Indeed 58 degrees is what is published in the report. It seems likely that the Libyan report was in integer Celsius degrees.

Hang in there. I have a bit of the type 2 myself. I lost about 30 pounds fairly quickly. It's tough giving up so many great foods. I highly recommend stevia as a sugar substitute. I use the white powder refined form. I also eat barley instead of rice. I eat Ezekiel bread. I have found that barley and Ezekiel bread don't affect the blood sugar much. Lately I have been a little off the wagon, probably because I miss the carbs. I have been eating small amounts of carb treats, but my stupid body wants a lot of it....

Good luck

Well, fyngyrz, you should feel proud to be doing well. If you have strength, stamina and flexibility, you are doing great. I would guess that your blood pressure is normal and you are non-diabetic. If so, then a little fat is a superficial thing. Health is what matters. It is unfortunate that you need to watch your diet so carefully, but it is well worth it.

I certainly hope that we learn a way to cope well with Syndrome X.

It's not really a proof, but violence has been decreasing in the U.S. for 20 years which is coincident with the huge increase in video game playing. So it seems a reasonable conjecture that video games reduce violence. Possible reasons include kids working out their aggression in a virtual world and kids simply having loads of fun. Having loads of fun keeps them off the streets and reduces their interaction with criminals. There might be some unstable people who confuse the real world and the game world, but so far it seems pretty clear that video games are not a disaster for public safety.

Nice discussion! I have run OpenVPN over port 80 TCP in order to get past a firewall. It worked but a little later I tried port 80 UDP. It worked better. I was happy to discover an unblocked UDP port for my needs.

There are 2 mechanisms which the C library uses to return memory to the OS. First if a certain amount of memory at the end of the data segment is free, it can reduce the size of the data segment. Second (known to work under Linux) if a process allocates large amounts (like 128KB) the memory allocator can use a different form of memory allocation (mmap for Linux). When this large block is freed it can be immediately returned to the OS. I was suggesting a way that memory could remain allocated. The original intent behind malloc retaining freed memory within a process was to allow the process to re-use the memory for subsequent allocations. This concept can be abused by processes which allocate different sized blocks leaving internal fragmentation with many chunks of memory too small to use. I would expect programmers for long running programs to guard against this problem. If I were writing Firefox I would try to compartmentalize the memory used for a tab so that all memory for a tab would be released to the OS when the tab was closed. I have read that Firefox has adopted a different allocator which may have solved the problem. I too have not studied Firefox code, but I expect that they do pretty well.

I wasn't really trying to refute your point. I was referring to someone who might have something like a lot of tabs open requiring lots of RAM, possibly running Javascript. Subsequently after closing most of the JS tabs, I would expect Chrome to use less RAM than Firefox under the same scenario. There might clearly be cases where the opposite is true. The memory usage charts you linked to are interesting. I am surprised that Chrome uses twice as much RAM. I would expect the code for the program to be present in memory once for all the Chrome processes which would mean the usage should be similar. I don't believe the article told how they measured RAM usage. It is also interesting that after dropping back to 1 tab, Firefox made it back to the same size as Chrome. This would seem to mean than Firefox under Windows is actually giving RAM back to the OS. I am unsure of Windows details, but it is cool if it does. My intent was to offer some explanation for how the first person mentioning RAM issues with Firefox might have noticed something real. The description given seems to match my assessment. Usage varies. As cheap as RAM is the real solution is to buy more RAM. Neither browser should be much of a memory hog with 16 GB.

Chrome runs a separate process for each window. I'm pretty sure Firefox is 1 process. With 1 process normally freeing memory does not return it to the OS. So closing a Firefox tab would not really shrink the Firefox process, while closing a Chrome tab would end a process and return its memory to the OS for re-use. It makes sense that Chrome might be better memory usage after extended use.

I have read several articles about the "standards" in Florida and Virginia. This article fails to make things clear. The race based standards are supposed to be used to assess the effectiveness of teaching, not to determine whether individual students pass or fail. The requirements for an individual student to pass are the same regardless of race. The goal for No Child Left Behind is to have 100% of the kids achieve at grade level on standardized tests. Now imagine that you teach at an all black school. Without attributing causes it would be very hard for 100% of those students to reach grade level in 5 years or so. If you taught at an all Asian school, getting to 100% in 5 years would be far easier. So let's assume that the black school went up from 40% to 70%, while the Asian school went from 70% to 80%. Did the teachers at the black school do a good job or a bad job. I would call going up 30% pretty good.

The problem with the article is it leaves the impression that students will make passing grades with lower scores based on being members of certain races. This would be discriminatory and hopefully the courts would agree and change that.

Now making the goals for schools (not individual students) based on race has some merit. I think that a better solution would be to base the goal on each school's current performance level. This leaves race out of the analysis and is fairer to schools with different socio-economic backgrounds. A school with students from poor families is likely to have lower performance than a school whose students have professional parents (doctors, lawyers, engineers, ...). This will be true regardless of their racial mix. Now if someone from the affected states would suggest different goals for different schools, perhaps they can eliminate a stupid plan.

Abstraction is a relative thing. I started out in Math and started a Ph.D. program in Math and decided the abstraction had gone a little far. I recall one class where the professor proved the existence of "Ghost Sets" before Halloween. Of course existence in Math means a logical conclusion based on some premises. As far as I can tell, there is no practical relation between Ghost Sets and the real world. I eventually got a M.S. in Math and a Ph.D. in Computer Science. For me the CS concepts seemed pretty concrete (well, excepting Theory of Computation). On the other hand high school algebra is too abstract for a lot of people. Having taught CS I agree that there is a big difference between the people who get it and those who don't.

I totally agree about plumbers. I can do most labor around my house, but I limit plumbing to replacing toilet floats and flappers. I have tried working with copper tubing and compression fittings and decided that I could afford to pay a plumber.

Go, Chuck! I would mod your comment up if I had points.

Thanks. Now I can generate the Romney I really like.

The percentage not paying income tax was about 34% in 2000. The big change is largely a result of the Bush tax cuts. Now the party which instituted the change complains about their own policy.

It is also a bit dishonest to complain about these people as paying no taxes. Many of these are retirees who have spent a lifetime paying taxes and most of the others pay Social Security and a host of other taxes. It would be interesting to learn the percentage of total taxes paid by these "non-payers" and compare that to Romney. I doubt that reliable numbers can be found but I expect that a majority of Americans pay a higher percentage of total taxes than Romney who complained about the 47%.

The concept of people voting themselves more money out of the general tax fund is interesting. This is precisely why so many wealthy people are "investing" in this election.

Perhaps sudden release of an enormous amount of C02. Suppose this works fairly well. We could sequester carbon for 50 years and then something could happen like another meteor from Mars and damage the refrigeration required. BAM! Sudden global climate chaos. Perhaps people will survive with the carbon intact for hundreds of years and society could degenerate. Then it would be a matter of time before lack of maintenance leads to failure.

I think we would be much better off seeking sequestration in soil enrichment through compost. Another possibility might be to stir up some of the ocean bottom in the dead part of the Pacific and stimulate life there.