Neat post. Conceptually, single-celled organisms can't get "cancer" because, in a way, they are cancer. However, they no doubt can suffer mutations or other genetic changes (like from viruses) that make them survive and reproduce more or less well, all things considered for their current environment. Cancer has to do with a cell deciding not to play nicely with the rest in a body, and to strike out on its own, so to speak. Cancer in general is a bit like a crazy individual or small group in a society trying to take over the whole thing (current US plutocrats?); generally it works out badly for everyone as core services start to fail and the cancer cells are no longer supported by the rest of the body. Cancer is like spammers, who for a quick buck in the short term, are busy destroying email and the rest of the internet that could otherwise bring everyone abundance. Cancer is about "selfishness" where the individual ignores its part to play in the whole and where the whole supports the individual. But since evolution involves variation and selection, the underlying mechanism of cancer via mutation or viral infection also in a sense underlies evolution. So yes, it will always be with us.

I've heard most people in the USA age 40+ years old have cancerous cells in small amounts, but the immune system is continually killing them off to keep them from spreading.

Good nutrition helps with that, like Dr. Joel Fuhrman talks about
https://www.drfuhrman.com/libr...
"Though most people would prefer to take a pill and continue their eating habits, this will not provide the desired protection. Unrefined plant foods, with their plentiful anti-cancer compounds, must be eaten in abundance to flood the body's tissues with protective substances. Vegetables and fruits protect against all types of cancers if consumed in large enough quantities. Hundreds of scientific studies document this. The most prevalent cancers in our societies are plant-food-deficiency diseases. The benefits of lifestyle changes are proportional to the changes made. As we add more vegetable servings, we increase our phytochemical intake and leave less room in our diets for harmful foods, enhancing cancer protection even further. Let's review some of these research findings and then review what a powerful, anti-cancer diet will look like. ... A typical anti-cancer diet should contain at least 4 fresh fruits daily, at least one large raw green salad, as well as a two other cooked (steamed) vegetables, such as broccoli, carrots and peas, squash or other colorful vegetables. A huge pot of soup laden with vegetables, herbs and beans can be made once a week and conveniently taken for lunch. Raw nuts and seeds are another important, but often overlooked, group of foods with documented health benefits contributing to longevity. ..."

One thing Fuhrman misses in his discussion is that these compounds are not "Anti-cancer" as much as the human body has adapted via evolution to use these compounds to prevent or fight cancer.

He is right that cancer is best prevented rather than treated. As I've heard, it said, you can either get your chemotherapy every day from fruits and vegetables, or you can end up getting it all at once in the oncologist's office (not that most current chemotherapy is probably worth it anyway).

Fasting may also sometimes help prevent cancer as well as can a ketogenic (fat burning) diet that deprives cancer cells of sugar.
https://www.google.com/search?...
https://www.google.com/search?...

But your point stands that this is all combinatorial (statistical, entropical?) about when something gets out of hand. Even when we have Elysium-like medical beds that get rid of cancer instantly, some computer virus or malicious person may make them work incorrectly. Or, as in the movie, selfish elites can keep the healing beds to themselves.

You mean Ares I? Three flights a year? Would this face lie to you?

Do you have a point to all this? Magnitude doesn't mean what you claim it means. It's not a "curve" of a seismograph or its amplitude. It just isn't what you claim it is.

That is peak acceleration. And when you discuss that with respect to magnitude, you still need to discuss the duration of the earthquake because longer earthquakes have more energy and hence are higher magnitude than shorter earthquakes when all is equal.

I linked to moment magnitude. Read up on it.

They do when both it requires extraordinary effort to achieve that goal, basically meaning the sacrifice of a considerable portion of humanity's other priorities and they advocate doing this.

An assertion which is not based on evidence.

This is the argument from authority fallacy. It keeps happening again and again with any climate-related discussion.

Unless of course, it doesn't work in humans. Then his "fear" is somewhat appropriate.

Just because two organisms have something in common with respect to this drug doesn't mean that their differences won't matter.

The new ones tend to be combined cycle. The old ones are plain turbines which helps them to follow load.

I don't write mediocre code, I write smart code which is something else entirely than being "clever". With a certain amount of hubris I'll say that I don't think I've ever written really bad code at the micro-level. However, I used to write a lot more code which disregarded encapsulation, separation of concerns, side effects, poor function and variable naming, anti-patterns and so on. And if I wrote enough of it then it resembled spaghetti code, it lacked the structure, abstractions and layers to make it clean and easy to maintain. I still suck at writing high level documentation but at least when people jump into my code they usually praise it for being easy to follow. That's much harder than it looks.

Two person home. Two each of cell phones and laptops connected. Two entertainment devices (gaming console and Blu-Ray). I also have another wifi-ready console that I've just never setup for network play. Also one tablet, and one printer. Considering a wifi thermostat.

That's 8 devices without trying, for two users. That's also not counting "sometimes" devices on the whitelist: work laptop, frequent visitors' phones.

Do you know of any purely gas boilers?

To replace coal, uranium use would have to increase by a factor of more than seven around the world. The reactors built to do that would run out of fuel before they all got commissioned.

No C-style casts or any explicit casts were involved at all in this particular case. I've long since stopped that sort of dangerous style of programming and adopted a much saner and safer subset of C++ unless there's no alternative.

Disabling "unsafe" features might be useful for some, but not in my case. In my particular field (videogame programming), we often have to interop with older C-style libraries, or write some very specific low-level optimizations down in the engine for maximum performance. For instance, nearly all AAA games that I've worked on completely replace the default memory manager, which is why I was using custom deleters. When you write your own memory allocator, you obviously have to do a lot of raw pointer manipulation and unsafe casting.

Honestly, it's probably better to simply develop a personal or corporate coding standard and make sure it's followed. That way, if there's a legitimate need to "break the rules", you can do so, but only if there's no realistic alternative. That's part of what makes C++ so useful. It's a very pragmatic language.

Programmers are smart enough not to unionise, which allows newcomers into the field without these insane artificial barriers of entry.

Unions are barriers to entry into the field to any newcomers, unions are also horrific from point of view of price setting and prevent people who actually excel in the job from making significantly more than those who only coast by. Your complaint is a complaint of somebody who shouldn't have become a programmer in the first place, but also it is a complaint of a horrible person, who wants to prevent others from entering the field freely.

People shouldn't be licensed just to try and make a living, all professional government dictated licenses and participation in various organizations are a huge economic mistake but more importantly they are a huge impediment to individual freedoms.

I like their hair and I like their shoes, it's just that useless bit in between that sucks.

A lot of Africa would disagree with that last part. Though it's kinda unfair to blame them, after all we force them to it.