Comments for nanothoughts.net

Comment on Natty by rog

rog — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 16:43:20 +0000

test of comment system

Comment on I"m so happy by rog

rog — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 03:58:55 +0000

6killers, that’s great! LOved it! Thanks for sharing!

Comment on Why is the equation editor grayed out in Microsoft Word 2007? by rog

rog — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 03:55:54 +0000

Glad it helped you, former33t!

Comment on Why is the equation editor grayed out in Microsoft Word 2007? by former33t

former33t — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 01:20:40 +0000

You rock. Any day the first google result is useful is a good day.

Comment on I"m so happy by 6 Killers

6 Killers — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 11:12:15 +0000

I remember one time I was in a line up of 4 people. While I was waiting I really had to fart. Way to much beer and chicken wings the night before.

I let go this fart that was actually very hot and clammy when it came out and when the smell hit my nose I almost puked. I am not shitting you when I say that I could have made a maggot gag. Well the guy behind me got the first whiff of this noxious smell and says very loud for all to hear ” I don’t know who just shit their pants but you should go to the hospital man as it smells like something crawled up your ass and died.”

Well now I am roaring with laughter making a comment or 2 myself to deflect that fact that it was me who shit myself when the girl in the lineup says “Good God, that’s thick. You can almost taste it.

That was it I lost it. Everybody in the place including the new guy who walked in was pissing ourselves laughing. Good bunch of people considering I could have killed them had the smell been anymore terrible. Just thought I would tell ya my little story.

Comment on A bit on Cell Phones and Cancer by JPL

JPL — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 21:49:43 +0000

I didn’t want to get into this in the post, but I think it’s most correct to say (as the linked study does) that there is no _known_ mechanism by which microwave radiation can cause cancer. The mechanism by which ionizing radiation causes cellular damage and carcinogenisis is, I think, well understood.

There is no proof that radiation below this threshold can cause cancer, and no biophysical model which predicts it, but DNA transcription seems like a fairly complicated operation, and it wouldn’t surprise me if it could be interfered with in ways we don’t currently expect. Of course, no one would confuse me with a molecular biologist.

Comment on Will calorie restricted diets help us live forever? by Josy

Josy — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 03:52:28 +0000

I’m in the camp that we’ll get less of a benefit from CR viz a viz other animal models as we live longer which I take as prima facie evidence that many of the pathways that could be better tuned already are.

However, I think CR is good for cutting down on various imflammatory diseases. But to be effective, life has to suck.

FWIW, I saw an interesting note that after you hit 80 (average), your odds of getting cancer levels off (i.e., your probability of getting cancer stops increasing with age – doesn’t go down, but doesn’t increase).

Comment on A bit on Cell Phones and Cancer by Josy

Josy — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 03:46:59 +0000

Damage is feasible (too much heat will kill you and your head needs to dissipate a lot of heat anyways). Cancer is unlikely. They’re looking for the wrong thing.

Your whole body is an antenna, though better at lower wavelengths. Back when we had analog TV you could see this effect when you walked close to the TV with a weak signal. With digital it’s kinda all or nothing so the extra SNR won’t help much.

That’s a long way to get to: in the cellular bands, there’s significant propagation loss through your head so you’re not getting resonance consistent with your head being a gigantic antenna.

Comment on A bit on Cell Phones and Cancer by rog

rog — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 17:01:50 +0000

Nice analysis. Considering though that microwave radiation is non-ionizing, I do wonder how bad it is. It shouldn’t be that bad. However, I can think of semi-plausible mechanisms where heating up the cells in your brain/ear would cause them to go cancerous more often.

I think a good experiment/control would be to get people to hold heaters up to their heads for a few hours a day to test it.

Also, how many of these studies use people that keep the phone low and use a wire or bluetooth as the earpiece/microphone?

(And does having the wired interface turn the head into a gigantic attenna?)

Comment on Free software and Free speech by JPL

JPL — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 02:13:04 +0000

One source of frustration for me in the past has been that Matlab toolboxes (even those sold by Mathworks), often have their own interfaces and data types, which you have to conform to if you want to interface with them. In particular the Robust Control toolbox has a weird packed matrix format that is required by most of its functions. I imagine this is pretty frustrating if you want to use more than one toolbox.