Viewing profile — maj0rhn

You're missing a key fact, which others have noted, but I would phrase it differently. Calcium is the end-stage of atherosclerosis. In other words, only advanced atherosclerosis ha…

Staggering to think that you can look at your hand and see evidence of relativity in action.

Perhaps a more enlightening view is in the book "The Socratic Method," by Ward Farnsworth, who is dean of the UTexas Law School. This is a great book for those just starting on the…

We had an Altair at home, that my father assembled from a kit. That version did not have a serial port. It had only the switches on the front panel. I did succeed in inputting some…

There is risk in this approach. Nobody has any real idea what supplements are doing in all of the bodily tissues, and sometimes the effects are not benign. "Folate acceleration" of…

First computer I ever programmed: 1970, in 7th grade math class, after school. It was a big deal -- actually having access to a computer! It wasn't a "personal computer" for us, be…

Correlation may not equal causation, but correlation does define syndromes. In medicine, a "syndrome" is any collection of findings that tend to occur together. A syndromic label s…

That is exactly the thesis of a recent book [0], summarized, more or less, as: "When there is no objective method to rate performance, then the social network becomes the measure o…

> I've seen transdermal plastic beads put in some interesting places - but they're hardly transhumanist. Transdermal metal beads, in the form of little bells, were put in "interest…

I tried to get it to play doctor... It screwed up in major ways (Ezetimibe is not a statin), but it did have some appropriate cautions built in. Still, not ready for prime time. In…

My money is that they will have to disclose inputs, if for no other reason than to address the uncertainty about race as a possible input.

A high price-point could eliminate random teenagers for some number of years, but it will not eliminate teenagers in well-to-do families -- especially if gene science experiments c…

Yes, misanthropes are a hazard, but I worry also about a scientifically sophisticated teenager who gets jilted or suffers some other emotional shock, and then decides to end it all…

And ICD is not a pacemaker. An ICD costs about $30K. When its battery wears out, the battery is replaced, not the ICD. So there will be no replacements of already-implanted ICDs be…

Blaming Apple is not absurd. The interaction between magnets near the chest and cardiac rhythm devices has been well known since at least the 1980s. Even I can remember a published…

The Brits of that era were equal-opportunity smallpox infectors. They captured some of George Washington's slaves, infected them with smallpox, and then released them on the battle…

The Lancet had a series of articles in the early 1980s about smallpox in Egyptian mummies, and the risk to Egyptologists. As far as I remember, at least some mummy bodies were pres…

Not hastily: the National Guard goes back to 1636 and is the oldest military force in the United States.

The F-15 wing in Fresno has an air defense mission. They are on 24/7 alert in case US airspace is threatened. The fact that they are assigned to the National Guard instead of the a…

Any theory for the firings has to explain why the enlisted chief was fired. He would not have been involved in any orders related to the F-15. His responsibility is the enlisted fo…

I have written three scholarly history books [0] where custom Python code was used to generate TeX files (not LaTeX) that were then typeset into PDF. Python's main purpose was to e…

An unmentioned physiological consideration, remembered from a lecture long ago... The rapid onset of the sound is an important factor. The ear has muscular reflexes that lessen the…

Looks to me like a bot generated the article, given its weird capitalization and inconsitent internal references. Here is the press release from Columbia University: http://newsroo…

You have inverted the temporal arrow. The question is not what's behind, but how much was left yet to do. Deeds left undone -- that is the tragedy.