The Mythbusters have no room to talk. It is better that children are watching this sort of stuff instead of whatever the current Fox rotation is, but you cannot call it science nor them scientists.
They once were attempting to blow up a port-a-john with methane, and were amazed that a 10% mix with air worked best. Eleventh grade chemistry says CH_4 + 2 O_2 = CO_2 + 2 H_2 O, and O_2 is about 21% of the atmosphere. They make no attempt whatsoever to reason through a hypothesis, and jump straight to the explosions. Science is about understanding the underlying principles, not just cataloging the observations.
In the article to which the parent linked, they mention that a kid pointed out that they should try comparing a vehicle's open-windows vs. AC efficiencies at a faster speed. It says in the user's manual of my car that the AC is more efficient at speeds over 55 mph. It is certainly ok to reinvent the wheel for educational purposes, but these guys rarely do any research in advance, and don't even try to understand what they are testing.
They just try something, see what happens, and learn nothing aside from the fact that something happened. This is the worst kind of science. It is analogous to having tables of empirical accelerations for tested masses and forces in place of F=ma.
especially on combat/defensive weapons. If you are aiming a real AR-15/M-16, for example, there is a small amount of guesswork in keeping the front sight post in the center of the rear aperture, and it is something you have to reestablish with each shot. There is no magic "kill pixel" in the center of your vision.
There is an old game called Trespasser, which somewhat pioneered realistic physics in a shooter, and you did have to use commands to manipulate your wrist and forearm to line up the sights on the guns. Needless to say, players are far better off just assuming their character is not an Olympic medalist quality marksman, and accepting some imperfection for the sake of realism.
For something like the Wii though, if you manually have to aim the accessory, and it shakes a bit between shots, or maybe the screen shakes slightly and is slightly removed from its original position to simulate recoil, there is probably no need for any randomness in the shot placement (aside from shifting the FOV slightly in the second case).
So with a few simple skills: basic geometry, SOHCAHTOA, Pythagoras's theorem, you can find the sine and cosine of 3 different angles. Now learn your CAST rule (where the different trig functions are positive based on the quadrant) and you can do it for up to 12 different angles. These rules are specifically part of the problem we are addressing here. Students should know that the sine of an angle in the upper two quadrants is positive because it is y/r, and that is where y is positive. Making them memorize which functions are positive in which quadrants earns them a few points on the next exam but teaches them nothing.
A specific case, but hopefully a good illustration.
I don't see a correlation between a Science degree and programming. I don't see Biology, Chemistry, or Physics majors needing or necessarily gaining anything beyond an understanding of logic. Engineering and Math majors might be good candidates, or any other science type that saw a potential job in Information Technology and the degree as a way in....There are already enough things required that are never used after graduation. What exactly is it that you think physicists do? Nearly the only physical problems that can be solved without resorting to numerics are classroom examples.
That being said, I do not really think it is necessary to have dedicated programming classes. I am a second year doctoral student in physics, at a decent university (somehow), and I have had several research assistantships for computational optics and quantum mechanics.
Someone with a non-half-assed degree in physics does not need training on how to think logically and build an algorithm; they need a tutorial for the syntax as the need arises. A class would certainly help, but there is not this horrible void in a physics education that some here seem to perceive.
...or they will leave it up because it allegedly offends a group that is tolerant of free speech. Offending intolerant demographics with media frequently turns into much more of an ordeal.
I would have thought this would be more of a recurring theme on this page. I thought a lot of dedicated Linux users (and a good fraction of/. users) just have better things to do. The people that I know that proudly proclaim to be "gamers" are the guys I knew from highschool that work service jobs, and their first kiss, first lay, and firstborn's mother was some chubby girl they met on World of Warcraft nine months and three weeks before that last qualifier became valid.
Yeah, it sucks that I have to boot into windows once or twice a week if I want to play Call of Duty 4, but who the hell really cares if Linux is a gaming OS? It works for me because I do a bit of computational physics research (and other bits of programming that would make nearly everyone else here either laugh or cry), and I put Ubuntu on my mother's and sister's machines so they can use the internet without having to keep up with six maintenance programs, but why should we care which OS is used by people who think computers are toys?
What pisses me off with respect to FOSS adoption is that the loaf of bread I buy at the grocery store for two bucks (and its ingredients) has probably passed through half a dozen corporate entities on its way to the shelf that all pay for windows licenses. How much of that $2.00 is the Microsoft tax? If it is not best expressed in scientific notation it is certainly too much.
And who wants to deal with 'lite speak, or however the hell it is spelled, in Linux forums?
You would not need treaties, an overseeing organization, or any compromise of sovereignty whatsoever; This sort of thing would happen naturally if both sides were comparably equipped.
Consider a war between two powers equipped with robot armies that are superior to human troops. There might not be any real danger to human populations on either side at first, but eventually, someone's army will be defeated. The losing party then either surrenders or begins to take human casualties against an enemy that has already proven themselves superior.
Societies with swarms of machines to fight for them probably would tend to dehumanize combat somewhat as well, making surrender at this point even more palatable, so I find it highly likely that such a war would amount to little more than a giant match of 'Battlebots' with an unfathomable budget.
America currently has big problems in science. These problems are not that we do not have a representative amount of women and minorities doing physics. Our problems are that we are struggling to not be left behind by the rest of the world.
We are not talking about workers in assembly lines or restaurants. Everyone benefits from technological progress. It is intolerably stupid to handicap these industries for a warm fuzzy feeling.
I am a graduate student in physics, and I have absolutely no time whatsoever to pursue any curiosities or extra curricular research. This is not due to my courseload; it is due to my obligations to the university: teaching E & M to engineers. Fellowships relieve these commitments, and allow universities to accept more students than they would otherwise be able to support, but they must go to the most able students to be effective.
I know far more capable and motivated aspiring scientists than myself that are incapacitated by the same obligations, yet I have a somewhat Hispanic roommate in engineering who received a fellowship last year and still did nothing beyond his coursework. It merely relieved him of an obligation. If this had instead gone to someone more promising as a student, who would have used their free time to take an additional research project, society may have experienced a return on its investment.
We put our best and brightest in environments as conducive to innovation as possible, yet effectively deny some of them the opportunity to properly exploit their environment for warmth and fuzziness.
I know this is not the situation with fellowships in general, or even in the majority of cases, but it happens sometimes and 'sometimes' is far too often. By nature, nurture, or otherwise, some people are better at certain things. It is in the interest of everyone, with the exception of the few members of minorities that would otherwise profit, that those who are able, can.
It is quite novel to see my home town mentioned on slashdot (particularly so since that home town is in Oklahoma), but how in the hell is this news?
I also did not see it mentioned anywhere that this is a private catholic school, and expensive as hell even for that. Yet in spite of this, providing a basic service to the students is not only news, but slashdot-worthy news.
Well 'this' power in particular is not actually turned into wasted heat on the spot, but the human body is generally less than 25% efficient, so at least three times the useful mechanical energy is actually radiated as waste heat.
A quick google shows energy efficiency ratios of good air conditioners to be about 14, so in this idealized case, air conditioning would only damage the output by about 20%. Considering the necessary inefficiencies though, the ratio of work to waste heat will decrease significantly, and this fraction will be much higher in application.
If each step depresses a panel 1 cm, the energy transfered per step is roughly 70kg *9.8 m/s^2 *.01m = 6.86 J, so one step per second provides about 7 watts of power per person. So if you have about 840 people continuously walking for ten minutes, you have saved 1 kW hr, or about nine cents. And that is not accounting for inefficiencies.
You also have to consider that this is power being turned into waste heat (burned calories) inside the facility. If they are having to air condition the place already, you have to subtract out the work necessary to pump out this additional heat.
The effect on the traveler would be that they have to step up to a surface 1 cm higher with each step. Of course,one CM is probably a bit of an exaggeration, so the effect would probably be even less significant than this.
Why not just restrict government financial aid, merit based and otherwise, to students pursuing a useful education? I am tired of my tax dollars paying for degrees in business. Public money should not fund a degree whose only purpose is to make the holder rich; it should be used to provide a service to the public. More business and art majors are hardly a service, and this would just reroute existing funding into science and engineering.
Why is it necessary to grow crops just for the purpose of producing cellulose? You cannot metabolize cellulose (AKA fiber). Human wastes have the same quantity of cellulose as the plant matter originally ingested. If you are not going to use the simpler sugars in something like corn anyway, you might as well let it run through something that can before destroying it.
The tone with which much of the world says that the U.S. is full of shit may someday change from disdain to envy.
Something that gets its energy directly from the sun has less benefit conveyed to it by mobility and manipulation of the environment. Intelligence is not just gifted to arbitrary organisms by some kind of designer (how stupid is that?), it has to provide a benefit. A smart tree will not get much more sun than a dumb one.
Compare that to the advantages of intelligence to an organism that must actively search for its food, distinguish useful items from the background, and compete with other mobile animals for limited resources.
And the sizes of biological life are not arbitrary. The surface tension of water sets the surface area to volume ratio of structures that can rely on passive transport of nutrients,as well as those of active transport structures, and the surface to volume ratio of course does not scale linearly. It is logical to assume that any cellular based life that needs water would evolve a familiar relationship between function and size.
Given a similar planet and concept of life, I do not think extraterrestrial life would really be that dissimilar.
I am not a dev, but the device does feature a USB port and a linux kernel. It might be a bit bulky, but is there any reason to assume that a gamepad, or even a keyboard for that matter, could not be made to work with minimal effort?
I didn't see anyplace where the mechanism for comparing files was mentioned, and I am neither into IT nor law, but if it just performs md5sums on every 700MB file it can find, would this not consume sufficient resources to qualify as a DoS attack?
I cannot recall where I heard it, but I believe that evolution was first taught in U.S. science classes the year that Sputnik was launched. Let's just let slip some "information" about this new giant technological power that hates everything we stand for. That might get some patent reform legislation passed.
The U.S. is quite the innovation machine whenever it is scared shitless.
...who at least understands and to some degree supports what he was doing with his son. Granted BFV is probably not the best method to introduce a child to violence, but too many Americans do not seem to realize that only a tiny portion of the country is actually Disneyland. At least when I was in elementary school, which would have been the first half of the 90's, our history classes were full of war: the strategies, the civilian casualties, and particular emphasis on all those who died in the civil war that were only a few years older than we were.
I don't talk to kids all that often, as I have none I am aware of, but whenever I have spoken to my father's younger step children, they are completely ignorant of these things. Granted that is not a statistically significant sample, and it is also quite probable that they are just piss poor students, I do get the impression that such things do not get the proper attention in modern schools.
American youth (I am one of them, I can talk) grow up thinking they deserve all their freedoms and never realize that what they deserve is irrelevant; you have what you can take and defend. We are currently just riding on the accomplishments of past generations as the spoiled progeny of far greater people.
When John Stewart had the Palestinian president as a guest on The Daily Show, the president mentioned once how terrorists detonated car bombs on a bridge, and he took that bridge to work the next morning. Stewart said that he certainly handled the situation better than he would have, and the president just said "I know." The audience sort of did a dry heave of a laugh as they realized the absence of any joke.
Perhaps if our youth did get proper exposure to violence, people would not be able to fire off 170 rounds with handguns in crowded buildings without someone jumping them when they tried to reload, and hijackers would be met by angry business class passengers brandishing uncapped ink pens.
But that is just my opinion.
All the technologies gained in the process of effectively destroying what a foreign world once was would certainly be applicable in modifying (or fixing, if you are of that school of thought) the environment on this planet as well. I mean, we got Tang from the moon landing.
Slashdot Mirror
They once were attempting to blow up a port-a-john with methane, and were amazed that a 10% mix with air worked best. Eleventh grade chemistry says CH_4 + 2 O_2 = CO_2 + 2 H_2 O, and O_2 is about 21% of the atmosphere. They make no attempt whatsoever to reason through a hypothesis, and jump straight to the explosions. Science is about understanding the underlying principles, not just cataloging the observations.
In the article to which the parent linked, they mention that a kid pointed out that they should try comparing a vehicle's open-windows vs. AC efficiencies at a faster speed. It says in the user's manual of my car that the AC is more efficient at speeds over 55 mph. It is certainly ok to reinvent the wheel for educational purposes, but these guys rarely do any research in advance, and don't even try to understand what they are testing.
They just try something, see what happens, and learn nothing aside from the fact that something happened. This is the worst kind of science. It is analogous to having tables of empirical accelerations for tested masses and forces in place of F=ma.
A newton is the amount of force (not energy) to accelerate a 1 kg object by 1 m/s/s (not to 1 m/s), but that is one error among many here.
There is an old game called Trespasser, which somewhat pioneered realistic physics in a shooter, and you did have to use commands to manipulate your wrist and forearm to line up the sights on the guns. Needless to say, players are far better off just assuming their character is not an Olympic medalist quality marksman, and accepting some imperfection for the sake of realism.
For something like the Wii though, if you manually have to aim the accessory, and it shakes a bit between shots, or maybe the screen shakes slightly and is slightly removed from its original position to simulate recoil, there is probably no need for any randomness in the shot placement (aside from shifting the FOV slightly in the second case).
A specific case, but hopefully a good illustration.
That being said, I do not really think it is necessary to have dedicated programming classes. I am a second year doctoral student in physics, at a decent university (somehow), and I have had several research assistantships for computational optics and quantum mechanics.
Someone with a non-half-assed degree in physics does not need training on how to think logically and build an algorithm; they need a tutorial for the syntax as the need arises. A class would certainly help, but there is not this horrible void in a physics education that some here seem to perceive.
...or they will leave it up because it allegedly offends a group that is tolerant of free speech. Offending intolerant demographics with media frequently turns into much more of an ordeal.
uh, urban environments were specifically constructed to be easily traversable by humans.
Yeah, it sucks that I have to boot into windows once or twice a week if I want to play Call of Duty 4, but who the hell really cares if Linux is a gaming OS? It works for me because I do a bit of computational physics research (and other bits of programming that would make nearly everyone else here either laugh or cry), and I put Ubuntu on my mother's and sister's machines so they can use the internet without having to keep up with six maintenance programs, but why should we care which OS is used by people who think computers are toys?
What pisses me off with respect to FOSS adoption is that the loaf of bread I buy at the grocery store for two bucks (and its ingredients) has probably passed through half a dozen corporate entities on its way to the shelf that all pay for windows licenses. How much of that $2.00 is the Microsoft tax? If it is not best expressed in scientific notation it is certainly too much.
And who wants to deal with 'lite speak, or however the hell it is spelled, in Linux forums?
I didn't see an air intake; if it contains its own oxidizer it is rocket.
Consider a war between two powers equipped with robot armies that are superior to human troops. There might not be any real danger to human populations on either side at first, but eventually, someone's army will be defeated. The losing party then either surrenders or begins to take human casualties against an enemy that has already proven themselves superior.
Societies with swarms of machines to fight for them probably would tend to dehumanize combat somewhat as well, making surrender at this point even more palatable, so I find it highly likely that such a war would amount to little more than a giant match of 'Battlebots' with an unfathomable budget.
We are not talking about workers in assembly lines or restaurants. Everyone benefits from technological progress. It is intolerably stupid to handicap these industries for a warm fuzzy feeling.
I am a graduate student in physics, and I have absolutely no time whatsoever to pursue any curiosities or extra curricular research. This is not due to my courseload; it is due to my obligations to the university: teaching E & M to engineers. Fellowships relieve these commitments, and allow universities to accept more students than they would otherwise be able to support, but they must go to the most able students to be effective.
I know far more capable and motivated aspiring scientists than myself that are incapacitated by the same obligations, yet I have a somewhat Hispanic roommate in engineering who received a fellowship last year and still did nothing beyond his coursework. It merely relieved him of an obligation. If this had instead gone to someone more promising as a student, who would have used their free time to take an additional research project, society may have experienced a return on its investment.
We put our best and brightest in environments as conducive to innovation as possible, yet effectively deny some of them the opportunity to properly exploit their environment for warmth and fuzziness.
I know this is not the situation with fellowships in general, or even in the majority of cases, but it happens sometimes and 'sometimes' is far too often. By nature, nurture, or otherwise, some people are better at certain things. It is in the interest of everyone, with the exception of the few members of minorities that would otherwise profit, that those who are able, can.
She will not continue using Linux if it will not work with her replacement.
I also did not see it mentioned anywhere that this is a private catholic school, and expensive as hell even for that. Yet in spite of this, providing a basic service to the students is not only news, but slashdot-worthy news.
A quick google shows energy efficiency ratios of good air conditioners to be about 14, so in this idealized case, air conditioning would only damage the output by about 20%. Considering the necessary inefficiencies though, the ratio of work to waste heat will decrease significantly, and this fraction will be much higher in application.
If each step depresses a panel 1 cm, the energy transfered per step is roughly 70kg *9.8 m/s^2 * .01m = 6.86 J, so one step per second provides about 7 watts of power per person. So if you have about 840 people continuously walking for ten minutes, you have saved 1 kW hr, or about nine cents. And that is not accounting for inefficiencies.
You also have to consider that this is power being turned into waste heat (burned calories) inside the facility. If they are having to air condition the place already, you have to subtract out the work necessary to pump out this additional heat.
The effect on the traveler would be that they have to step up to a surface 1 cm higher with each step. Of course,one CM is probably a bit of an exaggeration, so the effect would probably be even less significant than this.
Why not just restrict government financial aid, merit based and otherwise, to students pursuing a useful education? I am tired of my tax dollars paying for degrees in business. Public money should not fund a degree whose only purpose is to make the holder rich; it should be used to provide a service to the public. More business and art majors are hardly a service, and this would just reroute existing funding into science and engineering.
The tone with which much of the world says that the U.S. is full of shit may someday change from disdain to envy.
Compare that to the advantages of intelligence to an organism that must actively search for its food, distinguish useful items from the background, and compete with other mobile animals for limited resources.
And the sizes of biological life are not arbitrary. The surface tension of water sets the surface area to volume ratio of structures that can rely on passive transport of nutrients,as well as those of active transport structures, and the surface to volume ratio of course does not scale linearly. It is logical to assume that any cellular based life that needs water would evolve a familiar relationship between function and size.
Given a similar planet and concept of life, I do not think extraterrestrial life would really be that dissimilar.
I am not a dev, but the device does feature a USB port and a linux kernel. It might be a bit bulky, but is there any reason to assume that a gamepad, or even a keyboard for that matter, could not be made to work with minimal effort?
I didn't see anyplace where the mechanism for comparing files was mentioned, and I am neither into IT nor law, but if it just performs md5sums on every 700MB file it can find, would this not consume sufficient resources to qualify as a DoS attack?
The U.S. is quite the innovation machine whenever it is scared shitless.
...who at least understands and to some degree supports what he was doing with his son. Granted BFV is probably not the best method to introduce a child to violence, but too many Americans do not seem to realize that only a tiny portion of the country is actually Disneyland. At least when I was in elementary school, which would have been the first half of the 90's, our history classes were full of war: the strategies, the civilian casualties, and particular emphasis on all those who died in the civil war that were only a few years older than we were. I don't talk to kids all that often, as I have none I am aware of, but whenever I have spoken to my father's younger step children, they are completely ignorant of these things. Granted that is not a statistically significant sample, and it is also quite probable that they are just piss poor students, I do get the impression that such things do not get the proper attention in modern schools. American youth (I am one of them, I can talk) grow up thinking they deserve all their freedoms and never realize that what they deserve is irrelevant; you have what you can take and defend. We are currently just riding on the accomplishments of past generations as the spoiled progeny of far greater people. When John Stewart had the Palestinian president as a guest on The Daily Show, the president mentioned once how terrorists detonated car bombs on a bridge, and he took that bridge to work the next morning. Stewart said that he certainly handled the situation better than he would have, and the president just said "I know." The audience sort of did a dry heave of a laugh as they realized the absence of any joke. Perhaps if our youth did get proper exposure to violence, people would not be able to fire off 170 rounds with handguns in crowded buildings without someone jumping them when they tried to reload, and hijackers would be met by angry business class passengers brandishing uncapped ink pens. But that is just my opinion.
All the technologies gained in the process of effectively destroying what a foreign world once was would certainly be applicable in modifying (or fixing, if you are of that school of thought) the environment on this planet as well. I mean, we got Tang from the moon landing.