Slashdot Mirror

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/M0KMM9W... Those are some strong words, AC.

Memory is complex.

I'd rank myself at the top of the spectrum in what Paul Ekman / Daniel Goleman term "cognitive empathy" (also called perspective-taking).

Yet I can draw the most amazing blanks when encountering someone I haven't seen recently—for the first five minutes. Gradually it all comes back. I tend to recognize people far quicker by their physical mannerisms than by face, dress, or other static aspects of appearance. I recall ambiguities I've detected in people far better than their outward, declared identity.

My sister, by contrast, never fails to recognize someone on first glance, complete with name, recent concerns, context of last meeting, and last fragment of personal information exchanged. "Stephanie, how's it going with new job assignment? Oh, I like this necklace. Is it new? Hey, you know what? I saw Bob downtown just last week. Are you still in touch?" and so on. Meanwhile, I would still be at "you know, that walk looks familiar, and there's that ironic tilt of the head—there's something lurking behind that I haven't figured out yet—I so know this chick, whatsherfuckingname".

It's not just a profound difference in social orientation. My sister's social skills are, well ... social. Whereas my social skills are cognitive. I pick up many shades of a person's internal self-image vs their external self-image and projected self-image. My sister socializes first, connects second. I connect first, socialize second. And both our memories reflect this.

A long time ago, when we were growing up, I used to grief her about watching the same TV shows. "Don't you remember? You watched this show last summer. That guy is going to do this, and this girl is going to do that. The dialogue was so bad, I could hardly concentrate on my calculus assignment from the next room." She never seemed to recall watching the same show twice.

Now, on basic personal dossier, she'd beat me 99 times out of 100. Until it gets deep.

What can you figure out from a face anyway? Whether someone is Jewish? How useless. What you can tell from microscopic hitches in eye movement or verbal delivery will tell you whether a person is pretending to be someone they're really not, or not. Fixed or flexible? Now we're getting somewhere.

I can only conclude that memory is deeply conditioned on the purposes in life we choose to regard as most important.

When I was roughly thirty, I looked at a photo of my grade two classroom, and remembered nearly every face and name (pretty much a fixed cohort through grade five, which certainly helped).

On a parallel note, I suck at basic plot analysis. Never had any gift with the conventions of genre fiction. I've sat beside people steeped in genre who seem to process fiction (whether a book or a movie) the way the Terminator itemizes conversational gambits, whereas I anticipate nothing immediate, but somewhere during the second act I'll start to growl, "this director is going to panic and fuck the ending, I just know it already" (by the time a film is edited, the director's success/failure in bringing the movie home is front and center in everyone's mind—director, editor, producer—so these early hints are not incidental). Yet again, conventions of form are slow for me, while deeper traces knock early.

In particular, movies that go for the fake suspense scene never work for me. He's dead! No, he's not really dead! LOTR pulls this stunt quite a few times (Frodo, Aragorn, Samwise; all the hobbits snug in their feathery Bree beds; meanwhile while Gandalf struts around as the meme personified). The form never hooks me enough to take me along on these silly ruses. After a certain amount of time wandering around in the labyrinths of tvtropes (a quantity of time that shall remain nameless), I now pick up much of this on an analytical level.

She will always be with us... as long as we have CGI: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/vFQWLfJ...

claiming fanged ET's are coming to kidnap all the women and mass cloning Justin Beibers with long hair to replace them

If it already happened, we probably wouldn't notice the difference.

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/iB5txqI... Look real productive!

No, AGW was genuinely scientifically controversial in the late 19th and early 20th Century. The prevailing view was that changes in climate (including periodic ice ages) were cyclical and self-regulating. Arrhenius showed the potential for changes in carbon dioxide to cause long-term changes in climate, but there was as yet no evidence that humans had a measurable effect on CO2 and it was believed that the atmosphere was too large for human activity to be able to change it.

So AGW contradicted dogmatic theories which were unsupported by data, but it also had some empirical counter-evidence. The atmosphere is already saturated with CO2 to the point of being optically opaque. Water vapor also absorbs energy over much the same spectrum, and water vapor is far more prevalent in the atmosphere. It was eventually realized that increasing the partial pressure of CO2 raises the layer of CO2-rich air and thus increases the effective radiating height. Despite the work of Arrhenius and a few other scientists, the theory of AGW was considered entirely discredited up until at least the 1950s.

From the 1900s to the 1970s the mathematics of describing global climate defeated human scientists. It was fruitful however in discovering different feedback mechanisms (especially small changes in albedo) whereby small changes in climate or weather could be amplified to potentially produce "Snowball Earths" or Venus-like atmospheres. The death of the idea of a static or self-regulating climate was a drawn-out affair, but had gained broad acceptance by that time. Beginning in the 1950s with the advent of digital computers, scientists began to make headway on modeling the effects of CO2 and climatic feedbacks, and the first baseline measurements of CO2 (from 1960 onwards) began to paint a picture of rising levels of CO2 due to human industry exceeding what could be absorbed by natural processes.

By the late 1970s the theory of AGW was dominant, but some controversial aspects remained, particularly with regards to the effects of warming on cloud formation. However, the research from that point on was mostly trying to establish how much warming would result from an increase in CO2, and many lines of evidence were converging to the same 2-6 degree range.

I am sure that most informed people you have met during your life have been concerned with anthropogenic climate change. The status of AGW as "settled science" is actually fairly recent: the formation of the IPCC in 1988 is probably as good a date as any. It's not a bad thing for a scientific theory to have been controversial, it means it has been challenged many times and come out as the best possible explanation.

Out of curiosity, where are you from? I grew up in Alaska and spent about 25 years there. Alaska has been losing glacial ice at a rate of 75 cubic kilometers per year for some decades now, mostly in the smaller glaciers, lower alpine glaciers, and tidewater glaciers -- which are of course the most accessible and visible. The bottom layers of glacial ice can be thousands and tens of thousands of years old. Its deep blue color is like nothing else in the world. In some places there are little glacier overlooks built for people to stop and view glaciers from the roadside. Some built a few decades ago no longer overlook anything as the glaciers have retreated out of sight. The Columbia Glacier near my home retreated 20 kilometers. Alaska is a tragedy in action, and the land of glaciers and permafrost that I knew will soon only exist in photographs.

Me it's RC boats. I live in a city so it's the cheapest, quickest way to get my RC nerdery done. Apparently, for a dog's visual cortex, this:

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/OdtfMNj...

looks like the most delicious roast chicken a dog could ever want. As soon as I put the boat in the water, every dog around will jump into the water and desperately swim after the stupid thing. Now I warn dog owners before I put the boat in the water!

One day a guy shows up with a Husky. He tells me not to worry, Huskies don't like the water. OK, fine. After he told me he never thought he'd see his dog chest-deep in the water! It was true however that this dog didn't go any further and didn't actually swim for it. But he also didn't expect to have to towel down his dog!

Sorry, the second image should be this: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/2LlicAX...

This pic illustrates very clearly and concisely the general character (or lack thereof) and attitude of the Windows 10 'customer base' of which you speak. Need I say more?

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/XNBP18nrRdw/maxresdefault.jpg

It most certainly is. Tougher than Dacron anyway...

So you're saying if the government offered the populace a small cash incentive to exercise, people would do it

No, they wouldn't. They'd continue to be lazy slobs for the most part, and the people who would do it don't need a "small cash incentive" because they're already doing it. If an improvement in your life and health and happiness isn't enough, a coupon's not going to make a difference.

People like this fat pig, for example, for whom life is just about living off the government teat and self-gratification: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/o00Noel...

The camera's mega-pixel count did sound high, but those numbers are nearly meaningless w/o the quality optics and image sensors to make those huge images actually look good.

Earlier they made(?) and used sensors with high pixel count even though you could save the pictures at a lower resolution, but it still gave better details (also normal CCD processors doesn't catch all colors per pixel but the colors in a grid even though the final resulting image has all colors in one pixel so the output data doesn't match the input data there and with a higher original resolution you shrink the errors there relative the output pixel / get better averages.)

I don't know if someone else (one?) did use a similar camera solution. I don't know if they actually developed the sensors themselves / had them made for them and if so if they still do.

At-least from a historical perspective it could be the case that their camera was one of the very best / the best used in a device of that kind.

I think I would say the iPhone 5 have a better quality image than the Lumia 1020 here:
http://www.technobuffalo.com/w...
Maybe lower dynamic range here?
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/qaV5N_Z...

5s doing well here too:
http://www.windowscentral.com/...

I remember some images back when were I thought the Nokia phone was better though, was it against iphone 4 and some pre-Lumia phone?

Here, Nokia N8 vs iPhone 4:
http://mynokiablog.com/2010/10...

White balance seem better on the iPhone 4 than the Nokia N8:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Place of origin matter in that if it's a rebranded Chinese phone with Nokia software or so then it can't really beat what it is based on in hardware and differ from what others have access to whereas if it was Nokia made it could be both worse and better. It at-least leave room for the possibility of it being special/different/better (Then again the likelyhood of Nokia releasing a better phone than Apple or Samsung considering R&D funds available ..)

Then I say we need this as an Emoji.

Are you saying we need a Bricktop Emoji?

I am surprised that people don't think that Niantic owns the Pokemon trademark. Take a look at the title screen. It says "Niantic <br/> [Niantic Logo] <br/> The Pokemon Company." It looks like "The Pokemon Company" is Niantic's tagline. That's not typically how a company is named.

Even if what you say about him is true (and it isn't as far as I've seen), what bearing does that have on what he has said?

Let me ask your question a different way: Would you take investment advice from a homeless person? Would you be concerned if the surgeon who was about to operate on you had prison tattoos and canker sores?

Thunderf00t is a walking, talking canker sore. There are better places to get information about the viability (or not) of renewable energy methods.

Here is a picture of Thunderf00t:

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/nIzTNap...

It is offtopic. NASA has always been very public relations savvy.

You don't remember the Curiosity press report then?
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/UzfeSuj...

Dress codes have changed due to the other incident, and the Juno mission now won't let anyone speak from Mission Control wearing anything but uniforms. Very much on topic, but still flamebait, IMHO.

Bays don't sail...

... actually some do

http://i4.ytimg.com/vi/O_NrTW4...

the previous stopgap measure was temperamental and made strange sounds.

http://i.ytimg.com/vi/3vzZLWBJ...

no, that face is pretty scary.
like....stephen king's clown scary

I meant the gang from Sesame Street.

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/E97Pg6YuOqk/hqdefault.jpg

It would look like this.

So, to recap your argument, we have an industrialized nation with a modern whaling fleet that wants to use what amounts to a ship to ship missile to catch and harvest an endangered species about the rights granted to an aboriginal tribe that uses a row boat to catch one of the few food sources available.

Oh for god's sake, do you even read?

1) Alaskans eat as much whale per capita as Icelanders. Alaskans of native ancestry significantly more.

2) Alaskans also use modern equipment. It's a complete myth that they're out there in rowboats hunting whales with wooden spears - they're chasing them in motorboats, shooting them with huge caliber pistols and spearguns, and hauling them ashore with backhoes and carrying them around with forklifts.

3) Minke whales are not even remotely close to endangered species, they're "LC" (Least Concern).

4) They have perfectly modern grocery stores stocked with a wide range of food just like anywhere, and not only do they not have any state taxes, they get a regular stipend from the state government on top of their salaries. And Alaska is by far the biggest net-positive state in terms of per capita subsidy vs. tax paid federally as well.

You're living in a fantasy world if you're picturing Inuit and Yupic indians as being some sort of primitives out freezing in igloos. Or that the scene there is any less bloody than in the Faroes. But the latter are white devils trying to destroy the world and the former are just poor natives preserving the cultures, you see!

Something tells me it's not just going to be little girls that will get spied upon:

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ijiNDZy...

http://i.ytimg.com/vi/NOVAbKjo... This product prevents others from accessing your backdoors

I don't like putting chemicals on my skin, so I just wear a giant sombrero. Here is a selfie of me and my cool lid:

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/6W-JqB-...

While thanks to technological advances it may be trivial to detect a fully erect and unobscured penis, detecting a penis that is only partially visible could very well be an extremely difficult problem.

Example:

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/7I95IFw...

Google could easily afford to grow a brain the size of ten thousand human brains.

Oh yeah, we already know how that will turn out.

How is this not their fault? They clearly didn't test their software properly.

They may have tested it with hundreds or thousands of photos available on Picasa and not had it tag anyone "Canus Lupus Homus Sapius Chimpanzeeus", and then released it and in a week had someone take a picture at their wedding and get tagged "Chimpanzees". If your face is hard, deeply-wrinkled, and sporting a bolt-on pair of enormous, leathery ears, it might tag you as a monkey; I think I've encountered exactly one person in my life who looked like that, so it's not surprising it'd miss him in testing. Maybe they're not Aerosmith or

Be careful what you wish for.

one count of computer fraud, aid and abet – both of which carry a maximum prison sentence of five years and a fine of up to $250,000

that sounds familiar.

You now have a basis to sue. Have at it.

By all means, I want to see the giant mangina who brings the lawsuit because "White men are being discriminated against".

I bet he looks something like this:

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/oe9uK9Q...

Mangina ? Such hate speech

You now have a basis to sue. Have at it.

By all means, I want to see the giant mangina who brings the lawsuit because "White men are being discriminated against".

I bet he looks something like this:

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/oe9uK9Q...

This is "optional" for OEMs in the same way as they have the option to have MS break their legs or not.

Solution: Buy from OEMs with no legs to break, like Arkadians, Terra-Fermians, Weebles, Bile Demons, or maybe Mr. Wobblyman.

This is where image support would make this place so awesome:
http://i1.ytimg.com/vi/dZqAEV0...

If a fat person eats skinny people shit will they lose weight??

I don't know about that one, but having worms in your intestine can make you lose weight for sure.

See picture. It's just like a big bowl of yummy pasta!

5 can be bigger than 15 proof Here we see a yellow 5 larger than a red 15.

What is existence for which the owls must dwell?

and of course there are hats. What does that have to do with anything?

The "hackers" I've seen in the movies wouldn't have much trouble with combat training:

http://www.allaboutjackman.com...
http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Es2uYtSJ...

True that the prevailing west winds will reduce the chance of the fallout getting to France. But the Chernobyl disaster showed a rather different pattern; you can not count on it to work out.

I think one should make Disney pay dearly for extending copyrights but since we can't fight them via the law, maybe we should try some culture jamming instead?

For an example we need to fill the net with links and images so if somebody uses a search engine for "Mickey Mouse" instead of the clean sanitary Disney version they get the broken down whored out Taco-Man version? Bonus if they come with his catch phrase "I'll suck your dick for $10".

Its obvious that Disney will just keep buying congresscritters until copyrights last for eternity so it looks like the only thing left to do is just shit all over the mouse, make the mouse so lame Disney can't reap endless profits without penalty by whoring the mouse out for eternity.

Yeah but take a look at the construction photos like this one. A modern construction crew with huge excavators and trucks would be in a whole different league.

Arnbitter macht frei.

And we finally know what nematodes are thinking: http://i1.ytimg.com/vi/GpEDsoZ...

What you really need is one of these:

http://i1.ytimg.com/vi/S0hRzEi...

Because this man would be the perfect leader for their new project.

drinkypoo is a disgusting, smelly, fat slob. He has never had sex and he still lives with his mother. No woman would ever want him unless they are disgustingly fat too. Anybody, even Justin Bieber, could kick his obese, flabby, gelatin-like ass.

I tracked down this picture of drinkypoo

drinkypoo is a disgusting, smelly, fat slob. He has never had sex and he still lives with his mother. No woman would ever want him unless they are disgustingly fat too. Anybody, even Justin Bieber, could kick his obese, flabby, gelatin-like ass.

I tracked down this picture of drinkypoo

ok, so these guys took the idea from Aerovironment, gear mechanism from Festo, and the latest openCV optimization to create something that avoids static objects in a still wind environment. And of course made it into a PhD project.

And I like the "crowd over a concert".... Yeah... I'm sure the stereo will work well among all those lights air currents, and people.