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Comment Re:Overly broad? (Score 4, Interesting) 422

The 40 to 55% of HFCS that isn't Fructose is Glucose, which triggers insulin production immediately when it reaches the small intestine and is transported into the bloodstream before the insulin reaches it - Insulin is then needed to transport the glucose out of the bolldstream and into muscles and other tissues. Sucrose has to be cleaved first into glucose and only starts triggering insulin production after cleavage by other enzymes. This means, qat the very least, that Sucrose gets farther into the intestine before triggering insulin production, and that the rate of production is limited by the rate at which the sucrose is split and not the much faster rate at which glucose enters the bloodstream. I really don't see how you can call those two processes identical. Note I'm not saying that its been proved the differences in how high and low insulin levels and blood sugar levels get necessarily means there's a difference in health consequences, but its certainly not impossible just because of the fact both forms of sugar get to the same organ before digestion. And what about the part that is Fructose? That's certainly dealt with separately.

Comment Re:Units hurt the brain (Score 1, Insightful) 74

Being a European i have no clue how much a pound is, and probably British and US pounds differ too. Ok, i could guess a pound is about half a kilogram. Still makes no sense to mix them up in a scientific article.

Wrong guess, minus five.

Hint: the pound is a unit of FORCE, the kilogram is a unit of MASS. It makes no more sense to measure thrust in kilograms than it does to measure distance in square meters.

If you really want to have consistency, they should have measured the thrust in newtons, NOT in kilograms.

The fact that Europeans (at least one of them) don't know their own measurement system any better than that is appalling....

Comment Re:Region-Specific (Score 1) 86

So you make a regional system by setting up the orbits so that there are always 3-4 satellites visible from the region of interest. Occasionally you will be able to get a fix elsewhere in the world, but usually not.

Actually, while it's generally pretty trivial to make sure 3-4 (5+ would be better) are visible from any given point on Earth, it's rather harder (read: nearly impossible) to make sure 3-4 are visible from any point in India but NOT from any point outside India.

Unless the satellites are in geosynchronous orbits, of course, but then you're not going to have the separations you need for a good solution.

Realistically, India needs an array like GPS or GLONASS, not just seven satellites.

Comment Re:Why Cold Fusion (or something like it) Is Real (Score 2) 350

It's possible there are as yet unknown natural laws. It's even possible that there are natural laws our species is just too dumb to discover, ever. But the chance of undiscoverable laws is lower than the more general chance of as yet undiscovered laws.
            In the same way, the chance that there's an as yet undiscovered law which applies to this particular technology, and which has certain properties making it at all likely it gets inadvertently followed sometimes is possible, but is an accumulation of low probablility circumstances, and so has very low overall likelyhood. It's generally more likely that any undicovered laws will be ones where they consistently block getting the technological configuration right. For a simplified example, if there's some undiscovered property of, say, Tungsten, then it's likely to become apparent when people note that all the claims for success come from experiments where tungsten was used for a particular stage of the process in a particular way. There's much less chance that simply having a certain mass of Tungsten within a certain number of feet of the device, whether it's made into a part of the apparatus or light bulb filaments, will make the experiment very likely to succeed in either case.
        Try to describe a hypothetical law that works in such a way it is very hard to spot a pattern or regularity that will lead the researchers to really formally formulating that law, but makes a big enough difference that it determines general success or failure much more than many other variables. Try to craft such a genuinely new law for explaining anything, from apiary colony collapse disorder to zebra camoflage evolution*. I'll bet this results in a very long, convoluted law to explain all the conditions. That's what usually happens with novel approaches - sure every once in a while one pays off big time, but not every discovery is Special Relativity. If you end up with a long formulation, full of various clauses which make it fit all the observations, then what you have is a chain of things, and if any link of that chain is wrong, the whole formulation collapses. If a chain is really only as strong as its weakest link, then a very lengthy chain of logical inferences is a chain with a very low probability of being right.

* why do Zebras have stripes when one of their predators in roughly the same size range has polka-dots (Leopards)?, and another one even closer to Zebras in size is solidly colored (Lions)? Try to develop a new law relating to natural selection that rules out any possibilitys that this is simply happenstance, and yet that doesn't predict what sorts of camoflage any other species should display in case some of the facts don't fit that case.

Comment Re:What equations? (Score 2) 89

Are they talking about general relativity equations?
That's included, but I think the article and summary are actually getting it right for once. The equations in question are ones that reconcile GR with Quantum Mechanics, and that, in general, means variations on various String or Brane Theories, and quite possibly specifically Supersymmetry, if that's not being completly discarded by the researchers just because CERN is finding preliminary evidence that the simplest and lowest energy Supersymmetry model doesn't work. It's possible some alternatives to those models can also be tested and refined or dismissed, but either way, we really are looking at math where complexity increases result time very, very rapidly. Here's a link for an example of some math used for both Supersymmetry and more general String Theory calculations - If you look at the section specifically about "Stringy theories" calculations, there's a good example of a formula that's obviously, by simple inspection, prone to grow very quickly with added terms for more complex situations, and there's some other quite good examples in the lead up to that section.

Lie superalgebras of string theories
http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/97...

(Note: Paper is 22 pages in PDF, and is NOT behind a paywall).

Comment Re:freedoms f----d (Score 2) 132

I'm sure that the parent poster can define their own use of the term "rent seeking", but in case you're genuinely unaware of the more common uses of the term, in general, it involves taking a situation where an item or good is normally fully owned by the person who bought it, and making it a situation where the item or good is somewhat changed, so that it must be paid for by perpetual fees, without the payer gaining all the rights they had in the older situation. "Rent seeking" is not the same thing as merely choosing a rental model for seeking profit, rather it's placing blocks before those potential customers who want to instead own the good or item and all the rights that are normally associated with owning that particular item..

                For example, if I own a physical copy of a book, one of the things I may value is that I can use that copy to detect when someone edits the text of a new edition to change what the author actually wrote, particularly if that change is to the author's views on philosophical, political or religious ideas. If my copy of a book is in rented storage 'in the cloud', ownership doesn't come with that ability anymore. Even if storage is made dependent on a one time fee, as for a physical purchase, the persons controlling access gain the ability to charge rent to those persons who want all the rights everybody once had (in this case, casual users may not see a difference, but universities and such can be manipulated into paying regular fees for access to verified, un-tampered-with editions or databases).

              Rent-seeking frequently involves lieing, for example by arguing that ownership never meant you could do absolutely anything you wanted with property, so a publicly ratified speed limit is equivalent to a private lease contract where you agree to let the carmaker give your personal payment data to all insurance companies and receive fees from them. It also involves special privilege (in the most literal meaning of that word, private law) in legislation - for example, the laws in most US states which state there is a contract attached to purchase of a movie theater ticket, even though the patrons don''t see or sign that contract. Such associated methodologies are often an indication that the goal is not merlely to offer something for rent voluntarily, but to coerce.

Comment Re:Let me get this right (Score 2) 839

It encourages people to save and hoard till the day they die, which defeats the purpose of money.

So, if it encourages people to build up some capital, it's a bad thing, eh?

Yes, I'm aware that current economic theories pretty much rely on most everyone spending their money as fast as they make it.

And then bitch about the fact that they don't set aside money for their old age, or to deal with bad economic times, etc....

Comment Re: It only takes one ... (Score 5, Insightful) 381

The experts only screwed up if it turns out that a low grade fever of less than 100.4 F actually indicates the Ebola patient has entered the contagious stage. (Her fever reached 99.5 F, less than a degree above normal.). What reasonable people here are debating is whether the current standard rules are enough or if we should adjust them further to 'err on the side of caution'. Personally, I would go with more caution by the CDC, AND more caution by the airline, but carry that far enough, and we take a flamethrower to a perfectly good airplane. Constant calls for more caution have associated costs, and need to come from people who generally think about consequences.
            Unfortunately, some people in the discussion are neither reasonable nor unbiased. Bill O'Riley for example, is calling for mass firings and resignations at the CDC, going all the way to the top, but has been unwilling to even criticise the fact that his own party has blocked selecting a new surgeon general for seven months. If America does end up with Tens of Thousands dead, it will be because of people who are so political that they want immediate reprisals against people of the other party they think may have made mistakes that may contribute to deaths in the future, but no action taken when we already have at least one actual death and clear indications of actual negligence, unless there's political capital to be made and it doesn't step on anyone in their own party's toes.

Comment Re:US,Nigeria (Score 4, Insightful) 381

Hmm, interesting theory, that.

Both Nigeria and the USA began their ebola problems with one (1) Liberian man entering their country with ebola.

Nigeria ended up with ~20 ebola cases, of which 9 died.

So far, the USA has had ~3 cases, of which one has died.

Now, the USA isn't done yet. Probably. Maybe. We'll see.

But so far, our situation is essentially identical with Nigeria's, and our outcome is the same as or better than their outcome. Note the "so far" - it's important.

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