Domain: bridgewater.edu
Stories and comments across the archive that link to bridgewater.edu.
Comments · 6
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Funes, The Memorious
This man's abilities reminds me of a story, Funes, The Memorious.
Daniel's life story is not the same as Ireneo Funes' fictional life, but in a way they both lead to the same question - what does it mean to think?
Without effort, he had learned English, French, Portuguese, Latin. I suspect, nevertheless, that he was not very capable of thought. To think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract. In the overly replete world of Funes there were nothing but details, almost contiguous details.
In March 2001, there was an article in Science, "The Art of Forgetting" which touched on these issues, and more current research begins to detail the chemical methods of action for the brain's 'forgetting system'. Indeed, life would not be possible if we remembered everything. Human cognition seems to be defendant on removing details, as much of what we do is through abstracting away the differences... this allows us to generalize. Of course, over-generalization is a failure-point for human cognition as well, as we all know.
All of this will be very useful to AI research, especially if we are trying to model computer minds after the ones nature evolved. -
Bakersfield Ca,Chemistry teacher tries to be cool
This comes to mind. When I was a Senior at Ridgeview High school In Bakersfield Ca, a Chemistry teacher at East High decided to ignite
"a few milliliters of methanol" in a GLASS bottle. This "experiment" (make science look kool, blow shit up)
is usually done in a plastic five gallon water bottle. Well, needless to say, he sent himself, and a few students to the hospital.
News Story -
SPoD/SBoD Pizzas and Beachballs? Nah, Discs!
First of all if you want to parody an Intitialism such as BSoD you want to keep it the same amount of letters. Beachball is actually two words according to Dictionary.com beach ball is the correct spelling. So SBBoD just doesn't work, it looks and sounds stupid.
Next up the Pizza, it in no way looks like any pizza I have seen under any state of mind. So you can just quit it with that. How many blue and purple pizza slices have you seen not counting Japanese Squid Ink Pizza? Even that's more black than either color.
In its most general form the spinning "Beach Ball" or "Pizza" cursor is really just a Disc.
I've been calling it a Spinning Disc of Death for as long as I can remember but someone made a good point in a post to this /. article that unlike the Blue Screen of Death, the cursor doesn't mean an imminent and uncertain end, i.e. a crash.
So I'd like to maybe switch the D of Death to maybe be the D of Doom, because to most of us having to wait makes it feel more like we're doomed when we're in a hurry more than it makes us feel like we're going to die.
My Spinning Disc of Death will now be known as a Spinning Disc of Doom. :)
I also like what user jo_ham called it "The Beach Ball of Rumination"
In addition, the colorful cursor isn't one of a kind, it has an older brother that you sometimes see when using Classic or Carbon apps like Mozilla. It is made up of four quarter slices alternating black and white. When you use the term SDoD you cover all the bases... -
Re:On Demand House InspectionsI agree with most of what you said, but this caught me:
I suppose a minimum death penalty for certain crimes without any option for parole fits in here, because most lifers never thought they'd be there for life
I am completely opposed to the death penalty. The most glaring reason is because sometimes, justice is inaccurate. If we lock a guy up for 10 years and find out we did wrong, we can't give him his 10 years back, but we can set him free and clear his record.
If we kill a guy, and find out we did wrong, he stays dead.
A supporting reason is the statistic that it costs more to kill a prisoner than to feed him for the rest of his life (court costs and attorneys). So it's less economically viable to kill prisoners. See here:
A 1993 California study shows that each death penalty case costs at least $1.25 million more than a regular murder case and a sentence of life without possibility of parole.
Or here:The Miami Herald reported that in 1988 the state of Florida spent 57 million dollars on executions. The average per man w as $3.2 million. It also stated that it was possible to keep a man in prison for life for just 1/16 of that dollar amount. The "Sacramento Bee" reported that California spent 90 million dollars a year to maintain the death penalty. In 1993 the Dallas Morning News stated that in Texas it would cost three times the amount to execute a man instead of keeping him in prison for life (Jacobs 46).
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Harrisonburg is SMALL,But pretty cosmopolitan tooHaving lived there...there's a burgeoning arts community, a wide array of political ideas, and three colleges.
Eastern Mennonite University(disclosure: I'm trying to transfer into that school)
They also have gee-whiz stuff going on occasionally like the Green Valley Bookfair and JMU sponsors an event called macrock which is a two-day rock festival...
Then there's lovely little joints like the Artful Dodger (neat coffee shop) and The Little Grill (mmmmmmmh yummy)....they're also within range of some great radio....WVTF in Roanoke can reach 'em, WEMC community radio(bluegrass, jazz, and good public affairs programming), and WXJM...good college radio...they're also within range of WNRN in Charlottesville.
So, even though it's a teeny-tiny little community where old order mennonites ride their buggies around...it still has some REALLY neat stuff going on...of course that's just my opinion.
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Re:not DVDA!
heh, okay, my mistake.
I meant I agreed everything else in this line:
Write your congressman today and request, nay, DEMAND that the DMCA and CSS and DVDA be repealed so we can steal MP3's again.
and the stealing MP3 portion of it...(I buy my cds) ... okay, okay so I was way off... ;)
but besides that, wasn't it Schrodinger that claimed that a cat in a box is both dead alive?