I agree - I think understanding grammar comes not from learning all the rules, but from reading a lot of great writing and absorbing it that way. I think the parent thought he was supposed to absorb it from "the environment" - which I take to mean from talking to people - but obviously the way people talk is quite different from the way people write.
I have trouble remembering what nouns, verbs, adverbs, etc. are, and there are only a couple of grammar "rules" I might be able to come up with. Despite that, I am the best writer I know (in person, and quality of slashdot posts aside;) ) I tend to frequently make certain grammatical errors, but I am aware of them because when I read back what I wrote it is awkward or doesn't make sense, not because I memorized whatever rule it was that I broke.
That's great, and avoiding HFCS helps toward that goal (apparently) - HFCS blocks you from feeling full, so you eat more. If that's true and is really a big effect, then all that would be required to get caloric intakes to a reasonable level would be removing HFCS.
That's no longer micromanagement, but a single large change that could (partially) solve the overlying issue, which is consuming too many calories as you say.
Obesity is a bigger problem in the US than in most other places, and the US is also the place where it's basically impossible to avoid HFCS. Americans as a whole eat too much... correlation is not causation, but if it's shown that HFCS makes you feel less full so you eat more, then that *is* causation and is way beyond "micromanagement".
Here in southern California you can get Mexican coke as much as you want any time of year... they even carry it in Target stores in heavily Hispanic areas, and most liquor stores have it.
I don't buy it because it is more expensive, but I don't buy regular HFCS Coke either - I drink Coke Zero instead because I don't want to gain more weight than I already have and I consume too many calories as it is:)
If I had a higher metabolism and exercised more, I would be all over Mexican Coke - it really does taste great. The regular Coke tastes fine, though not as good, and it leaves that really sticky feeling in your mouth that I can't stand.
In Thailand I regularly drank sugar-sweetened Coke (in moderation); because that's all there is so it's easily available and cheap.
Also, there's something about drinking it from a glass bottle... the plastic bottles really ruin the experience.
I am two years younger but even I have understood that I'm no longer part of the younger generation at least since graduating from university and possibly even a few years earlier:)
And as someone else said in their reply, most around this age didn't use a C64 in school. In my early schools, we had Apple IIs, like the other poster mentioned. Even then, they weren't used for very much (got a lot of settlers across the oregon trail, though). I'm kind of curious about how much you actually used C64s in school, and if you learned to program on them at school or by yourself at home? Surely they were outdated and replaced by the time you reached an age where you might have had the opportunity to learn programming in school?
All that said, my grandfather had a C64 which he hardly used originally - he gave up with it apparently, packed it all up in the original packaging, and stashed it in the basement. He gave it to me when I was in high school and I played around with it because I thought it was cool, and I made an adapter to plug the floppy drive into a modern computer's serial port to download stuff from the internet to use on it, but it didn't hold my interest very long... there's just so much more to fool around with on modern systems.
How is that any different from the accelerometers in smartphones? There are a lot of games for iphone and android that use the accelerometer and there's no problem of the sort you're describing; it seems to me that they've got this one figured out already...
As for the specific implementation described by the parent, I imagine you'd have to hold down a button to enable the effect; the change would be calculated from the position the device was in when the button is pressed.
Actually, the default photo gallery app in android 2.1 does this already... if you tilt it to the side in thumbnail view it tilts all the thumbnails and you can see more thumbnails, as if you were tilting a camera pointed at a bunch of thumbnails laid out on a table. You don't press a button to get it to do this, but the sensitivity threshold is low enough that it's not annoying, and there's no fast-paced gameplay going on at the same time to pay attention to. I'm guessing it would be these kinds of simple effects you'd see in DS games. You don't even need a 3D engine to do this, just different layers of 2D that you can slide past each other to see around.
Well, it is actually quite easy... there is a lot of software available that will capture the data from accelerometers and display it to you. The hardware is pretty simple and I guess the APIs are easy to use (I'm not a programmer I'm just assuming based on the software I've seen). When I first got a computer with an accelerometer (a Thinkpad from a couple years ago) I was even able to set it up to use the accelerometer input as a joystick in linux. Not practical, but kind of amusing to try to play a flying game by moving the whole computer around:) There are also several programs for iphones and Android devices that will output all of the accelerometer data to you (on android I recommend the free "Tricorder" program, it shows you data from all the sensors and more than you probably thought possible).
Therefore it should be - and apparently was - fairly trivial to set up a program to run in the background logging and monitoring the data
The neat thing is that the accelerometers really are quite high-resolution, and there is one measuring each direction (x, y, and z) which real seismometers also do.
This specific implementation (the quake-catcher network) has been around for several years already, so this is already old news - and I believe there was indeed an article on slashdot about a similar idea for smartphones. I think I posted information about this in that article's comments, actually.
I'm the same way, except as a grad student I am in a position where I really can do all my work at night.
The only times I actually get any work done are when my schedule works out such that I am able to do work between 11PM and 7AM (approximately). If I need to do something during business hours, I just stay up a little longer, go and do it, and then come home and go to sleep. I wake up around 6 or 7PM, eat a combination breakfast/dinner, waste a little time doing whatever, then get to work fully awake and relaxed and with few distractions.
Currently, however, I've switched into an almost "normal" schedule... falling asleep exhausted around 9 or 10 PM and getting up around 6 or earlier. If we're throwing syndromes around, it's clear to me I have the problems described by Non-24-hour sleep-wake syndrome. It's not always gradual, though, pushing forward over days and weeks... sometimes it can be suddenly jolted forward several hours (which is what happened to me recently).
The coolest part, though, is that I had a great way to test this: while I was in a "reverse" phase (asleep during the day and awake overnight) I went to Thailand for a month, which was a 13-hour difference in timezones (currently it's 14 hours but was 13 hours at the time due to DST). That means that I should have had no jet lag and should have been able to keep a "normal" schedule while there. Indeed, I had no jet lag... by keeping with the same schedule I had been keeping at home, I woke up in the morning for the first few days... but then it started slipping. I didn't get quite to the point of a reverse schedule again because I had things to do during the day while there, but it was tough and I was usually tired during the day.
On the one hand, having these kinds of problems with sleep schedules is a good thing - I'm able to fairly easily alter my schedule at short notice if I need to for whatever reason, and I can stay up for a day or two if necessary with little ill effect. On the other hand, it really hurts my ability to interact with people in regular society. As a grad student no one cares about that's fine, but I know I'm going to have huge problems if/when I get a real job (sticking with academia would seem to be a partial solution, but I don't want to do that for other reasons;) )
Well, it's one thing to quote Holy Grail incessantly as in the xkcd you linked to, and in particular the knights of ni line quoted therein and other lines of theirs that really were supposed to be unexpected, shocking, whatever... I still think most of it is funny, but yes, it's unnecessary to quote all the time.
It's something else entirely to go for a less obvious line like this one - it's a classic bit but not as well-remembered and over-quoted as the rest of the film - that not only is still funny in its original context (it doesn't rely on being shocking or unexpected for its humor) but also draws parallels to the situation at hand.
I understand as a British citizen any Monty Python references must seem rather annoying to you at this point. I'm young and from the US, and I have seen all of the Monty Python films and series and loved them all, and even I am sick of references to their best-known bits. Instead of discouraging referencing them entirely (in which case the references would move elsewhere, to stuff that isn't as funny - you can't ever stop people from making pop-culture references in lieu of being witty themselves), one might as well encourage people to delve further into the material and to revive all the brilliant lines we've mostly forgotten about.
I don't think I've seen Holy Grail since 2002 or so (high school), having watched it ten or fifteen times at that point... I don't think you could get me to watch it again for at least a few more years, because of the way it's been abused in nerd and popular culture. However, I re-watch some of their other stuff occasionally (Life of Brian is far from getting old for example) if I'm looking for a guaranteed laugh from smart/clever humor.
I realize now that this rant is pretty pointless... but I've gone and written it and no one will probably read it, so I'm posting it anyway:)
Hopefully, you can at least understand from this why many still quote Monty Python and find it funny. You're right that the "stupid" stuff from Holy Grail should never be quoted ever again, but there's plenty of stuff that is still funny if you don't take things so seriously! The parent comment fit the context, is not necessarily obvious (and it isn't "in soviet russia" or the like), and is mildly clever; and to an American audience is extra funny because TFA is about Britain.
You're right about those "definitions", and I'm glad that people are corrected on slashdot when they use them incorrectly... but I can't help but feel that the common usage of these terms has changed.
Especially now that the cold war is quite over, "second world" doesn't really have a meaning. "Third world", whether it was originally intended to mean this or not, is used now to refer to under-developed countries - especially Africa and the like, but not necessarily *that* undeveloped.
We're in the position now where "first world" still refers to western democracies, and now more-or-less also refers to any developed nation, including Russia, and "third world" refers still to "everybody else." It's separated from its original cold war meaning, and it's a very shaky distinction at best.
Therefore, in popular usage "second world" is sometimes being used (as in the parent's post) to describe developed nations with "issues" - things that prevent them from really being considered progressive, democratic nations.
Just as describing someplace as a "third world" country carries a lot of meaning and is useful in describing places, "first world" and "second world" as terms can be just as useful, and I expect this type of usage to increase greatly over the next few years.
Not that things really need to be simplified that much, but it does help clear up ambiguities in descriptions of places one is unfamiliar with. For example, I would describe Thailand as a third-world country after spending a lot of time there, but at the same time it's far from African countries with starving babies and rampant disease - it's at the upper limit of being considered third-world, but it's definitely not first-world. Obviously, since "second world" is obsolete in its original meaning, it makes a lot of sense to re-purpose it to describe those kinds of countries.
It's not like it was an article that slipped under the radar, either... it has close to 500 comments. Easily one of the worst slashdot dupes I can recall:)
I'm from Buffalo and went to school in Rochester (Western New York), and one of my greatest pleasures during those years was driving home and back after or during a big snowstorm. I had a ten-year-old FWD Saturn - really not a great car to drive on snow and ice - but I learned to drive in cheap cars in snow and ice so I know how to handle it. I would often drive somewhere when it was really bad specifically because I knew I could, I didn't really care if the car got damaged, and I knew there wouldn't be anyone else on the road.
Anyway, it was great driving on the thruway between Rochester and Buffalo because even when it wasn't that bad you would always see several cars off in the ditch - and as you say, they aren't just the small 2WD cars, it's mostly SUVs driven by people who don't know how to drive in snow and ice. Why the thruway is designed with ditches on both sides I'm not really sure, when I know the designers understood about snow and ice making people run off the road, but it sure makes a great trap for cars.
I never even came close to having a problem, myself - you just have to understand that depending on conditions it may very well take you two to three times as long to get where you want to go.
Now I'm living in southern California, and I drive an AWD car (a Subaru) which is completely unnecessary since there's no weather here... but every time there's rain, people here who have never driven on anything but dry and hot roads have almost as much trouble as those back east in the snow... here I don't always find it amusing, though, because the traffic is so heavy and the drivers or so bad to begin with (not that I think I'm a super great driver, but I can drive in the rain at least...) that it's much more likely to affect me.
That's irrelevant, because isotope studies in geology are not done on "mud". You don't take the lid off a mountain and find liquid mud that's been sitting there for millions of years (in which case the isotopes would have circulated as you suggest).
The "mud" hardens into a rock. If it's really mud, then it might be mudstone or shale. Anything that's in the mud, like isotopes, is trapped in place in the chemistry of the rock. And believe it or not, geologists do realize that things "leak out" or are otherwise mixed up over time, and this is taken into account.
That said, as a geologist myself I do often think results based on isotope studies are bullshit, but not because the science of isotopes is bullshit. It's because of the problems described in TFA - misunderstanding of statistics - and misapplication of isotope-related techniques.
Your disagreement with public health bullshit is understandable, and I agree to some extent with that. However, I really don't think you understand the chemistry of isotope studies and the principles of geology that make these things valid (when used properly).
It's already been pointed out that this is a rather obvious result (not that I personally think that means the study wasn't worthwhile). Given the option, of course boys are going to choose video games over basically any other activity.
Personally, I think computer games harmed my intellectual development as a kid. Here's my anecdote.
I grew up around computers - my dad was into them and basically gave me free reign over whatever systems we ended up with in the house. He didn't ever teach me very much, leaving me to learn it all on my own. Of course I was most interested in games (Commander Keen era) but I spent a lot of time exploring what else was possible. I learned a whole lot about computers at a very early age that way.
A few years later, computer games for me really took off - especially because of Star Wars games like X-Wing, Dark Forces, and the rest... I had pretty much all of them, couldn't get enough. At that point, my primary intention when I fired up the computer was to get into the X-Wing cockpit as quickly as possible; I was no longer really interested in anything else.
This kind of went back and forth over the years... there would be periods when I'd briefly get really into something besides games (3D modeling, photoshop, basic programming, all kinds of stuff) - but that only lasted until the next great game came out, and I'd forget all that stuff. The only thing that really stuck from those interstitial phases was photo editing, which I consider myself an expert in now:)
Now, this still put me way ahead of the pack - I knew more about computers than anyone else at school. The reason is that I was actually using computers in all my spare time (even if I was just gaming) rather than playing Nintendo. I never had a console or handheld like every other kid seemed to have. In the mean time I played all the big computer games, and a lot of small ones, up until 2001 or 2002 when I lost interest. When I stopped playing computer games, I went straight back into learning all I could about computers and various software, and though I was still way ahead of most people I knew, I was actually way behind in general. I'd lost several years of computer knowledge to games, and I never really caught up as much as I think I could have.
Also during that time when I was constantly gaming, I missed out on other stuff. I didn't watch a lot of good films (now a major passion of mine), I didn't read a lot of good books (I have quite the collection of Star Wars books, though...), the only music I knew was The Beatles (not that I regret that), and so on. Thus, though I was still an unpopular nerd in high school, once I stopped playing computer games I found all this time that I could suddenly use for more interesting cultural and intellectual pursuits, and I'm really grateful that I didn't waste all of high school playing games.
I still do like games, but I take them in moderation and I wait a while after they come out to decide if I really want to spend time on it. I play through one or two games a year at most (most recent ones I spent a lot of time on were Civ IV and Fallout 3; I do also play most of the Call of Duty games as a guilty pleasure...) The rest of my time is spent doing things that are more intellectually stimulating or otherwise useful.
So what's my point... well, given the chance - and given that they aren't going to put much thought into how this will affect them in the future - boys are going to choose video games. If parents want their kids to know more than how to play first person shooters when they grow up, they should probably do some parenting. I'm very grateful that my parents let me do whatever I wanted growing up (more or less), but I don't think most kids can handle that responsibly. Most of my actual learning took place outside of school, and if I spent all my time playing video games like a lot of kids do now, I would be a completely different person today.
I have a Nexus One and I have the SNES emulator; it works but keep in mind that on the iphone you only have the touchscreen for input. Using a tiny portion of the touchscreen to control all the buttons from even a relatively simple console controller really doesn't work that well. In fact, most games are practically unplayable because the input is so imprecise.
The Nexus One has a trackball and some other buttons that can be used, but still, it really doesn't work. Android phones with physical keyboards are the only practical mobile platform that things like SNES emulators are going to work on.
It would be great if Apple allowed things like that in the app store, yes... I am not arguing that. Just saying that practically, SNES emulators and the like aren't something you're really missing on the iphone since it'd be mostly useless.
It's such a bummer to find a restaurant with food you like at reasonable prices, only to discover that they serve pepsi products... even if the food's great, that usually means I don't go back very often (or ever); pepsi products really are pretty terrible compared to coke:)
I have been doing this as part of my master's thesis, with scanned maps. Something like this solution using GIS is definitely the way to do it, however, I have a few things to add.
This is something that greatly benefits from a GUI approach. Command-line-style GIS can be powerful, but when you're matching up features like this, being able to just point and click on the two points you want to match is really a lot easier. I have played around with the open source GIS programs, but am not familiar enough with them to offer any specific advice. I have access to ArcGIS and use that for everything - I can say at least that in Arc, this stuff is really very simple point-and-click stuff, though very powerful with plenty of options too.
In any case, to get something to match your maps to in whatever GIS software is used, one can get high-resolution georeferenced topographic maps and aerial and satellite imagery from USGS and NASA, for free. Since the poster is apparently not in the US the US topographic maps probably aren't helpful, but LANDSAT satellite imagery, for example, is available for most of the earth and is usually pretty good (if not spectacularly high in resolution - it's 15m pixels at best).
Several others have noted this as well - for Asian languages, Google has a lot of work to do. The Chinese translation near the top is impressive, but while Chinese and Japanese translations are probably pretty good on Google, other Asian languages suffer greatly.
I've been translating a lot of Thai lately, and initially I thought Google was great - the interface is really slick, and it seemed to give a decent result. Passing the translation back through often gave me really weird stuff, but I was expecting that. So it was great, until I tried using it to communicate with someone in Thai - even for really, really basic stuff, often they had absolutely no idea. It was just way off.
While you can feed western languages through it and get great, usable results, for Asian languages besides Chinese and Japanese it's next to useless. I'm guessing there isn't much of an incentive for Google to focus on other Asian languages - for example, in Android 2.1 on the Nexus One there is no way to even install fonts for less-popular Asian scripts like Thai, much less inputting text in those scripts - despite this capability being available on certain other Android phones (you can install it on the Nexus One if you root it, of course).
Based on what their technique for learning translation is, though, hopefully this will improve over time. It's an impressive system as it is, but very much limited to "popular" languages and those very similar to English.
Here's an anecdote regarding a good teacher allowing the display of weaponry in class, in this century.
In 2001 or so I was in 10th grade (I believe), and another student brought in (with permission - and encouragement - from the teacher) his grandfather's samurai sword, which he got in Japan during the occupation. It was passed around the history class for us to "feel the weight" (I guess). That's more dangerous than an inert civil war rifle, I would say. It sure made a big impression on a lot of students that day, and no one got disemboweled.
If teachers are willing to take risks like that (there is no risk of anyone getting hurt - I mean the risk that the teacher will get punished for allowing such a thing), the rewards for students can be great, and these I would say are the great teachers - ones who are willing to do whatever it takes to be a good teacher, even if it means going around the bureaucracy and rules of the school.
I am a TA, and I teach geology 101 lab classes. I wildly bend the rules of the school and department in many cases all throughout the semester, and the students love the class. I have covered for other TAs who had to miss their classes, and it's a wildly different environment where the TA is strict about the rules.
The funny part is that the Nexus One (which I have) prevents you from tethering in its default state as well. You either have to pay (as in the "solution" presented in this "article") or root the phone... which is nowhere near as easy (yet) as jailbreaking the iphone!
I have spent a lot of time there but only used voice and sms on my phone (also a years-old Nokia phone, but I bought the phone there too because I didn't have an unlocked US phone, and I wanted to be able to input Thai script). Still, I never had a problem getting online... literally every coffee shop (and there are a lot of them) offers free wi-fi. It's much, much easier finding free wi-fi in Thailand than in the US.
Obviously since the wireless plan is so cheap and painless and convenient it's not a big deal, I'm just saying, it's perfectly easy to get free, fast wi-fi there:) Most hotels offer it for free as well; I'm not sure what you consider a "business hotel" but most regular places offer it for free.
Anyway, that's good to know about mobile internet rates in Thailand - I'm planning on going back and being there for a few months and I will definitely want something along those lines since I won't be staying in a hotel.
You'd be amazed how much water people pour on their lawns in OC (where I currently live). It spills out onto the street in great floods when the sprinklers are going in some places - and they run them *every night*. Of course, we're in a desert here, so it makes sense if one must have a lawn - most of it evaporates in the daytime.
Therefore, the GP's assertion that no one in this area should have a lawn - why this isn't obvious to more people who live here, I don't know. Perhaps this case - if properly publicized - will get people to realize that. But who are we kidding? Most people in OC couldn't care less about anything, except their appearance to others - and a lush lawn is a big part of that, apparently.
I live there too and can report the GP is correct. If your sister lives here, she must be a college student or work at a university, because those are the only places you'll find large concentrations of "bluish" people in Orange County.
Further, if she has mostly young friends, chances are none of them care *at all* about politics - young people around here are pretty vapid regarding "serious" stuff (which is not to imply anything about your sister - it sounds like she must not be native to Orange County). Therefore, she wouldn't be exposed to either side of the political spectrum. As stereotypical as this all sounds, this has really been my experience after living here for two years and interacting with a lot of young people (I TA at a university).
I know you're joking a little bit, but "releasing the pressure" from a big looming earthquake is a valid theory and geologists are exploring the possibility. Of course, the problem is that you'll never be able to convince people that setting off a smaller quake is preventing a bigger one - in the case that you're successful, how can you prove the big one was ever going to come, and if you're unsuccessful, then you're proven wrong and your earlier quake was unnecessarily damaging (even if it actually reduced the size of the bigger one later - you can't prove that either). Anyway, there is a lot of geophysical modeling being done to try to answer these kinds of questions, especially within the academic geology community in California (I'm a geology grad student in California, but I'm not studying earthquakes so I'm no expert).
Interestingly, some are also exploring the possibility that we have already been releasing the pressure because of various deep engineering projects - for example, there was a story here within the last year or so about an earthquake in Iceland (I think) that may have been set off by drilling/geothermal energy stuff.
And of course, you can't forget the possibilities put forth by "A View to a Kill";)
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I agree - I think understanding grammar comes not from learning all the rules, but from reading a lot of great writing and absorbing it that way. I think the parent thought he was supposed to absorb it from "the environment" - which I take to mean from talking to people - but obviously the way people talk is quite different from the way people write.
I have trouble remembering what nouns, verbs, adverbs, etc. are, and there are only a couple of grammar "rules" I might be able to come up with. Despite that, I am the best writer I know (in person, and quality of slashdot posts aside ;) ) I tend to frequently make certain grammatical errors, but I am aware of them because when I read back what I wrote it is awkward or doesn't make sense, not because I memorized whatever rule it was that I broke.
That's great, and avoiding HFCS helps toward that goal (apparently) - HFCS blocks you from feeling full, so you eat more. If that's true and is really a big effect, then all that would be required to get caloric intakes to a reasonable level would be removing HFCS.
That's no longer micromanagement, but a single large change that could (partially) solve the overlying issue, which is consuming too many calories as you say.
Obesity is a bigger problem in the US than in most other places, and the US is also the place where it's basically impossible to avoid HFCS. Americans as a whole eat too much... correlation is not causation, but if it's shown that HFCS makes you feel less full so you eat more, then that *is* causation and is way beyond "micromanagement".
Here in southern California you can get Mexican coke as much as you want any time of year... they even carry it in Target stores in heavily Hispanic areas, and most liquor stores have it.
I don't buy it because it is more expensive, but I don't buy regular HFCS Coke either - I drink Coke Zero instead because I don't want to gain more weight than I already have and I consume too many calories as it is :)
If I had a higher metabolism and exercised more, I would be all over Mexican Coke - it really does taste great. The regular Coke tastes fine, though not as good, and it leaves that really sticky feeling in your mouth that I can't stand.
In Thailand I regularly drank sugar-sweetened Coke (in moderation); because that's all there is so it's easily available and cheap.
Also, there's something about drinking it from a glass bottle... the plastic bottles really ruin the experience.
I am two years younger but even I have understood that I'm no longer part of the younger generation at least since graduating from university and possibly even a few years earlier :)
And as someone else said in their reply, most around this age didn't use a C64 in school. In my early schools, we had Apple IIs, like the other poster mentioned. Even then, they weren't used for very much (got a lot of settlers across the oregon trail, though). I'm kind of curious about how much you actually used C64s in school, and if you learned to program on them at school or by yourself at home? Surely they were outdated and replaced by the time you reached an age where you might have had the opportunity to learn programming in school?
All that said, my grandfather had a C64 which he hardly used originally - he gave up with it apparently, packed it all up in the original packaging, and stashed it in the basement. He gave it to me when I was in high school and I played around with it because I thought it was cool, and I made an adapter to plug the floppy drive into a modern computer's serial port to download stuff from the internet to use on it, but it didn't hold my interest very long... there's just so much more to fool around with on modern systems.
How is that any different from the accelerometers in smartphones? There are a lot of games for iphone and android that use the accelerometer and there's no problem of the sort you're describing; it seems to me that they've got this one figured out already...
As for the specific implementation described by the parent, I imagine you'd have to hold down a button to enable the effect; the change would be calculated from the position the device was in when the button is pressed.
Actually, the default photo gallery app in android 2.1 does this already... if you tilt it to the side in thumbnail view it tilts all the thumbnails and you can see more thumbnails, as if you were tilting a camera pointed at a bunch of thumbnails laid out on a table. You don't press a button to get it to do this, but the sensitivity threshold is low enough that it's not annoying, and there's no fast-paced gameplay going on at the same time to pay attention to. I'm guessing it would be these kinds of simple effects you'd see in DS games. You don't even need a 3D engine to do this, just different layers of 2D that you can slide past each other to see around.
Well, it is actually quite easy... there is a lot of software available that will capture the data from accelerometers and display it to you. The hardware is pretty simple and I guess the APIs are easy to use (I'm not a programmer I'm just assuming based on the software I've seen). When I first got a computer with an accelerometer (a Thinkpad from a couple years ago) I was even able to set it up to use the accelerometer input as a joystick in linux. Not practical, but kind of amusing to try to play a flying game by moving the whole computer around :) There are also several programs for iphones and Android devices that will output all of the accelerometer data to you (on android I recommend the free "Tricorder" program, it shows you data from all the sensors and more than you probably thought possible).
Therefore it should be - and apparently was - fairly trivial to set up a program to run in the background logging and monitoring the data
The neat thing is that the accelerometers really are quite high-resolution, and there is one measuring each direction (x, y, and z) which real seismometers also do.
This specific implementation (the quake-catcher network) has been around for several years already, so this is already old news - and I believe there was indeed an article on slashdot about a similar idea for smartphones. I think I posted information about this in that article's comments, actually.
I'm the same way, except as a grad student I am in a position where I really can do all my work at night.
The only times I actually get any work done are when my schedule works out such that I am able to do work between 11PM and 7AM (approximately). If I need to do something during business hours, I just stay up a little longer, go and do it, and then come home and go to sleep. I wake up around 6 or 7PM, eat a combination breakfast/dinner, waste a little time doing whatever, then get to work fully awake and relaxed and with few distractions.
Currently, however, I've switched into an almost "normal" schedule... falling asleep exhausted around 9 or 10 PM and getting up around 6 or earlier. If we're throwing syndromes around, it's clear to me I have the problems described by Non-24-hour sleep-wake syndrome. It's not always gradual, though, pushing forward over days and weeks... sometimes it can be suddenly jolted forward several hours (which is what happened to me recently).
The coolest part, though, is that I had a great way to test this: while I was in a "reverse" phase (asleep during the day and awake overnight) I went to Thailand for a month, which was a 13-hour difference in timezones (currently it's 14 hours but was 13 hours at the time due to DST). That means that I should have had no jet lag and should have been able to keep a "normal" schedule while there. Indeed, I had no jet lag... by keeping with the same schedule I had been keeping at home, I woke up in the morning for the first few days... but then it started slipping. I didn't get quite to the point of a reverse schedule again because I had things to do during the day while there, but it was tough and I was usually tired during the day.
On the one hand, having these kinds of problems with sleep schedules is a good thing - I'm able to fairly easily alter my schedule at short notice if I need to for whatever reason, and I can stay up for a day or two if necessary with little ill effect. On the other hand, it really hurts my ability to interact with people in regular society. As a grad student no one cares about that's fine, but I know I'm going to have huge problems if/when I get a real job (sticking with academia would seem to be a partial solution, but I don't want to do that for other reasons ;) )
Well, it's one thing to quote Holy Grail incessantly as in the xkcd you linked to, and in particular the knights of ni line quoted therein and other lines of theirs that really were supposed to be unexpected, shocking, whatever... I still think most of it is funny, but yes, it's unnecessary to quote all the time.
It's something else entirely to go for a less obvious line like this one - it's a classic bit but not as well-remembered and over-quoted as the rest of the film - that not only is still funny in its original context (it doesn't rely on being shocking or unexpected for its humor) but also draws parallels to the situation at hand.
I understand as a British citizen any Monty Python references must seem rather annoying to you at this point. I'm young and from the US, and I have seen all of the Monty Python films and series and loved them all, and even I am sick of references to their best-known bits. Instead of discouraging referencing them entirely (in which case the references would move elsewhere, to stuff that isn't as funny - you can't ever stop people from making pop-culture references in lieu of being witty themselves), one might as well encourage people to delve further into the material and to revive all the brilliant lines we've mostly forgotten about.
I don't think I've seen Holy Grail since 2002 or so (high school), having watched it ten or fifteen times at that point... I don't think you could get me to watch it again for at least a few more years, because of the way it's been abused in nerd and popular culture. However, I re-watch some of their other stuff occasionally (Life of Brian is far from getting old for example) if I'm looking for a guaranteed laugh from smart/clever humor.
I realize now that this rant is pretty pointless... but I've gone and written it and no one will probably read it, so I'm posting it anyway :)
Hopefully, you can at least understand from this why many still quote Monty Python and find it funny. You're right that the "stupid" stuff from Holy Grail should never be quoted ever again, but there's plenty of stuff that is still funny if you don't take things so seriously! The parent comment fit the context, is not necessarily obvious (and it isn't "in soviet russia" or the like), and is mildly clever; and to an American audience is extra funny because TFA is about Britain.
You're right about those "definitions", and I'm glad that people are corrected on slashdot when they use them incorrectly... but I can't help but feel that the common usage of these terms has changed.
Especially now that the cold war is quite over, "second world" doesn't really have a meaning. "Third world", whether it was originally intended to mean this or not, is used now to refer to under-developed countries - especially Africa and the like, but not necessarily *that* undeveloped.
We're in the position now where "first world" still refers to western democracies, and now more-or-less also refers to any developed nation, including Russia, and "third world" refers still to "everybody else." It's separated from its original cold war meaning, and it's a very shaky distinction at best.
Therefore, in popular usage "second world" is sometimes being used (as in the parent's post) to describe developed nations with "issues" - things that prevent them from really being considered progressive, democratic nations.
Just as describing someplace as a "third world" country carries a lot of meaning and is useful in describing places, "first world" and "second world" as terms can be just as useful, and I expect this type of usage to increase greatly over the next few years.
Not that things really need to be simplified that much, but it does help clear up ambiguities in descriptions of places one is unfamiliar with. For example, I would describe Thailand as a third-world country after spending a lot of time there, but at the same time it's far from African countries with starving babies and rampant disease - it's at the upper limit of being considered third-world, but it's definitely not first-world. Obviously, since "second world" is obsolete in its original meaning, it makes a lot of sense to re-purpose it to describe those kinds of countries.
It's not like it was an article that slipped under the radar, either... it has close to 500 comments. Easily one of the worst slashdot dupes I can recall :)
I'm from Buffalo and went to school in Rochester (Western New York), and one of my greatest pleasures during those years was driving home and back after or during a big snowstorm. I had a ten-year-old FWD Saturn - really not a great car to drive on snow and ice - but I learned to drive in cheap cars in snow and ice so I know how to handle it. I would often drive somewhere when it was really bad specifically because I knew I could, I didn't really care if the car got damaged, and I knew there wouldn't be anyone else on the road.
Anyway, it was great driving on the thruway between Rochester and Buffalo because even when it wasn't that bad you would always see several cars off in the ditch - and as you say, they aren't just the small 2WD cars, it's mostly SUVs driven by people who don't know how to drive in snow and ice. Why the thruway is designed with ditches on both sides I'm not really sure, when I know the designers understood about snow and ice making people run off the road, but it sure makes a great trap for cars.
I never even came close to having a problem, myself - you just have to understand that depending on conditions it may very well take you two to three times as long to get where you want to go.
Now I'm living in southern California, and I drive an AWD car (a Subaru) which is completely unnecessary since there's no weather here... but every time there's rain, people here who have never driven on anything but dry and hot roads have almost as much trouble as those back east in the snow... here I don't always find it amusing, though, because the traffic is so heavy and the drivers or so bad to begin with (not that I think I'm a super great driver, but I can drive in the rain at least...) that it's much more likely to affect me.
That's irrelevant, because isotope studies in geology are not done on "mud". You don't take the lid off a mountain and find liquid mud that's been sitting there for millions of years (in which case the isotopes would have circulated as you suggest).
The "mud" hardens into a rock. If it's really mud, then it might be mudstone or shale. Anything that's in the mud, like isotopes, is trapped in place in the chemistry of the rock. And believe it or not, geologists do realize that things "leak out" or are otherwise mixed up over time, and this is taken into account.
That said, as a geologist myself I do often think results based on isotope studies are bullshit, but not because the science of isotopes is bullshit. It's because of the problems described in TFA - misunderstanding of statistics - and misapplication of isotope-related techniques.
Your disagreement with public health bullshit is understandable, and I agree to some extent with that. However, I really don't think you understand the chemistry of isotope studies and the principles of geology that make these things valid (when used properly).
It's already been pointed out that this is a rather obvious result (not that I personally think that means the study wasn't worthwhile). Given the option, of course boys are going to choose video games over basically any other activity.
Personally, I think computer games harmed my intellectual development as a kid. Here's my anecdote.
I grew up around computers - my dad was into them and basically gave me free reign over whatever systems we ended up with in the house. He didn't ever teach me very much, leaving me to learn it all on my own. Of course I was most interested in games (Commander Keen era) but I spent a lot of time exploring what else was possible. I learned a whole lot about computers at a very early age that way.
A few years later, computer games for me really took off - especially because of Star Wars games like X-Wing, Dark Forces, and the rest... I had pretty much all of them, couldn't get enough. At that point, my primary intention when I fired up the computer was to get into the X-Wing cockpit as quickly as possible; I was no longer really interested in anything else.
This kind of went back and forth over the years... there would be periods when I'd briefly get really into something besides games (3D modeling, photoshop, basic programming, all kinds of stuff) - but that only lasted until the next great game came out, and I'd forget all that stuff. The only thing that really stuck from those interstitial phases was photo editing, which I consider myself an expert in now :)
Now, this still put me way ahead of the pack - I knew more about computers than anyone else at school. The reason is that I was actually using computers in all my spare time (even if I was just gaming) rather than playing Nintendo. I never had a console or handheld like every other kid seemed to have. In the mean time I played all the big computer games, and a lot of small ones, up until 2001 or 2002 when I lost interest. When I stopped playing computer games, I went straight back into learning all I could about computers and various software, and though I was still way ahead of most people I knew, I was actually way behind in general. I'd lost several years of computer knowledge to games, and I never really caught up as much as I think I could have.
Also during that time when I was constantly gaming, I missed out on other stuff. I didn't watch a lot of good films (now a major passion of mine), I didn't read a lot of good books (I have quite the collection of Star Wars books, though...), the only music I knew was The Beatles (not that I regret that), and so on. Thus, though I was still an unpopular nerd in high school, once I stopped playing computer games I found all this time that I could suddenly use for more interesting cultural and intellectual pursuits, and I'm really grateful that I didn't waste all of high school playing games.
I still do like games, but I take them in moderation and I wait a while after they come out to decide if I really want to spend time on it. I play through one or two games a year at most (most recent ones I spent a lot of time on were Civ IV and Fallout 3; I do also play most of the Call of Duty games as a guilty pleasure...) The rest of my time is spent doing things that are more intellectually stimulating or otherwise useful.
So what's my point... well, given the chance - and given that they aren't going to put much thought into how this will affect them in the future - boys are going to choose video games. If parents want their kids to know more than how to play first person shooters when they grow up, they should probably do some parenting. I'm very grateful that my parents let me do whatever I wanted growing up (more or less), but I don't think most kids can handle that responsibly. Most of my actual learning took place outside of school, and if I spent all my time playing video games like a lot of kids do now, I would be a completely different person today.
I have a Nexus One and I have the SNES emulator; it works but keep in mind that on the iphone you only have the touchscreen for input. Using a tiny portion of the touchscreen to control all the buttons from even a relatively simple console controller really doesn't work that well. In fact, most games are practically unplayable because the input is so imprecise.
The Nexus One has a trackball and some other buttons that can be used, but still, it really doesn't work. Android phones with physical keyboards are the only practical mobile platform that things like SNES emulators are going to work on.
It would be great if Apple allowed things like that in the app store, yes... I am not arguing that. Just saying that practically, SNES emulators and the like aren't something you're really missing on the iphone since it'd be mostly useless.
It's such a bummer to find a restaurant with food you like at reasonable prices, only to discover that they serve pepsi products... even if the food's great, that usually means I don't go back very often (or ever); pepsi products really are pretty terrible compared to coke :)
I have been doing this as part of my master's thesis, with scanned maps. Something like this solution using GIS is definitely the way to do it, however, I have a few things to add.
This is something that greatly benefits from a GUI approach. Command-line-style GIS can be powerful, but when you're matching up features like this, being able to just point and click on the two points you want to match is really a lot easier. I have played around with the open source GIS programs, but am not familiar enough with them to offer any specific advice. I have access to ArcGIS and use that for everything - I can say at least that in Arc, this stuff is really very simple point-and-click stuff, though very powerful with plenty of options too.
In any case, to get something to match your maps to in whatever GIS software is used, one can get high-resolution georeferenced topographic maps and aerial and satellite imagery from USGS and NASA, for free. Since the poster is apparently not in the US the US topographic maps probably aren't helpful, but LANDSAT satellite imagery, for example, is available for most of the earth and is usually pretty good (if not spectacularly high in resolution - it's 15m pixels at best).
Several others have noted this as well - for Asian languages, Google has a lot of work to do. The Chinese translation near the top is impressive, but while Chinese and Japanese translations are probably pretty good on Google, other Asian languages suffer greatly.
I've been translating a lot of Thai lately, and initially I thought Google was great - the interface is really slick, and it seemed to give a decent result. Passing the translation back through often gave me really weird stuff, but I was expecting that. So it was great, until I tried using it to communicate with someone in Thai - even for really, really basic stuff, often they had absolutely no idea. It was just way off.
While you can feed western languages through it and get great, usable results, for Asian languages besides Chinese and Japanese it's next to useless. I'm guessing there isn't much of an incentive for Google to focus on other Asian languages - for example, in Android 2.1 on the Nexus One there is no way to even install fonts for less-popular Asian scripts like Thai, much less inputting text in those scripts - despite this capability being available on certain other Android phones (you can install it on the Nexus One if you root it, of course).
Based on what their technique for learning translation is, though, hopefully this will improve over time. It's an impressive system as it is, but very much limited to "popular" languages and those very similar to English.
Here's an anecdote regarding a good teacher allowing the display of weaponry in class, in this century.
In 2001 or so I was in 10th grade (I believe), and another student brought in (with permission - and encouragement - from the teacher) his grandfather's samurai sword, which he got in Japan during the occupation. It was passed around the history class for us to "feel the weight" (I guess). That's more dangerous than an inert civil war rifle, I would say. It sure made a big impression on a lot of students that day, and no one got disemboweled.
If teachers are willing to take risks like that (there is no risk of anyone getting hurt - I mean the risk that the teacher will get punished for allowing such a thing), the rewards for students can be great, and these I would say are the great teachers - ones who are willing to do whatever it takes to be a good teacher, even if it means going around the bureaucracy and rules of the school.
I am a TA, and I teach geology 101 lab classes. I wildly bend the rules of the school and department in many cases all throughout the semester, and the students love the class. I have covered for other TAs who had to miss their classes, and it's a wildly different environment where the TA is strict about the rules.
The funny part is that the Nexus One (which I have) prevents you from tethering in its default state as well. You either have to pay (as in the "solution" presented in this "article") or root the phone... which is nowhere near as easy (yet) as jailbreaking the iphone!
I have spent a lot of time there but only used voice and sms on my phone (also a years-old Nokia phone, but I bought the phone there too because I didn't have an unlocked US phone, and I wanted to be able to input Thai script). Still, I never had a problem getting online... literally every coffee shop (and there are a lot of them) offers free wi-fi. It's much, much easier finding free wi-fi in Thailand than in the US.
Obviously since the wireless plan is so cheap and painless and convenient it's not a big deal, I'm just saying, it's perfectly easy to get free, fast wi-fi there :) Most hotels offer it for free as well; I'm not sure what you consider a "business hotel" but most regular places offer it for free.
Anyway, that's good to know about mobile internet rates in Thailand - I'm planning on going back and being there for a few months and I will definitely want something along those lines since I won't be staying in a hotel.
You'd be amazed how much water people pour on their lawns in OC (where I currently live). It spills out onto the street in great floods when the sprinklers are going in some places - and they run them *every night*. Of course, we're in a desert here, so it makes sense if one must have a lawn - most of it evaporates in the daytime.
Therefore, the GP's assertion that no one in this area should have a lawn - why this isn't obvious to more people who live here, I don't know. Perhaps this case - if properly publicized - will get people to realize that. But who are we kidding? Most people in OC couldn't care less about anything, except their appearance to others - and a lush lawn is a big part of that, apparently.
I live there too and can report the GP is correct. If your sister lives here, she must be a college student or work at a university, because those are the only places you'll find large concentrations of "bluish" people in Orange County.
Further, if she has mostly young friends, chances are none of them care *at all* about politics - young people around here are pretty vapid regarding "serious" stuff (which is not to imply anything about your sister - it sounds like she must not be native to Orange County). Therefore, she wouldn't be exposed to either side of the political spectrum. As stereotypical as this all sounds, this has really been my experience after living here for two years and interacting with a lot of young people (I TA at a university).
I know you're joking a little bit, but "releasing the pressure" from a big looming earthquake is a valid theory and geologists are exploring the possibility. Of course, the problem is that you'll never be able to convince people that setting off a smaller quake is preventing a bigger one - in the case that you're successful, how can you prove the big one was ever going to come, and if you're unsuccessful, then you're proven wrong and your earlier quake was unnecessarily damaging (even if it actually reduced the size of the bigger one later - you can't prove that either). Anyway, there is a lot of geophysical modeling being done to try to answer these kinds of questions, especially within the academic geology community in California (I'm a geology grad student in California, but I'm not studying earthquakes so I'm no expert).
Interestingly, some are also exploring the possibility that we have already been releasing the pressure because of various deep engineering projects - for example, there was a story here within the last year or so about an earthquake in Iceland (I think) that may have been set off by drilling/geothermal energy stuff.
And of course, you can't forget the possibilities put forth by "A View to a Kill" ;)
And that's beside the fact that most people that are in the target market for Apple products don't live two hours away from an Apple Store...