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Comment Re:Fun with EM sensitivity (Score 1) 529

That's not EHS. Those people are bothered by the low-frequency flicker of older types of fluorescent lights that use magnetic ballasts - especially older or low-quality lamps with or older or low-quality ballasts. The flicker can get as low as half of the power supply frequency, where it is just at the limit of being visible.
Modern lamps and CFLs use electronic ballasts that operate at a much higher frequency, and that is why they don't bother people.

Comment If you don't open your eyes, you can't see (Score 1) 529

The quote from the article says:

No serious scientific study has been able to establish that electrosensitivity exists ....

There are literally thousands of studies that have confirmed that electromagnetic hypersensitivity (EHS) exists. The intra-cellular mechanism has been discovered independently by different research teams composed of credited scientists in the field at major well-regarded universities in different parts of the globe.

But of course, a study about something that does not exist can not be "serious", now can it?

Here are the search terms to google for: Voltage-Gated Calcium Canals (VGCC), NO-ONOO cycle.
There are a couple of very good videos about it on Youtube, by professor Martin Pall. I very much recommend them, especially how he debunks earlier studies that had claimed that electrosensitivity wouldn't exist.

BTW, 40 people are nothing. The associations for people with electrohypersensitive disorders have thousands of members that would love to move to a town like Green Bank.

Comment Re:The comment (Score 1) 233

That's it? Really? The comment was not more specific than that? That's "defamation"??

Not that it really concerns me, but yes I checked out what view he has: he lives on the other side of a well-trafficked road from the front entrance of the school. He could see kids being dropped off and picked up by their parents. That's it.
It took me 20 seconds to check this on Google. If anyone else did what I did, then they would also see that the comment has no merit.

A Technical Look Inside TempleOS 284

jones_supa writes: TempleOS has become somewhat of a legend in the operating system community. Its sole author, Terry A. Davis, is a special kind of person, who has a tendency to appear in various places with a burst of strange comments. Nevertheless, he has spent the past 12 years creating a new operating system from scratch, and has shipped a functional product. An article takes a constructive technical look at the internals of TempleOS: installation, shell, file explorer, hypertext system, custom HolyC programming language, and interaction with hardware. The OS ships with a suite of several tools and demos as well. To see the sheer amount of content that's been written here over the years, to see such effort expended on a labor of love, is wonderfully heart-warming. In many ways TempleOS seems similar to systems such as the Xerox Alto, Oberon, and Plan 9; an all-inclusive system that blurs the lines between programs and documents.

Comment Re:Noocular (Score 1) 298

You could expect Germany to phase out lignite before they phase out coal. There is a wide-spread public resistance against it and it is likely that it will be taxed out of being profitable.
Many "blocks" (lignite-burning power plants) will reach end-of-life in the next one or two decades anyway so if power companies would want to continue burning lignite then they would have to invest heavily in new plants and that wouldn't be a good financial decision.

Comment Re:Yet another proprietary API... (Score 1) 415

It doesn't look like it is far off.

Imagination Technologies showed a demo of Vulkan on PowerVR the same day as Vulkan was presented at GDC this year.
PowerVR GPUs have been powering all of Apple's iOS devices.

I am sure that AMD would use the same core for Mantle, DirectX 12 and Vulkan. They are phasing out development on Mantle in favour of Vulkan.

Comment Yet another proprietary API... (Score 3, Interesting) 415

Anybody else think that Apple should ditch Metal in favour of Vulkan? If they want the latest games ported to Mac then they should use an open API that is used on other platforms.

But I am starting to think that maybe ports is not Apple's game... Maybe they want there to be almost only Apple-specific titles on Mac so that people wouldn't compare performance on Mac to that on PC or consoles. Now that they are known mostly for laptops and their desktop machines are also having laptop-grade internals then they are not going to be able to compete on graphics performance anyway.

Science

Have Some Physicists Abandoned the Empirical Method? 364

HughPickens.com writes: Adam Frank and Marcelo Gleiser write in the NY Times that two leading researchers, George Ellis and Joseph Silk, recently published a controversial piece called "Scientific Method: Defend the Integrity of Physics," that criticized a newfound willingness among some scientists to explicitly set aside the need for experimental confirmation of today's most ambitious cosmic theories — so long as those theories are "sufficiently elegant and explanatory." Whether or not you agree with them, Ellis and Silk have identified a mounting concern in fundamental physics: Today, our most ambitious science can seem at odds with the empirical methodology that has historically given physics its credibility.

Quoting: "Chief among the 'elegance will suffice' advocates are some string theorists. Because string theory is supposedly the 'only game in town' capable of unifying the four fundamental forces, they believe that it must contain a grain of truth even though it relies on extra dimensions that we can never observe. Some cosmologists, too, are seeking to abandon experimental verification of grand hypotheses that invoke imperceptible domains such as the kaleidoscopic multiverse (comprising myriad universes), the 'many worlds' version of quantum reality (in which observations spawn parallel branches of reality) and pre-Big Bang concepts. These unprovable hypotheses are quite different from those that relate directly to the real world and that are testable through observations — such as the standard model of particle physics and the existence of dark matter and dark energy. As we see it, theoretical physics risks becoming a no-man's-land between mathematics, physics and philosophy that does not truly meet the requirements of any."

Richard Dawid argues that physics, or at least parts of it, are about to enter an era of post-empirical science. "How are we to determine whether a theory is true if it cannot be validated experimentally," ask Frank and Gleiser. "Are superstrings and the multiverse, painstakingly theorized by hundreds of brilliant scientists, anything more than modern-day epicycles?"

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