Posts by Nigel 11

Re: Reverse the polarity of the Neutron flow.

Unlocking our telomeres would be much more likely to increase the rate of cancers than giving us immortality.

More realistically, it might give most of us a healthy life extending to 100, maybe 120 years. How successfully depends on how many of the diseases and failings of old age are caused by the biological senescence mechanism, and now many by other causes such as accumulating cellular mutations.

Alzheimers is not a certainty. I remember interviews with Jeanne Calment (she lived to 122, despite smoking heavily all her life!) and Harry Patch (the last veteran of WW1). Both were of sound mind when their bodies quit on them. So are the majority of people who (mostly) die in their 70s, 80s and 90s from causes related directly or indirectly to cellular senescence.

Wrt cancer: as other causes of death become curable or treatable, its incidence increases. It's also more likely the older we are, because of accumulating cellular mutations. Personally I'd take an increased risk of eventually falling to cancer, than the near-inevitability of falling apart in my 80s or 90s when my body's self-repair mechanisms start to turn off.

Immortality is not even conceptually attractive. However, a few more decades of reasonably enjoyable life most certainly is.

Methane and Global warming

Methane is anout 15 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2, true, but it has a short half-life in the atmosphere (about 10 years from memory). It gets broken down by UV and recombines with oxygen as CO2 and water. Incidentally water vapour is an even more potent greenhouse gas than methane, but the atmosphere is naturally pretty much saturated with the stuff. If it weren't for global warming caused by water vapour, the planet would mostly be too cold for life.

Anyway: methane does not accumulate long-term in the atmosphere, whereas CO2 (probably) does. Which is why the focus is on the CO2.

There IS a clear and present danger of a runaway warming event caused by the thawing of methane hydrates of natural orogin currently trapped in permafrost across the world's Northern tundras. If the permafrost thaws, lots of methane is released, causing increased global temperatures, causing more thawing and more methane. A positive feedback loop until all the arctic has thawed. The fossil record shows that this has happened several times in recent geological time, without human causation. A very sudden thaw, followed by a gradual cooling. To my mind, this is the key reason why we should be VERY bothered about human CO2 emissions.

Re: I would love to have LASIK

The question should be whether your life is really seriously impaired without LASIK? If spectacles are able to correct one's vision defect, then LASIK is a risk being taken for little reason beyond convenience or vanity. If it goes wrong (which sometimes it does) one is irreversibly worse off, and spectacles then won't help.

The thought of someone risking both eyes at once is quite incredible. Have one done, and wait until one can judge the short-term results before risking the other one! Having one eye irreversibly screwed up is bad, being functionally blinded is far, far worse.

Re: LASIK night-vision loss

Night vision loss - I'd guess that what people notice is increased scattering of bright light, such as oncoming headlights, by the scar tissue. Light scattered into the dark parts of your visual field means that the subtle gradations of dark are washed out by the "noise".

Everyone's dark vision deteriorates with age, but an optician may point out that you have a "pre-cataract". That's clouding of the natural lens in the eye, which will lead to a cataract but which at present is only hurting one's night-driving vision. Hard question: give up night driving, or pay for and risk a cataract operation a decade before the cataract will be causing everyday vision problems?

I also wonder whether some people who try LASIK to correct severe lens defects which spectacles can't properly address, might be better treated with a full cataract operation to replace the faulty natural lens in their eye? The cataract lens-implant operation has an extremely high success rate and leaves one with vision that's in some ways more perfect than nature. I guess the risk of losing the eye altogether is higher for cataract surgery, though the risk of being left with vision that's worse after the procedure than before is surely higher with LASIK. And one does have two eyes .... But there again, eye lens implants haven't yet been tested for a full lifetime. People who have lens implants are usually elderly, for whom a lifetime is unlikely to exceed 20 years (and the implants have now been well-tested over that timescale).

Re: @Nigel 11

The effects of drugs taken for a short time are almost certainly reversible, even if your body reacts badly. The adverse effects of long-term use of Ibuprofen are well-known, starting with increased risk of heart attacks (read the leaflet in the packet). It's a long-term effect, caused by the drug interfering with your body's self-repair mechanisms. Short-term (for a few days), it's a negligible risk.

Surgery is almost by definition irreversible. Contact lenses are equivalent to long-term drug usage, and I would also counsel avoiding elective use of a drug therapy for the rest of one's life if the treated condition isn't life-threatening or seriously debilitating.

I have in fact made that choice with respect to life-long use of anti-gout medication (no thanks). I prefer to put up with a few hours of extreme pain in my big toe maybe once a year, and treat that with diclofenac (a more powerful version of ibuprofen) for about a week when it happens. Someone suffering from gout more severely would doubtless choose otherwise, as I will if the attacks become frequent, or develop into chronic gouty arthritis, or spread to my major joints.

Don't consider ANY elective surgery until they can point at a statistically valid number of guinea-pigs, sorry people, who have lived to a ripe old age with no undesirable side-effects. The medical history books are full of treatments that looked like a good idea at the time, but proved to be a long-term disaster.

I won't even consider contact lenses. It'll be another couple of decades before there are ninety-year-olds who were wearing them since their twenties. Does vanity or slight convenience justify even the slightest increased risk of losing your sight in your old age?

(It is of course different if the surgery is to address a life-threatening or seriously life-limiting problem.)

Re: The Saudis have a better moral compass

a pit of amorality and cluelessness

Completely valid righteous indignation, completely wrong argument. They have such a strong view on moral standards they they'll force children to be burned to death rather than see them break the moral code even in the most desperate of circumstances. It's not amorality, it's the even worse sort of dogmatic insanity at the complete other end of the spectrum. Give me a choice between someone with no moral compass and someone whose moral compass is glued immovably in a particular direction, and I'll unhesitatingly choose the former!

Re: so-called “dot-brand” or “single-registrant” gTLD

I still can't understand the rationale behind paying big bucks for these TLDs. Why is .virgin better than .virgin.com or .virgin.co.uk? Do people really go domain-name guessing, rather than putting what they want into a Google (or other) search box? Heck, if they use IE, there's only the one box in any case.

Or is that the reason? Buy the .baby TLD and make it impossible for a not-very-smart mother-to-be to search for "Baby" using IE?

Re: Very strange behaviour indeed

His specific anti advertising hissy fit is a logical disconnect.

If you have a soul that responds to music, it most certainly is not.

For example, the second movement of Dvorak's "New World" symphony is one of the most sublime musical creations of all time. Unfortunately some soul-dead advertising agency used it to advertise Hovis bread, and now I can no longer listen to it without momentarily wincing at the association. Which incidentally, has negative value for Hovis, because I always buy some other make of bread whenever I have a choice!

(It could have been worse. They might have associated the music with something I really detested. Be thankful for small mercies).

Re: HP PCs and Printers Are a Disgrace to the HP Name

Another vote for the DJ970. Mine still going strong, though a bit slow by today's standards!

Also for the Officejet Pro range, from the K550 through to the 8000. (I don't yet have the current 8100 model to play with, but I've heard from others it's a worthy successor to the 8000).

Cheap printers are always a false economy. They're built down to a price rather than up to a standard, so that they can be bundled (given away) with PCs, or piled high in supermarkets at Xmas for the clueless to buy. Then you pay through your nose over and over again for tiny ink cartridges. When you are deciding which printer to buy, include the cost of consumables for five years of use, and assume usage will increase with time. This advice applies to all manufacturers, not just HP.

Re: HP Titanic

That comment is like saying there's no future in transistor technology two years after Brittain, Bardeen and Shockley invented the things!

(And with the benefit of LOTS of hindsight you'd have been right ... the real breakthrough technology was CMOS, and the field effect transistor was invented as a theoretical possibility by Prof. Sir Neville Mott back in the 1930s, when the technology to actually make one did not exist).

It'll be quite a fewl more years before memristors appear in actual products. However, HP owns the patents, and HP (or whoever it sells those patents to) should do very well out of them.