Comment Re:Ask Japan... (Score 1) 309
I think a better question is: why use a design requiring active cooling? Obviously, this only applies going forward.
I think a better question is: why use a design requiring active cooling? Obviously, this only applies going forward.
Yes. I live approximately 35 miles downstream from an active plant. Wouldn't mind them building a new (emphasis on new: modern design, preferably a MSR) plant nearby either.
This is essentially the process for beer.
I would suggest that the argument here is weak because it collapses everything into a binary view: Science and the Rest_of_Us.
Indeed, we need to be able to count past two here. It's silly to view Science in a monolothic way that ignores time, competing views, vested interests, etc.
The issues raised here actually have more to do with the relative inability of folk to DIGEST information from Science, scientists and scientific studies than it really does with a lack of credibility on the part of Science and Scientists. Very often any benefit or harm discovered in a study is altogether minor. And yet, folk latch on to something being either good or bad (that inability to count past two again).
Furthermore, it is sheer folly to ignore the way the general population feeds information back into itself and turns things into trends and fads. Why blame the Scientists when the "crediblity problem" is often a factor of marketing forces, popular science (both facile journalism and self-help books), fads, etc.?
Because what is the alternative? Alchemy? Voodoo? Religion?
There are two things to say about this:
1) Diet and fitness are hard problems because humans evolved as opportunistic hunter-gatherer-scavengers, so we are moderately well adapted to almost any imaginable lifestyle. When the optimum is broad and shallow (which it necessarily is, especially for diet, unless you are an evolution denialist) it is easy to wander around in the noise.
This is made worse by snake-oil salespeople who are dedicated to the idea that the optimum is narrow and deep, and they can sell you its precise location. They take any minor wobble that scientists identify--which based on evolution is almost certainly noise--and declare it the One True Location of Perfect Health.
2) The alternative is stories. Science fails to get traction with the public because it lacks narrative, which is an idea I explore in a lot more depth here: http://www.amazon.com/Darwins-...
If I read the article (or even the summary) correctly, this is about updating the known_hosts file, not authorized_keys. So, even with this enabled, this only affects the "The hostkey has changed" warning message, not who can log in with which keys. Although I am a tad uneasy about automatic key updates, this seems to be fairly safe, and it makes it so much easier to change a hostkey, without bothering all the users of a system.
It's like having a super-long prehensile finger with a tongue at the end. You do the math.
There are summaries? What are these "articles" you speak of?
Indeed. It's blood money they're taking.
Pay a decent wage and you'll get better candidates. Gas station attendants are generally part-time, no benefits, minimum wage, not paid nearly enough to give a shit in a dead-end job. You get what you pay for.
My friend was at least smart and professional enough to refuse all such advances, not all are so.
Your own answer makes clear what anyone who isn't a sociopath knows: people in positions of power and respect--which includes professors and college instructors--have a professional obligation to refuse all such advances.
There are a whole bunch of reasons for this, but a big one is that even if you can't imagine it[*] people in such positions have a ridiculous amount of influence over some individuals, a degree that amounts to coercion.
[*] though why anyone would think what they can or cannot imagine is interesting or relevant to any question of what is real is unclear... however I've seen some commenters here announce their imaginary ideas as if they were somehow important to the question.
That was the point of my comment. I stated what had been done previously and then moved on to the new work.
This is incredibly cool. Previous work has managed to fully stop light, but this is quite a finding (that light can travel slower through a vacuum).
The old stuff, from Wiki:
In 1998, Danish physicist Lene Vestergaard Hau led a combined team from Harvard University and the Rowland Institute for Science which succeeded in slowing a beam of light to about 17 meters per second,[1] and researchers at UC Berkeley slowed the speed of light traveling through a semiconductor to 9.7 kilometers per second in 2004. Hau later succeeded in stopping light completely, and developed methods by which it can be stopped and later restarted.
However, now we can alter the structure of the beam of light and measure a slowdown (from the abstract):
Our work highlights that, even in free space, the invariance of the speed of light only applies to plane waves. Introducing spatial structure to an optical beam, even for a single photon, reduces the group velocity of the light by a readily measurable amount.
Details from the pre-print:
We use an ultraviolet laser incident upon a beta-barium borate (BBO) crystal to produce photon pairs with central wavelength at 710 nm. The photons, called signal and idler, pass through an interference filter of spectral bandwidth 10 nm and are collected by polarization-maintaining, single-mode fibers. One fiber is mounted on an axial translation stage to control the path length (Fig. 2A). The idler photon goes through polarization maintaining fibers before being fed to the input port of a fiber-coupled beam splitter (Fig. 2B) (17). Instead of going straight to the other beam splitter input, the signal photon is propagated through a free-space section (Fig. 2C). This consists of fiber-coupling optics to collimate the light and two spatial light modulators (SLMs). SLMs are pixelated, liquid-crystal devices that can be encoded to act as diffractive optical elements implementing axicons, lenses and similar optical components. The first SLM can be programmed to act as a simple diffraction grating such that the light remains collimated in the intervening space, or programmed to act as an element to structure the beam (e.g. axicons or lenses with focal length ). The second SLM, placed at a distance 2, reverses this structuring so that the light can be coupled back into the single-mode fiber that feeds to the other input port of the beam splitter. The output ports of the fiber-coupled beam splitter are connected to single-photon detectors, which in turn feed a gated counter (Fig. 2D). The coincident count rate is then recorded as a function of path difference between the signal and idler arms. The position of the HOM dip is recorded as a function of the spatial shaping of the signal photon.
Even better. I was a military brat. During my childhood, I lived overseas and in various locations around the US (both coasts, north and south, rainy/wet/cold, hot/dry, and hot/wet).
You know how people go to college and get sick because they're exposed to new infectious agents? (I'm steering heavily into <anecdote> territory here, take it with some salt.) I don't recall an excess of children being sick after transferring in, nor do I remember getting a major illness, with one exception. One of the couple times I got the flu was immediately after moving (we were still in billeting). That said, it was still rare overall to get sick.
I often wonder if moving frequently and receiving vaccinations for everything under the sun (military requirements) helped. But I can't really say. Perhaps the extensive and thorough vaccination did reduce the numbers of sick people, but I don't have data to say either way.</anecdote>
Sure, I got the flu a couple times (in my childhood). Sure I had ear aches (however, I have serious ear problems, resulting in multiple surgeries and my being nearly deaf). But: athletes foot? migraines? frequent sore throats and pink eye? pneumonia? Nope, none of it.
I certainly didn't get the flu every year and I definitely didn't get most of the stuff you listed. I've been quite healthy, with the minor exception of the ears being useless. The CDC's own stats support this, with only roughly 20-30% of specimens tested being positive for influenza. That's not "most people". It's significant, sure, but it isn't "most people" and it's definitely not "most people every year".
I think you might consider getting your hypochondria checked out.
He has not acquired a fortune; the fortune has acquired him. -- Bion
