> Sitting is bad because it displaces physical activity…
This is at odds with the article, which states:
> Since 2010, researchers have been keen to point out that sedentary behaviour is distinct from a lack of physical activity. You can get sufficient exercise per day, and still sit for too long.
I think this is confounding the two points. I don't think GP was talking about "exercise per day" but rather long periods of time of sedentarism. The quote from the article doesn't at all dispute the proposed point that "standing still for a long period of time can also be harmful"
> The model village includes a scale model of the model village (which would be at 1:81 scale). This model, in turn, contains a scale model of the model of the model village; being at 1:729 scale this measures around 1 foot (30 cm) in width. This model also contains a scale model (in paint only) of the model of the model of the model village (which would be at 1:6561 scale).
This is great news. It’s appalling that the prison system is the only place left in the country that charges more for “long distance” calls (like 3x IIRC).
I’ve helped several families set up Google voice numbers in the region of their loved one’s prison just to save money.
Most of the jail and prison systems I know have technical checks in place for Google voice and other VOIP systems to avoid you getting around their charges. They will ban the numbers and then often ban you from the phone system and sometimes put you in the Hole for games like that.
I used to use them to try to call the UK instead of paying multiple dollars a minute when my mother was dying of cancer. But it's a game of cat-and-mouse. And if you're in a place that makes you wait 4-8 weeks to get a number added to your call list, then you can't afford your number to get banned.
Every day I help multiple guys inside do "3-way" calls from prison to numbers that aren't approved onto their lists yet. It's a dangerous game, though, as the calls are often detected and blocked.
FWIW, my interactions have been with the federal system over 10+ years. I never heard of any blocking of google voice numbers there. It appears to be common knowledge among the inmates as a way to avoid the long distance charges.
That's wild. Google Voice has been my primary phone number since before it was called Google Voice; at this point no one except me even knows my current "real" number. I'd hate to think that someone might get in trouble just for trying to call me from prison.
I worked for a company which offered a bridge between CorrLinks (federal prison email system) and SMS. The inmate would get their own phone number they could receive messages from, and make outgoing texts as well.
My boss's friend operates https://phonedonkey.com, which provides a VOIP relay service such as what you set up.
I suspect you’re taking that excerpt too literally. By my reading, the author is expressing their surprise to learn something to improve their writing from an unexpected source (a book about mathematics), and is even more surprised at this source being written by someone very different from the author culturally (Hungarian) and philosophically/politicaly (Stalinist).
The author did not imply that sugar addiction is anywhere as bad as heroin addiction.
They observed a technique that was shown scientifically to be effective for the more serious addiction and decided to try it for their milder addiction. That’s just good reasoning, and it worked for them.
> The main conclusion from the study is that a change of environment as radical as Vietnam’s during a war period compared to the US was critical for their recovery.
This is a proof of concept project. The “3 years” is not because of some inherent difficulty, it’s just a typical research project.
From the article:
> …will closely monitor the health and vital statistics of the rhinos over a period of six months, in order to determine the viability of this approach.
If this approach is shown to be healthy, I’m sure it could be done much faster.
I often see this (gp's) sentient on HN and it is quite surprising to me given how people here specifically work in technology. Are we not intimately familiar with how one typically starts with small trial groups before we scale, so that we understand the effectiveness and safety? Or are we just "move fast and break things" and leave a mess in our wake with no one spending time to clean anything up. I guess that would explain enshitification.
But seriously, S-curves aren't just about how the middle part looks exponential. Both ends are slow. Slow to start and slow to end. When technology B replaces technology A it is (almost) always WORSE than technology A initially. The difference is that its theoretical maximum is higher. Because guess what? In the long run if you stack a bunch of S-curves together, you get an exponential curve. And this is how so much technology has improved, including transistors, solar, batteries, and so on. Sometimes this slow start can be on the order of decades! The Motorola DynaTAC 8000X (1983) wasn't "a failure," it was a step to the IBM Simon (1992) which was a step to the iPhone (2007).
So if you're exclusively chasing things that are better *now*, you won't make any progress. You have to invest.
> After three years of meticulous and dedicated hard work, the Rhisotope Project at Wits University has successfully inserted low doses of radioisotopes into 20 live rhinoceros.
Sounds like there is some inherent difficulty requiring years of meticulous and dedicated hard work to insert doses into 20 live rhinoceroses.
> inherent difficulty requiring years of meticulous and dedicated hard work
I'm not quite convinced of this. If you watch the video in the article they demonstrate the procedure. Considering that they typically paint the rhino's horns with substances to make them undesirable to poachers, they clearly have the capacity to subdue and restrain the rhino already. And in the video they show a person using a standard hand drill, who drills into the rhino. You can see this at 0:20 and them insert the device at 0:34, where just after they show another horn being drilled into. And they do it several times throughout the video while the narrator explains the process.
I suspect that the 3 years is far less due to the actual "installing" it into the rhino (as it looks like once subdued the process is really <15 minutes...) but rather to things like regulation and determining the nuances like "how many isotopes do we need" (clearly more than one), "what types of radiation are more detectable?" "what levels of radiation will sustain and be detectable when transporting horns across international airports?", "Are we causing harm to the rhinos through the radiation?", "does the radiation leech into the rhino's body, such that while the device is safe inside the horn it would be harmful," "how often does that happen, especially given when they fight?", "do the devices stay in place for sustained periods of time?" and so on. There's quite a lot of important questions and many I'm sure that an actual expert in this could ask, but I'm nowhere near a rhino expert (or even enthusiast) [though am experienced with radiation technologies] and I have a bunch of questions that would reasonably take years to adequately answer.
It isn't "ah fuck, rhinos are so hard to catch that we're only able to catch one every 2 months" but "okay, we've installed these devices in 5 rhinos, are they still there 3 years later?" and "oh fuck, that type of glue and that drilling depth didn't work because we lost 10 devices in the first year. Time to update our methodology."
I find these kinds of questions magnitudes more likely than the explanation that they couldn't catch 20 rhinos and drill into their horns. Especially given what can be seen in the video about how the rhinos act.
There is not enough information to draw that conclusion. Anyone familiar with academia (or even a R&D tech project) can imagine what could take 3 years: ethics board approval, getting permission from the relevant government agencies, finding and hiring local Rhino experts to do the tagging, iterating on design of the drill and placement of isotopes, waiting to find enough rhinos that fit the high-standards demanded for a POC study (extra large, extra healthy, etc), and so on.
Or the other way: If it really took three years to tag 20 rhinos with everything working at full speed, don't you think the University and the researches themselves would be the first to realize this is impracticle? Don't you think the journal reviewers would point this out?
> Anyone familiar with academia (or even a R&D tech project) can imagine what could take 3 years
Yeah honestly (as an academic; on applied side), when I saw "3 years" my first thought was "wow that's fast." And the second one was "was that just to get approval or is that they've had the device in the rhino 0-3 years and are testing how effective their methods are at staying in and not doing long term damage to the animal?" Because the latter question I can see taking even longer. Though they say a rhino is poached every 20 hrs, so I think there's probably some urgency to the matter where 3 years of testing is good enough.
> Don't you think the journal reviewers would point this out?
Well... I also don't have faith in journal reviewers so who the fuck knows.
> Over 11 000 radiation detection portal monitors are installed at airports, harbours and other ports of entry, including thousands of trained personnel equipped with radiation detectors, all of which can detect the smallest radioactive particles.
I didn’t realize this. Injecting small, safe radioactive material into rhino horns seems like an incredibly good hack: turn all that nuclear monitoring equipment into poached animal artifact detectors.
Classic case of a societal problem that technology tries to paper over, and does a poor job doing so. Rhino horns are used for their keratin and "traditional" medicine ingredients.
Radiation portal monitors will not detect all quantities and there are simple techniques for masking these detections with sheilding, or via nuisance alarms if they are detected. [1]
Shark fin extraction, for shark fin soup, has a similar cultural problem. Influential people in the communities that consume these products, ie Yao Ming, could make a lot more progress by simply having public campaigns against it. [2]
[1] Source: me, I am a radation detecion PhD who works on similar kinds of problems, with similarly or more capable systems.
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJG7RaLX-DM
Any deterrence scheme relies on awareness and uncertainty just as much, if not more than, an actual technology. If poachers think it will raise the chances of detection, even if that chance isn’t 100%, that’s just as good to deter them.
Only if the percentage of the population injected is high, which is unlikely given it took 3 years to inject 20 rhinos. If the percentage is small, the poachers could just get a cheap radiation detector and screen out whatever portion of their haul is contaminated before passing it along. Further, many smugglers are unconcerned with detection, they already likely bribe a customs agent to ignore it.
Even if the poachers can detect the contamination, they are probably going to kill the rhino, flee the area, and then assess the goods. So you still have a dead rhino unless the doping is well communicated and obvious to all.
Sure, the multiagent problem needs communication of the credible threat to the bad actors. "Credible threat" implies that bad actors don't collect information about the system, technical and non-technical, that implies the balance of risk and reward isn't tilted in favor of continuing their actions.
Do the black-market consumers know that? Fentanyl and xylazine come to mind: not many drug users intend to get those, they can get many batches of what they do want before they get an adulterated batch, and they often don’t find out they got the adulterated kind until it’s too late.
I’m also wondering where we’re getting the idea that it’s extremely toxic if ingested. Maybe it’s in the video? The article seems to suggest that it’s “non-toxic” and that
> “the inserted radioisotopes hold no health or any other risk for the animals or those who care for them.”
> 'The radioactive material would "render the horn useless... essentially poisonous for human consumption" added Nithaya Chetty, professor and dean of science at [the University of the Witwatersrand]'
> Q: What if you drop the radioactive seed in the grass and cannot be found? And other animals accidentally ingest it?
> A: This is a highly unlikely scenario as specific standard operating procedures will be developed to ensure that no radioactive material will be left behind at the treatment site. Should an animal ingest some of the radioactive material subsequent to the initial treatment, the radioisotope will be of such a chemical and physical form that it will quickly pass through the bowels of the animal and be excreted out by that animal. The calculated doses will not do any significant harm.
Perhaps something significant happens when grinding up the radioisotope, but then again this would also happen when ingested by animals (grinding between teeth etc).
Not fully ruined... since the injections are typically not loose contamination, for fear that it migrates into the rhino via capillary action or irradiates the rhino more than people are comfortable with.
Smugglers would likely be able to use simple, cheap detectors to remove these.
Potentially they don't remove the pils, simply grind the horn + source into medicine... the amount of radiation will not cause acute effects to the person who ingests it and will likely just cause some "unexplainable" tumor or system failure later in life or after a prolonged consumption.
Honestly I'm a bit confused, the descriptions seem contradictory or require an extraordinary level of fine tuning.
If you just insert a capsule of radioactive material, it's easy to make it (extremely) poisonous, easily detectable and harmless to the rhino. But I don't see a way to do all three at once.
If you just wanted to kill the consumers a small amount of an alpha emitter would work quite well, but would be hard to detect and carry a small amount of risk to the rhino if it breaks confinement.
Conversely you could use a strong gamma emitter to make it easily detectable but I don't see a way to do so that would harm the consumers but not the rhino. Best you can do is some level or radioactivity that we're fine with in animals but not in humans because we're hypocrites.
I think that no one believes killing consumers of these products is a viable solution or that it doesn't have disastrous side effects. What happens with rhinos that die? do we have to collect their tusks and these are rad-waste now?
Making them radioactive with non-penetrating particles might be ok from the standpoint of trying to make them less desirable... but you aren't making them detectable & it is highly controversial to do this.
In reality, and back to the solutions proposed by the article: I don't know if the source article's idea has merit or is just funded by a non-profit where this is a small pet project or if they really don't understand the tradespace.
If this has a chance of getting to 100% of the population, I think if I were the rhino I’d want to take those odds given the alternative is being hunted.
And if it’s eg 50%, I’d very much want to be in the injected 50% because all poaching effort would be in the non treated population. Obviously assuming all animals in an area were injected and that was known to poachers.
> Best you can do is some level or radioactivity that we're fine with in animals but not in humans because we're hypocrites.
I don't know if this is the case, but if the life expectancy of rhinos is much less than humans, then there would be radiation levels that are safe for the rhino but harmful for humans. Tumors can take time to develop.
> Radiation portal monitors will not detect all quantities and there are simple techniques for masking these detections with sheilding, or via nuisance alarms if they are detected.
I think more than actual quantities involved, the scary risk of radiation, however unlikely, may be a bigger deterrent for the consumers of these products. The more widely this news spreads, the better it is for the Rhinos.
Sure, but paying for an anti-shark fin commercial might be as much as a single portal monitor.
Having portal monitors that serve many purposes is good, and generally the biggest impact they have is in the deterrence effect, ie bad actors might be constrained by their existence. However in order for deterrence to be effective it must be a credible capability. Since there are so many smugglers, and they could reasonably implement simple countermeasures, it is likely the deterrence effect is small to nil in this case.
People say that, but the data proves good commercials work. Of course not all commercials work, but there is plenty of data showing they do work and what works.
Yes... sorry I am thinking of some related topics in this area, not only just about rhinos. Elephant trade has a similar issue, and this is why my mind was in that space.
> Although the amount in a single banana is small in environmental and medical terms, the radioactivity from a truckload of bananas is capable of causing a false alarm when passed through a Radiation Portal Monitor used to detect possible smuggling of nuclear material at U.S. ports.
If you leave a scintillating detector such as a Radiacode or similar on a bag of potassium chloride water softener salt for a while you can actually detect a very slight amount of radioactivity and generate a spectrum :)
Bananas are not so radioactive, my guess is that they are using a stronger radioactive source. Perhaps hide the horn inside a truck full of bananas? I guess the horn will be still more radioactive.
Also, each radioactive source produce radioactivity with different energy, so you can use specialized equipment to identify the source. (We used one in the lab in an undergraduate couse of Physics. It's not very big, like the size of a shoe.)
Probably is by the time they are found, the rhino is dead. They might catch the last guy holding the bag, but I suspect it's passed through a few different groups by the time it reaches the airport. So the poachers just go on poaching as they already got paid.
But the idea of the test is that this could be done in a wider scale. If a significant portion of horns are being confiscated (via radiation sensors) then there’s fewer horns being sold and less money available for all those middleman groups. Over time the market goes away.
Perhaps similar to how the market for stolen iPhones dried up once people could remotely brick their stole phone. There’s just less money to be made so thieves move on to more lucrative targets.
I’ve enjoyed this story over several decades, but what stands out to me now is the fact that Bill Atkinson was working from home during the creation of the Macintosh.
We used it extensively in the 80s for birthdays, Christmas cards and more.
Anything made by computer was instantly special, and the ability to customize card to the recipients interests was viewed as magic.
As more of our neighbors and friends got computers, print shop was one of the first programs to be acquired. (Okay, often pirated!)