition of sovereign immunity.
TFA sounds a lot like the early descriptions of the Phalanx Close-In Weapons System for defense of ships against low-flying antiship missiles like the infamous Exocet. I recall the Phalanx being described around the time of the Falklands War as throwing up a "wall" of bullets in front of an incoming missile through its extremely high rate of fire (up to 75 rounds per second). The widget in TFA may do much the same with a "force field" of fragments from the explosion of a shaped charge.
That is, I surmise "force field" is a metaphor here. Marketspeak, to forcefully (as it were) convey the impression of how the device works.