The eight author (Philip M. Hinz) seems to work at the Steward Observatory in Tucson, AZ. The article says that the observations were done at the VLT (Very Large Telescope) at the ESO (European Southern Observatory) on Paranal mountain in Chile. However, Hinz may deserve substantial credit, since he was part of a team that actually used an APP for the first time, according to this article. That article did not look for exoplanets, but the astronomers did successfully image a faint companion for the star mu Herc A. That companion had previously only been observed spectroscopically.
Posters here are missing a big point about the process of creative writing: when you write, two parts of your mind are at work: the creator and the critic. The creator comes up with the material. The critic edits the material, worries about punctuation, spelling, over-all structure, the fact that the phone bill is overdue, your spouse's opinion of your work, street noise, paragraph formatting, etc.
The critic's main role is to say "NO". "You can't say that". "You spelled that wrong". "That word is hyphenated badly". "You should close quotation marks after the period." (I just noticed that) etc.
The problem with wysiwyg word processors like MS Word and their kin is that they show you nice formatted paragraphs (encouraging you to worry about hyphenation), underline misspelled words (making you go back and fix them), even criticize you grammar. By its very nature, a word processor engages the inner critic.
I have learned that the best way to write is to 1: make a mess; 2: clean it up (see "Writing your dissertation in fifteen minutes a day"). It's best to just write, let the words come out in a mess, maybe complain about the fact that the words aren't coming out, anything to get the pipeline going. Only at the end of the session, when you're done writing, should you go back over the text, fixing things up. Fixing up text is easy, once the text exists. However, creating the text is hard, if you're always stopping to fix it up.
That's why ed is a wise choice. It disables the inner critic. It has no spelling checker, no grammar checking, doesn't format as you type. It's wonderful.
You could prevent the trees from rotting and returning the CO2 to the atmosphere: bury the trees deep underground. Just daydreaming, but we could chop down the forests that cover mountains, strip off the tops of the mountains, haul the trees there, and cover them with the overburden we had removed. Strip mining in reverse.
And, millions of years in the future, we could do it all in reverse order.
Of course it's space-inefficient. But if you're the Library of Congress, you're probably willing to endure the low bandwidth. You certainly won't be able to retrieve the information quickly, but if you're archiving the data, you can tolerate slow retrieval.
It's not quite as bad as you think, though: if you've saved a 4.3 GB DVD onto 2200 pages of paper, and you placed the printed stack onto a sheet-fed scanner which does about 1 page/second, it would take you about half an hour to do the scanning.
That's less time than it takes to play the DVD!
Physical space inefficiency would be an issue. DVDs are small, but 2200 pages takes up as much space as a box of files, about one cubic foot (about 30 liters, or 0.03 cubic meters). Not to mention that paper is heavy.
Short of carved writing on stone tablets (eg, the Behistun monument), the longest-lasting medium I can think of is printed paper. Libraries know how to archive it: it's called a book.
There are ways to take digital files and convert them to bitmaps (eg www.ollydbg.de/paperbak). You can print the bitmaps, and read them back reliably with a scanner. About 500K can fit on one page of paper, so a one-hour MP3 recording (about 60MB) would take up 30 sheets of paper. If printed on acid-free stock, this should last for centuries. The pages could be bound in a book, whose introduction would describe the encoding, and provide an algorithm to extract the data.
Why rely on currently-fashionable media like the chemical dyes in a CD-R when good old reliable natural-fiber materials like paper are known to last centuries?
I tend to make exams open-book, but was dismayed when one of my students had bought only the electronic version of the textbook! I had to lend him my copy. No biggie for me, but students should be wary of electronic textbooks, lest the prof bans electronic devices during exams!
The real problem here is power consumption. The LCD's signal has to be stronger than the reflection's signal, and you can only do this by giving the LCD a very powerful backlight, which would wear your battery out very quickly. Probably backlights can't even be made that bright anyway. The bright light would also hurt your eyes.
On the other hand, you could make the surface matte, thus adding noise to the reflection, and also adding noise to the LCD image. To overcome this noise, you would again have to make the LCD brighter. Same problem.
Our eyes perceive relative brightness, not absolute brightness. They tend to adjust to the over-all brightness we see, and only distinguish differences in brightness. That's why, if it's bright outside, and you look into a dark house through a window, you can't see in. The light from inside the house is indeed coming through the window, but the reflected light is much stronger, and your eye perceives the variations in the reflected image, not the fainter variations in the light transmitted from the inside. Hence you have to lean in and cup your hands around your head to block out the daylight, to see the light from inside.
That's why you need curtains. At night, people inside a lit room in a house see only their reflections on the window, not the fainter light from outside. But people outside see the stronger light from the room, not their own fainter reflection.
So, just use a matte surface, and crank the brightness way up.
Polarized glasses won't work. Most reflections are only partly polarized. Hence a polarizing filter will only eliminate a portion of the reflection. Only reflections at the Brewster angle are purely polarized, and that's a pretty shallow angle. Polarized glasses are good when you're driving, because most of the reflections you're trying to get rid off (reflections on the road surface) come in at a shallow angle, and are strongly polarized. The reflections in question here come in nearly perpendicular to the screen surface.
is wrong! Well, at least the usual assumptions about it are wrong. Read Gary Taubes' "The Scientist and the Stairmaster" (http://nymag.com/news/sports/38001/). The "common sense" approach to weight loss (eat less, exercise more) misses a really big factor: the body is charge. You are not a detached mind, your brain is inside your body, and your body doesn't want to let go of that fat. So, your body is going to tell your brain to exercise, or to eat. The body is in charge, your will is not. YOU ARE NOT IN CHARGE.
When fat people eat, and their blood sugar rises after a meal, insulin tells their cells to grab that sugar, and store it as fat. They run out of blood sugar, so their bodies tell them to
1. stop moving, to conserve energy. 2. eat more (NOW!) to get the blood sugar up.
the poor brain (and its side-effect, the will) are helpless before the body's command.
From the outside, it looks like fat people are lazy gluttons, so that's why they gain weight. But it's backwards: they gain weight (they turn sugar into fat), so they become inactive and hungry.
We skinny people (myself included) are just the opposite. When we eat, our blood sugar doesn't get turned into fat. There's lots of sugar around, so our body tells the brain to start moving, to burn the sugar off, and to stop eating, to keep the sugar from going up again.
Again, it looks like skinny people can control themselves, and exercise and THEREFORE lose weight, but again the causality is backwards.
What is actually going is a bunch of skinny snotty people imposing their prejudices on fat people. This has to stop.
Your preacher was right. Symbolically, NASA is indeed about an alternate way to heaven. No matter how much civilization we accumulate, we're still genetically hunter-gatherers, and we still think religiously. We can know that there is no God, but our religious instincts are still there. You can't kill an instinct.
Let's be cold-blooded an rational about it: not a lot of real science is being done up in the International Space Station. There are much cheaper ways to do research than to cram people into cylinders orbiting in hostile space. The same goes for going to moon, or, worse, Mars. So it's not really being done for science. There is a lot of mythology driving the space program: the yearning for heaven, wanting to become like gods, controlling the forces of the universe like Prometheus or Faust, exploring mysterious worlds, all of these are irrational motivations, based on religious instinct.
The NIST code is mostly in fortran, but what's so bad about fortran? It's well suited to numerical computation, pretty easy to learn, and there's always f2c, which will turn fortran into C.
Sure, it's got insight, explanations, interesting archeological information, diagrams of excavations, photos of ceramic artifacts, but it's only got one decent lidar scan. How can you say it's more informative than the NYT article?;-)
All this talk about the subtleties of British politics ignores the most important aspect of this problem: forming a coalition is an instance of the 0-1 Knapsack problem: given a set of heavy objects (here the objects are the parties, their weights their number of seats), find the subset of the objects whose weight comes closest to a given knapsack's capacity (here the capacity is 50%+1 of the seats in parliament). As TFA shows, there are many many combinations to consider, which is not surprising since the problem is NP-complete.
I doubt that Gordon Brown can complete negotiations before the 25th, if only because the problem is algorithmically intractable.
Geez people. Don't go spouting opinions about color if you've never taken a graphics course.
The range of colors that humans can see is bigger than the color produced by any three-color display. No matter which three colors you use. For example see a chromaticity diagram here: http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/specrend/ (scroll down to the image labeled "chromaticy coordinates"). This diagram shows what colors the average human can see (if you ignore brightness; brown for example isn't shown). The three primaries in a typical RGB display are shown, and the colors they can produce lie inside a triangle. The triangle is clearly smaller than the tongue-shaped region of perceivable colors (though the effect is exaggerated because the diagram isn't perceptually uniform, but the point still stands). You can't fit a triangle inside a round region without leaving parts of the round region uncovered.
That's why having more than three primaries will give you more colors: with four primaries, you can cover a quadrilateral-shaped portion of the tongue (unless you're stupid and pick a fourth color inside the RGB triangle). Most likely the display in TFA uses a different G primary from the usual one, because adding a Yellow primary around 580nm wouldn't extend the triangle out by much. I imagine the four primaries used have dominant wavelengths of around 610nm (Red), 570nm (Yellow-green), 500nm (Blue-green), and 490nm (Blue). There will still be colors you can't produce with a 4-primary display.
As some people have mentioned, your eye adjusts to the device's gamut, and your brain will "fill in" colors that the device can't produce. The brain does this magic all the time: you "see" the color of a rose as the being the same, under many different lighting conditions.
One problem the Sharp display will run into is that the TV signal comes from cameras with only three (RGB) primaries. The display must be taking each RGB pixel, converting it to CIE XYZ coordinates, tweaking those coordinates to push the signal into the gamut region that the new display can produce, and then producing 4 values from the original 3. So the colors you see are ficticious: you can't get 4 numbers from 3 without guessing (the fancy word for "guess" is "extrapolation").
This may sound like a troll, but isn't Arizona the same state that passed a law authorizing police to arrest people on suspicion of being illegal immigrants? The same legislature is now worried about infringing the privacy of its citizen drivers?
This strikes me as hypocritical. On the one hand, you can detain mestizos and other darker-skinned workers. You can hire them to work as nannies, dish washers, laborers, gardeners, etc, all the while holding the sword of Damocles over their heads: if you get uppity, or get in trouble, we'll get you arrested. On the other hand, you can't photograph or otherwise bring the state apparatus of law enforcement to bear on white people speeding in public.
This sounds like two different set of rules for two different social classes. Oh, I forgot: the USA is a classless society.
I agree with you about Piaget. Children are not ready for math at a very early age. And teaching them too early has exactly zero long-term benefit. I would say it's better for children to be kept out of school until they're around 10 years old. Then they can have a childhood and develop as independent beings, instead of being taught to conform and fit into a group.
Of course, that would put pressure on families to actually stay home and take care of their kids, depriving the economy of valuable employees. The main reason for getting kids into school so early is to socialize them into conformity, and to provide a form of daycare so mothers can go and work in factories.
Any talk about early teaching being good for young kids is just an excuse for taking them away from their mothers. It's motivated by industry, and not based on science.
TFA's argument that elementary school teachers don't know math well is a different issue, though I agree with it heartily. In fact, most of us don't understand math well, and few teachers can explain things well. Bad teachers exists at all levels, including university. I took several courses in real analysis in university, managed to get a math degree, and yet I only really understood infinity clearly when I read David Foster Wallace's book "Everything and More", about 10 years ago. He gives you the context and the history behind the idea, tells you who invented the epsilon-delta definition of limits, and more importantly WHY, when the mathematical crisis on infinity occurred, which solutions were tried when, and so on. I've met few university teachers who actually know the historical context behind the techniques they're teaching. How then can we expect elementary school teachers to have the necessary contextual knowledge?
The world is full of practicioners, the equivalent of auto mechanics, who know that "if I do this by rote, the right answer will come out", but who lack the context to explain WHY it works. This kind of mechanical thinking occurs at all levels, from elementary school to graduate school. Few are the people with leisure enough to figure out why things work the way they do.
The company's website claims that it's easier to cool oil than to cool air. Their argument is that conventional air cooling requires 45 degree F air to keep components at 105 degree F, whereas the higher heat capacity of the oil lets it come out of the racks at 105F. The oil is hotter than ambient air (at least where I live), so it should be easier to remove its heat (through a heat exchanger) than to chill warm exhaust air back to 45F (through a refrigeration unit). Of course most components can run hotter than 105F, and that only strengthens their argument.
> "ask your doctor if [insert drug here] is right for you"
Absolutely not! Doctors have little objective knowledge about drugs. All their information comes from representatives of pharmaceutical companies. I think that pharma should definitely be allowed to advertise to consumers, but that doctors should be left untouched. Pharma pays doctors big piles of money (I think I heard Corey Doctorow say that there are as many drug salesmen as doctors!), so doctors are terribly corrupted.
Moreover, the corruption is subtle, and the doctors actually think they're giving objective advice!
Looking at the video, I would guess that it's doing some edge detection, stitching edge pixels into chains, and drawing each chain. However, the chains seem to be drawn in arbitrary order, and the robot arm spends most of its time "seeking", pen up, to the start of the next chain. It would have been nice to optimize the drawing order to get faster output. Hell, a human would have drawn the sketch a lot faster.
Of course, obtaining the optimal sequence is equivalent to the traveling salesman problem, but there's lots of cheap and easy-to-implement approximations to the TSP that could have been used.
Actually, one reason bullies get away with their violence is that other people ADMIRE them. Think back to a situation where one person was being singled out by a bully. What did other people do? They gathered in a circle to watch. Why? Because they feared and admired the bully. They wished they had the bully's apparent courage.
Not to mention schadenfreude. It's fun to watch someone suffer. Humans often derive pleasure from watching the pain of others. Morality often gets in the way, but when we really want to, we can overcome morality and get into a pleasurable trance and indulge our desires.
This admiration has been shown to extend to figures of authority. Whatever you may have heard to the contrary, everyone, including teachers in school, admires apparent strength. It's a natural reaction.
The only reason teachers might step in and intervene on the victim's behalf is because a pang of conscience, instilled on them at some training session, comes up. Then the teacher screws up the courage to call on their own authority and "do the right thing." But it takes a deliberate effort: just like the other fans of the bully standing in a circle around the victim, the teacher has a natural admiration for the aggressor.
The "research" that the article is talking about basically says that victims of bullying are socially inept and tend to irritate socially-skilled bullies into action.
The article reflects a strong bias towards extroversion. Extroverts and introverts just don't understand each other: extroverts can't fathom why introverts keep to themselves, and find introverts "weird" and "inept"; introverts can't fathom why extroverts are such social butterflies, and find extroverts "shallow" and "superficial".
I'm an introvert, and I suspect most people on./ are too. Hence the article rubs a lot of people the wrong way. In essence the article claims that victims of bullying are socially inept. That's a typical extrovert's view of introverts.
I suspect that most bullies are extroverts, and most victims introverts. I wonder if anyone has looked for a correlation?
Probably not. After all, in America, extroversion is considered normal, and introversion is treated as a disorder.
The reason Larry Cuba could do real-time rendering in 1976 was that he was using a vector graphics display (http://www.cca.org/vector/). In a vector display, there are no pixels. There is no video RAM. Instead, there is a list of (x y) pairs (a list of positions on the screen, each with an off/on flag). The controller simply loops through the list over and over: the (x y) are fed to digital-to-analog converters, which drive the left/right and up/down deflectors for the CRT's electron beam. The on/off flags turn the beam on and off. In other words, it's just a big oscilloscope, with the signal replaced by a list of numbers. The longer the list, the more time it takes to traverse it and draw it, the lower the refresh rate, and the greater the flicker.
If you stick to black and white, you don't need a CRT mask to separately illuminate the red, green and blue phosphor dots. Without this mask, you can get some very sharp images.
If Cuba were using pixels instead, he would have needed megabytes to hold an image. I doubt anyone could afford a megabyte. Moreover, I doubt that in 1976 the electronics was fast enough to even read an image's bytes and turn it into a CRT signal. And that's just displaying the image on the screen. To create the image in the first place, he would have needed, for each line segment, to fill in all the pixels from endpoint to endpoint. There's no way he could have filled that many pixels in real time. But with a vector display, filling is done by the movement of the electron beam, and costs you zero computation.
Slashdot Mirror
The eight author (Philip M. Hinz) seems to work at the Steward Observatory in Tucson, AZ. The article says that the observations were done at the VLT (Very Large Telescope) at the ESO (European Southern Observatory) on Paranal mountain in Chile. However, Hinz may deserve substantial credit, since he was part of a team that actually used an APP for the first time, according to this article. That article did not look for exoplanets, but the astronomers did successfully image a faint companion for the star mu Herc A. That companion had previously only been observed spectroscopically.
Posters here are missing a big point about the process of creative writing: when you write, two parts of your mind are at work: the creator and the critic. The creator comes up with the material. The critic edits the material, worries about punctuation, spelling, over-all structure, the fact that the phone bill is overdue, your spouse's opinion of your work, street noise, paragraph formatting, etc.
The critic's main role is to say "NO". "You can't say that". "You spelled that wrong". "That word is hyphenated badly". "You should close quotation marks after the period." (I just noticed that) etc.
The problem with wysiwyg word processors like MS Word and their kin is that they show you nice formatted paragraphs (encouraging you to worry about hyphenation), underline misspelled words (making you go back and fix them), even criticize you grammar. By its very nature, a word processor engages the inner critic.
I have learned that the best way to write is to 1: make a mess; 2: clean it up (see "Writing your dissertation in fifteen minutes a day"). It's best to just write, let the words come out in a mess, maybe complain about the fact that the words aren't coming out, anything to get the pipeline going. Only at the end of the session, when you're done writing, should you go back over the text, fixing things up. Fixing up text is easy, once the text exists. However, creating the text is hard, if you're always stopping to fix it up.
That's why ed is a wise choice. It disables the inner critic. It has no spelling checker, no grammar checking, doesn't format as you type. It's wonderful.
Alejo
You could prevent the trees from rotting and returning the CO2 to the atmosphere: bury the trees deep underground. Just daydreaming, but we could chop down the forests that cover mountains, strip off the tops of the mountains, haul the trees there, and cover them with the overburden we had removed. Strip mining in reverse.
And, millions of years in the future, we could do it all in reverse order.
Of course it's space-inefficient. But if you're the Library of Congress, you're probably willing to endure the low bandwidth. You certainly won't be able to retrieve the information quickly, but if you're archiving the data, you can tolerate slow retrieval.
It's not quite as bad as you think, though: if you've saved a 4.3 GB DVD onto 2200 pages of paper, and you placed the printed stack onto a sheet-fed scanner which does about 1 page/second, it would take you about half an hour to do the scanning.
That's less time than it takes to play the DVD!
Physical space inefficiency would be an issue. DVDs are small, but 2200 pages takes up as much space as a box of files, about one cubic foot (about 30 liters, or 0.03 cubic meters). Not to mention that paper is heavy.
That's the cost of permanence.
Alejo
Short of carved writing on stone tablets (eg, the Behistun monument), the longest-lasting medium I can think of is printed paper. Libraries know how to archive it: it's called a book.
There are ways to take digital files and convert them to bitmaps (eg www.ollydbg.de/paperbak). You can print the bitmaps, and read them back reliably with a scanner. About 500K can fit on one page of paper, so a one-hour MP3 recording (about 60MB) would take up 30 sheets of paper. If printed on acid-free stock, this should last for centuries. The pages could be bound in a book, whose introduction would describe the encoding, and provide an algorithm to extract the data.
Why rely on currently-fashionable media like the chemical dyes in a CD-R when good old reliable natural-fiber materials like paper are known to last centuries?
Alejo Hausner
I tend to make exams open-book, but was dismayed when one of my students had bought only the electronic version of the textbook! I had to lend him my copy. No biggie for me, but students should be wary of electronic textbooks, lest the prof bans electronic devices during exams!
Alejo
The real problem here is power consumption. The LCD's signal has to be stronger than the reflection's signal, and you can only do this by giving the LCD a very powerful backlight, which would wear your battery out very quickly. Probably backlights can't even be made that bright anyway. The bright light would also hurt your eyes.
On the other hand, you could make the surface matte, thus adding noise to the reflection, and also adding noise to the LCD image. To overcome this noise, you would again have to make the LCD brighter. Same problem.
Our eyes perceive relative brightness, not absolute brightness. They tend to adjust to the over-all brightness we see, and only distinguish differences in brightness. That's why, if it's bright outside, and you look into a dark house through a window, you can't see in. The light from inside the house is indeed coming through the window, but the reflected light is much stronger, and your eye perceives the variations in the reflected image, not the fainter variations in the light transmitted from the inside. Hence you have to lean in and cup your hands around your head to block out the daylight, to see the light from inside.
That's why you need curtains. At night, people inside a lit room in a house see only their reflections on the window, not the fainter light from outside. But people outside see the stronger light from the room, not their own fainter reflection.
So, just use a matte surface, and crank the brightness way up.
Polarized glasses won't work. Most reflections are only partly polarized. Hence a polarizing filter will only eliminate a portion of the reflection. Only reflections at the Brewster angle are purely polarized, and that's a pretty shallow angle. Polarized glasses are good when you're driving, because most of the reflections you're trying to get rid off (reflections on the road surface) come in at a shallow angle, and are strongly polarized. The reflections in question here come in nearly perpendicular to the screen surface.
Pahhleeze, Mrs. Obama!
Yet another bunch of blather about weight loss from a skinny person! Hasn't anyone read the research? The simple equation
(weight loss) = (calories in) - (calories exercised)
is wrong! Well, at least the usual assumptions about it are wrong. Read Gary Taubes' "The Scientist and the Stairmaster" (http://nymag.com/news/sports/38001/). The "common sense" approach to weight loss (eat less, exercise more) misses a really big factor: the body is charge. You are not a detached mind, your brain is inside your body, and your body doesn't want to let go of that fat. So, your body is going to tell your brain to exercise, or to eat. The body is in charge, your will is not. YOU ARE NOT IN CHARGE.
When fat people eat, and their blood sugar rises after a meal, insulin tells their cells to grab that sugar, and store it as fat. They run out of blood sugar, so their bodies tell them to
1. stop moving, to conserve energy.
2. eat more (NOW!) to get the blood sugar up.
the poor brain (and its side-effect, the will) are helpless before the body's command.
From the outside, it looks like fat people are lazy gluttons, so that's why they gain weight. But it's backwards: they gain weight (they turn sugar into fat), so they become inactive and hungry.
We skinny people (myself included) are just the opposite. When we eat, our blood sugar doesn't get turned into fat. There's lots of sugar around, so our body tells the brain to start moving, to burn the sugar off, and to stop eating, to keep the sugar from going up again.
Again, it looks like skinny people can control themselves, and exercise and THEREFORE lose weight, but again the causality is backwards.
What is actually going is a bunch of skinny snotty people imposing their prejudices on fat people. This has to stop.
Your preacher was right. Symbolically, NASA is indeed about an alternate way to heaven. No matter how much civilization we accumulate, we're still genetically hunter-gatherers, and we still think religiously. We can know that there is no God, but our religious instincts are still there. You can't kill an instinct.
Let's be cold-blooded an rational about it: not a lot of real science is being done up in the International Space Station. There are much cheaper ways to do research than to cram people into cylinders orbiting in hostile space. The same goes for going to moon, or, worse, Mars. So it's not really being done for science. There is a lot of mythology driving the space program: the yearning for heaven, wanting to become like gods, controlling the forces of the universe like Prometheus or Faust, exploring mysterious worlds, all of these are irrational motivations, based on religious instinct.
The NIST code is mostly in fortran, but what's so bad about fortran? It's well suited to numerical computation, pretty easy to learn, and there's always f2c, which will turn fortran into C.
The missing comma strikes again. Kinda like "eats, shoots, and leaves."
Sure, it's got insight, explanations, interesting archeological information, diagrams of excavations, photos of ceramic artifacts, but it's only got one decent lidar scan. How can you say it's more informative than the NYT article? ;-)
Alejo
All this talk about the subtleties of British politics ignores the most important aspect of this problem: forming a coalition is an instance of the 0-1 Knapsack problem: given a set of heavy objects (here the objects are the parties, their weights their number of seats), find the subset of the objects whose weight comes closest to a given knapsack's capacity (here the capacity is 50%+1 of the seats in parliament). As TFA shows, there are many many combinations to consider, which is not surprising since the problem is NP-complete.
I doubt that Gordon Brown can complete negotiations before the 25th, if only because the problem is algorithmically intractable.
Alejo
Geez people. Don't go spouting opinions about color if you've never taken a graphics course.
The range of colors that humans can see is bigger than the color produced by any three-color display. No matter which three colors you use. For example see a chromaticity diagram here: http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/specrend/ (scroll down to the image labeled "chromaticy coordinates"). This diagram shows what colors the average human can see (if you ignore brightness; brown for example isn't shown). The three primaries in a typical RGB display are shown, and the colors they can produce lie inside a triangle. The triangle is clearly smaller than the tongue-shaped region of perceivable colors (though the effect is exaggerated because the diagram isn't perceptually uniform, but the point still stands). You can't fit a triangle inside a round region without leaving parts of the round region uncovered.
That's why having more than three primaries will give you more colors: with four primaries, you can cover a quadrilateral-shaped portion of the tongue (unless you're stupid and pick a fourth color inside the RGB triangle). Most likely the display in TFA uses a different G primary from the usual one, because adding a Yellow primary around 580nm wouldn't extend the triangle out by much. I imagine the four primaries used have dominant wavelengths of around 610nm (Red), 570nm (Yellow-green), 500nm (Blue-green), and 490nm (Blue). There will still be colors you can't produce with a 4-primary display.
As some people have mentioned, your eye adjusts to the device's gamut, and your brain will "fill in" colors that the device can't produce. The brain does this magic all the time: you "see" the color of a rose as the being the same, under many different lighting conditions.
One problem the Sharp display will run into is that the TV signal comes from cameras with only three (RGB) primaries. The display must be taking each RGB pixel, converting it to CIE XYZ coordinates, tweaking those coordinates to push the signal into the gamut region that the new display can produce, and then producing 4 values from the original 3. So the colors you see are ficticious: you can't get 4 numbers from 3 without guessing (the fancy word for "guess" is "extrapolation").
ALejo Hausner
This may sound like a troll, but isn't Arizona the same state that passed a law authorizing police to arrest people on suspicion of being illegal immigrants? The same legislature is now worried about infringing the privacy of its citizen drivers?
This strikes me as hypocritical. On the one hand, you can detain mestizos and other darker-skinned workers. You can hire them to work as nannies, dish washers, laborers, gardeners, etc, all the while holding the sword of Damocles over their heads: if you get uppity, or get in trouble, we'll get you arrested. On the other hand, you can't photograph or otherwise bring the state apparatus of law enforcement to bear on white people speeding in public.
This sounds like two different set of rules for two different social classes. Oh, I forgot: the USA is a classless society.
Alejo Hausner
I agree with you about Piaget. Children are not ready for math at a very early age. And teaching them too early has exactly zero long-term benefit. I would say it's better for children to be kept out of school until they're around 10 years old. Then they can have a childhood and develop as independent beings, instead of being taught to conform and fit into a group.
Of course, that would put pressure on families to actually stay home and take care of their kids, depriving the economy of valuable employees. The main reason for getting kids into school so early is to socialize them into conformity, and to provide a form of daycare so mothers can go and work in factories.
Any talk about early teaching being good for young kids is just an excuse for taking them away from their mothers. It's motivated by industry, and not based on science.
TFA's argument that elementary school teachers don't know math well is a different issue, though I agree with it heartily. In fact, most of us don't understand math well, and few teachers can explain things well. Bad teachers exists at all levels, including university. I took several courses in real analysis in university, managed to get a math degree, and yet I only really understood infinity clearly when I read David Foster Wallace's book "Everything and More", about 10 years ago. He gives you the context and the history behind the idea, tells you who invented the epsilon-delta definition of limits, and more importantly WHY, when the mathematical crisis on infinity occurred, which solutions were tried when, and so on. I've met few university teachers who actually know the historical context behind the techniques they're teaching. How then can we expect elementary school teachers to have the necessary contextual knowledge?
The world is full of practicioners, the equivalent of auto mechanics, who know that "if I do this by rote, the right answer will come out", but who lack the context to explain WHY it works. This kind of mechanical thinking occurs at all levels, from elementary school to graduate school. Few are the people with leisure enough to figure out why things work the way they do.
Alejo
The company's website claims that it's easier to cool oil than to cool air. Their argument is that conventional air cooling requires 45 degree F air to keep components at 105 degree F, whereas the higher heat capacity of the oil lets it come out of the racks at 105F. The oil is hotter than ambient air (at least where I live), so it should be easier to remove its heat (through a heat exchanger) than to chill warm exhaust air back to 45F (through a refrigeration unit). Of course most components can run hotter than 105F, and that only strengthens their argument.
Alejo
> "ask your doctor if [insert drug here] is right for you"
Absolutely not! Doctors have little objective knowledge about drugs. All their information comes from representatives of pharmaceutical companies. I think that pharma should definitely be allowed to advertise to consumers, but that doctors should be left untouched. Pharma pays doctors big piles of money (I think I heard Corey Doctorow say that there are as many drug salesmen as doctors!), so doctors are terribly corrupted.
Moreover, the corruption is subtle, and the doctors actually think they're giving objective advice!
Alejo
Looking at the video, I would guess that it's doing some edge detection, stitching edge pixels into chains, and drawing each chain. However, the chains seem to be drawn in arbitrary order, and the robot arm spends most of its time "seeking", pen up, to the start of the next chain. It would have been nice to optimize the drawing order to get faster output. Hell, a human would have drawn the sketch a lot faster.
Of course, obtaining the optimal sequence is equivalent to the traveling salesman problem, but there's lots of cheap and easy-to-implement approximations to the TSP that could have been used.
Alejo
Actually, one reason bullies get away with their violence is that other people ADMIRE them. Think back to a situation where one person was being singled out by a bully. What did other people do? They gathered in a circle to watch. Why? Because they feared and admired the bully. They wished they had the bully's apparent courage.
Not to mention schadenfreude. It's fun to watch someone suffer. Humans often derive pleasure from watching the pain of others. Morality often gets in the way, but when we really want to, we can overcome morality and get into a pleasurable trance and indulge our desires.
This admiration has been shown to extend to figures of authority. Whatever you may have heard to the contrary, everyone, including teachers in school, admires apparent strength. It's a natural reaction.
The only reason teachers might step in and intervene on the victim's behalf is because a pang of conscience, instilled on them at some training session, comes up. Then the teacher screws up the courage to call on their own authority and "do the right thing." But it takes a deliberate effort: just like the other fans of the bully standing in a circle around the victim, the teacher has a natural admiration for the aggressor.
Alejo
The "research" that the article is talking about basically says that victims of bullying are socially inept and tend to irritate socially-skilled bullies into action.
The article reflects a strong bias towards extroversion. Extroverts and introverts just don't understand each other: extroverts can't fathom why introverts keep to themselves, and find introverts "weird" and "inept"; introverts can't fathom why extroverts are such social butterflies, and find extroverts "shallow" and "superficial".
I'm an introvert, and I suspect most people on ./ are too. Hence the article rubs a lot of people the wrong way. In essence the article claims that victims of bullying are socially inept. That's a typical extrovert's view of introverts.
I suspect that most bullies are extroverts, and most victims introverts. I wonder if anyone has looked for a correlation?
Probably not. After all, in America, extroversion is considered normal, and introversion is treated as a disorder.
Alejo
The reason Larry Cuba could do real-time rendering in 1976 was that he was using a vector graphics display (http://www.cca.org/vector/). In a vector display, there are no pixels. There is no video RAM. Instead, there is a list of (x y) pairs (a list of positions on the screen, each with an off/on flag). The controller simply loops through the list over and over: the (x y) are fed to digital-to-analog converters, which drive the left/right and up/down deflectors for the CRT's electron beam. The on/off flags turn the beam on and off. In other words, it's just a big oscilloscope, with the signal replaced by a list of numbers. The longer the list, the more time it takes to traverse it and draw it, the lower the refresh rate, and the greater the flicker.
If you stick to black and white, you don't need a CRT mask to separately illuminate the red, green and blue phosphor dots. Without this mask, you can get some very sharp images.
If Cuba were using pixels instead, he would have needed megabytes to hold an image. I doubt anyone could afford a megabyte. Moreover, I doubt that in 1976 the electronics was fast enough to even read an image's bytes and turn it into a CRT signal. And that's just displaying the image on the screen. To create the image in the first place, he would have needed, for each line segment, to fill in all the pixels from endpoint to endpoint. There's no way he could have filled that many pixels in real time. But with a vector display, filling is done by the movement of the electron beam, and costs you zero computation.
Alejo
Ok, so the thief finds your wallet, learns where you live, breaks in, finds your secret backup piece of paper, and steals that too!
So there. ;-)
Alejo
I forgot to add: if your original passwords aren't obvious, it's resistant to known-plaintext attacks.