1. Memorize a single 10-digit number, which will be your master passphrase (eg 1234567890).
2. Keep all your passwords, encrypted with this passphrase, written on paper in your wallet, as follows:
write down the true password on a scrap piece of paper.
eg: augur4
3. subtract one passphrase digit from each password character:
a - 1 = z (wrap around the alphabet)
u - 2 = s
g - 3 = d
u - 4 = q
r - 5 = l
4 - 6 = 8 (wrap around 0 back to 8)
4. Keep the result in your wallet: zsdql8, next to the name of the website you need it for.
5. Burn or eat or compost the scrap of paper.
This has several advantages: - addition can be done in your head: look at zsql8, and it's not too hard to reconstruct augur4 without using a temporary piece of paper. - if someone steals your wallet, they'll need your 10-digit passphrase. - you don't need internet access or a USB key to recall your ATM's PIN.
> If your wallet is lost, immediately set all your passwords to something temporary
Hang on! If he lost the magic cheat sheet in his wallet, how can he log into all those websites and change his passwords? If he can pull that off, that means he memorized the passwords and doesn't need the cheat sheet in the first place.
The physics is correct, but the causality is backward! Weight loss and gain DRIVE exercise, not the other way around.
The energy balance equation is simple: energy in - energy out = energy stored as fat. In more detail, we could write:
F - (B + E) = S, where F is energy from food, B is energy spent by your basal metabolism (keeping warm, digesting, etc), E is calories burned from exercise, and S is energy stored as body fat. As the article argues, E is much smaller than B, but there's more to it:
We typically turn this equation into an inference: if you eat more, you have to exercise more to keep your weight stable (ie, to keep S=0). But that inference contains several assumptions. It assumes that B is a fixed, and it assumes that E is controlled by the will.
As some posters have argued here, the basal metabolism B adjusts depending on what you eat, or on how much muscle mass you have. I'm not going to argue against that assumption. The more important assumption to consider is that E is driven by the will.
Before his recent book, Gary Taubes wrote an article on exercise and weight loss for "New York" magazine: http://nymag.com/news/sports/38001/index3.html. In it, he documents some of the research behind the exercise-weight loss problem, and he strongly argues that exercise IS NOT controlled by the will.
He argues that we have the causality backwards: weight loss/gain drive exercise, not the other way around! People who do a lot of exercise (eg long-distance runners and cyclists) have a metabolism that is continually burning down their fat stores. They absolutely have to something with all that available fuel, and hence they are compelled to be in motion all the time. They're jumpy and wiry. They just can't help it. Of course, they get hungry and eat, but their bodies don't store the fuel, and eating just leads to a greater need for exercise.
Conversely, people who are prone to gain weight have bodies that refuse to burn calories, and suck every bit of food out of the bloodstream and store it as fat. There is no ready fuel available, so such people have no energy, and no natural propensity for vigorous motion. They're happy to be standing still.
In other words, people's tendencies to lose weight or gain it are CAUSING exercise or inactivity, no the other way around!
I find the argument compelling, especially since there are so many weight-loss studies that show you can't fight your body's natural tendencies: simple calorie-deficit diets always lead to weight gained back (with a bonus!). Matter is much stronger than mind, especially when that mind is encased in (and maybe a function of) the body's matter.
Maybe it's just me, but the body language of the young men on stage is telling. The guy in the yellow shirt looks like he's clenching his fists. He looks uncomfortable. The guy on the left is going out of his way not to raise his hands. Plus they're on stage. I think they're not happy to be there.
Maybe they wish they were back in front of their terminals coding.
If the original species is vulnerable to an invasive fungus, then I don't see how cloning will help. Clones don't have enough genetic diversity to keep up the evolutionary arms race with their microbial and insect enemies.
This problem isn't new to Tasmanian shrubs: banana plants are propagated by cuttings (ie cloned), and the "Gros Michel" variety was wiped out 100 years ago by a fungus, because they were all genetically identical. They were eventually replaced by the "Cavendish" variety, which is now being wiped out by a new fungus. The same problem plagues apples: apple trees grown from seed usually produce sour-tasting crab apples, which are only good for making cider (that's why Johnny Appleseed planted them, to make alcohol). Occasionally an apple tree results which yields sweet apples, and such trees are henceforth replicated exclusively through cuttings. Such clones don't change with the evolutionary times, and hence require huge quantities of fungicides and insecticides to yield worm-free apples.
Cloning a threatened species just postpones the inevitable.
This approach has been in place in Montreal for at least a decade. Each parking spot has labeled marker near it. You simply:
park and lock your car, and remember the code on the labeled marker
walk to the ticket machine (at most 1/2 block)
pay with cash or credit, and keep the receipt in case of dispute
walk away
A few interesting notes:
It's very important to lock your car. Montreal used to be the car-theft capital of North America. People claim things are better now, but the island city is surrounded by "chop shops" where stolen cars are disassembled.
The markers are set well away from the curb, to make room for snow removal machinery. Here's a picture of a marker, showing the parking enforcement rules (in French, then written smaller in English in order to annoy the once-dominant English minority, that is a very long and bitterly contested story).
The curb itself is covered with a heavy steel band, for the snow removal machinery to scrape right against it without damaging the curb.
Notice that I've mentioned snow removal machinery twice already? There's a draconian system in place after a winter storm: crews show up to tow away cars that are parked in snow-removal zones (residents are notified through temporary signs or through a system of red lights), and leave the cars parked elsewhere. The cars are not impounded, but owners have to go hunting for their cars. The whole process is described here.
The snowblower was invented in Montreal, not surprisingly. Irate workmen whose job of removing snow by hand was thus threatened used to sabotage the first machines by placing iron bars in snowbanks
> airport security employees should be well aware that they are, more likely than not, harassing innocent people.
That is a very key point. That's why terrorism works! That's why terrorists strike at random. Let me elaborate: suppose you belong to a group of powerless people. How can you weaken the government? You don't have any military power. What can you do?
This is the scenario you would like to see happen:
1. Kill some innocent civilians, at random.
2. The authorities must appear be doing SOMETHING. So, they impose measures that reduce people's freedom. Maybe they imprison many innocent people who are guilty by association.
3. The government's measures don't work, because they're trying to find one grain of sand in a beach. So, they are applied with even more force.
4. People grow to hate the government.
5. Two possible outcomes ensue, depending on the type of government:
a. (democracy) the government is voted out of office.
b. (dictatorship) the government is overthrown through revolution.
Either way, you (the terrorist) got what you wanted. I would posit that 5a) is what has happened in the USA. Bin Laden got what he wanted: a more moderate government in Washington, one which may oppose Israel more often, and perhaps might help the downtrodden living in corrupt dictatorial countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
Bush got it all wrong. Osama did not "hate the USA". He was not simply lashing out at America. The 9/11 hijackings were a calculated move.
Jeez people, read the article. It's talking about WEB passwords, you know, the kind which are impractical to crack by brute force, because a typical web server will lock you out after three failed attempts. For web passwords, the biggest threats are keyloggers and phishing attacks, not brute-force cracks. A simple 6-digit numerical PIN can't be brute-force cracked in less than 1000 years if the server locks you out for 24 hours after three failed attempts.
Of course, there are lots of fascistic sysadmins who demand impossible-to-remember passwords, but that's really not the topic at hand.
Alejo --------- Writing advice: Proofread carefully to make sure you don't any words out.
I read somewhere that, in Germany, the technical schools where mechanics are trained are highly sought after, have high tuition, and are hard to get into. The social value of being a mechanic in Germany is high. In the USA, being a mechanic is considered a low-status position.
I think that, at root, the problem is class consciousness. All societies have social classes, but people in the USA are, strangely enough, convinced that social classes do not exist in their country. The myth that anyone born into a low class can make it to the top is a pervasive lie in the USA. Statistics (and common sense) consistently show that such freedom is a rare exception.
In other countries (European countries in particular), people know what class they belong to, and people believe less in class mobility. As a result, people in such countries value the position they have been born into, and make the most of it.
On the other hand, Americans are constantly unhappy with their social position and hoping to better it. Hence being born into a working-class family carries a taint of shame; you're not supposed to better yourself within the world you were born into: you must devalue that world and leave it behind.
That's the reason that trade schools and high school courses for manual trades have been neglected in the USA. Those professions carry none of the sense of nobility that they hold in other countries.
It hurts the nation's competitiveness, and it leads millions of miserable kids to try to learn computer science when they would be happier and more productive sharpening their minds on the challenges of the physical world.
You're thinking like a colonialist. Europeans came to the Americas, subdued the local inhabitants, and spread West until they reached the Pacific coast. When all the natives had been conquered, and most of the population was of European descent, that colonialist spirit had to go somewhere else.
I think it went into science fiction. Since the "West was won", no more land on this planet could be conquered, and we had to imagine lands on other planets where we could expand into.
But why should our efforts be devoted to an impulse that is based on aggression over other peoples? And why should it be based fantasy books written by sci-fi authors? What intrinsic value does space colonization have?
I think most of your ideas about finite resources and "gaining the high ground" are just colonialism in disguise.
Yet another epidemiological study. Yes, it's suggestive, but doesn't really prove a causal connection. There could be all sorts of reasons for the observed effect:
People who drink coffee may tend to be wealthier than those who do not. There are well-known correlations between social status and health (there was a big study on British civil servants that showed this).
People who drink coffee may go to the doctor more often. It is known that people who visit doctors often take better care of themselves (whatever that means), and tend to be healthier.
Coffee, like all foods, is a complicated mix of many chemicals. Any one of them could be active in the effect.
Coffee influences the levels of glucose in the blood. It stimulates the secretion of adrenaline, which makes the liver release glycogen as glucose into the blood. There are well-known correlations between high blood sugar and Alzheimer's. One interesting theory is that the enzyme in brain cells responsible for clearing out amyloid protein reacts to insulin, and its function may be impaired by too much insulin. Too much insulin is a natural consequence of too much blood sugar.
The cyberknife works by delivering multiple beams of high dose radiation from a wide variety of angles using a robotic arm.
Hang on a sec! Doesn't radiation give you cancer? And doesn't cancer take a long time to develop?
It seems likely to me that the damage done by such devices will not be detected right away. Hence if it kills the cancer cells in the tumor, but damages the DNA in neighboring tissue and gives you more cancer years later, you will likely blame the original cancer for having grown back, and not the machine for having given you a new cancer.
C'mon, let's use a little physics and dose of common sense:
you shoot particles into someone's flesh
the particles slow down and stop somewhere in the flesh.
you set the particle energy "just right", causing them to end up exactly where the tumor is located.
There is one big problem with this scenario:
Particles will not stop exactly where you want them to. The energy loss follows a probabilistic distribution, so they will either damage tissue outside the tumor, or will not hit every tumor cell. Either way, you will get more cancer.
Moral: don't believe the "wider impact" statements in a research grant application. Physicists developed particle accelerators to study physics, and argued in their grant proposals that those particle accelerators weren't just good for pure research, but could also be used for medicine. How would you feel if a gun manufacturer told you that shooting bullets into flesh "very carefully" could be used to destroy tumors?
This would definitely not work. There is no imaging (no lens, or pinhole) at work. What you are proposing is analogous to sitting in a dark room with white walls with the television on: you will see areas of color on the wall, but you will be unable to deduce from these reflections what the picture on the TV looks like (beyond getting the average color of the TV picture). Of course, if the wall were a mirror, you could do it, but walls are diffuse reflectors, which means that, at each point on the wall, any light arriving is scattered into a 180-degree hemisphere of directions. The light reaching your eye from any point on the wall comes from the whole TV screen. You can't easily undo what is, effectively, a massive blurring operation.
To make matters worse, room walls are white, and reflect light back and forth to each other, so a large fraction of the light you see on the wall has already bounced off one or more other walls. Thus it's undergone several blurring passes.
This latter inter-reflection problem will, of course, happen in space too. There's lots of nebula to scatter light.
And, what's worse, we don't know exactly where those nebular are, at least not precisely enough to get the data needed to undo the blurring, assuming that were at all feasible.
That's an interesting idea. You could hypothetically look at the light emitted by the pre-supernova star, as it was reflected off a nebula. The trouble is that, before the explosion, the star isn't especially bright (well, a heck of a lot dimmer than a supernova). Hence the reflected light wouldn't stand out very much, and I doubt you could subtract out the light on the nebula due to other sources. But you might catch the rising part of the supernova's light curve.
As the article suggests, the biggest benefit of using light echoes is that the SPECTRUM of the original supernova can be obtained. In other words, while today we mostly see the direct-path light emitted by the supernova's gas remnant, light echoes let us see all the wavelengths of the light emitted at the time of the explosion.
I use the syntax-sensitive aspect of TAB to indent my code as I go. It's wonderful! It's a great way to catch mis-matched curly braces, parentheses, commas where semicolons should be, etc. As someone else just said, I just don't know how I could program without it.
And, of course, M-x indent-region: are there any tools out there that will do what indent-region does? I would love to tell students to use such a tool, rather than force emacs on them.
People look back on what they did, and can't accept that emotions like greed trumped logic and common sense. This happens after every bubble.
As Nietszche famously said:
"I have done this," says my memory.
"I cannot have done this,", says my pride, and remains steadfast.
Eventually, memory gives way.
Alejo
Actually, maybe airlines don't allow phones on planes because they are being considerate to other passengers who don't want to spend 6 hours sandwiched next to a blabbermouth.
Then again, why would the companies who fly sardine cans with wings care about the comfort of their prisoners?
Alejo
Absolutely. It's no surprise that so many programmers are into games which involve solving puzzles and uncovering secrets. The whole of computer programming is imbued with a kind of mysticism, and programmers feel like they are high priests of an arcane art.
That kind of attitude quite naturally leads to contempt for documentation. Now, I've never worked at Microsoft, so I don't know what their documentation habits are like, but I suspect they are as poor as in most companies.
Now, of course many companies do produce got user documentation, but that kind of writing can be done effectively by a skilled technical user who is also adept at documentation. The problem here at hand is the programming guide. Making your software inter-operable comes very close to writing such a guide.
Howver, skilled writers are rarely involved in writing such guides. The work is left to the programmers themselves. That's like leaving the fox in charge of the henhouse. Programmers have a natural inclination to not describe their techniques clearly.
"If the code was hard to write, it should be hard to read! We're not going to reveal our secrets without a fight!"
As another comment below suggests, most likely the inter-operability docs never existed in the first place: the documents presented to the EU courts were, most likely, reverse-engineered from the code itself!
C/C++ languages have little to no native support for multiple threads
This is an important point. Programming for GPUs has gotten easier now that nVidia's CUDA and AMD/ATI's CTM are around. But "easier" is not the same as "easy".
Before CUDA and CTM, if you wanted to write a GPU program, you had to pretend to do graphics. This meant setting up a whole pile of OpenGL or Direct3D nonsense, and then drawing a rectangle to trigger the pixel processor on each data item. At least that nonsense is out the way.
But the problem hasn't gotten easy in an essential way. Writing programs for parallel machines is not easy. At the very least, it's very different from writing programs for serial machines. It's different enough that you shouldn't expect anyone to come up with an automatic translator. I doubt you will ever be able to take a C++ program and put it through some magic special compiler that turns it into a parallel program.
Which, in a way, is a very good thing, because there are so many interesting serial algorithms out there, and there's a lot of interesting work to be done coming up with brand new ways to achieve the same result using parallel hardware.
Siggraph often includes papers describing major upcoming graphics or graphics-related hardware. So, it's no surprise that it was published. Most papers at the conference are on software techniques, but hardware papers for new platforms are often accepted.
Another likely reason for acceptance is the last author listed, Pat Hanrahan, a giant in computer graphics (and a truly nice guy). Of course, the review process is supposedly scrupulously blind (the referees don't see the authors' names), but once the reviews come back, the head referees do argue over the merits of the papers too, and I think they know the authors' names.
Another thing to consider is that the paper can't be truly anonymously reviewed, because it almost certainly mentions the hardware's name. The referees read the news, and they know what "Larrabee" means, so they will likely be pushing for publishing a description of major new hardware.
Re. how to stay on low carb: it's hard. Just going to the supermarket is a trial. You basically have to walk around the perimeter of the store, avoiding all the central aisles, where the bread, paste (aka pasta), processed foods, sugary drinks, etc are there to tempt you.
A couple of things have helped us stay on low carb:
find interesting recipes: if you're gonna go low carb, you'll have to learn how to cook. As a bachelor, I found easy to cook roast chicken legs or grilled burgers or fried eggs, with steamed frozen broccoli. But if that's all you eat, you're gonna get mighty bored. There's a real dearth of low carb convenience foods: all the frozen stuff and packaged stuff is sugary and starchy (at times I suspect a conspiracy).
be nice to yourself. Once a week, have a "carb feast", and eat some cake, or donuts, have a beer, etc. You are part mind, part body, and you can't be too mean to your body. It's going to want satisfaction at some point. I was at a lecture where Marion Woodman (a psychoanalyst) described the typical dieter's dilemma: you're standing in front of the fridge at 11pm, and something very powerful and neglected within you says, with irresistible force "Ok, now it's MY turn."
I don't tend to gain weight, so feel free to call me a hypocrite for pontificating on diet theories. But I'm not a total ignoramus. I used to moderate a mailing list (remember those?) for people with reactive hypoglycemia who traded stories, ideas, and recipes. One idea kept coming up: blood sugar swings. Lots of people complained that, if they ate the usual low-fat, high-starch diet advocated by the powers-that-be, they would get horrible sugar crashes. In such crashes, they would get irritable, ravenous, and weak. They couldn't think straight, or see straight (the brain and eyes live mostly on glucose). Sound familiar?
I realize this doesn't tie in very well with the set-point theory I've been talking about, but I think that blood sugar control is the key to staying thin. I know it's worked with my wife, who unlike me gains weight and used to have sugar crashes.
So, how do you control your blood sugar? The one theory I've heard that makes sense to me is that some people tend to have an over-reactive pancreas (or something like that). Whenever they eat sugar or starch, their blood sugar goes up alot. Then there's an over-reaction, and a boatload of insulin gets secreted. The role of insulin is to turn blood glucose into fat. If there's too much insulin, all the blood glucose gets converted, and your blood sugar plunges. And you gain weight too. It's kind of like the feedback mechanism isn't balanced.
To prevent this from happening, avoid sugars and starches. Each meats, fats and leafy vegetables. Kinda what the "paleolithic diet" folks advocate. They argue that, before the neolithic revolution introduced starches into our diet, we had adapted, over millions of years of evolution, into eating just such a diet.
A.K.A. Low-carb.
Gotta go! Dinner's ready (barbecue chicken and leafy salad);-)
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a low-tech solution:
1. Memorize a single 10-digit number, which will be your master passphrase (eg 1234567890).
2. Keep all your passwords, encrypted with this passphrase, written on paper in your wallet, as follows:
write down the true password on a scrap piece of paper.
eg: augur4
3. subtract one passphrase digit from each password character:
a - 1 = z (wrap around the alphabet)
u - 2 = s
g - 3 = d
u - 4 = q
r - 5 = l
4 - 6 = 8 (wrap around 0 back to 8)
4. Keep the result in your wallet: zsdql8, next to the name of the website you need it for.
5. Burn or eat or compost the scrap of paper.
This has several advantages:
- addition can be done in your head: look at zsql8, and it's not too hard to reconstruct augur4 without using a temporary piece of paper.
- if someone steals your wallet, they'll need your 10-digit passphrase.
- you don't need internet access or a USB key to recall your ATM's PIN.
Alejo
> If your wallet is lost, immediately set all your passwords to something temporary
Hang on! If he lost the magic cheat sheet in his wallet, how can he log into all those websites and change his passwords? If he can pull that off, that means he memorized the passwords and doesn't need the cheat sheet in the first place.
Huh?
Alejo
The physics is correct, but the causality is backward! Weight loss and gain DRIVE exercise, not the other way around.
The energy balance equation is simple: energy in - energy out = energy stored as fat. In more detail, we could write: F - (B + E) = S, where F is energy from food, B is energy spent by your basal metabolism (keeping warm, digesting, etc), E is calories burned from exercise, and S is energy stored as body fat. As the article argues, E is much smaller than B, but there's more to it:
We typically turn this equation into an inference: if you eat more, you have to exercise more to keep your weight stable (ie, to keep S=0). But that inference contains several assumptions. It assumes that B is a fixed, and it assumes that E is controlled by the will.
As some posters have argued here, the basal metabolism B adjusts depending on what you eat, or on how much muscle mass you have. I'm not going to argue against that assumption. The more important assumption to consider is that E is driven by the will.
Before his recent book, Gary Taubes wrote an article on exercise and weight loss for "New York" magazine: http://nymag.com/news/sports/38001/index3.html. In it, he documents some of the research behind the exercise-weight loss problem, and he strongly argues that exercise IS NOT controlled by the will.
He argues that we have the causality backwards: weight loss/gain drive exercise, not the other way around! People who do a lot of exercise (eg long-distance runners and cyclists) have a metabolism that is continually burning down their fat stores. They absolutely have to something with all that available fuel, and hence they are compelled to be in motion all the time. They're jumpy and wiry. They just can't help it. Of course, they get hungry and eat, but their bodies don't store the fuel, and eating just leads to a greater need for exercise.
Conversely, people who are prone to gain weight have bodies that refuse to burn calories, and suck every bit of food out of the bloodstream and store it as fat. There is no ready fuel available, so such people have no energy, and no natural propensity for vigorous motion. They're happy to be standing still.
In other words, people's tendencies to lose weight or gain it are CAUSING exercise or inactivity, no the other way around!
I find the argument compelling, especially since there are so many weight-loss studies that show you can't fight your body's natural tendencies: simple calorie-deficit diets always lead to weight gained back (with a bonus!). Matter is much stronger than mind, especially when that mind is encased in (and maybe a function of) the body's matter.
Alejo
Maybe they wish they were back in front of their terminals coding.
Alejo
This problem isn't new to Tasmanian shrubs: banana plants are propagated by cuttings (ie cloned), and the "Gros Michel" variety was wiped out 100 years ago by a fungus, because they were all genetically identical. They were eventually replaced by the "Cavendish" variety, which is now being wiped out by a new fungus. The same problem plagues apples: apple trees grown from seed usually produce sour-tasting crab apples, which are only good for making cider (that's why Johnny Appleseed planted them, to make alcohol). Occasionally an apple tree results which yields sweet apples, and such trees are henceforth replicated exclusively through cuttings. Such clones don't change with the evolutionary times, and hence require huge quantities of fungicides and insecticides to yield worm-free apples.
Cloning a threatened species just postpones the inevitable.
A few interesting notes:
Alejo
That is a very key point. That's why terrorism works! That's why terrorists strike at random. Let me elaborate: suppose you belong to a group of powerless people. How can you weaken the government? You don't have any military power. What can you do?
This is the scenario you would like to see happen:
Either way, you (the terrorist) got what you wanted. I would posit that 5a) is what has happened in the USA. Bin Laden got what he wanted: a more moderate government in Washington, one which may oppose Israel more often, and perhaps might help the downtrodden living in corrupt dictatorial countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
Bush got it all wrong. Osama did not "hate the USA". He was not simply lashing out at America. The 9/11 hijackings were a calculated move.
Alejo
Jeez people, read the article. It's talking about WEB passwords, you know, the kind which are impractical to crack by brute force, because a typical web server will lock you out after three failed attempts. For web passwords, the biggest threats are keyloggers and phishing attacks, not brute-force cracks. A simple 6-digit numerical PIN can't be brute-force cracked in less than 1000 years if the server locks you out for 24 hours after three failed attempts.
Of course, there are lots of fascistic sysadmins who demand impossible-to-remember passwords, but that's really not the topic at hand.
Alejo
---------
Writing advice: Proofread carefully to make sure you don't any words out.
I read somewhere that, in Germany, the technical schools where mechanics are trained are highly sought after, have high tuition, and are hard to get into. The social value of being a mechanic in Germany is high. In the USA, being a mechanic is considered a low-status position.
I think that, at root, the problem is class consciousness. All societies have social classes, but people in the USA are, strangely enough, convinced that social classes do not exist in their country. The myth that anyone born into a low class can make it to the top is a pervasive lie in the USA. Statistics (and common sense) consistently show that such freedom is a rare exception.
In other countries (European countries in particular), people know what class they belong to, and people believe less in class mobility. As a result, people in such countries value the position they have been born into, and make the most of it.
On the other hand, Americans are constantly unhappy with their social position and hoping to better it. Hence being born into a working-class family carries a taint of shame; you're not supposed to better yourself within the world you were born into: you must devalue that world and leave it behind.
That's the reason that trade schools and high school courses for manual trades have been neglected in the USA. Those professions carry none of the sense of nobility that they hold in other countries.
It hurts the nation's competitiveness, and it leads millions of miserable kids to try to learn computer science when they would be happier and more productive sharpening their minds on the challenges of the physical world.
Alejo
You're thinking like a colonialist. Europeans came to the Americas, subdued the local inhabitants, and spread West until they reached the Pacific coast. When all the natives had been conquered, and most of the population was of European descent, that colonialist spirit had to go somewhere else.
I think it went into science fiction. Since the "West was won", no more land on this planet could be conquered, and we had to imagine lands on other planets where we could expand into.
But why should our efforts be devoted to an impulse that is based on aggression over other peoples? And why should it be based fantasy books written by sci-fi authors? What intrinsic value does space colonization have?
I think most of your ideas about finite resources and "gaining the high ground" are just colonialism in disguise.
Alejo
Alejo
The cyberknife works by delivering multiple beams of high dose radiation from a wide variety of angles using a robotic arm.
Hang on a sec! Doesn't radiation give you cancer? And doesn't cancer take a long time to develop?
It seems likely to me that the damage done by such devices will not be detected right away. Hence if it kills the cancer cells in the tumor, but damages the DNA in neighboring tissue and gives you more cancer years later, you will likely blame the original cancer for having grown back, and not the machine for having given you a new cancer.
C'mon, let's use a little physics and dose of common sense:
There is one big problem with this scenario:
Particles will not stop exactly where you want them to. The energy loss follows a probabilistic distribution, so they will either damage tissue outside the tumor, or will not hit every tumor cell. Either way, you will get more cancer.
Moral: don't believe the "wider impact" statements in a research grant application. Physicists developed particle accelerators to study physics, and argued in their grant proposals that those particle accelerators weren't just good for pure research, but could also be used for medicine. How would you feel if a gun manufacturer told you that shooting bullets into flesh "very carefully" could be used to destroy tumors?
Alejo
To make matters worse, room walls are white, and reflect light back and forth to each other, so a large fraction of the light you see on the wall has already bounced off one or more other walls. Thus it's undergone several blurring passes.
This latter inter-reflection problem will, of course, happen in space too. There's lots of nebula to scatter light.
And, what's worse, we don't know exactly where those nebular are, at least not precisely enough to get the data needed to undo the blurring, assuming that were at all feasible.
Alejo
Alejo
http://www.naoj.org/Pressrelease/2008/12/03/index.html
As the article suggests, the biggest benefit of using light echoes is that the SPECTRUM of the original supernova can be obtained. In other words, while today we mostly see the direct-path light emitted by the supernova's gas remnant, light echoes let us see all the wavelengths of the light emitted at the time of the explosion.
Alejo
And, of course, M-x indent-region: are there any tools out there that will do what indent-region does? I would love to tell students to use such a tool, rather than force emacs on them.
Alejo
True (slaps forehead). Cut assumes single-char delimiters between fields, whereas the awk parser allows regular expressions as delimiters. Alejo
Or, just use
cut -d: -f1
People look back on what they did, and can't accept that emotions like greed trumped logic and common sense. This happens after every bubble. As Nietszche famously said: "I have done this," says my memory. "I cannot have done this,", says my pride, and remains steadfast. Eventually, memory gives way. Alejo
Actually, maybe airlines don't allow phones on planes because they are being considerate to other passengers who don't want to spend 6 hours sandwiched next to a blabbermouth. Then again, why would the companies who fly sardine cans with wings care about the comfort of their prisoners? Alejo
That kind of attitude quite naturally leads to contempt for documentation. Now, I've never worked at Microsoft, so I don't know what their documentation habits are like, but I suspect they are as poor as in most companies.
Now, of course many companies do produce got user documentation, but that kind of writing can be done effectively by a skilled technical user who is also adept at documentation. The problem here at hand is the programming guide. Making your software inter-operable comes very close to writing such a guide.
Howver, skilled writers are rarely involved in writing such guides. The work is left to the programmers themselves. That's like leaving the fox in charge of the henhouse. Programmers have a natural inclination to not describe their techniques clearly.
"If the code was hard to write, it should be hard to read! We're not going to reveal our secrets without a fight!"
As another comment below suggests, most likely the inter-operability docs never existed in the first place: the documents presented to the EU courts were, most likely, reverse-engineered from the code itself!
This is an important point. Programming for GPUs has gotten easier now that nVidia's CUDA and AMD/ATI's CTM are around. But "easier" is not the same as "easy".
Before CUDA and CTM, if you wanted to write a GPU program, you had to pretend to do graphics. This meant setting up a whole pile of OpenGL or Direct3D nonsense, and then drawing a rectangle to trigger the pixel processor on each data item. At least that nonsense is out the way.
But the problem hasn't gotten easy in an essential way. Writing programs for parallel machines is not easy. At the very least, it's very different from writing programs for serial machines. It's different enough that you shouldn't expect anyone to come up with an automatic translator. I doubt you will ever be able to take a C++ program and put it through some magic special compiler that turns it into a parallel program.
Which, in a way, is a very good thing, because there are so many interesting serial algorithms out there, and there's a lot of interesting work to be done coming up with brand new ways to achieve the same result using parallel hardware.
Another likely reason for acceptance is the last author listed, Pat Hanrahan, a giant in computer graphics (and a truly nice guy). Of course, the review process is supposedly scrupulously blind (the referees don't see the authors' names), but once the reviews come back, the head referees do argue over the merits of the papers too, and I think they know the authors' names.
Another thing to consider is that the paper can't be truly anonymously reviewed, because it almost certainly mentions the hardware's name. The referees read the news, and they know what "Larrabee" means, so they will likely be pushing for publishing a description of major new hardware.
A couple of things have helped us stay on low carb:
I realize this doesn't tie in very well with the set-point theory I've been talking about, but I think that blood sugar control is the key to staying thin. I know it's worked with my wife, who unlike me gains weight and used to have sugar crashes.
So, how do you control your blood sugar? The one theory I've heard that makes sense to me is that some people tend to have an over-reactive pancreas (or something like that). Whenever they eat sugar or starch, their blood sugar goes up alot. Then there's an over-reaction, and a boatload of insulin gets secreted. The role of insulin is to turn blood glucose into fat. If there's too much insulin, all the blood glucose gets converted, and your blood sugar plunges. And you gain weight too. It's kind of like the feedback mechanism isn't balanced.
To prevent this from happening, avoid sugars and starches. Each meats, fats and leafy vegetables. Kinda what the "paleolithic diet" folks advocate. They argue that, before the neolithic revolution introduced starches into our diet, we had adapted, over millions of years of evolution, into eating just such a diet.
A.K.A. Low-carb.
Gotta go! Dinner's ready (barbecue chicken and leafy salad) ;-)