Comment Godspeed (Score 1) 1521
You are lucky that you leave with the satisfaction that arises from a job well done. Congratulations on your achievement and best of luck in your future life. You'll be missed.
Time to move on.
Comment Re:Someone help me out. (Score 1) 54
I'm a complete idiot with this sort of thing, but why did they orbit so far away (9k miles)? It surely can't have that great of a gravitational pull, can it? Why not get as close as is prudent (or is 9k miles the prudence limit)? It seems like the closer the better for studying the thing.
As someone far more knowledgeable than me has pointed out elsewhere, they did this because astronomers are not sure about the exact mass of the asteroid and therefore want to play it safe until they have more data, at which point they plan to lower the orbit.
Comment Adverse drug events and duplicity (Score 1) 60
Drugmakers are already required to keep track of adverse drug events that arise during clinical testing. Much of this information is reported to regulatory agencies on almost a daily basis and there's a lot of work going behind the scenes to make sure the information is reliable, consistent and keeps patient privacy.
I can understand to some extent why drugmakers aren't too keen to jump into this. There is little use in adding yet another database into an already busy workflow. This new database is guaranteed to be different from many in-house solutions currently in use, so you will need to train people, get them used to the new process, etc. just to input the same data the regulator already receives. IMO this won't be worth the effort in the eyes of many drugmakers unless you get regulatory agencies involved.
I am not saying in general this is not a worthy cause. We currently have more data derived from genomics (and all the other -omics) than we can analyze. However to be successful this guys need to make sure they aren't duplicating the functionality of the myriad of public databases already out there.
Comment More to this discussion... (Score 1) 152
...in this great blog. Also check out the rest of the posts, if you're a chemist you'll definitely will enjoy the "stuff I won't work with" series.
Comment Re:Enhancements (Score 1) 67
What's your point? If we didn't have equipment, we couldn't see the rings around Saturn. We couldn't see Uranus let alone Neptune.
You probably mean we couldn't see the rings around Jupiter instead of Saturn. Saturn's rings are quite visible from any decent backyard telescope.
Living In Tokyo's Capsule Hotels 269
afabbro writes "Capsule Hotel Shinjuku 510 once offered a night’s refuge to salarymen who had missed the last train home. Now with Japan enduring its worst recession since World War II, it is becoming an affordable option for people with nowhere else to go. The Hotel 510’s capsules are only 6 1/2 feet long by 5 feet wide. Guests must keep possessions, like shirts and shaving cream, in lockers outside of the capsules. Atsushi Nakanishi, jobless since Christmas says, 'It’s just a place to crawl into and sleep. You get used to it.'”
Comment Re:infinite? (Score 1) 241
You could probably get more than that if you rotate 90 degrees on the same spot those pixels that have a color gradient.
Proton Beams Sent Around the LHC 115
feldhaus writes "The BBC reports that the first beams for over one year have been successfully sent around the complete circumference of the Large Hadron Collider. Engineers do not yet have a stable circulating beam but they hope to by 0600 GMT on Saturday."
Comment Good changes (Score 5, Insightful) 328
The latest patch has been great for me. I'm more of a casual player and now I'm able to level up with just a couple hours of gameplay. Before it would take me a good couple days to increase just one level, which got increasingly frustrating and became the main reason why I canceled my subscription last year. I'm also a big fan of soloing and now I'm able to do that in more areas of the game (I usually do the party quests and dungeons during the weekends when all my friends are able to connect at the same time).
Overall I think it was a good move for players like me. I don't know what the "old-timers" would think about it, though...
Overall I think it was a good move for players like me. I don't know what the "old-timers" would think about it, though...
DNA to Test Theory of Roman Village in China 203
Reverse Gear writes "Many of the inhabitants of a lonely village in north western China seems to have distinctive western features. An old theory from the 50s suggests that a Roman legion lost in what is now Iran in the year 53BC lost their commanding officer. They traveled east, so the legend goes, working as mercenaries until they were caught by the Chinese 17 years later. The Chinese described them as using a 'fish-scale formation', which could be a reference to the well-known Roman phalanx technique called the 'tortoise'. The remainder of the legion, it is suggested, may have intermarried with the villagers in Liqian. Scientists are now trying to verify the fascinating theory by testing the DNA of the inhabitants of the Chinese village."
Journal Journal: Play Scrabble Online for free 1
Check out Scrabulous at http://www.scrabulous.com/ .
It's a great new site for playing Scrabble online (free of course :)). The site looks fresh and some of the features I really like are:
- Automatic Adjudication - helps you fight against quitters
- Advanced Rating System - gives you a good idea of where you stand
- Clean interface and very user friendly
- Really nice, moderated community makes this site kid-f
Submission + - Writing Open Source Documentation?
An anonymous reader writes: I'm an Open Source guy. I run Linux, I suggest FF and OO.org to friends. And I'd like to give back. The problem is, I'm not a coder. So how do I go about writing documentation, and what kind of projects should I look into? What are some stellar examples?
Submission + - DNA to test old theory of Roman village in China
Reverse Gear writes: "Many of the inhabitants of a lonely village in north western China seems to have distinctive western features.
An old theory from the 1950'ies suggests that an old roman legion which in 53BC had lost it's commander, Markus Craccus, in what is now Iran, had been traveling east as mercenaries until they were caught by the Chinese 17 years later. The Chinese described them as using a "fish-scale formation". The remainders of the legion is then suggested to have been the ancestors of the village.
Scientists are now trying to verify the fascinating theory by testing the DNA of the inhabitants of the Chinese village."
An old theory from the 1950'ies suggests that an old roman legion which in 53BC had lost it's commander, Markus Craccus, in what is now Iran, had been traveling east as mercenaries until they were caught by the Chinese 17 years later. The Chinese described them as using a "fish-scale formation". The remainders of the legion is then suggested to have been the ancestors of the village.
Scientists are now trying to verify the fascinating theory by testing the DNA of the inhabitants of the Chinese village."
Journal SPAM: U.S. website: Mossad killed Iranian nuclear physicist
Last update - 13:55 04/02/2007
U.S. website: Mossad killed Iranian nuclear physicist
By Yossi Melman, Haaretz Correspondent
A senior nuclear physicist involved in Iran's nuclear program who died under mysterious circumstances two weeks ago was killed by the Mossad, according to a report released in a U.S. website this weekend.
Submission + - Scientology critic arrested after 6 years
destinyland writes: "Friday police arrested 64-year-old Keith Henson. In 2000 after picketing a Scientology complex, he was arrested as a threat because of a joke Usenet post about "Tom Cruise Missiles." He fled to Canada after being found guilty of "interfering" with a religion, and spent the next 6 years living as a fugitive. Besides being a digital encryption and free speech advocate, he's one of the original Burr-Brown/Texas Instruments researchers and a co-founder of the Space Colony movement."
