Three to five amps? For what? This is a relay controller, not a motor starter. Low voltage, and afaik low amperage. I don't think those itty bitty wires that the thermostat is wired to would handle that many watts (24 volts * 3-5 amps).
We should trade. You can have my old thermostat, and I'll take yours. Except it's too late:I got tired of setting the smart (but not networked) thermostat: every day of the week was at least four (IIRC) separate settings (morning/ evening, summer/ winter), and half the time when I got through all of them, the setting didn't "stick." So I took the smart thermostats (one upstairs, one down) off the wall and replaced them with dumb thermostats from Home Box (name changed to protect the guilty). Two settings each (summer/ winter) and I'm done.
And I wouldn't get ads from Google telling me Chrome is better for searching (it isn't) every time I do a search in a competing browser. And I mean *every* time.
"Windows mobile is dead." Well, I hope not. A year or so ago, I ditched my old Android phone for a Nokia with Windows8, and I much prefer Windows to Android. Many reasons, but one of them is exactly apps that you're told you shouldn't remove from Android, lest it go belly-up. I've had no such problem on my Windows phone.
With a few exceptions, most of the comments here are about computer programming, not learning. I have been working through an ancient copy of Papert's book Mindstorms, which is more about teaching kids to think mathematically (he uses a different word, but same root). As a linguist, I found myself disagreeing part way through when he claimed that learning math was substantially the same as learning a (first) language. It isn't, IMHO.
Anyone else have comments about his more general contributions? Have they had an effect on schools anywhere (not just in the US)?
Back on programming: I also have a copy of "Exploring Language with Logo" by E. Paul Goldenberg and Wallace Feurzeig, which does an interesting job of exploring language using the Logo programming language. I don't think I would use Logo to teach linguistics nowadays, but there are lots of good ideas there that are really programming language agnostic. I wonder to what extent it was ever used for teaching language/ linguistics.
I'm not the OP here, but I was intrigued enough to look in Wikipedia. In what seems a very optimistic article, this sentence is buried: "South Australia has been described as 'Australia's hot rock haven' and this renewable energy form could provide an estimated 6.8% of Australia's base load power needs by 2030." Note the qualifiers: "could", "estimated", "by 2030"--and even then only 6.8% (from that part of Australia--but apparently that's the best part).
Disclaimer first: predictions are hard, especially about the future.
Seems to me that the problem is not the number of people, but the proportion of them that are employable. Now mind you, we've come through the agricultural revolution and the industrial revolution, and managed to retrain the workforce each time. But this time the machines are going to be really smart, and it's not obvious to me that your average person is going to be smarter than the machine no matter how much retraining/ education you give them.
If that's so, then population control doesn't help; you'll always have N% of the population that is unemployable, regardless of the number. (Ok, a population of zero would be ok, but I don't think we want to go there.)
In other words, "them" will always be with us. And you (or I) may find ourselves as one of them sooner than we'd expect.
Linguist here. I work on a daily basis with accountants (that's not their title, but let's say it is for the sake of argument or agreement); they help manage the money end of my projects, and a bunch of other projects. If we were dealing with one project, then a spreadsheet would be fine. But we're dealing with scores of projects, not to mention payroll (with individuals being paid off of from one to ten of those projects), and then there's all the taxation details that you guys know about. All this has to be tied together.
The impression from where I sit is that it's very easy to make a mistake in setting up a spreadsheet (we do have templates, but still). But an even bigger problem, it appears to me (and remember, I'm not doing this) is transferring the numbers from one spreadsheet to another. Someone needs to ensure that everyone is allocated 100% to some combination of the available projects, no more and no less, that we do the best we can at using up $ by the end of a project. (And projects do not, by and large, have identical begin/ end dates.) And each of those projects is on a separate spreadsheet, which as I say need to be tied together to ensure everyone is correctly allocated. The tying seems to be done by hand: John Doe is allocated at 37% on the project spreadsheet, so copy that '37' over to the payroll spreadsheet by hand.
Also, everything on a spreadsheet is done with labels of rows and columns: A, B, C...AA, BB...; and 1, 2, 3... I learned decades ago in computer programming 101 to use meaningful names for my variables. I don't know whether it's even possible to give meaningful labels to spreadsheet rows, columns and cells, but I can see that no one (where I work) does so. That seems to be another recipe for disaster.
In sum, it seems like a mess, and spreadsheets seem to me to be only a step above using an abacus. (Ok, a couple steps; an abacus can't print.) From where I sit, it seems like we need some kind of accounting system that ties everything together, with real names for values: something like Salary[John Doe] + Overhead[John Doe] not A1+A3.
There was an effort to move us over from spreadsheets to a real accounting system, but in the end it foundered over the cost (purchase/lease, re-training, data transfer...), and perhaps the inability to find an accounting system that worked the way we do.
If spreadsheets hadn't been invented, would we be using rational, tailorable, relatively inexpensive accounting systems?
", if you dont support Hillary you must support Trump": My daughter has a bumper sticker on her car with three check boxes: Democrat, Republican, and Awake. Awake is checked.
But I have to make that assumption regardless of how file open() works; for me, it's just a question of how much code I have to write, whether I need to import the codecs library and call its functions, or whether that's done under the hood.
I know about the PYTHONIOENCODING variable, but I want to make my program self-contained. Not every computer I run on will have PYTHONIOENCODING set.
I can see the logic behind that, but it means that a program that works on one computer will not work the same on another computer, even when (IIRC) the input is coming from (or going to) a pipe, which means it has no necessary relation to whatever encoding someone's shell is set to. We've been bitten by that several times.
What I'm getting at is that I have to write code like this:
strMainFSTOut = codecs.getwriter('utf-8')(sys.stdout.buffer) when it seems like
strMainFSTOut = open(sys.stdout, 'w', encoding='utf-8') ought to be sufficient.
In the end it's a minor irritation: I can never remember the incantation when writing a new program, and have to go back to my old code. 3 is better than 2 was.
Lions, tigers and bears are quite dangerous. Most of us wouldn't consider them particularly intelligent. (If you think they are, then consider sharks, or the Portuguese Man O'War.)
Of course we put them in zoos (or aquaria), not the other way around. But an automated tank could be quite hard to put in a zoo, even if it wasn't "intelligent."
"getting the requirements document into a form that would be comprehensible to an intelligent human": Agreed, and then building an AI that can understand such natural language documents would take much longer. Automatic programming is, IMO, rather like nuclear fusion: it's always ten years off.
One big difference between rocket "science" and CS is that the rocket science remained the province of a few countries for a long time (Soviet Union and US, later China, the EU and India, with most other countries still struggling to field mid-range missiles). But CS, and particularly programming skills, can be copied and then used by almost any other country. And that makes a CS race comparable to the Space Race of the 60s rather unlikely....and I realize that basic programming skills are not computer _science_. But even real computer science (e.g. algorithmic complexity) is much more available to the public than rocket "science."
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Probably as many people choose their house for the furnace it has, as choose their car for the cupholders it has.
Three to five amps? For what? This is a relay controller, not a motor starter. Low voltage, and afaik low amperage. I don't think those itty bitty wires that the thermostat is wired to would handle that many watts (24 volts * 3-5 amps).
We should trade. You can have my old thermostat, and I'll take yours. Except it's too late:I got tired of setting the smart (but not networked) thermostat: every day of the week was at least four (IIRC) separate settings (morning/ evening, summer/ winter), and half the time when I got through all of them, the setting didn't "stick." So I took the smart thermostats (one upstairs, one down) off the wall and replaced them with dumb thermostats from Home Box (name changed to protect the guilty). Two settings each (summer/ winter) and I'm done.
And I wouldn't get ads from Google telling me Chrome is better for searching (it isn't) every time I do a search in a competing browser. And I mean *every* time.
"Windows mobile is dead." Well, I hope not. A year or so ago, I ditched my old Android phone for a Nokia with Windows8, and I much prefer Windows to Android. Many reasons, but one of them is exactly apps that you're told you shouldn't remove from Android, lest it go belly-up. I've had no such problem on my Windows phone.
But if your calendar is susceptible to the Y2K problem...
Oh, wait, we dodged that bullet, which was supposed to have disastrous consequences too.
With a few exceptions, most of the comments here are about computer programming, not learning. I have been working through an ancient copy of Papert's book Mindstorms, which is more about teaching kids to think mathematically (he uses a different word, but same root). As a linguist, I found myself disagreeing part way through when he claimed that learning math was substantially the same as learning a (first) language. It isn't, IMHO.
Anyone else have comments about his more general contributions? Have they had an effect on schools anywhere (not just in the US)?
Back on programming: I also have a copy of "Exploring Language with Logo" by E. Paul Goldenberg and Wallace Feurzeig, which does an interesting job of exploring language using the Logo programming language. I don't think I would use Logo to teach linguistics nowadays, but there are lots of good ideas there that are really programming language agnostic. I wonder to what extent it was ever used for teaching language/ linguistics.
Really? where?
If someone were keeping score, it'd be MR 5000-something, Z-0
Guess you've never heard of the KGB.
I'm not the OP here, but I was intrigued enough to look in Wikipedia. In what seems a very optimistic article, this sentence is buried: "South Australia has been described as 'Australia's hot rock haven' and this renewable energy form could provide an estimated 6.8% of Australia's base load power needs by 2030." Note the qualifiers: "could", "estimated", "by 2030"--and even then only 6.8% (from that part of Australia--but apparently that's the best part).
I don't think I'd put my money on it.
Right. And nuclear bombs are just like bows and arrows.
Disclaimer first: predictions are hard, especially about the future.
Seems to me that the problem is not the number of people, but the proportion of them that are employable. Now mind you, we've come through the agricultural revolution and the industrial revolution, and managed to retrain the workforce each time. But this time the machines are going to be really smart, and it's not obvious to me that your average person is going to be smarter than the machine no matter how much retraining/ education you give them.
If that's so, then population control doesn't help; you'll always have N% of the population that is unemployable, regardless of the number. (Ok, a population of zero would be ok, but I don't think we want to go there.)
In other words, "them" will always be with us. And you (or I) may find ourselves as one of them sooner than we'd expect.
Linguist here. I work on a daily basis with accountants (that's not their title, but let's say it is for the sake of argument or agreement); they help manage the money end of my projects, and a bunch of other projects. If we were dealing with one project, then a spreadsheet would be fine. But we're dealing with scores of projects, not to mention payroll (with individuals being paid off of from one to ten of those projects), and then there's all the taxation details that you guys know about. All this has to be tied together.
The impression from where I sit is that it's very easy to make a mistake in setting up a spreadsheet (we do have templates, but still). But an even bigger problem, it appears to me (and remember, I'm not doing this) is transferring the numbers from one spreadsheet to another. Someone needs to ensure that everyone is allocated 100% to some combination of the available projects, no more and no less, that we do the best we can at using up $ by the end of a project. (And projects do not, by and large, have identical begin/ end dates.) And each of those projects is on a separate spreadsheet, which as I say need to be tied together to ensure everyone is correctly allocated. The tying seems to be done by hand: John Doe is allocated at 37% on the project spreadsheet, so copy that '37' over to the payroll spreadsheet by hand.
Also, everything on a spreadsheet is done with labels of rows and columns: A, B, C...AA, BB...; and 1, 2, 3... I learned decades ago in computer programming 101 to use meaningful names for my variables. I don't know whether it's even possible to give meaningful labels to spreadsheet rows, columns and cells, but I can see that no one (where I work) does so. That seems to be another recipe for disaster.
In sum, it seems like a mess, and spreadsheets seem to me to be only a step above using an abacus. (Ok, a couple steps; an abacus can't print.) From where I sit, it seems like we need some kind of accounting system that ties everything together, with real names for values: something like Salary[John Doe] + Overhead[John Doe] not A1+A3.
There was an effort to move us over from spreadsheets to a real accounting system, but in the end it foundered over the cost (purchase/lease, re-training, data transfer...), and perhaps the inability to find an accounting system that worked the way we do.
If spreadsheets hadn't been invented, would we be using rational, tailorable, relatively inexpensive accounting systems?
I'd echo that, but the cat's out of the bag.
", if you dont support Hillary you must support Trump": My daughter has a bumper sticker on her car with three check boxes: Democrat, Republican, and Awake. Awake is checked.
I'm pretty sure Buzzbot is Light Years ahead
But I have to make that assumption regardless of how file open() works; for me, it's just a question of how much code I have to write, whether I need to import the codecs library and call its functions, or whether that's done under the hood.
I know about the PYTHONIOENCODING variable, but I want to make my program self-contained. Not every computer I run on will have PYTHONIOENCODING set.
I can see the logic behind that, but it means that a program that works on one computer will not work the same on another computer, even when (IIRC) the input is coming from (or going to) a pipe, which means it has no necessary relation to whatever encoding someone's shell is set to. We've been bitten by that several times.
What I'm getting at is that I have to write code like this:
strMainFSTOut = codecs.getwriter('utf-8')(sys.stdout.buffer)
when it seems like
strMainFSTOut = open(sys.stdout, 'w', encoding='utf-8')
ought to be sufficient.
In the end it's a minor irritation: I can never remember the incantation when writing a new program, and have to go back to my old code. 3 is better than 2 was.
Lions, tigers and bears are quite dangerous. Most of us wouldn't consider them particularly intelligent. (If you think they are, then consider sharks, or the Portuguese Man O'War.)
Of course we put them in zoos (or aquaria), not the other way around. But an automated tank could be quite hard to put in a zoo, even if it wasn't "intelligent."
That assumes we make misteaks.
Perhaps the journalists are AIs.
"getting the requirements document into a form that would be comprehensible to an intelligent human": Agreed, and then building an AI that can understand such natural language documents would take much longer. Automatic programming is, IMO, rather like nuclear fusion: it's always ten years off.
Not since Pascal, anyway (the man, not the programming language).
One big difference between rocket "science" and CS is that the rocket science remained the province of a few countries for a long time (Soviet Union and US, later China, the EU and India, with most other countries still struggling to field mid-range missiles). But CS, and particularly programming skills, can be copied and then used by almost any other country. And that makes a CS race comparable to the Space Race of the 60s rather unlikely. ...and I realize that basic programming skills are not computer _science_. But even real computer science (e.g. algorithmic complexity) is much more available to the public than rocket "science."