Slashdot Mirror

I can heartily recommend the Astronomy Hacks book (Amazon Link (no referrer ID)), which is part of O'Reilly's "Hacks" series. Average 5* reviews from 48 reviews.

I went through the same thing. I was fresh to amateur astronomy and didn't know what to do. My first warning: Don't spend to little on a telescope. $180 for a StarBlast is the lowest I'd pay for anything decent (and it is, I drool over it as a quick 'plop down and observe' scope from time to time). Second Warning: Astrophotography is insanely expensive. As in 10+ times your budget. Don't do it. If you really want to do astrophotography take a camera, put it on a tripod, point at the sky, set it as wide as you can and expose for 15 seconds for digital, a few hours for film. The results are quite nice.

Here's what my own experiences have taught me: Get a Dobsonian. With $1000 you can get a 10"-12" Dobsonian and still have tons of room for accessories. A dobsonian is very portable compared to a refractor and with near zero setup and takedown using it is much easier than a refractor too. 10" is a lot of aperture and you won't catch the "aperture fever" for something bigger for a while. The scope I eventually got is an Orion XT10 Intelliscope, but you may not want the computerization with your budget.

I found the people at Cloudy Nights very, very helpful. They have reviews of lots of products as well as their forums and they tend to specialize in getting the most out of your money.

As far as books go, I use Nightwatch by Terence Dickinson every night I observe just for the charts. Star Watch by Philip Harrington goes well with Nightwatch as good place to find new objects for the beginner. A lot of people suggest Turn Left at Orion, but I fount it to be a bit slow and the charts lacking in lower magnitude stars for their size.

I went through the same thing. I was fresh to amateur astronomy and didn't know what to do. My first warning: Don't spend to little on a telescope. $180 for a StarBlast is the lowest I'd pay for anything decent (and it is, I drool over it as a quick 'plop down and observe' scope from time to time). Second Warning: Astrophotography is insanely expensive. As in 10+ times your budget. Don't do it. If you really want to do astrophotography take a camera, put it on a tripod, point at the sky, set it as wide as you can and expose for 15 seconds for digital, a few hours for film. The results are quite nice.

Here's what my own experiences have taught me: Get a Dobsonian. With $1000 you can get a 10"-12" Dobsonian and still have tons of room for accessories. A dobsonian is very portable compared to a refractor and with near zero setup and takedown using it is much easier than a refractor too. 10" is a lot of aperture and you won't catch the "aperture fever" for something bigger for a while. The scope I eventually got is an Orion XT10 Intelliscope, but you may not want the computerization with your budget.

I found the people at Cloudy Nights very, very helpful. They have reviews of lots of products as well as their forums and they tend to specialize in getting the most out of your money.

As far as books go, I use Nightwatch by Terence Dickinson every night I observe just for the charts. Star Watch by Philip Harrington goes well with Nightwatch as good place to find new objects for the beginner. A lot of people suggest Turn Left at Orion, but I fount it to be a bit slow and the charts lacking in lower magnitude stars for their size.

I went through the same thing. I was fresh to amateur astronomy and didn't know what to do. My first warning: Don't spend to little on a telescope. $180 for a StarBlast is the lowest I'd pay for anything decent (and it is, I drool over it as a quick 'plop down and observe' scope from time to time). Second Warning: Astrophotography is insanely expensive. As in 10+ times your budget. Don't do it. If you really want to do astrophotography take a camera, put it on a tripod, point at the sky, set it as wide as you can and expose for 15 seconds for digital, a few hours for film. The results are quite nice.

Here's what my own experiences have taught me: Get a Dobsonian. With $1000 you can get a 10"-12" Dobsonian and still have tons of room for accessories. A dobsonian is very portable compared to a refractor and with near zero setup and takedown using it is much easier than a refractor too. 10" is a lot of aperture and you won't catch the "aperture fever" for something bigger for a while. The scope I eventually got is an Orion XT10 Intelliscope, but you may not want the computerization with your budget.

I found the people at Cloudy Nights very, very helpful. They have reviews of lots of products as well as their forums and they tend to specialize in getting the most out of your money.

As far as books go, I use Nightwatch by Terence Dickinson every night I observe just for the charts. Star Watch by Philip Harrington goes well with Nightwatch as good place to find new objects for the beginner. A lot of people suggest Turn Left at Orion, but I fount it to be a bit slow and the charts lacking in lower magnitude stars for their size.

I am 99% tinfoil wrap. Beat that! ::Bzzzzzzzzzt::

It probably uses a mini pci wireless card. Replace the one in there with an Intel one and it should work.

Some notebooks have BIOS locks. I tried replacing the Broadcom WiFi NIC in my HP with an Atheros NIC...it wouldn't even POST.

Fortunately, bcm43xx has advanced enough that I can get a reliable connection at home or on the road with the travel router I pack with my notebook, but it has some signal-strength problems that can make using public APs in unknown locations a bit dicey. (The travel router takes care of some of those problems, and for when it doesn't, there's data service from my Treo over Bluetooth.)

(ndiswrapper has never worked IME, so it's not really an option.)

JSP and ASP are terrible compared to rails. You really ought to pick up Agile Web Development with Ruby On Rails and go through the sample project at least.

It'll change the way you think about development for the web.

Or, if you're really set on Java, try Rails for Java Developers and you'll see how much more concise the exact same code is in Rails.

JSP and ASP are terrible compared to rails. You really ought to pick up Agile Web Development with Ruby On Rails and go through the sample project at least.

It'll change the way you think about development for the web.

Or, if you're really set on Java, try Rails for Java Developers and you'll see how much more concise the exact same code is in Rails.

My high school physics teacher would read sections from Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynmann! every week on Friday. I though it was weird then, but now I realize that it had a positive effect on me. It really helped to humanize the sciences.

We can build machines that are better than humans at a lot of tasks, but we'll need much better concepts of what intelligence really is before we can even start thinking about how to design a a general AI that is smarter than a human all around.

Have you researched this much? I find our concepts to be pretty advanced, and I think they will only advance faster as we approach the processing power necessary to implement them. This textbook is a pretty good starting point if you want to know details (and it's a lot of fun to read, too!).

All through recorded history we've had philosophers thinking about thinking, and we're not visibly closer to an answer to "what does it mean to say 'I think'" than the ancient Greeks were. It tends to make one pessimistic about the age of thinking machines being right around the corner...

I disagree. Logicians and mathematicians have come a long way in defining the rules of thought, and computer scientists much further than them, even.

The guy I was responding to was claiming that we can't design something smarter than ourselves. You're just saying that we have to understand how intelligence works first. That's an entirely different (and obvious) argument. Do you believe that it is impossible for us to ever understand how our brains work? Why would that be?

We actually do understand quite a bit about intelligence already, if you look at the research. We haven't quite tied it all together yet, but most of the pieces are there. One of the biggest obstacles is the fact that we just don't have the processing power to run any sort of general intelligence algorithm yet, but if hardware continues to advance at the rate it has for the last few decades, that should change soon enough. Once the hardware is available, there will be a lot more interest in actually trying to write a general intelligence on it. Right now, there's much more interest in using the pieces for more restricted purposes that are possible now, e.g. using planning algorithms to plan the construction of a 747.

If you want details, I highly recommend this textbook. It's actually a lot of fun to read.

This one did it for, with a heaping serving of the old SciFi masters, starting with Heinlein, Clarke, Bradbury, Asimov, Foster...

http://www.amazon.com/Godel-Escher-Bach-Eternal-Go lden/dp/0465026567

There won't be a singularity. I suggest readers take a look at "Myths of Innovation" a realistic truly well written book Scott Berkin, http://www.amazon.com/Myths-Innovation-Scott-Berku n/dp/0596527055 He shows how Innovation occurs and has not sped up or slowed down even at this time.

Douglas Hofstadter's Godel, Escher and Bach is a must-read for both its english language surprises and its science eye-opening. It's a big books but you can select some parts for class reading. The 'group intelligence of ants' chapter introduction comes to mind. Many intros read like Lewis Carol, and I'm pretty sure it was written with that intent. Note: english is not my prime language, but this is the 3rd english book I've read when I was 15 (after Orwell's Animal Farm as a warmup and Tolkien's trilogy which is the whole point why I learnt english in the first place)...

Douglas Hofstadter's Godel, Escher and Bach is a must-read for both its english language surprises and its science eye-opening. It's a big books but you can select some parts for class reading. The 'group intelligence of ants' chapter introduction comes to mind. Many intros read like Lewis Carol, and I'm pretty sure it was written with that intent. Note: english is not my prime language, but this is the 3rd english book I've read when I was 15 (after Orwell's Animal Farm as a warmup and Tolkien's trilogy which is the whole point why I learnt english in the first place)...

Douglas Hofstadter's Godel, Escher and Bach is a must-read for both its english language surprises and its science eye-opening. It's a big books but you can select some parts for class reading. The 'group intelligence of ants' chapter introduction comes to mind. Many intros read like Lewis Carol, and I'm pretty sure it was written with that intent. Note: english is not my prime language, but this is the 3rd english book I've read when I was 15 (after Orwell's Animal Farm as a warmup and Tolkien's trilogy which is the whole point why I learnt english in the first place)...

Not read it myself (it not having been released an all), but Lucy (Stephen's daughter) and Stephen Hawking's new book, "George's Secret Key to the Universe" might be worth a read?

What about a 100 Tons Hydraulic Shop Press? If you compress it a few time along the main axises, you should be able to do a good job of bending the HD casing and the platter together into a mess.

BTW 20T cost ~ $455 and a 100T press cost $6,250.00.

http://www.amazon.com/100-Capacity-Hydraulic-Shop- Press/dp/B000I1ZU2Y

Does anyone know of a book like Tracy Kidder's "Soul of a New Machine" that is perhaps a little more recently written? Kidder's book captivated me back when it was published, and I'm astonished to see that it's still in print, but it is pretty dated now. Amazon's got some similar items listed, but I haven't read 'em. "Soul" helped to fire me up about engineering.

I think that TV and movies rarely tell the stories of engineers and scientists in a way that will pique a kid's interest, and a kid who has a tendency toward leveraging their right brain much more than their left may not be reachable. For some kids, though, a well-written story about the human side of technology disciplines can turn a tiny inclination into a passion. Are there any out there that were written in this century?

Why science fiction, why not science fact? How about a book like "One, Two, Three... Infinity" by George Gamow? Or anything written by Martin Gardner? How about Innumeracy by John Allen Paulos? Or Max Born wrote a book, "Einstein's Theory of Relativity", which explains relativity in great detail with nothing more than pre-algebra. Or for the computer nerds, the obligatory recommendation is "Godel Escher Bach, an Eternal Golden Braid" by Douglas Hofstadter.

I have never understood the point of fiction, except as pure entertainment. Non-fiction is where the good stuff is. If it really has to be fiction, try Flatland by Edwin Abbott.

Journey through Genius: The Great Theorems of Mathematics. The best math book for school children. Really got me into the subject.

I highly recommend the collections of Asimov's science columns for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. He wrote the column monthly for decades, and was given free reign to delve into any aspect of science he pleased. Later, the collections were grouped by subject into books, such as

Asimov On Astronomy

Asimov On Chemistry

Asimov On Numbers

Asimov On Physics

Many of the essays were collected into a more general book, Asimov On Science

For younger readers, Asimov also wrote a series of books with the subject prefixed with, "How did we find out about...", for example, "How Did We Find Out About Electricity?".

I highly recommend the collections of Asimov's science columns for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. He wrote the column monthly for decades, and was given free reign to delve into any aspect of science he pleased. Later, the collections were grouped by subject into books, such as

Asimov On Astronomy

Asimov On Chemistry

Asimov On Numbers

Asimov On Physics

Many of the essays were collected into a more general book, Asimov On Science

For younger readers, Asimov also wrote a series of books with the subject prefixed with, "How did we find out about...", for example, "How Did We Find Out About Electricity?".

I highly recommend the collections of Asimov's science columns for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. He wrote the column monthly for decades, and was given free reign to delve into any aspect of science he pleased. Later, the collections were grouped by subject into books, such as

Asimov On Astronomy

Asimov On Chemistry

Asimov On Numbers

Asimov On Physics

Many of the essays were collected into a more general book, Asimov On Science

For younger readers, Asimov also wrote a series of books with the subject prefixed with, "How did we find out about...", for example, "How Did We Find Out About Electricity?".

I highly recommend the collections of Asimov's science columns for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. He wrote the column monthly for decades, and was given free reign to delve into any aspect of science he pleased. Later, the collections were grouped by subject into books, such as

Asimov On Astronomy

Asimov On Chemistry

Asimov On Numbers

Asimov On Physics

Many of the essays were collected into a more general book, Asimov On Science

For younger readers, Asimov also wrote a series of books with the subject prefixed with, "How did we find out about...", for example, "How Did We Find Out About Electricity?".

I highly recommend the collections of Asimov's science columns for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. He wrote the column monthly for decades, and was given free reign to delve into any aspect of science he pleased. Later, the collections were grouped by subject into books, such as

Asimov On Astronomy

Asimov On Chemistry

Asimov On Numbers

Asimov On Physics

Many of the essays were collected into a more general book, Asimov On Science

For younger readers, Asimov also wrote a series of books with the subject prefixed with, "How did we find out about...", for example, "How Did We Find Out About Electricity?".

http://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Million-Master-M agic-Numbers/dp/039331071X

God Created the Integers - Stephen Hawking

http://www.amazon.com/God-Created-Integers-Mathema tical-Breakthroughs/dp/0762419229/ref=pd_bbs_2/102 -3884603-8680934?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1189325102&sr =1-2

http://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Million-Master-M agic-Numbers/dp/039331071X

God Created the Integers - Stephen Hawking

http://www.amazon.com/God-Created-Integers-Mathema tical-Breakthroughs/dp/0762419229/ref=pd_bbs_2/102 -3884603-8680934?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1189325102&sr =1-2

A few minutes with Google shows clearly that the corporation filed chapter 11, and that those proceedings protected the assets of corporate officers and other significant assets worth at least 900 million dollars, and furthermore the bankruptcy court denied compensation to over a half a million victims who apparently missed a filing deadline.

An apparently well researched and well respected source of information on the corporate fiasco that was the Dalkon Shield is this book:
Bending the Law: The Story of the Dalkon Shield Bankruptcy (by Richard B. Sobol. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991.)

A review of the book containing enough details to confirm that a simplistic interpretation "AH Robins went out of business" is not sufficiently detailed to be a meaningful contribution to the discussion:
Reviewed by Cary Coglianese, Department of Political Science, University of Michigan

An article from the day that bankruptcy was filed:
Robins, in Bankruptcy Filing, Cites Dalkon Shield Claims

A band named after the fiasco, with MP3 files online:
Dalkon Shield

Please, get a login, use it, and post under your real name. It might help provide you with incentive to read more and mouth off less.

Too bad it's done by Amazon. It's an absolutely fantastic idea, and a really new technology application (getting the public to scan pictures). Unfortunately, I don't have, and won't have an Amazon ID due to their continued promotion of dog fighting

Fuck you, Amazon.

Product Description

Staticmaster Brushes have a strip of polonium that neutralizes static electricity as the camel's hair brush removes dust from the negatives. Available in 1" or 3" sizes. Connector allows one or more 3" brushes to be joined together.

Concerta at first and , as well as therapy. I also did some heavy research into the disease and successful coping mechanisms. (the book: "You Mean I'm Not Lazy, Stupid or Crazy?!" by by Kate Kelly and Peggy Ramundo was tremendously helpful.)

Several months into Concerta and was I finding that the Ritalin ups and downs were too much for me to handle. One 12 hour Concerta would last roughly 9 hours, which was fine while I was at work, but the trough of the wave actually brought me lower than my normal ADD baseline making me useless after I came home. The Psychiatrist gave me follow on Ritalin pill but if I took it, then I was completely exhausted by the end of the day.

Now I'm completely off of the stimulants and I'm taking Strattera, and while it doesn't work quite as well as the Ritalin did, it works well enough without having to deal with any side-effects like the aforementioned stimulant treadmill. The only unwanted side-effect is that I have to eat before taking my pills in the morning. Otherwise I end up with some pretty heavy nausea.

http://www.amazon.com/Archos-Portable-Digital-Reco rder-500870/dp/B000HAVWUA

Archos player. Has a widescreen. Supports *way* more video and audio formats. I can drag-and-drop my music/videos into *folders* instead of being *forced* to use iTunes.

Of course, I was offered a 25% discount on an iPod which made it priced less than this (~$200 for the 60GB before the 80 came out) so I went with that. I have been regretting that decision since.

Use this instead.

I'd like to point out that the reference for the statements labeling the seal of quality as a "marketing ploy" is a single book. While that is better than nothing, I can't remember ever writing a research paper in college with fewer than 3 credible sources.

Perhaps my memory is fuzzy, but this book doesn't share the same assessment.

It's possible it's merely a semantic issue or a bad implication on the part of Wikipedia.

DRM restricts the user. 10NES restricted the developers.

The chip was designed for two purposes, keep crap games off the system and give Nintendo control to that effect. Was it 100% effective? Certainly not, but neither are most Spam filters. That, and there's no accounting for taste.

Take the time to read Game ver, you'll have a better idea of what went on.

For any questions about E&M wave equation solutions -- standing, boundary conditions, free propogation, etc., -- get a copy of this text:

http://www.amazon.com/Classical-Electrodynamics-Th ird-David-Jackson/dp/047130932X

It's _the_ classic grad. level E&M textbook. Generations of physicists have learned much from (and dreaded exams on) this text. My old copy of Jackson had no info on numerical solutions, but I'm guessing you need some theoretical background, not a canned math method/computer code.

If you didn't know _anything_ about this textbook beforehand, you may not posess the background you need to solve the problem you're working on.... Sorry to be so blunt.

Hear, here!

If I wanted to read childish politics, I'd read a newspaper.

If I wanted to read childish comments on childish politics, I'd read the letters to editors of newspapers.

Though I'll probably never work on the particular problem of Our Topic, I do appreciate the opportunity to broaden my knowledge of numerical methods.

Lots of interesting links to click in a discussion like this. Software to download and play with. Brain cells to grow.

That's what *real* nerds do.

Nerds do not travel in herds. They do not subscribe to herd mentality. Real nerds do not endorse mob rule.

How can Slashdot be "News for Nerds" without threads like this? The obvious political leanings of the editors puts them squarely in the mob rule category, and they've brought on board the usual scum to enforce it.

As evidence of the de-nerdification of Slashdot, I refer to Forget Math to Become a Great Computer Scientist?, wherein but a few contributors to the discussion even knew what Pure Mathematics is.

There is even a Wackypedia entry on Pure Math. Yet a nearly a thousand comments were made about the article, by people who didn't know a damn thing about the topic!

I recommend Hardy's book for freshmen. Nearly a century old.

I guess school have quit teaching math, pure or impure. That's the only thing that can explain the nearly complete ignorance displayed here on Slashdot.

We will know when Slashdot is over when it starts covering sports.

(line #0's spelling is an extremely little joke so I didn't think it warranted a smiley so I write this just to fend off the spelling Nazis. And I did not intend a pun on "squarely.")

whodda thunk it?
http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0380788314/ref=sib _dp_srch_bod/002-0605345-5416837?v=search-inside&k eywords=64# read page 64 & 65.....

Evolutionary genetics and simple game theory lead to the conclusion that morality is an inevitable consequence of living in social groups.

Actually, you don't even need genetics. In Darwin's Cathedral, David Wilson convincingly argues that evolution in the most general sense (trait duplication, plus selective agency) suffices for the development of morality.

I'm currently getting my PhD in that area, and I'd recommend looking into Discontinuous Galerkin methods. Those are higher-order finite-element methods, and they work very well for hyperbolic problems. I can whole-heartedly recommend a book by my advisor: Nodal DG Methods (it comes out next month).

DG Methods take a little time to implement, but their accuracy and speed is well worth the effort. If you'd like some precooked software, check out http://git.tiker.net/?p=hedge.git;a=summary. (but be aware that there's little to no documentation just yet--don't be afraid to ask, though)

For interesting examples of alternate tunings, try this:

http://www.amazon.com/Easley-Blackwood-Microtonal/ dp/B0000018Z8
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easley_Blackwood_Jr.

Many reviews keep stating that the PS3 may still be the best Blu-Ray player on the market, and entry-level Blu-Ray players start at $500. Many people don't care about Blu-Ray right this second, but after seeing a movie in true 1080p, I'm ready to buy a new TV and a PS3. For $500 I'm getting a good Blu-Ray player, with the gaming console/media server/web appliance thrown in for free.

Make sure you buy the Sony Remote. You CAN control the movie playback with the 6 Axis, but the interface is Ass-tastic. Also "Planet Earth" is still the Best to show off your HD display... (sound not so much, but Visually, it's breath taking...)

Most gamers don't see it that way, and that's fine. But for me, it is actually quite a value.

If you act quick you might be able to get a 60 gig PS3 for $350 and would still be eligable for the 5 Free BluRay Movies.

Pianos have multiple overtones... but the stiffness of the strings means that those overtones do not form an arithmetic series. See The Physics of Musical Instruments for a discussion (and much much more).

When it comes to this, I am a layman, but my guess would be that if the overtones are not an arithmetic series, they will not be as straightforwardly helpful for pitch recognition as a (more typical) arithmetic series would be.

I'm surprised that there are so many knowlegable folks on slash here that can discuss music and the physics of music

One thing that I'm lacking is a good reference on the theory. For example, I know that "no sharps of flats" is the key of C-major/A-minor. Why? Is it by definition?

Orwell's Revenge (Hardcover): http://www.amazon.com/Orwells-Revenge-Peter-Huber/ dp/0029153352

The suggested retail price for Windows 3.1 in 1992 was $149.95

Microsoft Announces Worldwide Availability of Windows 3.1

Vista Home Basic Full Version is $183 at Amazon.com and $139 at Royal Discount Technologies

Windows is approaching one billion users on the desktop - one Windows PC for every 6.5 people on the planet. Microsoft Antitrust Settlement Is a Success!

There are enormous economies of scale in building and marketing for the Windows platform.

The $800 Dell Inspiron Vista Premium Laptop will feature a dual core CPU, 2 GB RAM, a 120 GB HDD, and a DVD burner -- tech that simply isn't imaginable at mass market pricing in 1992.

Because javascript is the devil. I think it has some of the most flawed type casting - if I can call it that - out there today. It's not a "type safe" language.

I take it that you are referring to Australian dollars? New releases here in the US average sub-$14 and have for a while. In a perfect example of your explanation of prices finding the right point on the curve, CDs were $20 in the US about ten years ago.

CDs costs under $14 now? The last tyme I bought new CDs, about three years ago, the cheapest I paid was $18. And they weren't hot pop performers, the last few new CDs I bought were by Niko Case and Norah Jones, I suppose you could say they're pop jazz. For both Amazon is showing for the street price about what I paid for most of their CDs. Now, the last CDs I bought were only half that but they were used and included Melissa Etheridge and other older ones.