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In Google Earth you could always easily see a shallow landmass around New Zealand, so what's new here?

There are lots of interesting things abut this. For one thing it would be interesting to know exactly how much of this continent was above sea level during the last glacial maximum. The same goes for the Atlantic area. There are several islands in the Atlantic that are now either sunken, smaller than they were then or just reefs now but that would have been much larger during this period and could have served as stop-over points for people on a trans oceanic migration to N-America. There is a little flash App of the area that allows you to drop the sea levels: http://sahultime.monash.edu.au... Seems New Zealand was at least twice as big as it is today about 20k years ago and that it was surrounded by islands that are now sunken. Makes me wish could drop sea levels in Google Earth.

... they are going to identify the remains as male or female by the subtle differences unique to each and identify the person as 'male' or 'female' based on their physiology.

Male and female yes, but those are not genders. They are sexes.

The very point of the modern construct of 'gender' was to isolate that which is social construct (masculine/feminine) from physiological sex (male/female). This really is not a difficult concept to grasp. Why is this such a challenge for you? [Rhetorical question: I realise you are not too stupid to understand the distinction, you are motivated to misunderstand].

Gender is not a social construct.

Doublethink! Gender, at least in the usage you to which are objecting (not grammatical gender etc), is a social construct by definition . Of course you might object to the usefulness of the concept, or its impact on the object of study (i.e. society), perhaps even its theoretical coherence, but just stamping your feet and insisting "black is white" is simply unintelligent.

It is noteworthy that the first link you supply does not make the error of your second link of conflating 'gender' with 'sex.' The anthropologists understand they are determining sex (which is, of course, highly correlated with gender, particularly in traditional societies*, but thankfully** also in ours). The ignorant error in the second link, if it is not ideologically motivated ignorance (but merely sloppy English), is probably due to a lack of relevant education: that anthropologists would not make this error, but forensic scientists might is telling.

While social constructs such as gender are not directly to be determined by looking at bones --one cannot examine the pelvis of a body from the 1950s and tell that being a nurse was considered a normal form of employment for women but not men --if you have a knowledge of 1950s society, in addition to the bones, you might reasonably infer questions of gender. Eg. you may be able to exclude the probability that the male (and presumably also masculine) skeleton you are examining was not a nurse by occupation ... or that he ordinary wore a dress ... or all those other facts of gender which are not determined (outside of culture) by physiological sex.

[*But not all traditional societies, note the Polynesian and Indian traditions of tripartite genders.]

[**If tranny sex is your thing you may not be as thankful as I am.]

There's nothing wrong with "infotainment" as long as it's audio. People have been listening to car radios without problems for many decades.

Well, actually, EVERYTHING increases the risk of accidents. And "without problems" is really an euphemism for "cars already kill thousands of people per year, so we really don't want to think real hard about what causes those >"... http://www.monash.edu.au/miri/...

The wiki pretty much points in the direction that more speed = more injuries and fatalities.

Yeah but since that applies to all speeds greater than zero, why is one number chosen over another? This is the point you keep avoiding. Speed kills, yeah so why not reduce the limit even further? I'm still waiting for an answer to this one

Accident stats combined with speed monitor stats are the best tools they have access to at the moment.

I disagree. Speed is simply the easiest metric to throw around. How do you measure how many people are drunk/on drugs/fatigued/playing with their phone/radio/eating etc? All the things that cause accidents are hard to measure. Politicians like reportable numbers, so speed gets the focus because it's the easy fruit.

There's nothing logical about that statement. I'm pretty sure you're smart enough to know why.

Actually I'd like you to explain why if 100 is safer than 110, then it's logical that 90 is safer than 100 yeah?
So why isn't the speed limit 90 instead of 100?
The Speed Kills dogma is logically inconsistent.

I won't argue that some roads aren't marked properly (after all humans make mistakes) and I won't argue that lower speeds can result in boredom (although I get the same boredom at 120km/h when driving straight for a long time). I'd like to see a link to that study as I've never heard of it.

We have some roads with unlimited speed zones and contrary to popular belief, people aren't dying by the dozen because of it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
Here's some research into fatigue: http://www.monash.edu.au/miri/...

Considering how most countries have the same strategy towards speed limits I'd say things are probably in better shape than you think they are.

I have no problem with the concept of a speed limit. But "speed" means more than just driving faster than the posted limit. There seems to be very little effort to enlighten drivers of this, instead focusing on easy enforcement and revenue collection.

Fact is that in 30 years this will no longer be a topic of discussion as self driving cars will dictate the speed, not the driver.

Yeah and flying cars too eh? Don't believe the hype. Robot cars will never be mainstream, when a robot bus is far more efficient.

That has been done and abandoned. HPT (head-per-track) drives were popular way back, but were a bear to keep aligned.

no one ever cites those studies that show lower speed limits are safer... Because they don't exist.

...really?

That's fascinating.

Here's one.

Or perhaps this?

Suck it.

I've heard anecdotes that speakers of some languages (e.g. French) actually prefer programming languages written in English, because (a) the more regular grammar results in more predictable/compact function/keyword names, and (b) more transparent syntax... or at least a foreign language that abstracts away all of the questions about how to decline the verb in a function name.

For many languages, something as obtuse as Perligata would be required to generate a coherent mapping to their native tongue; with English, native speakers simply accept the broken grammar and move on, and non-native speakers just treat the grammar as a black box, like an English speaker regards the Italian terms embedded in music notation.

I'd think actually the number collection is so that the next time you go in, they can put your phone number in and ID you... "Do you have a discount card? Do you have it with you?? No, can I get your phone number? There you are!"

Most small shops don't (yet) have the smarts/connections to sell customer data. But the potential IS there, yes.

That may be one reason, but it isn't the only reason. the fact is, an extensive phone list linked to a specific demographic (e.g. hair care, female, city district) is worth money to the right person.

if they are giving you a 10% discount or raffling for a car in the mall, remember the information they're asking for is worth more to them than the discount out the till or the new car. Ask someone who works as a dataminer if they have any frequent flyer cards, supermarket loyalty cards, or petrol cards in their wallets.

These shops don't even have to be willing to sell the information: in 2005, a firefighter from Tukwilla, WA was charged with attempted arson, based on a police investigation that revolved around his Safeway Club Card purchase history

I also attend a uni in Melbourne, albeit a somewhat larger one. Windows, Mac and Linux are supported. For example, the wifi requires authentication to connect, which requires a certificate. Instructions are provided for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android and iOS X. (There's a web form to use as an alternate, but it gets annoying very quickly.)

I'm fairly certain this is due to the diverse use of OSs on campus. We have an Apple store on campus, so about 10% of students (and most engineering lecturers) have Macs. All the engineering computers dual boot WinXP and Scientific Linux (although only the postgrads have login rights under Linux).

In short, they have to support them because that's what people use.

Don't ask the teachers - if they knew the answers they'd wouldn't be teaching ;-p As the library staff or the student union, ask the support people. Or use Google. I've never had any problems accessing any of the major East coast uni networks. Monash Melbourne will tell you they don't support Linux - but then they're barely capable of reading the side of a Windows box... if you find translating the instructions for Windows users too hard (you should probably give up Linux and uni) ask the local LUG (the members can be found huddled over laptops without guis in the bar). Have phun

Perhaps even more surprising is the prof's willingness to share her beauty with the Slashdot crowd: http://www.physics.monash.edu.au/people/research/lazendic.html

Your standards for beauty aren't particularly high.

Antilock brakes help stop shorter and quicker.

False.

ABS only makes stops shorter and quicker on dry surfaces. However, on loose traction surfaces (gravel, snow, wet leaves, etc), ABS actually *increases* the braking distance fairly considerably. In this case, you are giving up braking distance for more control. (See here: http://www.monash.edu.au/muarc/reports/Other/RACV%20ABS%20braking%20system%20effectiveness.pdf)

Personally, however, I would rather have a low braking distance. I hate ABS. Almost caused me to die one time when I slid out on a patch of ice and, when I went to hit my brakes, they ABS kicked in and I didn't stop where I should have. Instead, I rolled right into the middle of an intersection with a couple cars coming at me fast.

It does, however the comments aren't. I'm not sure how useful this is since you still need to use ASCII characters for programming.

The article, and many of the comments, strike me as guys whom have never used a serious hard core preprocessor.

How bout Lingua::Romana::Perligata?

http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~damian/papers/HTML/Perligata.html

This paper describes a Perl module -- Lingua::Romana::Perligata -- that makes it possible to write Perl programs in Latin. A plausible rationale for wanting to do such a thing is provided

... and no, the rationale is not deploying Perl programs in "Latin America".

I believe I read about this in Perl Journal sometime last century.

You end up with stuff like this

sic
                        loco ianitori.
                        dato fonti perlegementum da.
cis

There is no particular reason why you couldn't implement the same idea in Kanji instead of Latin.

Rover experimented with a gas turbine auto. A heat exchanger* doubled the fuel efficiency, but it was problematic to make.

http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~lloyd/tildeLand-Rover/Rover/index.html

*Think cycles: In the compression cycle you want to remove heat to get more mass compressed, and in the combustion cycle you want to put heat in. A piston engine does not lend itself to heat exchange in combustion.

http://users.monash.edu.au/~ralphk/burroughs.html

This mainframe could be single-clocked through most of its execution and it brought out all of the registers to the front panel - each LED row was potentially 4 different selectable registers; that is how you isolated the problem and repaired the "bit". Pipelined, superscalar, and it had a relatively modern OS (many OS "firsts")l, the famous B5000 stack Architecture of the 1950s,60s. Its daddy had incandescent bulbs for indicators and core memory. You learned bare metal, or you didn't.

Have you noticed the http://kanji.sljfaq.org/kanji16/draw-canvas.html link on Jim Breen's http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/cgi-bin/wwwjdic.cgi website? Makes it dead easy for Westerners and clumsy beginners to enter three or four strokes of a handwritten character (using the mouse!) and get immediate feedback in the form of 20 candidate characters that might match what you've entered so far. This is the most lenient "clumsy kanji" analysis routine I've seen so far. Bodes very well for cyberlinguistics.

Perhaps you'd like to enlighten us with some examples of "byzantine syntax", since Greek and Latin [wikipedia.org] aren't valid Perl.

Wanna bet?

You must be kidding. For one, having lived for many years both in Europe and the US, I can tell you that the drivers in the US are _far_ superior. Much more disciplined and much much safer. In Europe I am literally scared to drive (even though there are some exceptions).

Which Europe did you live in?

Consider section 2.1 and 4.1 of the following paper: http://www.infrastructure.gov.au/roads/safety/publications/2009/pdf/rsr_05.pdf and the statistics on this page: http://www.monash.edu.au/muarc/reports/papers/fatals.html
(Note: It was commissioned so that the traffic fatality rates in Australia could be compared to the rates of other OECD countries, hence the Australia-centric nature of some of the chapters)

Contrary to your statements, the average driver in Europe is more disciplined, safer and far better at handling emergency situations than the average American driver, thanks to much more rigorous and thorough training and far more advanced testing.

Personal experience with numerous American expats among friends, relatives and colleagues supports this to a great degree.

The fact that you are scared to drive in Europe speaks of your lack of solid experience, because most Europeans assume much higher skill levels we tend towards a slight bit of arrogance towards 'lesser' drivers, as it were. Drive with confidence and you'll fit right in.

I believe "private inheritance" allows for as-a relationships.

http://phoenix.goucher.edu/~kelliher/cs23/apr07.html

http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jonmc/CSE2305/Topics/05.09.Inheritance/html/text.html

http://www.lib.monash.edu.au/tutorials/citing/harvard.html

Meh. In Australia, well-off people own cars AND live in the areas which have good, efficient public transport. Poor people live in the back of nowhere miles from that single bus stop where a bus has never been seen. There's a good paper on "Car ownership and Social Exclusion in Australia". http://civil.eng.monash.edu.au/its/caitrhome/prevcaitrproceedings/caitr2007/johnson_caitr2007.pdf As you'd expect, those who can afford cars mostly buy them. Poor people can't afford, but are often forced buy, cars or they can't get to work. "In Australia, lack of access to private or public transport was found (following having a criminal record) to be the second highest barrier to social and economic participation in a study of job seekers facing multiple barriers to employment". I noticed in the report that it might be different in the US because in Australia the richer you are the nearer you tend to live to the the centre of the city, which is also where the lush jobs and the good public transport are. Poverty, bad jobs and bad public transport go with outlying suburbs. I get the picture in the US that the well-off prefer to live in the suburbs and that good jobs are more decentralised? Speaking in broad generalisations of course.

Or even crazier, that a New Zealander did it!

Regrettably. I used to go to University of Melbourne (Australia) where it is still used today, and Monash University now where WebCT was once used, but now has also been turned into Blackboard. WebCT sucked anyway, but now it's just ten times worse. Still, all the syllabus, lecture notes, grades, weekly tests are put up there, and it makes uni life just that much worse.

Well, I guess I'm obliged to mention Richard Pearse http://www.ctie.monash.edu.au/hargrave/pearse1.html, the famous Kiwi who could have claimed first flight, but didn't. It seems Mr. Pearse managed to land in some shrubbery a couple of times and had other problems. *He* didn't consider his flights successful, but most Kiwis will defend his record to the death.

patients have died because of mis-programmed machines, and so on. I can't quote cases right now
This is what you are after:

http://www.netcomp.monash.edu.au/cpe9001/assets/readings/www_uguelph_ca_~tgallagh_~tgallagh.html

But everybody's experienced this: from art to videogames we extend our bodies and our minds with tools.

Revonsuo has been studying this for a while:
http://psyche.cs.monash.edu.au/v6/psyche-6-08-revonsuo.html
It's not a popsci-article though, some familiarity with statistical analysis in psychological research helps.

Bah, that's just a simple phrase translator. Try LOLPYTHON to actually program that way. I'm quite positive the lameness filter will rightly defy my efforts to post a sample here, so CLICKIE PLZ THX LOL.

Still, LOLPYTHON has nothing on Perligata

Same for String Theory, until recently. Why was that "allowed"?

To some extent, parsimony. String theory was an attempt to condense multiple distinct models into a single one. Assume the strong Church-Turing universe thesis; the work of Vitanyi/Li and Wallace/Dowe indicate that the simpler prediction correctly describing the known data is more likely to be correctly predictive.

That said, I would say that until some solid evidence turned up that previous theories didn't cover, String Theory was more philosophy than science per se.

They will then turn to David Hume's classic argument that there is no reason whatsoever that anybody should trust the results of inductive reasoning (i.e. they will say that evolution can never really be proved).

One may rebut that pure mathematics, such as set theory, is not subject to that limitation; that all work in the the real world is based on induction on finite ordered sequence of data observations; and that it may be mathematically shown (see Vitanyi and Li and Wallace and Dowe [WARNING: Postscript file of heavy duty math]) that the simplest expressed explanation for a finite data will most probably be correctly predictive.

For some reason, I've yet to meet a religious fundamentalist who can understand any set theory work done after Goedel's time...much less come up with a coherent response. Possibly because they're not that big into education?

He's a loon with a large vocabulary.

Nonono, perl code is the wall of unintelligible punctuation.

Well, unless you use this

Homosexuality. 1% of the population. http://elecpress.monash.edu.au/pnp/cart/download/f ree.php?paper=38 Ignorable as a minority group.

Abortion. Probably a lot bigger issue than gay marriages.

Patent law reform saves you $5 off your next drug purchase? Major vote winner.

actually.. it's quite above average for someone so early on in their time driving.

A friend of mine is from New Zealand. They are fiercely independent and patriotic people, much like Mr. Chekov in Star Trek (everything was done first or better in Soviet Union, remember?). Well, the Kiwi's may even have a valid claim on the first Powered Flight. Though Mr. Pearce never claimed to have flown first because he didn't achieve a controlled landing.

And don't forget the Therac-25 incident:

http://www.netcomp.monash.edu.au/cpe9001/assets/re adings/www_uguelph_ca_~tgallagh_~tgallagh.html

Yes, Virginia. Software bugs can and do kill.

(Tokyo itself is not a city; it's a prefecture made up of a couple dozen wards, one of which is Ginza.)

(Tokyo itself is not a city; it's a prefecture made up of a couple dozen wards, one of which is Ginza.)

The Brazilian computer without a Japanese method probably doesn't have Japanese fonts either, so even if the hypothetical webmail server had an ASCII URL, you wouldn't be able to read any of the text.

If it does have the fonts, but for some reason not an IME, I suppose you could Google for the company's webpage, and cut and paste. Or find the characters with WWWJDIC.

So kanji in the URL doesn't present any additional obstacle.

This might be the most expensive boondoggle, but a disaster is where peoples lives are lost. There are better examples of computer disasters.

... there is such a thing as carrying it too far. I'm reminded of the tale of the junior sysadmin who proudly showed the senior sysadmin the cabinet he'd just wired up. Very neat, very pretty.

The senior sysadmin looked at it thoughtfully, then flipped a single switch. Every server in the cabinet went down. Yup: every server had its entire power source coming from a single rail, instead of having the two redundant inputs coming from different rails.

Where I work, every cable to every server in the machine room is labelled at both ends. The patch panels are also labelled with the address of the other end of the cable. Makes troubleshooting network problems a lot simpler (and that's important when you're talking over 200 servers on the floor ...)

A method in a computer system for conjugating verbs in a target language, the method comprising: receiving a verb in a base language; identifying verb forms in the target language using a translation of the received verb from the base language to the target language; and displaying the identified verb forms in the target language.

MSFT probably did invent something worth patenting. The problem here is that their claims are too broad, or in the alternative, too vague.

Jim Breen's WWWJDIC Japanese-English Dictionary Server offers Japanese verb conjugation support. This sites been around for a while: main page from 1999. I found mentions of conjugation support back as far as 2003-02-11.

Funny you say that, some people think that is already the case. Who'da thunk it...

This website allows you to read an entire Holt, Rhineheart, and Winston textbook online if you already have a keyword from a textbook you buy online. If you're into foreign languages, it has French, German, and Spanish, and aside from that,

These sites teach you basic Japanese if you study enough.

Parents just have to watch to make sure their children aren't looking at porn instead of studying and help them along.

>>-a goes to -ae: ie supernovae, larvae
>>-is goes to -ii: virii, penii
>>some other things that I cannot think of at this moment

Virus doesn't end in -is. It's actually a funny word because IIRC it doesn't have a classical plural form. "Vir," latin for man, becomes "viri" when pluralized, so it seems "virus" (which I'm sure is somehow etymologically related, someone please help) can't become "viri" as well. It makes more sense to use the modern english pluralization of adding -es to words that end in s. Besides that, penis is pluralized "penes." I understand you were trying to propose a simplified rule for pluralization, but wouldn't it have made more sense to at least pick one of the classical rules if you weren't going to use the standard s/es suffix found in modern english?

If you'd like to see a chart of (most of? all of?) the many classical pluralizations compared with acceptable (and equally correct) modern english pluralizations, click here. It's about a quarter of the way down the page. Actually, the whole page is pretty interesting and I only just stumbled upon it today when looking for a source to point to when correcting your proposed rules.

Well for everyone who says don't learn Japanese or Japanese is too hard, or other such nonesense. It is a difficult language to learn but not impossible if you are motivated enough to spend the time doing so, but it can be fun at the same time. Learning Japanese is a great endeavor and I wish you luck.

Most naysayers have very little practical experience speaking/reading/writing Japanese.

As for me, I'm probably not as good as I should be.
Now, I'm not fluent, but speak pretty decent Japanese, I can write about 1000 kanjis and can read nearly 1500. I've been studying for quite some time though. Also my wife is Japanese, and I've dated a number of Japanese women and I've lived in Japan. I speak with her nearly daily in half Japanese and half English. I've also worked for nearly 3 years in Tokyo.

Depending on where you live, I would recommend taking some classes to get your feet wet, FIND Japanese friends. If you are single, find a Japanese girl, many of the girls I dated wanted me to learn more and were happy that I wanted to learn and studied Japanese. So they helped ALOT! My wife also happens to be a Japanese language teacher, but she is too strict with me, so I gave up on her giving me formal lessons, though the informal ones are the best.

I'm still learning and I'm nearly 40, but I'm always finding out new things.

The two really difficult things about learning Japanese are the particles and Kanji. The best way for me was to really learn the radicals and learn how to 'break' 'up' the kanji into small components, this way you can easily recognize much more complicated kanji.

Speaking and Listening are just a matter of using it. Watching Anime can help, but watching Japanese TV/movies and dramas with or without subtitles can beneficial too.

Check out this series of books for learning Japanese:

http://genki.japantimes.co.jp/index.en.html

Some good dictionaries:

http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/wwwjdic.html

http://linear.mv.com/cgi-bin/j-e/dict

Learning Kanji:

Guide to Writing Kanji & Kana Book 1: A Self-Study Workbook for Learning Japanese Characters (Tuttle Language Library) (Paperback)
ISBN: 0804833923

Find Japanese friends (girls)
http://friends.japantoday.com/

Just don't tell Japanese girls you are into Anime, they will generally run the other way.
Finding Japanese girls who are really into Anime, are well not as common as you would like or would think. Nearly all the girls I've dated thought guys who were into Anime or Manga were gross.

So I told them I'm only into Studio Ghibli, then they think your cool. :-)

Also, consider taking a break from doing IT or whatever you do and go teach English in Japane for 6 months to a year.

Good Luck

First, I highly recommend a site: http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/wwwjdic.html. This site has everything from java character input recognition for the dictionary, to a Japanese dictionary with examples for every word.

Second, to help learn all of the hiragana, katakana, and kanji (and everything else Japanese related) you should check out a program called SuperMemo. This program is a simple flashcard program, but it uses a spaced repetition algorithm to help you remember things before you forget them. (btw, I've read that people have used SuperMemo and MASTERED a language in something like 2-3 years.)

Also, having a friend that attempted to learn kanji on his own (also he has a very good imagination), he created a method called Kanji Town (just google it, he has a blog about it).

Finally, you need to immerse yourself in the language - through Pimsler, any Japanese music you can listen to, watch Japanese TV shows... every bit of audio stuff you can find to add to your reading studies.

Fox News : Hahahahahaha!

Oh, if Fox news says it then it must be right? eh!

Psuedo intelligence alert!

(Synesthesia) used to be and still is classed as a brain desease by some health authorities, some refuse to even entertain its existance. http://psyche.cs.monash.edu.au/v2/psyche-2-10-cyto wic.html

"Electrical Allergies" are a form of mental disorder.
: Or maybe just an undiagnosed legitimate medical problem...

If "Fox News" told you to go jump in the river would you do it?

Not really if you look at the example of cars and airplanes. They really where hobbyist creations until WWI. Cars where not big business until Ford and his Model-T.

I have no idea where you're getting this from. Ever hear of Benz? Daimler? Maybach? Oldsmobile? All these companies were producing hundreds of cars before Ford ever entered the market. Even Cadillac (formed out of Ford's first, failed venture) beat Ford Motor Company to the market, netting itself about 2000 orders a mere 4 months after the first vehicles were produced.

As for airplanes, there were dozens of inventors who were competing with the Wrights to be the first to achieve powered flight. Even after the Wrights' flight, competition remained fierce as these different companies tried to build better planes to achieve sustained flight. Prizes like the Coupe d'Aviation Ernest Archdeaco and Grand Prix d'Aviation spurred development of the airplane to produce vehicles like Santos Dumont's 14-bis. By 1907, the first helicopter had flown.

By 1908, the Wright Brothers were offered to direct a French Flight School in Sarthe département, and later in Pau. They then returned to the states in 1909 and accepted a military contract for $30,000 to produce a plane that met the military's standards. Of course, they were by no means alone in the market. Here's a list of the pioneers and manufacturers who made early airplanes.

In other words, the car and airplane were hughly disruptive technologies. It took several years for critical mass to be reached (thus make it to the general public), but they were hot areas of research with tons of competition.

After WWI the aircraft manufacturers shrank back to small businesses.

The surplus planes from post WWI were flooded the market and temporarily met its needs. But by the mid-20's, investments into new technologies from Howard Hughes, Boeing, Lockheed, and others took hold in the rapid mail and passenger transport businesses. By the time of WWII, aircraft were far larger, more powerful, and capable of transatlantic flight.