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Comment Re:They've been moving that way for a while (Score 2) 13

by claytonjr (#62278669) Attached to: FDA Clears First Smartphone App For Insulin Delivery

My wife's latest Omnipod pump comes with a controller which, if you were to dismantle it, would likely turn out to be an off-the-shelf unbranded smartphone running a customized Android. Presumably this device is a stopgap until that app gets approval.

I'm just guessing that your wife is using the dash model? I just got hooked up today. The off brand android model is called a PDM, and it has all of the cell phone bits turned off. To my knowledge, the us gov't didn't originally allow insulin delivery via smart phone until today - thus the cheap android/pdm device. There is an omnipod model 5 coming out is the very near future - it's my understanding that it should talk to smart phones then.
Science

Scientists Reveal How We Can Forget On Purpose 22

Posted by msmash from the forget-like-it-doesn't-matter dept.
An anonymous reader writes: When people say, "Forget you heard that," they don't usually mean literally. But it turns out that you can stop yourself from remembering, at least on a small scale. People can intentionally forget memories by changing how they think about the context those memories were made in, scientists reported this week in the journal Psychonomic Bulletin and Review. In the experiment, people studied a random list of words while viewing pictures of landscapes such as beaches or forests. They were then instructed to either remember or forget those words. The scientists then used an fMRI to track brain activity related to the outdoor scenes they'd planted as context for the word memories. They saw that people who'd been ordered to forget thought less about the context. The better people were at wiping nature-related thoughts from their minds, the fewer words they could later recall from their list.

Comment Re:I have a much more ambitious vision (Score 1) 1073

by claytonjr (#34779876) Attached to: The Continued Censorship of Huckleberry Finn

Lets reverse roles: How would you feel about living in China, behind their great firewall? They are trying to censor the content that it's population is exposed to. On Slashdot, that move is regarded as foolish. It seems that the citizens of China are always trying to find ways around it. I think in someways, filtering is good. But not in a one-size-fits-all sort of way.

To answer your question: I don't think we'd be better off for it.

Comment Re:Might I suggest an alternative currency (Score 1) 454

by claytonjr (#34297364) Attached to: Estonian Economist Suggests Abandoning Cash

In fact the value of currency is psychological.

In fact it's not. Or more precisely, not only.

If one dollar buys one candy bar, why should that change if there are more dollars? Nothing has really changed in terms of the candy bar's production costs.

The price of an item is a function of its scarcity and of the effort required to create it. If everybody had lots of money, nobody would be willing to work to create more candy (why bother making candy for a buck a piece, when you can just shake the money tree in the backyard, and get more bucks with less effort?). So candy becomes a scarce resource, and everybody competes for the same limited amount of candy. The only way to get the sweet luxury is to pay more. The price of candy goes up, and will continue growing until either people give up on candy, or the price becomes high enough that making candy becomes profitable again.

While I am not going to contest the properties of supply and demand, I don't fully agree with you. Here is a fact: a dollar is only worth anything, because you believe it is. This is why the government has such a hard time with counterfeit money.

Now here is a thought experiment: Imagine for a moment that all the money in the world disappeared, and is no longer part of the equation. We'd still be able to build candy bars.
Security

The Nuclear Bunker Where Wikileaks Will Be Located 187

Posted by CmdrTaco from the can-we-have-a-party-here dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Engadget has photos of 'Pionen White Mountains, the nuclear bunker in which Wikileaks will locate some of its servers. It was excavated 98 feet underground, in a rock hill in the center of Stockholm, Sweden, during the Cold War.' It looks like they hired the same interior designer who decorated Batman's lair."

Comment Re:I thought this was already solved (Score 1) 341

by claytonjr (#32912590) Attached to: The Chicken May Have Come Before the Egg

Dinosaurs laid eggs - we've found lots of them.

Chickens evolved from dinosaurs, i.e. came after them.

The rest is left as an exercise for the reader.

Parent is right. Its a relatively well known fact that chickens are the first cousins to dinosaurs. Besides, eggs were being laid before dinosaurs existed. I imagine that eggs were soft while being laid under/near the water. Once the animal evolved enough to walk onto land, and laid eggs on land, the eggs developed the hard shell -- the eggs as we know it today.

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