If you liked that, you ought to be reading

http://calculatedrisk.blogspot.com/

Look. Nothing else like it. (That's one of the sources thanked in the NPR program, and is very good thoughtful reading every day.)

> a sack of gears that she is using to replace
> the knobs

Brass, no doubt.

Wash hands immediately after handling brass.

Brass keys, for example:

"... source of lead exposure was determined to be my brass office key and my brass house key which I let her play with and chew on. ... are unplated brass with a lead content 4.5 times the allowable level if it were a toy or jewelry."

http://blogs.consumerreports.org/safety/2007/08/five-things-par.html
http://www.calprop65.com/keys.html

http://www.eastman.com/Company/Corporate_Citizenship/Responsible_Care/Resp_Care.htm

"In the mid-1980s, the chemical industry realized that its success would be greatly enhanced by gaining the public's trust...."

What do you suppose broght this on?

AND --> Where can we take the polycarbonate for recycling, so the bisphenol doesn't just leach out into the environment from the landfills?

What's Eastman's address for delivery of returns?

I have now patented nuclear warfare, biological warfare, chemical warfare, and rude messages on the Internet.

Welcome to the new era of peace and prosperity.

Well, the homebuilders quit donating.
The realtors quit donating
The bankers went broke
Who else are they going to go to for money?

First you threaten to regulate them
Then they start supplementing your salary.

Politics .....

Moonie, dear, the illiterate ones have to ask.

> standing on a nearby corner

Oh, good reporting sir. And when the drug dealers see this thing in action tonight, will they shoot the guy standing on the nearby corner? And if that doesn't stop the robot, shoot the guy standing on the next nearest corner? Oh, _good_ reporting.

Idiots.

This is wonderful.

Whose imagery is this, I learned it in the 300-baud modem days --- that using the Net can be akin to walking into a huge dark library and shouting out your question, and having voices from the stacks reply with answers. Borges, perhaps?

Check the cite, and you can follow forward in time as studies cite and add to what's known.

Check the footnotes, and you can go back to the previous studies.

Never rely on a single study or the latest work. Look at the pattern of research over time.

If you have any credible source to support your belief that "Medical researchers refute each other on a regular basis" please give a citation.

If you find a recantation next month, do post that.

Cites help tell the trolls from the readers. Prove yourself.

Misnomer.

War on Tourists, more like.

> plant pathogens

And what does this suggest?

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=353138

http://aem.asm.org/cgi/content/abstract/67/4/1494

Has anyone documented the way crows are replacing pigeons as the urban bird, around the world?

Tokyo long ago; Minneapolis-St. Paul, a friend told, me, a decade ago. Various other places.

Who counts pigeons and crows, anyone?

For those who didn't click the link above, an excerpt:

----------
.... Ravi Dhingra, M.D., lead author of the study and an instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School. "If you are drinking one or more soft drinks a day, you may be increasing your risk of developing metabolic risk factors for heart disease."

The Framingham study included nearly 9,000 person observations made in middle-aged men and women over four years at three different times.

In a "snapshot in time" at baseline, the researchers found that individuals consuming one or more soft drinks a day had a 48 percent increased prevalence of the metabolic syndrome compared to those consuming less than one soft drink daily.
------------------
And

High Fructose Diet Increases Triglycerides in Healthy Lean Young ... The high fructose diet resulted in significant increases in fasting plasma concentrations of triglyceride and leptin after one week, ...
www.diabeteshealth.com/read/2007/04/09/5077.html

And

High cola consumption linked to kidney disease
Drinking more than two servings of cola a day more than doubled the likelihood of having chronic kidney disease...
www.healthcentral.com/incontinence/news-43536-66.html

Does anyone else recall a science fiction short story from the 1940s or 50s, perhaps, in which the visiting aliens are not just humanoid, they're humanlike -- except they are all fat, cheerful, Biergarten types, good-fellow-well-met, unshakable, optimistic.

And at some point the protagonist asks, how did these people get past the warfare and instability Earth is going through, the self-destructive stuff.

And the answer is -- at puberty each child is given a little built in circuit with two contacts on fingertips and two on the small of the back, hard but not impossible to reach. And if the kid wants to, they reach around, touch both spots, and die.

Natural selection, they explain, wasn't fast enough to save their civilization, so they automated it.

And they got over war, and got faster than light travel, and are cheerfully visiting and opening beer halls or whatever it was they had to sell.

And the narrator thinks ---

-- and thinks -- what if this is what it takes to get past the instability without blowing ourselves up as a planet?

And then he thinks about his little girl. The sensitive one. Who feels hurts intensely, is moody ....

--------
God, if there is a God, save these kids from the tools we have put into their hands. We can't.

> outed yourself as a psychopath

Or a corporation. Same behavior, different stockholders.

And I read that the White House pushed this idea really hard. Has anyone heard _anyone_ in the military say it's a good idea?

I mean, why not just lease a good reliable vehicle -- a Soyuz, and go get the danged thing and turn the valve to bleed off the fuel?

Or send up something that can rendezvous and grab the thing and retrofire to bring it down.

But no, hit it from _underneath_ at high speed and knock half the pieces into higher orbit.

Really bright.

I guess we finally know the answer to the Fermi Paradox.

The aliens have been here all along running this planet into the ground so they can claim it as abandoned salvage. NO intelligent life here.

Thank you Charlie Stross. Every bit accurate; I'd been reading up on this in the last few days after seeing reports of flashlight explosions. Some of the aircraft fire reports go back ten years or more.

It takes a fair number of deaths before the USA labels anything proven dangerous, no 'precautionary principle' here yet.

http://candlepowerforums.com/vb/showthread.php?t=124776

Beyond that, Google; Google video too.

I checked; Monticello's second and third floors are off limits by act of the local fire marshal, presumably because getting people down their stairs in a hurry would be a big problem.

There is a partial tour of the building online.

Don't miss the tulip poplar trees next to the building. That's a grownup tree. Few people in the US have ever seen one.

> Alternating tread stair

There's one in Monticello, Jefferson designed it to take up less floorspace. Steep but easy.

It used to be open for the tours, I recall running up and down it as a kid on a tour there, but the last time I went the whole upper floor was unavailable to tourists because some regulator had decided the thing wasn't safe to use.

The whirling noise is Mr. Jefferson, spinning ....

Have you talked to the Exploratorium?
Lawrence Hall of Science?
Wozniak?

I recall Bill Atkinson, one of the most amazing early Apple team, quit Apple to go into education, is he around?

Seems to me if you invite scientists and engineers as well as writers, and invite _them_ to invite kids, you'll get a heady mix.

I really hate it when these whacko conspiracy stories survive serious attempts at checking facts.

Like the one above.

Like this one too:

Minot AFB Clandestine Nukes 'Oddities' --By Lori Price,
http://www.legitgov.org
Updated: 19 Sep 2007

The following section was compiled by 'The Pundit.'
Since the Minot story broke a week ago about the missing nukeclandestine operation from Minot, we have the following (for those who are paying attention):

1. All six people listed below are from Minot Airforce base
2. All were directly involved as loaders or as pilots
3. All are now dead
4. All within the last 7 days in 'accidents' [Not all of them --LRP]

http://www.kfyrtv.com/News_Stories.asp?news=10465
http://www.shreveporttimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070915/BREAKINGNEWS/70915012
http://www.kxmc.com/News/161562.asp
http://www.kxmc.com/getArticle.asp?ArticleId=140988
http://www.bismarcktribune.com/articles/2007/07/20/news/state/136489.txt
http://www.komotv.com/news/local/9679367.html

I am starting to get really fed up with this stuff being so easy to substantiate and so hard to dismiss as whacko nonsense.

I did _not_ want Heinlein to prove to be a prophet.

http://www.wegrokit.com/ri260s.jpg

Or buy a view camera. Nobody remembers it, I guess, but the zone system for photography has been around for a very long time, and all this foofaraw is because digital cameras still don't come close to capturing the full brightness range that a large sheet of emulsion film can record in a single image.

So the digitals take three images to cover the full range of brightness, to regain the ability to capture full detail both in the darkest and brightest parts of the image.

No, you couldn't do this with 35mm film -- well, barely, with Pan-X 25 black and white film and a very fine-grain developing chemistry, after having used a spot meter to measure the full brightness range of your subject and carefully exposing to capture maybe eight f-stops at best. From memory, wasn't Ansel Adams getting ten f-stops with his sheet film?

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/zone_system.shtml

Those stunning Sierra Club books your grandparents had along with their old Whole Earth Catalog? Look at the pictures in them.

The eye can do this. So could really good film cameras in the hands of good photographers.

Print can do this, on good paper.

Viewing online or TV though, you don't get the same effect. You get this sense of exaggerated brighter-than-life imagery -- not a picture that looks more real than anything you've seen lately, like the Sierra Club books had.

Just wait til the billboard companies finish gutting the last remaining rules that currently forbid them from putting their glare-and-jitter new technology -- look at the one they got a special law changed to allow, the first big ugly:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/05/17/BAG4MPSKM41.DTL
http://www.planetizen.com/files/u10403/IMG_0039.jpg

on every single billboard along every highway and on the side of every building, if you want poke-in-the-eye imagery. You're gonna get it.

Advertisers will love this kind of imagery.

Advertisers communicate like Vonnegut said Tralfamadorians communicate, by tap dancing and farting. In your face.

It'll suck. "human kind
Cannot bear very much reality"
http://www.tristan.icom43.net/quartets/norton.html

See, the Heinleins didn't have a big enough garage nor enough electricity available for one of these, that's why

"writing the description of how they got to that station required the famous three days of paper-and-pencil calculations (see Expanded Universe, pp. 519-520) for one line of writing. John Campbell would have been pleased to learn of this, but Heinlein was now writing for an editor who did not appreciate such effort."
http://members.iglou.com/jtmajor/SpaCadet.htm

I recall somewhere Heinlein describes the same kind of effort, days with a pencil and paper, doing the calculations for "Destination Moon."

Killfiles were good.
Threaded newsreaders were very good.
Just think of it as virtual reality with subtraction rather than addition, for use when the few people who actually know something and are helping you are all you want to focus on.

Vonnegut reminds us the Tralfamadorians communicated by tap dancing and farting. So do web advertisers.
Does this explain something?

I recommend this thread:
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r18517795-Hosting-a-WiFi-hotspot
started by Dane Jasper of Sonic.net

Sonic.net customers can put a wifi access point up that lets neighbors log in directly to Sonic. Most of those are up around Santa Rosa, CA, but the're scattered throughout the customer base elsewhere as well.

Mr. Jasper distinguishes this from FON, and has commented on the problems that a system like FON create for ISPs like Sonic.

He's continued to participate there and answered a good many questions.

(He also has a blog now: http://corp.sonic.net/blog/ )

I know FON has some cooperative projects with ISPs, but I'm still wondering how a small ISP can survive if a lot of its customers start sharing their connection via FON. The business model has to be priced based on some expectation of how much use each line is getting.

I'm guessing (pure uninformed guess) that FON will have to start setting up its own ISP connections to feed the network of FON devices eventually -- won't individual people figure out that once the system gets dense enough, they can just keep their FON device and cancel their own personal ISP and use their neighbors'?

The list? Where's Hoover's list?

Yep. They steal from luggage. They got a high tech LED flashlight out of mine a few years ago when I flew between Denver and SFO.

Someone should work up a sting operation with stuff that phones home when it's used and captures fingerprints of the people using it. Anyone make a little USB memory device that takes fingerprint security that could capture the print of whever uses it and log it to a website when it's next used?

OR something like that?

I bet it'd be popular with musicians. And flashlight owners. And computer owners.

Heck, just a gadget that photographs whoever opens the suitcase would be handy, or takes a sequence of images while it's opened up, eh?

Thank you Bren for the reality check.

More stories?

Too bad the decision didn't recognize Koko as a responsible party, eh?

Slashdot | Guantanamo Officers Caught Modifying Wikipedia
Guantanamo Officers Caught Modifying Wikipedia -- ... we're paying at least one incompetent hack that money to lie to us on Web forums? ...
politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/16/1842258&from=rss

Mirror neurons. Your ability for empathy is measurable and has a basis in brain structure, and it's common in evolution, not peculiarly human.

-- Feel icky watching? What you're seeing is convincingly (for you) lifelike.

-- Never bothered? Turing Torture Test, eh?

Note in the latter case it's _your_ humanity being tested, not that of the device.

You _can_ look this stuff up. Just for example:

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?num=100&hl=en&lr=&newwindow=1&safe=off&scoring=r&q=empathy+neuron&as_ylo=2007

A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Approach to Empathy. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 2007 - MIT Press
... Correlations between Mirror Neuron Activation and Individual Empathy Scores. ...

… neural deficit in adolescents with conduct disorder and its association with lack of empathy
... Previous studies investigating the neural correlates of empathy for pain have found
strong effects in the ACC in addition to the anterior insula ...

Motion, emotion and empathy in esthetic experience
... basic mechanisms that have been brought to the fore by recent research on mirror and canonical neurons, and the neural underpinnings of empathy and embodiment. ...

Someone wrote this as a science fiction story some years back -- people irresistably tempted to violence could request a completely convincing simulation of the person they wanted to hurt.

But if they actually found, upon being given the opportunity, that they really could hurt a completely convincing replica, they were locked up, having proved themselves capable of more than fantasizing about violence.

Call it the Turing Torture Test.

Is this basically 'privateer' action, can it now be done by private contractors once they have a court judgment against a foreigner in a business dispute, or only by government employees in a political case?

Great thread. Thanks for the email.

I emailed asking if I can buy music, write it to a CD and give that as a gift, NOT keeping a copy myself. This is perfect for holiday gifts if OK.

Also of course asked about lossless recording.

And pointed them here saying no need to answer me personally, I'll watch for clarification in public.

I like the comics in the genre.

"Okay, what's a "Gaslamp Fantasy?"

"Influences include Jules Verne and H. Rider Haggard. The genre is popularly called "steampunk." Expect big, clanking Victorian-style tech, old-fashioned clothes, Frankenstein monsters and airships. Lots and lots of airships. ..."

http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/info/faq.php#0011