533 karma · joined September 19, 2013
That's a bad sign. Battery technology is the gating factor for electric planes and not even calling that out suggests they have not solved it.
Great design, great prototype, now give us the power consumption specs. Show me where that 300km is coming from.
All genocides, persecutions, internments, etc. are necessarily preceded by the identification of a group of people. Most people don't like to hurt other people due to our innate empathy. But there's a more primal instinct we all have called "survival", and it will usually override empathy. Part of the survival instinct is the "warfare" instinct, and by splitting people into groups with insolvent identities, a state of war is created that will give group members the justification to fight other groups.
Most of the time the fighting is non-violent and results in positive outcomes - but only when the identity is associated with a tangible goal (as mentioned, the civil rights movement). Once the goal is achieved the group dissolves, satisfied. But as OP said, lately the goals have become less tangible and more fragmented, and the identities have become simultaneously broader and more exclusive. "Americans" vs "immigrants". "Cis" vs "LGBT".
It's concerning because I don't know how it can be resolved peacefully.
Like if you were unveiling the iPhone prototype to Steve Jobs and you pull off the handkerchief and there's a turd lying there.
Anyone who knows Miyazaki's films would have known he wouldn't like it. So if they made it FOR him they deserve the reprimanding they got. But if he was just dropping by for a casual demo it then his response was uncalled for.
Also the work was pretty bad. I wouldn't be surprised if they just made up the zombie excuse after they saw how horrible the result was.
Another great example of Aussie ingenuity! One farmer's way of dealing with the 2010 locust plague.
In your mind, do you see a "mental picture" of the model before you CAD it?
Even genetic evolution moves faster than our regulatory system!
There's so many electrical systems in a modern car; interrupt just one and it's going nowhere.
Helping hungry people is a fine thing to do, as long as it's optional.
It's interesting to compare it to natural self healing systems, which heal on a much higher scale (cellular).
The obvious difference is that artificial materials are molecularly homogeneous. But that homogenity precludes auto-determination of high level structure.
For example, my car paint may self heal, but it won't necessarily heal into a uniform coating because the individual units (in this case molecules) aren't guided to specific positions. In contrast, biological systems are much more robust because the placement of individual units (cells) is guided by a larger system.
That's why we still have a long way before our creations are truly 'self-healing'. Material science may ultimately not be part of the answer.
To me the ideal biolab is: digital genome data in, organism(s) out.
I know this isn't promising that, but I want to understand how close it is to full DNA synthesis.
A "story" is the way to convey the dynamics of a complex system while conveniently discarding the constituents of that system. If we don't keep the components, how can we prove the story is true? One problem is no one really cares or thinks they know enough to challenge the story. They accept it at face value.
I feel this is a deeper limitation of human thinking. It's very difficult to see something at different levels simultaneously. We can understand behaviour on a high level (e.g. income inequality), and we can understand behaviour on a lower level (e.g. not having enough money to eat), but we can't intuitively understand how low level behaviours effect and affect high level behaviours.
It's not like we're not trying to understand, it's more that we don't even have a basis for understanding. We know how elections work, but it's so easy to intuitively think "my one vote doesn't really count". We're observing high level dynamics while simultaneously contributing to them.
It's weird. Like thinking about one's own consciousness.
Aside from that, this is a really cool idea! But I don't know how it's being positioned. Is it a point and shoot replacement? Or a mirrorless camera replacement?
Or maybe it's just a technology demonstrator - this sort of system, suitably minimized, would make an excellent smartphone camera.
What's impressive isn't the efficiency of the body's use of energy (electric motors are already pretty good) , but rather how efficiently it extracts and stores it.
If smartphones had our stomachs, we wouldn't need to charge them..just let throw a hamburger in there once a month.
Here's an excellent engineering analysis of this exact project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOZBrHqTJk4
If your rocket blows up on the launch pad, you just learned that you shouldn't overpressure your fuel tank (or w/e). But if your rocket lifts off, goes to space, and lands, you learn thousands of things that work that you can use again.
Rather than ULA expending the intellectual effort to build the control and guidance systems needed to land the entire rocket as SpaceX does, they took the lazy route and added a few steps to their existing process.
The fact that they're willing to suggest that something like this is innovative is just further proof that the entire ULA is staunchly resistant to change. I'm not entirely sure this system will even have a chance to be used.
1964 theory: Allergies are caused by a misfiring reaction to generally harmless compounds that have a similar structure to proteins presented by parasitic worms.
Medzhitov's theory: Allergies are caused by the body mounting an intense immune response to compounds that are actually harmful and need to be eliminated.
..or so the article says. I don't know how true that is.
What I find much more probable is that the answer is somewhere in between. It's ridiculous to suggest that ALL allergens must look like worm proteins to the body. Why just worms? Why have such a specific restriction?
However, I also don't agree entirely with Medzhitov. In order for his theory (as presented in the article) to be correct, he has to prove that every single allergen is actually harmful. How does this explain food allergies? Why do peanuts harm one person but not another? It's possible, but it's a big task to prove.
So while I don't agree entirely with him, I think his theory is very close. I believe it more probable that some allergens are actually harmful, but that there are also harmless ones that are interpreted as harmful by the body and thus elicit an allergic response.
The biggest question to answer is why different people have different reactions to allergens. We're all exposed to pollen, after all. But.. what if there's an (unknown) compound that looks like pollen to the body, but is actually harmful? It would rightfully train the immune system to react to a specific molecular signature to eliminate the threat, but simultaneously train it to wrongfully respond to a harmless element.
No idea! I look forward to seeing the outcome of his research.
This kind of interface creates a terrible user experience. I've seen them before, and they always suck. The main issue is that you remove all context from the interaction. I don't know where I am relative to the entirety of the content. Furthermore, I can't jump to the point that I want.
It's disorienting and infuriating, and after about 10 seconds of exercising my middle finger (in multiple ways), I close the tab and add the site to my mental list of "examples of shitty UX".
Fortunately, this isn't the first such example, so I can provide solid evidence of how horrible this concept is. Ironically, it's the Famo.us Angular integration documentation...
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-10-perchance-reveals-brai...
http://www.webmd.com/stroke/news/20061009/can-you-have-strok...
Lenovo doesn't stand out as much as they used to. Dell/HP/Apple make pretty great business laptops these days. If everything else is equal and I know the competitor (for example) won't install adware, then why would I ever buy Lenovo again?