I don't know the Schrödinger one liner. But I have kept this link in my Favorites / Weirdly Cunning bookmark bin for about two decades now, as when it is appropriate, it is always very appropriate: The Schroedinger Cat Epic Poem.
It would please me to see someone post the HTML code for the blinkin one line Schrödinger. It may also have a place in my Favorites / Weirdly Cunning bookmark bin.
And an additional request: if it be not too far Off Topic--- and I think it not be so--- a discussion by those knowledgeable about anglicization of German names (esp, Schrödinger vs Schroedinger) would be interesting at this point. Provided it was kept short. And appropriately amusing.
The friggin frigate with a laser on its ass has its place. However there is not enough public information available to make any guesses on what that place is.
For instance, to what degree is this laser a fair weather weapon? I'm guessing rain or fog will attenuate the IR beam. How bad does the storm have to get before the laser becomes useless?
Too true. Slashdot does not discriminate by intelligence in the same way that Alaska Airline and AmTrack do not discriminate on body size or weight.
Although perhaps the USA airlines and railroads should use a tiered ticket system based on the individual's BMI. That would not only assure they were operating in the black, but would have positive benefits in reducing public health costs. And if that works as well as I think it might, then the program could be extended to toll booths. Each passenger vehicle would roll through a weighing station while video cameras recorded the head count of the occupants, and the toll would be determined by the average gross weight of the passengers and driver. Tolls would therefore be aligned with road surface wear, there would be the same sort of benefit in reduction of public health costs, and this would encourage car pooling, too!
And college basketball teams are discriminatory. If you are less than 4 feet tall, it does not matter that you are a pretty good player for your size, you cannot get on a team. And Mensa is highly discriminatory. If you happen to be born stupid, you cannot join.
That second example is clearly germane to the current line of reasoning.
Grammar trolls have other trolls to bother and to bite them...
Besides, it is not "grammar trolls". It is "grammar nazis". A grammar troll would be someone whose intensive purposes were to cause a Gentle Reader to transform into a Grammar Nazi and reply thusly.
As a contractor you bring your knowledge and experience, and the skills you have derived from that knowledge and the wisdom you have derived from that experience, to your client.
You can only teach your client's employee some of the knowledge that you have acquired. You cannot teach him your skills, in the same way you cannot teach someone new to bicycling how not fall over. He can only acquire skills through his own experience. Similarly, you cannot teach your wisdom; like skills, that is not transferable between human beings.
You and your client need to be clear about the limitations involved in this situation. Probably you need to be talking about a different kind of contract with the client, where the employee will be doing some of the heavy lifting that you now do while he begins to gain experience, but you will continue to provide the experience and wisdom that avoids costly mistakes. This would be similar to a traditional master - apprentice approach, but with a third party (the employer) paying the apprentice.
When I think about it, there is the more general category of courteous driving where I do not see how the driverless car could participate in the traffic flow in the same way that human drivers do. I have never thought about how often it happens, but probably more than once a day I am either giving someone the right of way because it is the courteous thing to do, such as letting them change lanes in front of me, or I am benefiting from their courtesy, such as maybe they are letting me take that prime parking space I have been waiting for, even though they legally have as much right to it, and are better in a better position to claim it.
I can see driverless cars negotiating with each other on this kind of thing, but I do not see how they can negotiate with human drivers, even if they could understand all the subtleties involved.
Maybe driverless cars would only work in Nevada, where there is usually ample space between people. Maybe driverless cars will increase road rage incidents, with the added twist that the shooter would be able to concentrate more on his aim.
Google has also been pretty good in Metro Portland area, Oregon. Same for my Garmin Nuvi.
I live near the I-5 bridge over the Columbia River, and when that drawbridge goes up, it sometimes affects roads miles north and south of the river, as drivers use city streets to get to the I-205 bridge.
In a younger day, I used to drive taxi in Boston. Back then there was only one traffic jam per day, from 6:00 am until 3:am the following day. It rarely involved more than 70% of the city streets.
Now I live in Oregon where slow moving herds of elk sometimes cause traffic jams on the road to the beaches.
Okay, I think I now understand this better. In simplistic terms, polygon modeling is to NURBs as raster image work is to vector graphics.
It seems the problem is that today's machine software only understands NURBs and does not (yet) understand polygon modeling. I can see how this would arise from the differences in the historical development of shop tools and rendering tools. Bezier worked in an automotive manufacturing setting, while Catmull works in an animation studio; everything from the manipulation tools to the tessellation methods would be different. Since there is no precise algorithm for translating a polygon mesh to a NURB structure, there is a serious loss of accuracy in trying to doing this. Not to mention the costs of essentially repeating work already done.
It seems the basic problem is not one of precision, since the Blender space can define a polygon with more precision than most 3D printing or CNC milling would call for. It is that the software that produces the final tessellated structure that guides the milling or printing at the lowest level accepts only NURBs. Similar software could develop identical tessellated structures from polygon meshes, but that has not yet been developed. And there are no good mechanisms for taking a polygon mesh and creating a good enough NURB structure from it.
I'm thinking that the first company to bring a 3D printer to market whose software understands polygon meshes will be one worth investing in.
Subdivs, while lacking the precision, do not have the same topological constraints.
I am puzzled by the "lack of precision" assertion. I use Blender for artwork, and occasionally for architectural models. It can be easily set up for meshes with sub millimeter accuracy within a 10 kilometer cubic universe. Its 3D cursor system allows precise placement of a vertex or object anywhere within that space, or precise location of an existing vertex, or extremely accurate placement of a new vertex or object at a point interpolated between the location of two or more existing vertices. Though for some interpolations, you do have to construct a simple temporary mesh to get very high precision: Euclidean geometry in 3 dimensions.
Blender does have some weaknesses. But its mesh modeling capabilities are pretty good, and for the purpose being discussed, the limitations in its nodal textures, its new render engine, its compositing features, and its video sequence editor will not matter since there would be no need to use them. OTOH, the ability to export a mesh constructed in Blender to the common CAD formats make it possible to easily work up a design in Blender, then export it to tools that can develop materials lists, cost estimates, and so on that true CAD tools can generate.
I don't know if Blender is a good tool for what OP wants to do, but it certainly has enough accuracy for any real world 3D design work.
Methinks there is now a confusion of flaps and slats and ailerons in this conversation.
Since pilots generally do not want to bank their aircraft on takeoffs and landings, being as how most planes these days do not have wing skids, ailerons are generally in the neutral position at these times. (Or they are being used as auxiliary flaps and not as coordinated roll controllers).
NASA is going back to wing warping: an 'aeroelastic" wing fighter plane, the USAF story. Using ailerons is a constant fight against the aerodynamics of flight, and a loss of efficiency. Wing warping works with aerodynamic properties and is much more efficient.
You can thank the Wright Bros for their patented wing warping and their resistance to selling licenses for that to any competitors. If they had not done that, ailerons would not have been invented.
I also thank you for the correct spelling of that word. It is just so logical that it should have "aero-" as its root that I even have trouble googling for the right spelling.
The Wright Bros were the first to demonstrate in a repeatable fashion the ability to fly above ground effect height and to do controlled turns. The key word being "repeatable". There were others who probably managed the same kind of flight, once or twice, but bad luck with crashes, or designs and workmanship that limited the lifespan of their creations to 2 or 3 flights, or some other factor put them out of the running.
I think an overlooked aspect of the Wright's success was their experience in running a bicycle shop, which led to them building an aircraft in a way where parts could be easily replaced or repaired... or upgraded when the initial design proved faulty. Which happened with at least the placement of the horizontal control surface and the pulley mechanism that warped the wings (their equivalent of aerolons).
I am tempted to ask what dangling jewelry has to do with this thread, but that would be pedantic. I am pretty sure I understand what the parent post was trying to say, despite its use of the wrong word.
Just to be clear, pedantry has to do with an inappropriate emphasis on unimportant details of syntax (unusual spelling or grammar or punctuation, etc). Semantic errors where an incorrect meaning is being foisted on the audience are much more serious.
Unless of course you are like Alice in a Wonderland world where words can mean whatever you want, so long as you pay enough for them. That's glory for you.
Good grief! I think I just stumbled upon a strong parallel between Lewis Carrol's imaginary world of twisted logic and the advertising industry!
The point being that nobody should care whether his doctor is "good" or "bad" according to the accepted standards of society, the law, or some club of doctors. The point is that what is important is whether mistakes are being made in the person's individual health care. You continue to confuse what is good for some group with what is good for the individual.
Open medical records help assure that the individual can obtain the best care available to him. It puts the patient in control, and fully responsible, for his own health care. At present, in the USA and to a lesser extent in other societies that follow the Euro-American model, responsibility for one's health is diluted between a multitude of specialist doctors, the hospitals and clinics they use, and the third party payers. At present, the individual patient has almost no responsibility for his own care. Worse, in any situation where the patient's life or health is at risk, current practice assures that there will be a sufficient number of different parties involved that no one person or entity is accountable for what happens.
In general, the laws in the USA do protect physicians and other health care professionals from honest mistakes. When things go bad, so long as the patient's records indicate that the doctor was meeting the standard of care for the patient's presenting condition, the doctor would win in court. Where this gets messy is that lawyers and insurance agencies know that there is no need for validity in a malpractice suit--- the suit will be successful with an out of court settlement so long as the pay out would be less than the various costs to the physician if he went to trial. The physician's doesn't care how the case is settled, so long as it does not reflect badly on his name and it does not increase his liability insurance too much.
This is not a problem with medical records or medical practice. It is a related problem, but it is one that can only be cured by serious revision of the USA insurance industry. Which is one of the biggest industries in the country, and certainly the least productive relative to its costs.
Statements that are "needlessly pedantic" are those that provide some instruction in an area where the reader would prefer to remain blissfully ignorant. The phrase, then, is useful in identifying bigots, those with very narrow minds, or those who are intent on pushing a hidden agenda and require that their readers dismiss out of hand inconvenient truths.
There is no quarrel with the original post, where the use of "malpraxis" was clear in context, even without the obvious references to a non-English context.
There is a huge problem with the blanket statement that in English, one specialized word ("malpraxis") is a synonym for another ("mal practice") when that is blatantly false. And also confounds the jargon of religious study with the jargon of law.
This line of reasoning demonstrates the fallacy of mis-applying statistics to an individual case.
Who the hell cares whether the bad doctor is identified and dealt with after he screws up a statistically significant number of times? What is important is whether he has screwed up in MY case.
I favor completely open medical records. There are plenty of laws on the books to protect doctors and other health care professionals from the consequences of their honest mistakes--- that's what "best practice" training and following standard of care protocols are all about. It will mean that doctors will lose their precious cachet of somehow being more godly than the neighborhood plumber. But in the long run that will be a good thing for everyone. Doctors are special people who are very highly trained in areas that most people do not even want to think about. But that does not make them somehow a better person, nor even necessarily an educated person. Just a person with a lot of specialized training.
Geez, if it's at 300 yards, why would you even want to kill it? Just to prove you are a red blooded macho american who can destroy chunks of the ecosystem well beyond any threat the critter could pose to any rational farming, ranching, or suburban life style? If you need more than a shotgun to protect your garden, chickens, or sheep, then then you are doing it wrong.
Dumb-ass John Wayne Neanderthals. The world has gotten too small to support that kind of stupidity.
Provided, of course, that the shooter has compensated for the lightest of breezes, and there are no blades of grass to deflect the bullet on its oh so fast but oh so delicate trajectory.
A round with a bit more of its energy in mass rather than speed will give more consistent results on the prairie.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know the Schrödinger one liner. But I have kept this link in my Favorites / Weirdly Cunning bookmark bin for about two decades now, as when it is appropriate, it is always very appropriate: The Schroedinger Cat Epic Poem.
It would please me to see someone post the HTML code for the blinkin one line Schrödinger. It may also have a place in my Favorites / Weirdly Cunning bookmark bin.
And an additional request: if it be not too far Off Topic--- and I think it not be so--- a discussion by those knowledgeable about anglicization of German names (esp, Schrödinger vs Schroedinger) would be interesting at this point. Provided it was kept short. And appropriately amusing.
The friggin frigate with a laser on its ass has its place. However there is not enough public information available to make any guesses on what that place is.
For instance, to what degree is this laser a fair weather weapon? I'm guessing rain or fog will attenuate the IR beam. How bad does the storm have to get before the laser becomes useless?
Too true. Slashdot does not discriminate by intelligence in the same way that Alaska Airline and AmTrack do not discriminate on body size or weight.
Although perhaps the USA airlines and railroads should use a tiered ticket system based on the individual's BMI. That would not only assure they were operating in the black, but would have positive benefits in reducing public health costs. And if that works as well as I think it might, then the program could be extended to toll booths. Each passenger vehicle would roll through a weighing station while video cameras recorded the head count of the occupants, and the toll would be determined by the average gross weight of the passengers and driver. Tolls would therefore be aligned with road surface wear, there would be the same sort of benefit in reduction of public health costs, and this would encourage car pooling, too!
We should do this. We have the technology...
And college basketball teams are discriminatory. If you are less than 4 feet tall, it does not matter that you are a pretty good player for your size, you cannot get on a team. And Mensa is highly discriminatory. If you happen to be born stupid, you cannot join.
That second example is clearly germane to the current line of reasoning.
Grammar trolls have other trolls to bother and to bite them...
Besides, it is not "grammar trolls". It is "grammar nazis". A grammar troll would be someone whose intensive purposes were to cause a Gentle Reader to transform into a Grammar Nazi and reply thusly.
....?
Oh Noes! I have been grammar trolled!
You have Springter in Scotland?
Oh that sounds so nice. All we got here in Oregon is Second Winter.
As a contractor you bring your knowledge and experience, and the skills you have derived from that knowledge and the wisdom you have derived from that experience, to your client.
You can only teach your client's employee some of the knowledge that you have acquired. You cannot teach him your skills, in the same way you cannot teach someone new to bicycling how not fall over. He can only acquire skills through his own experience. Similarly, you cannot teach your wisdom; like skills, that is not transferable between human beings.
You and your client need to be clear about the limitations involved in this situation. Probably you need to be talking about a different kind of contract with the client, where the employee will be doing some of the heavy lifting that you now do while he begins to gain experience, but you will continue to provide the experience and wisdom that avoids costly mistakes. This would be similar to a traditional master - apprentice approach, but with a third party (the employer) paying the apprentice.
When I think about it, there is the more general category of courteous driving where I do not see how the driverless car could participate in the traffic flow in the same way that human drivers do. I have never thought about how often it happens, but probably more than once a day I am either giving someone the right of way because it is the courteous thing to do, such as letting them change lanes in front of me, or I am benefiting from their courtesy, such as maybe they are letting me take that prime parking space I have been waiting for, even though they legally have as much right to it, and are better in a better position to claim it.
I can see driverless cars negotiating with each other on this kind of thing, but I do not see how they can negotiate with human drivers, even if they could understand all the subtleties involved.
Maybe driverless cars would only work in Nevada, where there is usually ample space between people. Maybe driverless cars will increase road rage incidents, with the added twist that the shooter would be able to concentrate more on his aim.
Google has also been pretty good in Metro Portland area, Oregon. Same for my Garmin Nuvi.
I live near the I-5 bridge over the Columbia River, and when that drawbridge goes up, it sometimes affects roads miles north and south of the river, as drivers use city streets to get to the I-205 bridge.
In a younger day, I used to drive taxi in Boston. Back then there was only one traffic jam per day, from 6:00 am until 3:am the following day. It rarely involved more than 70% of the city streets.
Now I live in Oregon where slow moving herds of elk sometimes cause traffic jams on the road to the beaches.
Good point.
This behavior suggests that there may be a problem with Google's driverless cars wrt safely handling intersections where the lights are out.
I believe Nevada is the only state where driverless cars are illegal. How are they handling it?
Okay, I think I now understand this better. In simplistic terms, polygon modeling is to NURBs as raster image work is to vector graphics.
It seems the problem is that today's machine software only understands NURBs and does not (yet) understand polygon modeling. I can see how this would arise from the differences in the historical development of shop tools and rendering tools. Bezier worked in an automotive manufacturing setting, while Catmull works in an animation studio; everything from the manipulation tools to the tessellation methods would be different. Since there is no precise algorithm for translating a polygon mesh to a NURB structure, there is a serious loss of accuracy in trying to doing this. Not to mention the costs of essentially repeating work already done.
It seems the basic problem is not one of precision, since the Blender space can define a polygon with more precision than most 3D printing or CNC milling would call for. It is that the software that produces the final tessellated structure that guides the milling or printing at the lowest level accepts only NURBs. Similar software could develop identical tessellated structures from polygon meshes, but that has not yet been developed. And there are no good mechanisms for taking a polygon mesh and creating a good enough NURB structure from it.
I'm thinking that the first company to bring a 3D printer to market whose software understands polygon meshes will be one worth investing in.
Subdivs, while lacking the precision, do not have the same topological constraints.
I am puzzled by the "lack of precision" assertion. I use Blender for artwork, and occasionally for architectural models. It can be easily set up for meshes with sub millimeter accuracy within a 10 kilometer cubic universe. Its 3D cursor system allows precise placement of a vertex or object anywhere within that space, or precise location of an existing vertex, or extremely accurate placement of a new vertex or object at a point interpolated between the location of two or more existing vertices. Though for some interpolations, you do have to construct a simple temporary mesh to get very high precision: Euclidean geometry in 3 dimensions.
Blender does have some weaknesses. But its mesh modeling capabilities are pretty good, and for the purpose being discussed, the limitations in its nodal textures, its new render engine, its compositing features, and its video sequence editor will not matter since there would be no need to use them. OTOH, the ability to export a mesh constructed in Blender to the common CAD formats make it possible to easily work up a design in Blender, then export it to tools that can develop materials lists, cost estimates, and so on that true CAD tools can generate.
I don't know if Blender is a good tool for what OP wants to do, but it certainly has enough accuracy for any real world 3D design work.
Methinks there is now a confusion of flaps and slats and ailerons in this conversation.
Since pilots generally do not want to bank their aircraft on takeoffs and landings, being as how most planes these days do not have wing skids, ailerons are generally in the neutral position at these times. (Or they are being used as auxiliary flaps and not as coordinated roll controllers).
NASA is going back to wing warping: an 'aeroelastic" wing fighter plane, the USAF story. Using ailerons is a constant fight against the aerodynamics of flight, and a loss of efficiency. Wing warping works with aerodynamic properties and is much more efficient.
You can thank the Wright Bros for their patented wing warping and their resistance to selling licenses for that to any competitors. If they had not done that, ailerons would not have been invented.
I also thank you for the correct spelling of that word. It is just so logical that it should have "aero-" as its root that I even have trouble googling for the right spelling.
The Wright Bros were the first to demonstrate in a repeatable fashion the ability to fly above ground effect height and to do controlled turns. The key word being "repeatable". There were others who probably managed the same kind of flight, once or twice, but bad luck with crashes, or designs and workmanship that limited the lifespan of their creations to 2 or 3 flights, or some other factor put them out of the running.
I think an overlooked aspect of the Wright's success was their experience in running a bicycle shop, which led to them building an aircraft in a way where parts could be easily replaced or repaired... or upgraded when the initial design proved faulty. Which happened with at least the placement of the horizontal control surface and the pulley mechanism that warped the wings (their equivalent of aerolons).
I am tempted to ask what dangling jewelry has to do with this thread, but that would be pedantic. I am pretty sure I understand what the parent post was trying to say, despite its use of the wrong word.
Just to be clear, pedantry has to do with an inappropriate emphasis on unimportant details of syntax (unusual spelling or grammar or punctuation, etc). Semantic errors where an incorrect meaning is being foisted on the audience are much more serious.
Unless of course you are like Alice in a Wonderland world where words can mean whatever you want, so long as you pay enough for them. That's glory for you.
Good grief! I think I just stumbled upon a strong parallel between Lewis Carrol's imaginary world of twisted logic and the advertising industry!
The point being that nobody should care whether his doctor is "good" or "bad" according to the accepted standards of society, the law, or some club of doctors. The point is that what is important is whether mistakes are being made in the person's individual health care. You continue to confuse what is good for some group with what is good for the individual.
Open medical records help assure that the individual can obtain the best care available to him. It puts the patient in control, and fully responsible, for his own health care. At present, in the USA and to a lesser extent in other societies that follow the Euro-American model, responsibility for one's health is diluted between a multitude of specialist doctors, the hospitals and clinics they use, and the third party payers. At present, the individual patient has almost no responsibility for his own care. Worse, in any situation where the patient's life or health is at risk, current practice assures that there will be a sufficient number of different parties involved that no one person or entity is accountable for what happens.
In general, the laws in the USA do protect physicians and other health care professionals from honest mistakes. When things go bad, so long as the patient's records indicate that the doctor was meeting the standard of care for the patient's presenting condition, the doctor would win in court. Where this gets messy is that lawyers and insurance agencies know that there is no need for validity in a malpractice suit--- the suit will be successful with an out of court settlement so long as the pay out would be less than the various costs to the physician if he went to trial. The physician's doesn't care how the case is settled, so long as it does not reflect badly on his name and it does not increase his liability insurance too much.
This is not a problem with medical records or medical practice. It is a related problem, but it is one that can only be cured by serious revision of the USA insurance industry. Which is one of the biggest industries in the country, and certainly the least productive relative to its costs.
....needlessly pedantic...
This needs to be defined.
Statements that are "needlessly pedantic" are those that provide some instruction in an area where the reader would prefer to remain blissfully ignorant. The phrase, then, is useful in identifying bigots, those with very narrow minds, or those who are intent on pushing a hidden agenda and require that their readers dismiss out of hand inconvenient truths.
There is no quarrel with the original post, where the use of "malpraxis" was clear in context, even without the obvious references to a non-English context.
There is a huge problem with the blanket statement that in English, one specialized word ("malpraxis") is a synonym for another ("mal practice") when that is blatantly false. And also confounds the jargon of religious study with the jargon of law.
No they are not equivalent.
"Malpractice" is the failure to deliver the recognized standard of care in a specific situation.
"Malpraxis" would be the deliberate effort to do evil things.Dorothy's wicked witches were into malpraxis.
This line of reasoning demonstrates the fallacy of mis-applying statistics to an individual case.
Who the hell cares whether the bad doctor is identified and dealt with after he screws up a statistically significant number of times? What is important is whether he has screwed up in MY case.
I favor completely open medical records. There are plenty of laws on the books to protect doctors and other health care professionals from the consequences of their honest mistakes--- that's what "best practice" training and following standard of care protocols are all about. It will mean that doctors will lose their precious cachet of somehow being more godly than the neighborhood plumber. But in the long run that will be a good thing for everyone. Doctors are special people who are very highly trained in areas that most people do not even want to think about. But that does not make them somehow a better person, nor even necessarily an educated person. Just a person with a lot of specialized training.
Their mistakes.
Sometimes I like to play the role of Captain Obvious.
Geez, if it's at 300 yards, why would you even want to kill it? Just to prove you are a red blooded macho american who can destroy chunks of the ecosystem well beyond any threat the critter could pose to any rational farming, ranching, or suburban life style? If you need more than a shotgun to protect your garden, chickens, or sheep, then then you are doing it wrong.
Dumb-ass John Wayne Neanderthals. The world has gotten too small to support that kind of stupidity.
Provided, of course, that the shooter has compensated for the lightest of breezes, and there are no blades of grass to deflect the bullet on its oh so fast but oh so delicate trajectory.
A round with a bit more of its energy in mass rather than speed will give more consistent results on the prairie.