Slashdot Mirror
Weird Science Offered As University Class
ludwigvan968 writes "The ACTLab at the University of Texas at Austin is making waves with its Weird Science class. The link is to the TA's blog with documentation of some of the projects: a laser harp, a 3D environment constructed with fog and an LCD projector, and a 'water bridge' using a 50,000-volt transformer. Next semester, they're introducing a new class called 'Disruptive Technologies.'"
This is not a complete class... I read nothing about animating an uber-hot girlfriend!
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
I want a mythbusters class as well
Deleted
Mad Science. Seriously, I'm dying for some funding on my research dealing with the re-animation of human flesh.
Now we're all stuck with thoughts of gym class taught by Kelly Brock.
I remember when I was working for a production company, a buddy of mine would always do stuff like this. We made a smoke cannon similar to the one shown there using an old PA speaker, some plastic cones, and a fog machine. The PA speaker pushed the fog through the cones making the smoke rings. We were going to build a large one, but never did. We also talked about doing something similar to the LCD/smoke projector with a large DLP projector when they first came out to experiment on replacing the aging atmospheric effect laser projectors. Of course, it still wasn't as impressive as a 10 watt white light laser with a color changing crystal. But its cool to see people out there playing with some of this kind of stuff. The water bridge was friggin cool.
"We'll be having a lab session today, so get a bra from the cabinet by the door and make sure it is securely fastened over your head before going to your lab station"
Technoli
I welcome our new Kelly LeBrock Overlords!
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090305/
Truly one of Canada's great contributions to the rest of the world. Kelly ROCKS!!!
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
No wonder everyone who seems to know anything about "Defense Against the Dark Arts" are all uber-geeks!
Solomon
"Twice half-assed makes an ass whole." --Solomon K. Chang
But for god's sake, I hope they don't forget the doll!
You end up making so much awesome stuff you never knew you had in you in these programs. definitely made my college experience worthwhile. some of mine:
http://home.actlab.utexas.edu/~charlesv/
Talk about cutting edge music. Hopefully it's not "ear-splitting" music...
Truly disruptive technology might be an "intestinal auger" with rheostat. Somehow, I suppose the FDA won't allow that piece of equipment to be added to the body...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
You might want to stay away from the dining hall on the day this class meets. Greasy pork sandwiches served in dirty ashtrays get tired after a while.
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
Unless it's taught by Anthony Michael Hall, you can forget about it.
And popcorn. LOTS of popcorn!
John
This is something I've found kind of interesting ever since I first heard of it a couple years ago. However, we may not be limited to simply looking much longer. For example, a newer application of the Wii Remote that allows users to convert any display into a digital white board could allow fog display users to directly manipulate both the fog and the image being projected over the affected area simultaneously, making it possible to do things like carve directly into the display itself. (Though, much of it may initially come off as a gimmick similar to some of Apple's interactive quicktime movie demos, such as realtime water ripples created on mouseclicks.)
Eventually, I'd love to see a way to do this that doesn't require the fog, like maybe using lasers to intersect at a single point in 3D space in such a way that the polarization reflects the light back to the viewer at that point, while remaining invisible elsewhere.
8==8 Bones 8==8
Will this revolution be televised? Maybe youtubed?
I'd like to see projects like this trickle into the anemic science materials at the highschool level and make learning science fun. Hopefully they contribute their materials to one/some of the several open coursework sites.
Disruptive technologies is a very real area of study. Supercomputing 2006 and 2007 even had a panel on it. (My phd adviser is one of the people listed there) Although somewhat buzz-wordy, the idea is to signify technologies that have the potential to bring about great change within an industry.
Just to name one kind of such technology for computing, if someone could get automatic parallelization to work reliably, that would be a very disruptive technology. (20 years of research has yet to achieve this, but people keep trying)
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
I thought this was about "Intelligent Design".
668: Neighbour of the Beast
Missing Objects office here. A humour sense unit has been found. Please come and check whether it is yours.
I really enjoyed watching the Physics for Future President's course from UC.
http://webcast.berkeley.edu/course_details.php?seriesid=1906978373 or http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ysbZ_j2xi0 (if you don't like real player!)
Kind of lightweight and zero math involved but entertaining for non science nerds.When I went to U.T. Austin in 1981 I took a class called "Fantastic Theories and Sobering Facts". U.T. Austin has always been a leader in classes for non-science majors. Oh, and HOOKEM!
Just so long as you're forced to laugh at my black joke. After all, if you won't join in making fun of black people, you're just a stick-in-the-mud, right?
You've been well trained! :)
As evidence I present my wife, who while showing occasional signs of rational thought, is consistently irrational.
But that's half the fun!
http://cws.org/ still exists, and it used to have some content years ago. This actually goes back at least to the '80s when I was living in Austin. Not sure I should name any names, but I wonder if any of he same people are involved. I was only peripherally aware of it, though I did have one of the official CWS pencils. My recollections are fuzzy after all these years, but I think the menu venue of weirdness was called "Slope House", somewhere on West 6th street, where a number of the principals lived at the time. It was called the slope house because it was an old house and all the floors were sloping by that time...
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
You dumb - any decent slashdotter would know that there are NO SUCH THINGS as girlfriends. Face it, IT'S A MYTH!
Shouldn't "Yourselfs" have a apostrophe? I'm not clear on punctuation Nazism.
If this is a rational world, why would rational women read cosmo? Why would rational men read maxim, look at playboy, or watch the man show?
Anyways, time for an assumption, given your wife has a PHD I would postulate that you too, have at least reached some manner of success in your career, education, or business. If not, you're probably good in bed and she's quite a bit older. Presuming gigolo gold diggers post on myspace not slashdot, I guess you both have achieved a nominal degree of success in at least one area of your lives. I assert this leaves the both of you with a predisposition for at least marginal success, if not happiness in love. You are not Mr. and Mrs. Joe & Jane A. Verage and Love is never necessarily rational.
Women often claim that "men are dumb" or things like "all the good ones are taken" or whatever. At what point do these idioms of dating angst become misogynistic? Is it really when we're talking about a movie where two nerds have trouble with the opposite sex and decide to build their own girl?
Under the influence of Post-Cyberpunk Gonzo Journalism
Sandy Stone teaches the class.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'd take that class. Have Frank bring some models.
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
I just watched Blazing Saddles this weekend. I laughed, but no one forced me to. I didn't see any reference to being stick-in-the-mud for not laughing at the racial humor in that movie, but I did see two black people in the mud (along with a hand cart)...pretty funny scene, actually. :) Folks around here need to lighten up.
Hey, where the white women at??I saw it on Slashdot, it must be true!
you're insane. maybe when citing a notion thousands of years old you should ask yourself why it is we don't practice human sacrifice, and burn scientists at the stake.
Under the influence of Post-Cyberpunk Gonzo Journalism
...and many are immensely profitable ones.
If you'll pay to take the class, they'll offer it. There's not much mystery there.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
In lieu of evidence backing up your claim, I offer my wife as an example contradicting your generalization (even if my assumption regarding your sex is incorrect). A lynchpin of the relationship I have with her is our mutual ability to consistently solve our problems rationally. To reinforce that point, her name is prefixed with the title of "doctor", a respected and enlightened status one does not achieve without the ability to reason. Not good enough. "Doctor" doesn't automatically equal "rational", in fact in many instances it can mean nothing more than "able to regurgitate and parrot dogma".
You're using her as bait, Master!
Can we all join the fun?
My wife is smarter than me, more fit, better educated and a better programmer. I'm just barely more qualified with networks and architecture, and I'm definitely less of a cook. I have an extraordinary amount of respect for her.
But if I ever accused her of being a rational being, she'd break my cranium, and then subtly change something to keep me off balance.
See? Geeks do know about women. Just not very much.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Given that this is Texas and the recent ID news from there http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/01/0551221 I would have thought EVOLUTION qualified as "weird science" in Texas.
Dear Miss LeBrock,
My son Joel is currently suffering from a groin injury and is unable to stand up in his gym shorts whilst you are teaching. Please allow him to keep his groin covered with a towel or blanket whilst he remains seated. He also has to do a massage exercise on his groin whilst it is covered by the blanket, so please don't ruin the moment.
Yours
Mrs. Joel's mother.
White people drive like this. Black people drive like this.
Well, it is fair enough to say that nobody is entirely rational. As I mentioned in an earlier response, that was not my intention. To clarify the point, it is incorrect to say: a person is irrational because they are a woman. Perhaps we can accurately say: a person may be either rational or irrational, disregarding gender.
Your humility is commendable and something most of the rest of us could learn a great deal from.
She, like you and I, is both rational and irrational. And the allocation of the two differs from person to person and I do not believe that gender is a prevailing factor (although nurture most definitely is). While I know nothing about the mechanics of your relationship and I am definitely a psychology layman, that sort of behavior seems to me like a form of play. Participants in all sorts of social groups engage each other in games, and I think couples are no different.
As much as you can learn about anybody, I suppose.
Why bother.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It's not humility, I'm just being clinical. Brains come in all packages. But I'm not willing to strip away the role playing gender games, they keep me from rolling out of bed.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Keep Austin Weird!
"Would you care to support that statement? If you cannot or choose not to, what does that say about your rationality? (It is worth noting I believe you are likely a male rather than a female who writes to degrade and misunderstand members of her own gender.)"
.
If you think there's anything consciously rational about the way _human beings_ usually make everyday decisions, you really need to go back to school. Even smart people do suboptimal/irrational/dumb things all the flippin' time. But unless you're a supreme tool (or an economist) you understand this and just wanted to take the "nothing rational about women" comment completely literally since that made the flimsiest straw man.
So, maybe it's possible that you and your wife have the only rational relationship on earth and are so clearly better than us all, due to your ultra-enlightened/educated status, that you really don't get this. However, a 'rational' person would conclude it's far more likely that your intention was just to brag about your wife, and to try to act smart but dignified while insulting someone for making a joke
"In lieu of evidence backing up your claim, I offer my wife as an example contradicting your generalization (even if my assumption regarding your sex is incorrect). A lynchpin of the relationship I have with her is our mutual ability to consistently solve our problems rationally. To reinforce that point, her name is prefixed with the title of doctor, a respected and enlightened status one does not achieve without the ability to reason."
Here's a hint- all the hey-its-a-real-logical-argument verbosity just seems pathetic when you aren't making a particularly complicated one. If you just said "nuh-uh, mah wife is rational, cuz _she's_ a doctor", it would have sounded kind of childish, right? Well, thats still all you said so dressing it up doesn't make you look smart. It just makes you look like you need to put down the thesaurus find something useful to be outraged about.
"Care to respond or are we all going to just let these anachronistic and misogynistic myths perpetuate ad infinitum? "
How about "you're a pretentious tosspot?" That work for you? And if your wife is a real doctor, not like the liberal-arts type but the useful kind, I'd recommend you tone it down a bit. Makes you look a little insecure. Women hate that.
Oh yeah? First off, you have a wife, which implies you have a human sexual partner, which is an issue of concern in and of itself. We're not going to talk about this, but I just want you to know we regard you with extreme suspicion as a result of that statement.
Second, you cannot offer contradicting examples "in lieu" of evidence, you arrogant vagina. Your attempt at grammatical decor is so disgusting, so contorted, you could substitute that sentence in for a whole week of pr0n videos at any old BDSM site and the clientele wouldn't mind. Then you have the nerve (I won't say balls, because you have apparently lost them a long ass time ago) to use the word "lynchpin"... in the *very next sentence*. I am appalled.
My computer and I solve problems rationally. My thesis supervisor and I solve problems rationally. But a wife? Logic? Are you even listening to yourself here? Next you'll be telling us your wife doesn't ask you what you're doing in the bathroom or try to irritate you when you're watching football on TV, or argue incessantly about silly little things in a high pitched voice just to get your attention. If she has boobies, then she will do all these things no matter what sequence of characters you pronounce before her name, and no matter how big her contribution to the PhD-thesis-factory that academic institutions have turned into this century. Enlightened, yeah. You poor man. And there's this certain time of the month, a very special time of the month... hell, why am I even trying. You're a lost case.
You know what, I will stop right here rather than give you a run down of factual evidence that irrational behavior is part of the exam females have to pass to ensure healthy breast development, because you are so painfully brainwashed that any attempt to re-educate you on the subject will have negative consequences on your relationship with your "wife". If you don't have the balls (sorry, never mind) to stand upright and ruffle the hair on your chest and holler out at the stupidity of what the woman is doing, then nothing good can come of this. You may stop solving things logically together. Imagine that. Or maybe you'll break down in tears and tell her to forgive you for leaving the toilet seat up. I won't have that happen to *any* man, even a clueless schmuck like you. It's just wrong.
I run into strange people on the internets... unconceivable, twisted minds. Yet in spite of all your pussyfooting around and your fear of the ad infinitum, you are the best candidate for the male savior of feminism I have seen thus far. Well done, you have my vote.
I love it!
This will bring the "Marty" out in all the potential future engineers out there, it may seem like a joke to many - but its dead serious! Weve had a decline in general science interest amongst kids these days - too much effort and too little actual "fun" - thats how they perceive science, but science is so much more - and anything WORTH doing costs patience and dedication.
The weird science classes will hopefully be a "springboard" for many students to "leap" into science and be fun enough to understand that they must invest time and dedication in order to receive actual results.
I have a "Weird Science" lab of my own - besides my work in a totally different area, that is because the most exciting areas of science is usually found in the unexpected results, things we didnt know before...stuff we stumble upon....as well as creativity.
Creativity is the single most important asset we have, math you can learn - anyone can learn - call it complex...call it advanced...call it animal names...doesnt matter what you call it, math is a constant - creativity is not - when both meet - wonderful tings can happen.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
Beakman as the professor. The assistant as the TA (forgot her name). Lester as that one sketchy TA that taught you how to do stupid-cool things. I'd sign up for it.
Do not look into laser harp with remaining eye.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
The original comment was: “[t]here is nothing rational about women”, to which I made two points in response.
One, that holding such a firm belief (having a vagina instead of a penis disqualifies an individual for rationality) without support is itself irrational.
Two, that the generalization is false because I can provide a single counter-example (“in place” of attempt at proof), which I attempted to reinforce with personal experience (the ability to work out problems rationally “serves to hold together parts or elements”) and a mention of credentials (that cannot be gotten by someone incapable of rational thought).
Nowhere did I make a general claim about women (or men) one way or the other and I did not even remotely imply that my wife does not behave irrationally at times (surprise, all humans do). My only position was and is that my wife, a woman, is clearly capable of rationality. Nothing more.
You have misconstrued my simple position and extrapolated it beyond any sensical ends, disparaging me along the way without ever comprehending or speaking directly to my claims, making some absurd assumptions, and never taking the time to open your dictionary. How is the water down there on the deep end anyway?
Why bother.
It's true, it's true we're so lame.
You are assuming far too much from my comments. What I wrote is what I meant. But I want to be clear, so here I go again.
Maybe I reacted because of experience in geek culture and because I held a similar position way back when. In either case, this joke that women are irrational and impossible to understand started getting old and stopped being funny in geek culture about a decade ago, in my opinion.
Rationality is important in any relationship and it is not unusual for people to have relationships wherein problems can be worked out meaningfully (as opposed to impassioned shouting matches). But I was not even speaking to relationships, only to provide a substantive counter-example to the generalization I rejected.
If I had said "I know a woman who is rational" and nothing else, I suspect I would have been challenged for baseless opinion. To avoid that, I cited personal experience and her credentials, that latter indicating she must at least be capable of rational thought. I hope you can see how that would fly directly in the face of: “[t]here is nothing rational about women.”
Mathematics. Define “useful kind”.
Once again, my only position was and is that my wife, a woman, is clearly capable of rationality and that counters the aforementioned generalization. Explain to me how I should “tone it down”.
Why bother.
Be covered this semester, or next?
It puts the lotion on it's skin, or else it gets the hose again.
troll, my ass. point is, at this point, sexist jokes are usually ok. racial jokes... that depends on whether or not there's black (or whatever) people around.
Last night my girlfriend said that girls make no sense. I was relieved it was her that said it and not me. Now however I am worried that she may in fact be a man. You may want to check your wife's medical history.
which is totally what she said
"All right, what would you little maniacs like to do first?"