I forgot to mention this quote: "They were followed for five years, and any volunteers who developed cognitive symptoms were excluded from the study."

Does anybody see a problem with that in a *controlled* experiment?

Can you draw any conclusion at all from this study? Really?

What's fascinating is that this kind of "scientific reporting" (and I use that term very loosely) is so typical.

Is there any possibility of truth? Certainly. Is there any trend they can see, in this study? Absolutely none at all.

Pure. Unadulterated. Tripe.

I saw this quote: "the researchers studied brain images of 94 people in their 70s who had participated in an earlier study looking at cardiovascular health and cognition."

At that point, I said, "Stop. What a useless study." Look at the sample size again... 94?!?!? That has a roughly 10% margin of error built in to the sample size (at a 95% confidence interval). At least they included the sample size! ...and then there's the operative word "study...." That, word (in the singular, no less), gives me all sorts of warm fuzzies.

So, is that 8% (+/- 10%) less brain mass for obese elderly people or a range from 7.2% to 8.8% for obese elderly people, based on this sample and a 95% confidence interval? I'm thinking the former.

In statistics class, this was called by the name "statistical deception." Just because a single study of 94 people says so, don't believe it. It has a roughly 50% chance of being right -- or wrong (at a 100% confidence interval) but so do psychics, horoscopes, and fortune cookies.

Junk science prevails in the popular press. Anything sensational gets front-page headlines -- it gets grant money and sells news. It doesn't matter that the next study contradicts it, the next supports it, the next contradicts that one, and on and on the tennis match goes....

Once this has been peer reviewed numerous times with tens of thousands of people per study, call me. I'll be getting a snack, in the mean time.

Here's a couple of links to refresh people with the term "margin of error:"
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margin_of_error
    http://www.isixsigma.com/library/content/c040607a.asp

I thought about the same thing.

So, use Stabil, but only fill your tank up 1/4 of the way, until you go on a long trip.

Rolls eyes. As a Kansas Citian (Kansas side), I've also looked at earthquake maps.... KC (KS/MO) is one of the least earthquake prone areas in the US.

So, underground in Kansas is good.

Oh yeah, what about that "remote" place on Long Island? Huh? How is anywhere on Long Island remote, compared to most of the US?

Yes, the TRS-80 Model 1 with Level 1 basic included a manual that was vaguely similar to this.

In fact, David Lien's manual is considered among the best ever made.

Yes and no.

Since this app is open source, there should be no issue, or else a fork will promptly be created.

Munich's now a State! Way to go, Linux!!!

DC? Absolutely.

Especially since they're ignoring the 10th Amendment on this one....

Then there's the powers of ten cost of fixing problems...
    Design = $1
    Development = $10
    Debugging = $100
    Deployment = $1000
    - Frederick P. Brooks
    The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software
    Engineering, Anniversary Edition (2nd Edition)

Think of it this way....

So, anything you catch in design costs you a "buck" for your effort. If you catch it during development, it *still* only costs you "10 bucks."

If you wait until debugging ("100 bucks") or deployment ("1000 bucks"), you're hosed.

You can be more or less effective during a code review, but as long as it catches stuff, it's still far easier, cheaper, faster, better to catch it there, than later... Yes, it may be 10x harder to catch during a code review than a design review. Well, you're just proving the Mythical Man Month to be true. Your boss knows it, too, and he's trying to stop the vicious debug -> deploy problem.

Do you want screaming customers at 4:00a, calling you about some obscure error in a program you wrote, when it might be avoidable? Does your boss want to earn blame for a team of "bad coders?"

I'd say that it's good that your boss wants this bit of extra discipline -- for your sake, his, the customers', and the company's....

Sure it was the prevailing opinion of the day. Look at Darwin's own racist views:
    here and here, too

By the way, if you look at Wikipedia on Darwin, whomever wrote this takes a biased, opposing view. However, it is well known (and well documented) that Darwin was a racist who believed that these were lower species of humans that must be exterminated! Today's spin doctors, however, want this issue of Darwin's racism to go away.

How many know today that Darwin's original title to Origin of the Species was On the Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection, or, the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life? You can read it, here.

His views were even clearer in The Descent of Man.

On the other hand, he didn't believe in slavery, which is good.

It has also been said that Adolf Hitler used Social Darwinism to exterminate millions of people in WWII. While that's not Darwin's fault, Hitler was being consistent to Darwin's viewpoints.

I did floppy installs, but before that, in 1992 or 1993 a friend and I installed SLS from QIC tape (Linux 0.9x).

He had a COMPAQ with a hard drive measured in megabytes.

He worked on a C program to demonstrate multitasking, which he couldn't as easily do on DOS.

If only we knew that we could have written a few line shell script to do the same.

So, it sounds like (pardon the pun) we have just departed the Golden Age of sound quality.

I was looking forward to high-quality 192KHz, 24-bit surround-sound audio becoming the norm -- compressed or not.

However, if the commercial music guys read reports like this, they'll degrade the sound either for cost or for effect. That's bad. :-(

It's also supposed to be bad for your ears (as are the ear buds most people use).

Most of the time, I can tell the difference right away for 128Kbit (or less) compressed audio.

When I was in high school/college, uncompressed 44.1KHz, 16-bit stereo (CD quality) was the norm and sounded nice, whether recorded as AAD, DAD, or DDD. (People debated the merits of each).

Today, here's your $1.00 MP3, and with better/faster/cheaper technology, we're getting worse audio and paying more!

Ergo, it was the Golden Age that was... :-(

1: // Code Submission by
2: // Our first "open source" code contribution to this thing called "an Apache project"
3: //
4: //
5: // Copyright (c) 2008-2009 by
6: //
7: //
8: // Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited.
9: // Use at your own risk.
10: // Read the EULA. You have been warned!!!
11: // All Rights Reserved
12: System.out.writeln("All your base are belong to us.\n");
13: System.out.writeln("Have a nice day.");

Where do you even get a small geothermal generator (1 KW in your example)?

So far, I find nothing on Google about said machines, except whitepapers for experimental models.

Are there companies that specialize in this, and if so, what kind of costs are involved, provided you have the land, zoning, geothermal conditions, etc.?

I, for one, am interested.

(Plus, with projects like Scala and Clojure it's looking increasingly like the JVM isn't going anywhere any time soon, regardless of Java's fate)

...and especially JRuby! www.jruby.org