That being said - I believe you may have misinterpreted my use of the term.
The way that you've defined your terms, it would be at least as accurate to re-label most of the individuals who've misappropriated the term "skeptic" as "zealots" as well.
Couldn't the same be said for climate change zealots?
Hard to determine, really. We haven't yet encountered a circumstance where the competent scientists (I believe you may have mistyped that phrase as "zealots" in your post) have firmly espoused a position that contradicts available evidence, based in implausible and improbable theories of error or conspiracy.
I'm going to borrow and adapt an analogy from The Relativity of Wrong , an essay by Isaac Asimov. Consider the question of the shape of the Earth. Alice and Bob believe, respectively, that the Earth is a sphere and an oblate ellipsoid. (We'll call them the pro-roundness zealots.) Carol and Dave believe that the earth is a flat plane and a tetrahedron. (We'll say Carol and Dave represent the roundness "skeptics".)
In point of fact, all four individuals are "wrong". The Earth's shape is complex, with lots of wiggly little bumps and depressions and distortions and lumps. Nevertheless, I know which camp -- and it's not the "skeptics" -- has done a better job of interpreting the data and generating a reasonable approximation of reality. It's not The Truth, but it's close enough to do useful work.
I meant those who survive the impact.
There's just no respect for comedy these days.
Most crash survivors are killed by burns and smoke inhalation.
Most crash survivors aren't killed.
Now I would want to see any studies done as to the actual effectiveness of any of these so-called safety positions [it doesn't actually matter for me, as being 6'5", being in that bent over position is impossible for me anywhere but in first-class]. Has it been shown that it actually has helped in real accidents, or it is just a way to try to get people to sit still and out of the way?
Having the head as close to (ideally, in contact with) the surface it is most likely to strike reduces the risk and severity of head trauma. Bending over (such that one's head is below the level of the seatbacks) also may provide some protection in the event that the overhead storage compartments collapse. Other aspects of the "brace" position are designed to prevent injury to oneself and others caused by flailing limbs and impact of feet and legs with the seats ahead. The recommended position is based on on-the-ground laboratory crash tests as well as the aftermath of real crashes (particularly the 1989 Kegworth air disaster).
Asking for figures to be given with units which actually make sense indicates competence, not arrogance....
Not really. For the person asking the question "Will this mean I can get reliable wifi in my bedroom now?" the qualitative experience of "I'm seeing two to four more bars" is a relatively meaningful unit. The little 'bar'-type displays of wifi signal strength, or battery life, or whatever other electronic property one might wish a consumer to be aware of virtually always have between 4 and 6 bars at full scale; one doesn't have to be familiar with a particular brand or device in order to interpret a 2-to-4-bar increase as significant-but-not-magical.
In contrast, saying "The reflector provided me with a 4 dB gain" isn't helpful to the average individual ("The router is how loud now?") and shrug-worthy to any competent electrical engineer ("Meh; that's about what I would have guessed. The gain is going to depend quite a bit on exactly how the can is placed and shaped - and on the design of my router - anyway; I'll just fiddle with mine until I get the best signal.")
Demanding precise measurements in technically-correct units characterizing a one-off device held together with Blu-Tack isn't an indication of competence, it's an indication of arrogance and pedantry.
The energy in subway trains is dwarfed by the energy used and lost on runways for jetliners.
A jetliner starts and stops once every four hours. A subway train starts and stops once every minute or two.
Non-military aircraft (and for that matter, non-carrier-based military aircraft) aren't designed and strengthened to survive being launched or caught by ground-based restraints. Are you sure that you can offset the energy cost of keeping that extra weight (the additional hardware and heavier framing) aloft? For that matter, can you justify the greater risk of accidents caused by the more-complex landing and takeoff system your idea would require?
If subway trains use regenerative braking to feed power back to the grid during periods of high demand they are reducing the strain on the grid, lowering demands on peaker generating stations.
No, no, no. If the trains were feeding the braking power back into the grid, it would make the situation worse, not better. Every time a train stopped there would be fifteen seconds of reduced load (by four megawatts or so) during braking, followed fifteen seconds of passenger boarding, followed by thirty seconds of increased load (by three or four megawatts) during acceleration out of the station. Instead of having a swing of four megawatts of grid load, there would be local swings of eight megawatts per train. Not good.
The advantage here is that the energy is stored (in flywheels at each station) and fed back to the same train a little bit later. Nothing goes back to the grid, and a lot less is drawn from it. That's how this (or other, similar systems which have been proposed in the past) would reduce the strain on the grid.
Of course, from what *I* understand about stem cells, injecting yourself with them all willy-nilly is as likely to lead to cancer as it is to a positive outcome. Or possibly growing an eyeball in the affected area. I bet Rick Perry will come to the taxpayer for some of that awesome government health care that the rest of us can't have, if he's suddenly afflicted with a case of back-eyeballs.
While Rick Perry with a terrible case of back-eyeballs is an amusing picture (and I look forward to seeing it on the campaign trail), that's not really how stem cell therapies work. You see, there are stem cells, and there are stem cells.
Fundamentally, stem cells are any cells that are capable of self-renewal -- that is, they can divide to make more stem cells like themselves, as needed. Most are also capable of some sort of differentiation: their daughter cells can form other cell types. The range of cell types that a stem cell can spawn (differentiate into) depends on the type of stem cell you're dealing with. The kind of stem cell that can differentiate into heart muscle, or nerve tissue, or back-blood cells, or back-eyeballs, is a pluripotent or totipotent stem cell; it can be coaxed into making just about any cell in the body. (Embryonic stem cells fall into this category; you can use them to make any part of a full-blown human, given the right biochemical signals. This is why embryonic stem cells are of such great interest to medical researchers.)
Once you get to an adult human, you don't (as far as we know) have any of these pluripotent stem cells left. Instead, we have partially-differentiated and fully-differentiated populations of multipotent and even unipotent stem cells: stem cells that can make just a few types - or even just one type - of daughter cells. In the bone marrow, for instance, we have (multipotent) hematopoietic stem cells: stem cells which can only make blood and blood-forming cells. In the skin, we have stem cells that can only make more skin and skin-forming cells.
In the case of Governor Perry, adipose (fatty) tissue was extracted, and adipose stem cells were isolated and reinjected. Presumably, they shouldn't be capable of making anything but soft tissue. (That said, I suppose there is the possibility of partial de-differentiation of the stem cells so that they can produce a larger range of cell types; the technique he used is poorly characterized and not supported by proper clinical trials.) In theory, the presence of adipose stem cells circulating in the blood could lead to the formation of lipomas--tumors made of fat cells experiencing uncontrolled division. In practice, I suspect that the injected stem cells will quickly recognize that they are out of their appropriate habitat and die off shortly after injection: a useless, politically-motivated therapeutic intervention that risks infection and wastes money.
Diving with your knees is not dangerous....
You sir, are a dangerously deluded idiot, who will someday kill an intelligent person through your own carelessness.
What if you need to supply a control input that's more than just basic lane-following? (Suppose there's debris in the road ahead of you? Shredded bits of truck tire are not uncommon, and within the last month I had to avoid what looked to be an escaped spare tire in the middle of a busy highway.) One cannot make fast, precise adjustments with one's knees. Either you hit the obstacle, or you sideswipe the car beside you, or you lose control on the shoulder.
What if you hit a pothole or other serious pavement irregularity? If you catch one unlucky bump without a firm grip on the wheel, you're across your lane and into oncoming traffic before you can regain control of the car.
By the way, where are your feet for all this? If your legs are busy holding the wheel and the cruise control is holding the throttle, then you're not ready to supply pedal inputs (probably brake, but occasionally gas) if they're urgently required.
70% removal of cancerous tissues from a terminal patient with no significant side effects (they mention flu like symptoms but I assure you compared to chemo or radiation that isn't even worth mentioning).
Speaking generally about cancer therapies, 70% reduction in tumor burden is interesting, but almost totally irrelevant from the standpoint of 'cure'. If you successfully kill off 70% of malignant cells, and the remaining cells divide once per week (not uncommon in malignant tumors), then you'll be back to your original tumor burden in less than two weeks--and often, the remaining cells will be resistant to the original therapy.
FTA: Both the National Cancer Institute and several pharmaceutical companies declined to pay for the research.
Of course they did. If you cure cancer with one shot, the cash cow of chemo drugs dries up for Big Pharma and the cash cow of donations dries up for the American Cancer Society and other 'non-profit' organization.
Paranoia is not required here. The success rate for grant applications to the National Cancer Institute in 2010 was just 17%. Roughly five out of every six NCI grant applications failed to receive funding. The margin between proposals that receive funding and those which do not is razor thin. Probably the top two-thirds to one-half of NCI proposals contain solid science that is worth doing and ought to be funded. Since the pool of government money is limited, two out of three worthwhile projects won't get funded--mostly through factors that boil down to bad luck.
This treatment is one of many, many, many gene therapy approaches in various stages of development and testing. Most such therapies haven't lived up to their promise, and so it is difficult to get additional funding in this area. I'm thrilled that these guys have managed to hit on the one-in-a-million combination of disease and therapeutic approach that finally (seems to) work, but I'm also not totally surprised that they've had some difficulty acquiring big-money funding.
I'll also note in passing that your conspiracy theory about the American Cancer Society (and other charitable organizations which fund research) is idiotic. Even if we grant the silly assumption that they're just money-grubbing, self-perpetuating bureaucracies interested only in maintaining their own longevity at the expense of cancer patients, this particular treatment is applicable to well under 1% of total cancers and well under 1% of total cancer deaths. Despite falling under a single umbrella name, cancer isn't one disease; it's hundreds of different diseases. This cancer (chronic lymphocytic leukemia) is particularly and specifically vulnerable to the type of therapy used in this study because it is a cancer of the blood (with easily-accessible-to-therapy circulating cells, unlike in any sort of solid tumor), it is relatively slow growing, and the cells involved are a very homogeneous population (easy to specifically target, at least for cancer cells). If I were an evil genius then this is exactly the sort of work I would encourage, because it looks good but will only ultimately help a very small fraction of the population.
This is...so incredible. The application of modified white cells and using HIV as a carrier has use beyond just cancer. It is too bad the drug companies and big cancer foundations didn't back this from the start. Hopefully the money will come pouring in now.
The use of retroviral vectors for gene therapy (and for basic biological science research, too) has been an active area of extensive research pretty much since we first figured out how these viruses worked. I would be shocked if there were any substantial cancer research institutes anywhere that didn't have at least a couple of projects that used retroviral methods.
Gene therapy techniques of any kind are conceptually easy but can be technically very finicky. If this is the one project in a thousand that actually works effectively and cleanly (and it may just be) then that's wonderful -- but the absence of other success stories isn't because of a lack of funding for research in this area.
These people are fucking idiots. Are they trained to go poking around devices that look like bombs? I thought that SOP for something that looked like a bomb was as follows:
The Slashdot post is poorly - indeed, deceptively - written. What the actual article says is: "X-ray screening workers spotted the science project in a carry-on bag...Out of an abundance of caution, screening operations were suspended and the terminal was evacuated...The Omaha Police Department's Explosive Ordnance Disposal Unit cleared the item with negative findings."
In other words, exactly what you think is supposed to happen, happened. The screeners called the bomb squad and got everyone else out of the way. After the bomb squad cleared the device, they took photographs. Presumably they did so because they want to be able to communicate to their colleagues what happened in this relatively unusual incident, and hopefully they want to learn from it.
On the other hand, if they realized that this was not an explosive device then they should not have blown the thing up. They either handled a potential IED in a remarkably unsafe manner or they knowingly detonated a safe object. Either way, the TSA has proven their incompetence.
The blown-up Altoids tin shown in the other linked blog was from a case where a bag was left unattended with the device inside. In that case, the bomb squad couldn't determine with complete confidence that the device seen on the x-ray was harmless, so they blew it up as a precaution. In that case, no one fiddled with the object in order to take pictures before the detonation.
While I'm no fan of the TSA, they don't deserve the particular and specific scorn you're heaping on them based on your reading of the sloppy Slashdot summary (and your failure to read the linked articles).
For those who have not seen the film or won't bother, the secret solution to the ultra secure keypad lock is to.... kick the door in.
Sometimes it can be almost as useful to know that a lock has been compromised as it is to have it remain secure.
Kicking in the door (and variations on that theme) certainly provides access to the locked space, but it provides undetected, unaudited access only until the security guard or cleaning staff make their next trip down the hall. Depending on what's on the other side of that door, a few minutes of readily-detected, one-time access may be quite a bit less harmful than months of covert access.
Work without a vision is slavery, Vision without work is a pipe dream, But vision with work is the hope of the world.
