Ignoring the century in the year, I love the coincidence that this question was first asked in the year '54 and in "Hitchhiker's", it's said that 6x9 and 42 are the same. In fact they are if 6x9 is base 10 (6x9=54), and 42 is base 13 (4x13+2 = 54).
So, we get three coincidences: This question was asked in '54 ; "Hitchhiker's" said the answer to the meaning of life is 54 (6x9, 42 base 13); and best of all, 42 was the last number solved. And if you want to add one more coincidence, this was solved in the year '19 (connecting 19 and 54).
All irrelevant coincidences applied with hindsight, but fun.
(Douglas Adams claimed that 42 was a randomly chosen number, but I'd argue his subconscious had been processing the idea for a while and gave him a number with a meaning. We just don't know which is the correct meaning.)
> I am interested to learn more about how they solved it if not brute force.
"Professors Booker and Sutherland's solution for 42 would be found by using Charity Engine; a 'worldwide computer' that harnesses idle, unused computing power from over 500,000 home PCs to create a crowd-sourced, super-green platform made entirely from otherwise wasted capacity."
>SUSTAINABLE, ULTRA-LOW CARBON - using PCs that already exist but are just underused
Wow, do they honestly believe their own marketing nonsense? There's no way the PUE and power efficiency of a bunch of old random desktop computers is going to come close to beating a modern Amazon, Google, or Microsoft datacenter. Cost wise, yeah sure, I'd bet it would be cheaper even with the lower efficiency and increased power usage but as far as "super-green" and low emissions this is just absurd. I think they might honestly not know that idle power usage is a small fraction of full load usage for any modern processor.
We don't need the datacenters at all. That's the difference.
No facilities. No hardware. No bricks, mortar, shipping, mining of metals or rare earths. No replacing of millions of obsolete machines every three years. We tread lighter than any datacenter owner can ever dream of
Indeed, I had finally taken the plunge on Carousel for its killer feature: Freeing up space on my 16GB iPhone while having the photos instantly available if I needed them. Carousel was a breath of fresh air; it had no issues with backing up photos over WiFi or cellular data, unlike the main Dropbox app. Now it's back to the unreliable and slow Dropbox app for photo syncing.
While I too dislike when stuff I use is shutdown, there's another possible way to look at this. Maybe the product lived a much longer life than it would have otherwise, had the original creators abandoned it after failing to make sufficient money on it directly.
Are these really even products if they have no plans or even really options for monetization? Mailbox was a free app with no ads and no freemium features. It was doomed from the start. Although Kudos to the founders there that were able to turn a good idea, a great marketing strategy, and a couple months of work from a small team into an immediate 9 figure exit. Those founders knew what they were doing.
Why since 2005, are things the wrong way around? Increases in temperature match with increases in ice levels??!!
e.g. 2005 to 2007 saw a 0.09 decrease in temperature above norm, and a 1.16million km2 decrease in ice?
Then as the temperature increased, the ice did too, up to 2010, then temp and ice decline to 2012.
Since 2012 temp has been rising again and so has the ice.
And you wonder why there's skeptics out there?!
You can clearly see the overall trends of heat rising and ice decreasing, but graphs like this shouldn't be thrown out to the masses without reasonable explanation of the anomalies of the last 10 years.
"Somehow, the microcomputer industry has assumed that everyone would love to have a keyboard grafted on as an extension of their fingers. It just is not so."
Obviously it wasn't then, but we've certainly grafter ourselves to our smartphone keyboards now. So, it turned out the "microcomputer" industry was right. Just took 20 years longer.
Incredible that this research from 60 years ago explains much of our current weather events. The Article ice shrinks, northern North America gets more snow.
It also explains why both global warming and impending ice age are linked.
This doesn't deny, of course, that mankind hasn't done his bit to accelerate the natural ebbs and flows of the global climate and the pace at which they are occurring.
A related belief which is found in both Greek and Asian cultures that proovs cycle of ice and warm ages purports that world goes through cyclical but not linear progress.
The ice age is typically considered an age of golden times. In the Timaeus, Plato talks of the mythical island of Atlantis, which was swallowed up by the sea in a “single day and night of misfortune” in c about 11000 years ago which matches with the time ice age is considered to have ended.
Following article goes in length on this cyclical theory, most concretely defined in Hindu's yugas cycle and provides several geological, archaeological and historical evidence to back the research presented.
If someone had told me this article had only been published in the last couple of years, it would not have been implausible.
The basic idea that melting of of the polar ice caps could result in drastically colder weather in Europe and the northeastern part of America not really new to me, but the idea that this might at the same time mean much warmer weather around the arctic circle is certainly fascinating.
The hypothesis is that 1 million years ago the "North Pole [was] in the middle of the Pacific, and the South Pole in the open southern Atlantic", and that the Ice Age cycles started because of a sudden shift that brought the poles to the current alignment.
If someone presented that scenario now, it would be considered very implausible, because it goes against the evidence and mathematical models of the physics of the Earth.
True enough. But I am not a geophysicist or a geologist or anything even remotely close to that.
Is the article talking about the geographic poles (the rotational axis of earth) or the magnetic poles? Because I think I remember reading that the magnetic poles of earth have been moving around quite a bit over time, that the magnetic poles are (slowly) moving today at a speed that scientists can measure, and that at some point, the magnetic north pole was rather close to the rotational south pole. (Although I do not know if the location of the magnetic poles has any impact on climate.)
The hypothesis is that the geographical North Pole was in the Atlantic 1 million years ago, and rapidly shifted to where it is now.
The problem with the hypothesis is it doesn't answer the question (quoting from page 7):
> What started off the first Ice Age cycle?
> “We know that during the past million years, the world has swung back and forth between ice ages and weather like today’s,” Ewing and Donn told me. “Before then, the whole earth was much warmer. There were no zones of extreme heat or cold; palms and magnolias grew in Greenland, and coral around Iceland; subtropical plants thrived within eleven degrees of the North Pole. Why didn’t the Arctic Ocean-glacier ‘thermostat’ work then? What suddenly turned it on one million years ago?
(We now know there have been multiple periods of glaciation. We are now in the Pliocene-Quaternary glaciation, which started 2.5 million years ago. The previous, the Karoo Ice Age, was 360–260 million years ago.)
It only explains why there are cycles, but if the planetary conditions were the same 3 million years ago, and there were no cycles, then the hypothesis would be in error.
Remember, in the 1950s the new theory of plate tectonics was only just coming into wide acceptance. The quote from the Harper's piece assumes that the crust moves a lot faster than the evidence found though the successive decades of research.
> Why are parents of vaccinated kids so terrified of unvaccinated kids?? Does vaccination work or not?
Vaccines don't always take. These people depend on herd immunity - high rates of vaccination in the general population - for protection. Then there are people like the one in the article, kids who cannot be vaccinated. Some have allergies to vaccine ingredients, some have had their immune systems destroyed by chemo. Others are simply too young to have gotten certain vaccines that are given later in life.
> If vaccination works, why do we care that a small minority aren't vaccinated?
Because it only works when enough people get it. 90-95% for many diseases is required, and there are some populations in California where the rates have dropped to the 60s.
My personal opinion is that if people could pin patient zero on an un-immunized underage person, the affected person should be able to bring a civil lawsuit against the offenders --with exceptions for infirm, very young, immuno-deficient.
Else this is crazy --and educated people of all people. I can't understand it. It does however, bring their intellect esteem down to earth. What I mean is it highlights that experts can be just as wrong in their conclusion as "nutters".
Imagine someone you love has a chronic auto-immune disease like MS, arthritis or even psoriasis and they are taking a drug to depress their immune system like a TNF inhibitor or something like methotrexate or cyclosporine. Or they have cancer and on chemotherapy that depresses their immune system. Or they have had an organ fail and they need to take drugs to stop their body rejecting the replacement. Or they have AIDS or any other disease that damages their immune system. Or they are old. Or they are very young, perhaps even unborn.
They did the right thing and unless they had some medical reason not to at the time they got vaccinated. Now what good will it do them with a damaged immune system? What good will it do them if they have not been vaccinated yet due to age.
Then we have a perfectly healthy family who decided that based on advice from their chiropractor/homeopath or some actor that vaccination is a conspiracy by evil big business and government. Besides it is their right not to give a fuck about anyone else. They get a mild sickness from some disease that was effectively non-existent a decade ago and can't understand what the fuss is about as their slightly spotty kids wipe their snot on the door handle. Then your immune compromised loved one comes along.
Your assumption that vaccination is binary is wrong. And your last question, you don't seem to care or know about immunocompromised people.
So:
- vaccination isn't perfect in preventing diseases - some people who get vaccinated aren't immune.
- in some cases, vaccination may reduce disease strength but not prevent the disease. More unvaccinated kids means greater transmission threat, i.e. greater chance of an illness that, while not as bad, can still be unpleasant.
- Afraid parents may have relatives who are immunocompromised, or may be immunocompromised themselves. Vaccinated people may act as short-term carriers, even if they are immune, and unvaccinated kids are more likely to act as a source, so the combination of these can cause immunocompromised people to get sick
- Same as previous, but with children too young to be vaccinated (younger siblings)
Immune compromise can come from AIDS, sure, but also cancer, transplant therapy, and other causes.
Yes, some of the fear may be unreasonable - probably being stressed out and sick isn't enough immune compromise to let you get measles (though that's probably) - but enough of it isn't.
I don't mean this in a mean way. However, I don't think you understand the science here at even an elementary level. It is this sort of attitude that only serves to bolster the position of those essentially against science. It's not about encountering a "mild dose."
"Here’s the simple answer: Vaccines are not 100% effective. Nothing in medicine is. They may be 99% effective, 95% effective, 90% effective, or even less. By medical standards, any intervention that’s over 90% effective is a pretty darned good intervention, and most vaccines are at least pretty darned good, especially given how rare serious reactions are. But they are not 100% effective, and it is almost as foolish for parents who vaccinate their children to believe that vaccines will be 100% effective in protecting their children as it is for antivaccinationists to believe that vaccines do more harm than good. At the very least, it’s naive. Also, there are children who for health reasons cannot be vaccinated and who thus rely on herd immunity. The larger the population of unvaccinated children, the weaker the herd immunity, and if the percentage of vaccinated children falls below a certain point herd immunity basically collapses."
The science here is so clear. A key point is that children that, in rare cases, cannot be vaccinated for other health reasons can not longer rely on herd immunity because such as what you are advocating for have taken up the madness pitchforks along with Jenny McCarthy to destroy herd immunity.
http://www.cdc.gov/measles/hcp/
>One dose of MMR vaccine is approximately 93% effective at preventing measles; two doses are approximately 97% effective.
Vaccination does not confer effective immunity
in all those vaccinated. If an outbreak hits
a school or day care, the 4 day period in which
the infection is contagious before any symptoms
appear means that most of the kids will be exposed,
and any who are not immunized (either not vaccinated,
or vaccination was not effective) are at risk.
I view those who choose not to vaccinate children
who could be vaccinated as freeloaders, depending
on the rest of us to provide group immunity to
protect their children. For those for whom it is
a personal preference or belief, rather than
part of a religious practice, I wish they would
choose to accept their share of the risks.
There are kids that cannot be vaccinated for various medical reasons.
If unvaccinated kids are rare, then they're safe because any disease outbreaks quickly stop and don't spread; but if the rate of unvaccinated kids is above a certain threshold then they are at a serious risk.
First, to answer your question: that's not how vaccination works - a vaccine is not 100% effective. So if you get your vaccination, you maybe still have a 5% (just pulling that number out of the air) chance of not being immune, at which point anybody else who has the disease or is a carrier for it is dangerous to you. It's not that you get 5% sick, it's that you have a 5% chance of getting 100% sick.
Second, to address this question in the context of the article that you're commenting on, the child in question is not vaccinated.
Vaccination is not a 100% guard against infection, but it has a substantial success rate.
However some individuals cannot be immunised, such as the child linked in the article who could not be immunised due to a weak immune system. Also, children under the minimum age to be safely vaccinated rely on herd immunity to stay safe. Having everyone in the community vaccinated makes it much less likely that these infections will spread from outside and put the weaker members of the community at risk.
Vaccination rely on the immune system to work, so in situations where the immune system breaks down, or is overloaded, vaccinations stop being reliable. Like with auto-immune disorders, or after heavy chemotherapy (as in the OP).
I also know of a case where a child got an illness it was vaccinated against due to a generally weak immune system (induced by a heart disease and several surgeries).
For me it is mainly about the babies. Measles hurt young children and babies the most, and can even be deadly for infants. You start the vaccine process when children are 12-15 months.
So, we get three coincidences: This question was asked in '54 ; "Hitchhiker's" said the answer to the meaning of life is 54 (6x9, 42 base 13); and best of all, 42 was the last number solved. And if you want to add one more coincidence, this was solved in the year '19 (connecting 19 and 54).
All irrelevant coincidences applied with hindsight, but fun.
(Douglas Adams claimed that 42 was a randomly chosen number, but I'd argue his subconscious had been processing the idea for a while and gave him a number with a meaning. We just don't know which is the correct meaning.)