Here’s a gadget idea. Have a faucet light that shows temperature. I’ve seen faucet lights, with a LED inside the water stream lighting it up. Take that design and add a temperature sensor and a 2-3 LED that get lit up in varying proportions to indicate temperature.
Update: Doh! Thinkgeek sells one! Foiled again.
I saw the beginning of the movie “Cellular”. Kim Basinger gets kidnapped, taken to a house, and tossed on the floor–on a conveniently placed rug. The kidnapper then gets a big sledge hammer and swings at an old-style Bell phone. Phones are important in this movie, huh? The unbelievable thing is that the phone shatters into smithereens! A Bell phone come apart like that? Not in this universe!
A few minutes later, the director decides we didn’t just see the phone shatter. It turns out it was only slightly wounded and Kim makes a call. Now that’s a Bell phone!
I figure it’s worth summing up the Iraq occupation, now 4 1/2 years in.
In 2006 the Bush administration’s plan was to train up the Iraqi Army and police force, and for the the US to “stand down as they stand up”. US troops would come home as the Iraqis took over. This plan was a complete failure, and even today there is no region turned over to Iraqi forces. In fact there are no more trained Iraqi units today than at the beginning of 2006.
As the Iraq occupation dragged on with a steady bleed of death and destruction the Bush administration’s “stay the course” plan grew harder to defend politically. A bipartisan commission headed by Republican fixer James Baker was put together to provide political cover for a change in the administration’s Iraq policy. The Iraq Study Group report at the end of 2006 recommended beginning a pull out from Iraq, offering a basket of withdrawal options to the President. Bush rejected them all, instead escalating the war with his “Surge” plan. The military brass almost all opposed the escalation, so Bush had to dig around hard before getting General Petraeus to head the new offensive.
The “Surge” was 20% increase in troops originally planned to last for six months. The primary goal of the “Surge” was to secure and pacify Baghdad and give the Iraq political parties a chance to come to a permanent agreement. The small increase in troops hasn’t had a noticeable effect on the violence in Iraq and there has been no political progress. If anything, the Iraqi national government has continued to fragment. The “Surge” assessment was pushed from six months to nine months (this week), and now the Bush administration plans to continue it until the end of the year, or next spring, or perhaps next summer. US troop levels in Iraq will go down in 2008–units ending long deployments start timing out then and their are no units available to replace them.
It’s clear that Bush plans to maintain the occupation of Iraq through the end of his presidency. So the Iraq occupation will continue, costing $3 billion and the lives of 14 US soldiers each week. The Republicans view leaving as losing so they won’t leave Iraq. If the “Surge” had either worked or was admitted to be a failure our troops could start withdrawing, so instead the administration finds small signs of progress and declares the occupation of Iraq will continue. The optimistic military and conservative think tank plans I’ve seen floated describe the US exiting Iraq in 5, 10, or even 20 years if progress continues. The majority of Dems support ending the occupation of Iraq, but with their thin majority in Congress they haven’t been able to force an end. The Republicans in Congress all support Bush. This creeping disaster will continue for the foreseeable future.
Iraq is a wreck. The little reconstruction that was done (1-3% of total US spending on the war) is falling apart. The best estimates have over a million Iraqis dead due to the invasion and civil war–4% of the population. Nearly 10% of Iraqis have fled the country, and about another 10% have fled their homes but are still in Iraq.
If that isn’t bad enough, it is possible things will get much worse. A faction in the Bush administration is pushing for a war with Iran. VP Cheney and the neoconservatives are pushing for an attack on Iran. They are the source of the war mongering stories about Iran that have been running in the newspapers this summer.
The first papers from the ENCODE Project: ENCyclopedia Of DNA Elements came out in Nature and Genome Research this week. The project’s goal is to understand non-coding DNA seqeunces by focusing in on 1% of the genome with multiple experimental approaches.
It’s not getting described well in the press. This news article is quite giddy: link
DNA study challenges basic ideas in genetics
Genome ‘junk’ appears essentialBy Colin Nickerson, Globe Staff | June 14, 2007
A massive international study of the human genome has caused scientists to rethink some of the most basic concepts of cellular function. Genes, it turns out, may be relatively minor players in genetic processes that are far more subtle and complicated than previously imagined.
Among the critical findings: A huge amount of DNA long regarded as useless — and dismissively labeled “junk DNA” — now appears to be essential to the regulatory processes that control cells. Also, the regions of DNA lying between genes may be powerful triggers for diseases — and may hold the key for potential cures.
The details are interesting for biologists but not super surprising. Here’s an overview of non-coding DNA:
2% of the human genome encodes proteins. A difficult problem is to figure out what the the remainder, the non-coding DNA, does. About 1% is clearly involved in regulating protein expression, and a few additional percent have other known functions. An additional 2% are conserved non-coding sequences, DNA that has kept its sequence for tens of millions of years. The function of most of these conserved non-coding sequences is not known but their DNA has been retained because it has a function.
While it is hard to prove a negative, most of the remaining 90+% is likely non-functional (’junk DNA’) or very weakly functional. Some bits are likely spacers the sequence of which is unimportant. About 1/2 the human genome is transposons, bits of DNA that have copied themselves over and over (it is like the genomic inbox is full of spam).
The most interesting finding is that some non-coding non-conserved DNA is functional. Exactly how this works biologically is not clear–so very new, very cool. Ultimately, this adds another 1-2% to the functional non-coding class of DNA.
So it is interesting to hear that a new function for a bit of the non-coding DNA has been discovered–there will be a lot of cool new biology working out what bits of this do. Still, most of the genome is junk DNA.
The amount of junk DNA in a genome can vary a lot. There are some frogs and salamanders with genomes ten times larger than humans. These animals likely have about the same number of genes as humans. They are thought to just have a *lot* more junk DNA.
The recent development of the 1TB hard drive reminded me of my first thoughts about the end of the hard drive expansion. Back when the 1 GB drives came out I calculated my total lifetime media need. It came out under 10TB and half of that was video:
1TB 200,000 books at 5MB/book (every book I’ll read or know about)
1TB 200,000 songs, 5MB/song (every song I’ll ever hear)
3TB 3000 movies, 1GB/movie (every movie I’ll watch or desire to watch)
1TB 300 TV show seasons, 3GB each (ditto)
Personal records:
1TB 500,000 photos, 2MB/photo (every photo I’ll take or see)
1TB 2000 hours home video, 500MB/hr (fun to shoot, but who will watch it?)
0.001 TB (every word I’ll write, email, publish)
0.1TB 1GB/year (saved email and internet cruft, LOL cats, etc.)
It sums up to 8TB/life. And indexes, you definitely need indexes, so say 1TB for indexes.
This will expand as high res video/photos phase in but even that won’t push this out much beyond 100TB.
300 TB would allow you to record your entire life in video for 16hr/day for 100 years at 500MB/hr (one camera angle). No compression for time spent watching your self-video is assumed. :)
Saw this colored peg low res image and was reminded again I want to do something similar with black and white ping pong balls. I would work up a Lego bot to drop the balls in.
And then I had a cooler idea–I’ve seen a programmed water drop device used to make images. A related idea would be to drop water onto piano strings. The drops would strike the strings and make sound instead of images. The drops would fall a distance so you would see the music visually–see the notes coming before they hit.
Thinking more, there’s a good chance this wouldn’t work–the water drops wouldn’t have enough force. Worth a try though. :)
It was announced today that the full genomes of James D. Watson (and Craig Venter, though for much more than $1,000,000) have been sequenced. The NYT article had this bioethics blurb:
Dr. Watson and Dr. Venter are both taking a considerable personal risk in making their genomes publicly available. As is probably true for everyone, their genomes are likely to contain mutations that could lead to disease, revealing possibly unfavorable information about themselves and their relatives.
For Venter this is clearly untrue. He’s rich and can self insure with no problem. Likely Watson has enough dough this isn’t a risk either. For their poorer relatives, yes there is risk. I don’t think the writer of the NYT article, Nicholas Wade, gave this any thought–genetic knowledge insurance/employment risk is a standard story line, and the writer plugged it into this article.
I heard NASA head Michael Griffin interviewed on NPR this morning. He was asked about global warming and after a bit of prodding said that while he knew it was happening and human caused he didn’t see it as a problem. He said that the current global temp might not be ‘optimal’ for humans and thought some warming might be a good thing. Classic second stage global warming denial.
This is a zombie argument–wrong and long proven to be wrong but it keeps popping up. A good site for rebuttal of global warming denial zombie arguments is at Gristmill. Griffin’s zombie is handled here.
Every few months I run across an anecdote about how horrible Canada’s or UK’s national health system is (but never about any of the other European health systems, hmm). Anecdotes may cause you to consider an argument, but you need to turn to data to draw conclusions.
US/Canada health system comparisons:
Big study, clearly written: http://www.pnhp.org/canadastudy/
And a 2007 Commonwealth Fund study:
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2007_05/011316.php
Med. student review of the literature: http://www.amsa.org/studytours/WaitingTimes_primer.pdf
BTW, the Canada comparison is the one in which the US looks best, several of the European national health systems are *much better* and *much cheaper*. US citizens with top-of-the-line employer provided health plans get care as good as in the best European systems (just more expensive).
Conclusion: US has the worst and by far the most expensive health system among Western nations.
Evolution question from the first Republican presidential debate, torture question from the second debate. The others believe in evolution (at least to some degree) and did not answer the torture question at the second debate.
