Whenever I hear people arguing over art (and it is usually as you say in your initial summary, that one will say they don't care for an artist's work and the other insists that the first is merely too ignorant to truly understand the art) it reminds me of the scene in Zoolander where the male models are all doing the rounds telling each other, "no, I think YOU'RE missing the point". There's so much effort put into trying not to be the crass, uncultured lout who doesn't understand 'the vision' that no-one actually realises that there IS no 'vision' and it's all just a big glob of pretentious wank.
As for the point about Pollock's later paintings having higher fractal dimensions, that's a natural consequence of random splotches of colour as you add more splotches and more detail, regardless of the actual artistic merit. You might as well say that maps of Britain have become more and more aesthetically pleasing as mapmakers made more precise maps and the coastline's fractal dimension increased.
I'd say there is a good chance it is all one Unified Field. When including torque in Einstein's equations (and not assuming you are locked on the spinning object), this guy's solution works from the micro to the macro.
It's cool to think that one bigass equation could describe our entire universe, but I've never understood why people believe that it's actually the case. I can't help thinking of savages looking at a McLaren F1 and thinking "Under the bonnet there must be a complex structure made of Car Molecules. Anything else we find in there, if we divide it sufficiently, will turn out to be made of Car."
Was it really proper child porn, as in nudity of prepubescent children?
This sentence is wrong. Porn is, by definition, material intended to provoke prurient interest. Just because someone finds it arousing doesn't make it porn. Witness the underwear section of clothing catalogues - that's certainly not porn but I'm sure when you were 13 you looked through them just like most other 13-year-olds (well, like they did when I was a lad and dinosaurs grew on trees... these days you'd just hit the internet and download some porn, no wonder kids are having sex younger).
But think of the 17-and-three-quarters-year-olds-who-took-the-damn-pictures-and-uploaded-them-themselves! They'll go unpunished for their own exploitation of themselves and the harm they caused themselves in the process!
No, the problem I have with the idea is that, unlike the solar updraft tower, it isn't immediately obvious to me where the energy to heat the air going into the base is coming from. The picture shows "warm water" being drizzled through the inlet vent and becoming "cool water" with the heat obviously going into the air, but where is the warm water coming from? Solar heating tanks, I guess?
I believe the input heat is the latent heat of vaporisation of the moist air being drawn into the bottom of the vortex. The heat comes into the system as sunlight heating bodies of water and causing evaporation, and as the pressure drops inside the vortex, the water vapour condenses out, releasing this heat.
Sounds very cool and plausible in theory, but does it actually work?
If you go to the front page of that site it goes on about the "stored energy resources" of the "latent heat of water vapor in the bottom kilometer of the atmosphere", is just so much nonsense. The wikipedia article just regurgitates the patent application.
Actually it seems quite interesting... or maybe I failed physics too. It's essentially a solar chimney, but powered partially by the same thermal mechanism (release of heat as water vapour condenses out of warm, moist rising air) that powers hurricanes/cyclones, and substituting a stable vortex for the tall chimney used by conventional designs. The only problem I can see with it is that this mechanism only works when the intake air is very humid. That's why cyclones start dying the moment they cross the coast, but it could possibly work in a humid coastal area.
I'm curious to know whether they've ever actually created and sustained a stable vortex using this method. It's one of the few systems like this that can't (as I understand it) be tested with a small-scale model.
Maybe there's something I'm missing, but I'm pretty sure all the energy that the sun will dump into these greenhouses was going to end up there anyway...
Actually he has a good point, if you assume (reasonably) that the "giant greenhouse" will have a solar absorbing base made of something with a very low albedo. So yes, it WILL contribute to global warming, but only as much as a 4-square-mile parking lot, not including the cars that park on it.
No, I'm definitely thinking of Hezbollah. After doing some wiki-research, however, I must concede that (if Wikipedia is relatively unbiased) Hezbollah do perform valuable social services. Still, if I'm confused about the veracity of the "Hezbollah uses human shields" claims, at least I'm not alone. The Human Rights Watch report claimed first:
Human Rights Watch found no cases in which Hezbollah deliberately used civilians as shields to protect them from retaliatory IDF attack. In none of the cases of civilian deaths documented in this report is there evidence to suggest that Hezbollah forces or weapons were in or near the area that the IDF targeted during or just prior to the attack.
But then contradicted themselves with:
Hezbollah occasionally did store weapons in or near civilian homes and fighters placed rocket launchers within populated areas or near U.N. observers, which are serious violations of the laws of war because they violate the duty to take all feasible precautions to avoid civilian casualties.... In addition, Human Rights Watch continues to investigate allegations that Hezbollah is shielding its military personnel and materiel by locating them in civilian homes or areas, and it is deeply concerned by Hezbollah’s placement of certain troops and materiel near civilians, which endangers them and violates the duty to take all feasible precautions to avoid civilian casualties. Human Rights Watch uses the occasion of this report to reiterate Hezbollah’s legal duty never to deliberately use civilians to shield military objects and never to needlessly endanger civilians by conducting military operations, maintaining troops, or storing weapons in their vicinity.
Amnesty International stated that
While the presence of Hezbullah’s fighters and short-range weapons within civilian areas is not contested, this in itself is not conclusive evidence of intent to use civilians as "human shields", any more than the presence of Israeli soldiers in a kibbutz is in itself evidence of the same war crime.
but I would hasten to point out that their statement only holds if the Israeli soldiers were shelling Hezbullah fighters or Lebanese civilians from that kibbutz.
3200x2400 is 7.68 million, not 4 million. The 30" Apple Cinema HD has a native resolution of... wait for it... 2560x1600. Which is four million pixels. At more than 60Hz. You fucking fail.
...you make the impression on me that you must either have a very strong bias towards one that party there, or that you are a bit naive (or perhaps young).
All three, from some points of view. But when the local news (specifically SBS News in Australia, slight liberal bias but other than that seems to be pretty even-handed, it's not like this semi-community public TV station is run by a secret Jewish council or anything) is reporting (complete with video footage) Hezbollah militants shooting rockets at Israeli suburbs from the grounds of a school with students in it, it's very hard not to see them as using human shields.
Either I must assume that the least biased news source I have access to is skewing the facts simply because one side is being reported as behaving in an unethical manner, or I must accept that one side is acting to some extent as reported. I find it too much of a stretch to take "both sides of any conflict are equal in magnitude of abhorrence" as an axiom.
Well, I did come across this strange contraption. Basically a swarm of bees carrying a chair, except each bee is a cordless drill and they're strapped to a grid.:P
It depends, as always, on exactly what you mean by 3D. As far as I can see, a high-enough-resolution screen which can emit different colours in different directions at least in the horizontal plane (call it horizontal-specular screen maybe?) you could simulate some depth of field (focally the screen would be made of vertical bars at different depths). A high-enough-resolution screen that can emit different colours in all directions from each pixel (that's gonna be a *long* way off but is the ultimate expression of a flat viewing screen) is basically a live-action full-colour hologram, reconstructing the wavefront of the light coming through the screen from the virtual objects, focal information and all.
It seems pretty stable from the video. I wonder how well this electronically-stabilised-quadricopter technology would scale to, say, human-sized?:D I did a bit of research on blade loadings and suchforth and it seems that a helicopter weighing 200kg with pilot would need 30-40kW to lift off, can anyone with more experience confirm or deny? I'd love to see something with the same format but, say, 2m long, powered by nanophosphate lithium batteries with a 5-10min flight time.
Of course the AR stuff is also cool. I bet there's a market for that... run a service where your users print a specific patterned logo in a print ad, register it with your site, and on a phone running the right application the pattern loads a video or even 3D virtual animated object anchored to the logo.
Karma be damned, any organisation or group that advocates violence against another group, or converting others by violence, is a "social problem". You want the "PC bullshit gloss" removed? How about "militant religious groups are cancers in our global society and no-one on earth is safe until the scourge of fanaticism is erased".
Slashdot Mirror
Whenever I hear people arguing over art (and it is usually as you say in your initial summary, that one will say they don't care for an artist's work and the other insists that the first is merely too ignorant to truly understand the art) it reminds me of the scene in Zoolander where the male models are all doing the rounds telling each other, "no, I think YOU'RE missing the point". There's so much effort put into trying not to be the crass, uncultured lout who doesn't understand 'the vision' that no-one actually realises that there IS no 'vision' and it's all just a big glob of pretentious wank.
As for the point about Pollock's later paintings having higher fractal dimensions, that's a natural consequence of random splotches of colour as you add more splotches and more detail, regardless of the actual artistic merit. You might as well say that maps of Britain have become more and more aesthetically pleasing as mapmakers made more precise maps and the coastline's fractal dimension increased.
They've obviously multiplied. Now they shall fight to the death for supremacy!
I wonder if there are Good Car Molecules as well as Bad Car Molecules?
You probably hate me now, too.
I'd say there is a good chance it is all one Unified Field. When including torque in Einstein's equations (and not assuming you are locked on the spinning object), this guy's solution works from the micro to the macro.
It's cool to think that one bigass equation could describe our entire universe, but I've never understood why people believe that it's actually the case. I can't help thinking of savages looking at a McLaren F1 and thinking "Under the bonnet there must be a complex structure made of Car Molecules. Anything else we find in there, if we divide it sufficiently, will turn out to be made of Car."
Fair enough. To be totally fair, I kind of already had that reply lined up and yours was the first post I read that it fit with. :P
:)
And as my Sears Catalogue example indicates, I agree with the rest of your point.
Was it really proper child porn, as in nudity of prepubescent children?
This sentence is wrong. Porn is, by definition, material intended to provoke prurient interest. Just because someone finds it arousing doesn't make it porn. Witness the underwear section of clothing catalogues - that's certainly not porn but I'm sure when you were 13 you looked through them just like most other 13-year-olds (well, like they did when I was a lad and dinosaurs grew on trees... these days you'd just hit the internet and download some porn, no wonder kids are having sex younger).
But think of the 17-and-three-quarters-year-olds-who-took-the-damn-pictures-and-uploaded-them-themselves! They'll go unpunished for their own exploitation of themselves and the harm they caused themselves in the process!
I'm sure Mothers Against Actual Parenting will consider this one a double win regardless of the outcome.
No, the problem I have with the idea is that, unlike the solar updraft tower, it isn't immediately obvious to me where the energy to heat the air going into the base is coming from. The picture shows "warm water" being drizzled through the inlet vent and becoming "cool water" with the heat obviously going into the air, but where is the warm water coming from? Solar heating tanks, I guess?
I believe the input heat is the latent heat of vaporisation of the moist air being drawn into the bottom of the vortex. The heat comes into the system as sunlight heating bodies of water and causing evaporation, and as the pressure drops inside the vortex, the water vapour condenses out, releasing this heat.
Sounds very cool and plausible in theory, but does it actually work?
If you go to the front page of that site it goes on about the "stored energy resources" of the "latent heat of water vapor in the bottom kilometer of the atmosphere", is just so much nonsense. The wikipedia article just regurgitates the patent application.
Actually it seems quite interesting... or maybe I failed physics too. It's essentially a solar chimney, but powered partially by the same thermal mechanism (release of heat as water vapour condenses out of warm, moist rising air) that powers hurricanes/cyclones, and substituting a stable vortex for the tall chimney used by conventional designs. The only problem I can see with it is that this mechanism only works when the intake air is very humid. That's why cyclones start dying the moment they cross the coast, but it could possibly work in a humid coastal area.
I'm curious to know whether they've ever actually created and sustained a stable vortex using this method. It's one of the few systems like this that can't (as I understand it) be tested with a small-scale model.
Paying an Australian company to build a money pit is a good use of US stimulus money? Would you be interested in buying a bridge?
Works for me, mate. :)
How many here know why greenhouses are green ?
answer: http://bit.ly/864NW3
Because they're full of friggin foliage, that's why. Your link answers the question "why are leaves green" quite nicely though. :)
Maybe there's something I'm missing, but I'm pretty sure all the energy that the sun will dump into these greenhouses was going to end up there anyway...
Actually he has a good point, if you assume (reasonably) that the "giant greenhouse" will have a solar absorbing base made of something with a very low albedo. So yes, it WILL contribute to global warming, but only as much as a 4-square-mile parking lot, not including the cars that park on it.
Never been to Thailand, I take it?
Seriously though, what good is a weapon that small going to be?
It has to be at least... three times bigger than this!
Human Rights Watch found no cases in which Hezbollah deliberately used civilians as shields to protect them from retaliatory IDF attack. In none of the cases of civilian deaths documented in this report is there evidence to suggest that Hezbollah forces or weapons were in or near the area that the IDF targeted during or just prior to the attack.
But then contradicted themselves with:
Hezbollah occasionally did store weapons in or near civilian homes and fighters placed rocket launchers within populated areas or near U.N. observers, which are serious violations of the laws of war because they violate the duty to take all feasible precautions to avoid civilian casualties. ... In addition, Human Rights Watch continues to investigate allegations that Hezbollah is shielding its military personnel and materiel by locating them in civilian homes or areas, and it is deeply concerned by Hezbollah’s placement of certain troops and materiel near civilians, which endangers them and violates the duty to take all feasible precautions to avoid civilian casualties. Human Rights Watch uses the occasion of this report to reiterate Hezbollah’s legal duty never to deliberately use civilians to shield military objects and never to needlessly endanger civilians by conducting military operations, maintaining troops, or storing weapons in their vicinity.
Amnesty International stated that
While the presence of Hezbullah’s fighters and short-range weapons within civilian areas is not contested, this in itself is not conclusive evidence of intent to use civilians as "human shields", any more than the presence of Israeli soldiers in a kibbutz is in itself evidence of the same war crime.
but I would hasten to point out that their statement only holds if the Israeli soldiers were shelling Hezbullah fighters or Lebanese civilians from that kibbutz.
I can't help thinking that the "just a few years ago" clause implied understanding that, as you say, this has now changed.
These guys seem to be pretty happy with the basic idea of a Cessna-scale light plane powered by lithium batteries. And I so very much want one.
Wow, they have come down a lot! I guess no-one wants those lame old LiPolys now that cool new LiFePO4 ones are in town.
;)
Would 'most LiPo powered RC gear'? include, say... Special Circumstances drones?
3200x2400 is 7.68 million, not 4 million. The 30" Apple Cinema HD has a native resolution of... wait for it... 2560x1600. Which is four million pixels. At more than 60Hz. You fucking fail.
...you make the impression on me that you must either have a very strong bias towards one that party there, or that you are a bit naive (or perhaps young).
All three, from some points of view. But when the local news (specifically SBS News in Australia, slight liberal bias but other than that seems to be pretty even-handed, it's not like this semi-community public TV station is run by a secret Jewish council or anything) is reporting (complete with video footage) Hezbollah militants shooting rockets at Israeli suburbs from the grounds of a school with students in it, it's very hard not to see them as using human shields.
Either I must assume that the least biased news source I have access to is skewing the facts simply because one side is being reported as behaving in an unethical manner, or I must accept that one side is acting to some extent as reported. I find it too much of a stretch to take "both sides of any conflict are equal in magnitude of abhorrence" as an axiom.
Well, I did come across this strange contraption. Basically a swarm of bees carrying a chair, except each bee is a cordless drill and they're strapped to a grid. :P
It depends, as always, on exactly what you mean by 3D. As far as I can see, a high-enough-resolution screen which can emit different colours in different directions at least in the horizontal plane (call it horizontal-specular screen maybe?) you could simulate some depth of field (focally the screen would be made of vertical bars at different depths). A high-enough-resolution screen that can emit different colours in all directions from each pixel (that's gonna be a *long* way off but is the ultimate expression of a flat viewing screen) is basically a live-action full-colour hologram, reconstructing the wavefront of the light coming through the screen from the virtual objects, focal information and all.
It seems pretty stable from the video. I wonder how well this electronically-stabilised-quadricopter technology would scale to, say, human-sized? :D I did a bit of research on blade loadings and suchforth and it seems that a helicopter weighing 200kg with pilot would need 30-40kW to lift off, can anyone with more experience confirm or deny? I'd love to see something with the same format but, say, 2m long, powered by nanophosphate lithium batteries with a 5-10min flight time.
Of course the AR stuff is also cool. I bet there's a market for that... run a service where your users print a specific patterned logo in a print ad, register it with your site, and on a phone running the right application the pattern loads a video or even 3D virtual animated object anchored to the logo.
Karma be damned, any organisation or group that advocates violence against another group, or converting others by violence, is a "social problem". You want the "PC bullshit gloss" removed? How about "militant religious groups are cancers in our global society and no-one on earth is safe until the scourge of fanaticism is erased".
Goddamn invisible sky faeries.
Hmm... not so sure of that. Also, 120hZ is 60 hZ for each eye with 50% duty cycle. That's gonna give you a migraine.