Well, you don't like Glass, and that's fine. Say what you will, his music is beautiful to some (including me).
However, I don't believe you can call the timing of some of his scoring "an error". Perhaps Glass made the decision conciously, perhaps because perfect alignment would be predictable, and putting the music earlier creates some tension because there is no visuals to go along with it. We don't know what he though. But we can't assume it was a simple error, because assuming music changes have to align with scene changes is very simplistic.
In my opinion, everyone should watch this movie once a year. It really puts things in perspective. And besides that, the visual and audio artistry are incredible, although Philip Glass isn't everyone's cup of tea.
Koyaanisqatsi is partly about the modern lifestyle, but in the more general sense, it is about humanity itself. It takes the us out of our routine life, up into a wider viewpoint, where individuality loses its meaning and we can see our lives as closer to what they are. Individual movements blend grossly to show the patterns of life. We are not unique. We follow the same routine. We swarm.
There are great visual ironies to the film. After showing clips of people rushing around like mad, it shows a person playing Robotron like mad. After showing a bird's eye view of a city, it shows a circuit board.
Some say that this movie is an environmentalist, or leftist in some way. I think the movie trancends political viewpoints. Watch it once a year to get back your sense of scale. We are statistics.
Ah, I see I was in fact a bit incorrect. The Food Pyramid was created in 1992 (strange, but I do remember something similar in the 80's).
While there have been some minor changes (butter vs margarine is an excellent example, but really a quibble since both are not good for you), the basic lessons are the same: avoid a high fat diet, eat plenty of fruits and vegetables, and exercise. This is what the government has been telling us for as long as I can remember.
No, the FDA & Surgeon General can in fact make up their mind. What is thought of as good for you today has not changed substantially in the last 50 years. The Food Pyramid is the same as ever.
no, we did use FFT, but I was referring to a particular statistical technique that uses singular value decomposition to break a number of waveforms into a series of component waveforms that are statistically significant.
From having worked with EEG's before, both on the recording end, and the analyzing end, I can tell you it is amazingly difficult.
We were doing something that would get much better results anything they can do in airports, which is fitting an cap of about 30 electrodes on the head, and meticulously calibrating them so they are in good contact with the scalp. It requires a special gel to get good conductivity.
Even so, the data was very difficult to analyze. There is a low signal to noise ratio. In our case we didn't have a lot of outside electrical noise, but there just is a lot going on inside a persons head. And different people have different EEG's, some very strong, others weak and hard to analyze. Analysis frequently requires advanced techniques such as wave decomposition (I'm forgetting the real term for this, though).
What this is about is signal detection. My personal view is that the signal to noise ratio will be incredibly low, making this detection fairly useless. Either there will be too many false alarms, or not enough hits. So i wouldn't start worrying yet.
According to The Third Chimpanzee by Jared Diamond, diamonds are a form of self-destructive competion for mates.
It's a similar situation to male peacock's tail feathers, which are obtrusive and make it difficult to walk around. A female, upon seeing such a male, will see that the bird has survived so far despite this massive tail that hinders its movements. Obviously it might be superior to a peacock that did not have such large tail-feathers, since that one did not have such a hurdle to go through. Sort of like if you see a skier with one leg, and a skier with two legs skiing down the mountain, you may assume the skier with one leg is a better skier, even though both are doing essentially the same thing.
So when you get a diamond, you are sending a signal that you can afford to spend money and still survive. The beautify of it is an extra. You might accomplish the same thing by wasting money in other ways as well.
This is Jared's speculation in this book. I'm not sure if I buy it, but it's an interesting theory anyway.
Everyone interested in the science of cooking should run out and buy On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee.
He has the same scientific approach as Alton Brown, and this book covers an immense amount of material, from emulsions to the science of kneading dough, to historical recipes showing how the Aztecs really made hot chocolate.
This is one of my favorite books. On the surface, it's a parody of spys and "military intelligence". Deeper down, it's really about the meaning of life. Replace "what is the mission" with "what is the meaning of life" and you see the parallels.
In another level, it's a great book for programmers. It often has the kind of problems programmers love to solve. You're looking to find out what is going on, and you have a certain number of clues. But every conclusion you draw from those clues violates a subset of them. There is seemingly nothing you can think of that would explain all of them. But are all of the clues important, perhaps some are mere coincidence? These are thoughts that every programmer has had while debugging a particularly nasty problem. It's fun in a way, and maddening in the way. It's what makes this book so special.
If you like that sort of thing, you might want to also checkout Lem's "The Investigation" and also "The Chain of Chance" for some deep mysteries.
Social Networks has been pretty slow to come to open source world. One of the few pieces of software I know that uses them is the R project, which now has some social network analysis tools.
For visualization, though, I'm currently unaware of any open-source tools. Krackplot has a free web interface, and there is a simple Java program that uses spring-based algorithms for node positioning, but I know of nothing open-source that uses Krackplot's simulated annealing algorithm.
In general, social network analysis can be very useful, but it's results are often subject to misinterpretation. For example, a social isolate in a business might be isolated for a good reason (they are doing research, for example), so you wouldn't want to tell them to integrate themselves more. But in general, it's a great tool to get another look at data you would not normally find out about.
By the time it's released for the Mac, the major bugs should be fixed (at least those that would affect both versions). It's always better to wait a little while for these things...
The Bay Area has implemented the same smart card system, which will go into production fairly soon. You can see the readers and add value machines around already - for example at the SF Caltrain Station.
I've used it in Hong Kong, it's a wonderful system . It will be a great thing for the Bay Area. There is no personalization attached to it here that I know of..
The very demographic that has been salivating over nanotechnology is the same demographic least likely to use the sunscreen it has produced. The only thing more ironic would be some sort of nano-technology condom.
Basically, when Mohammed died, there were two people seen as legitimate successors to him. Those who followed one were Sunni Muslims, and those who followed the other were Shi'ite Muslims.
Re:Something interesting about Moz on Windows XP
on
Mozilla RC3 Released
·
· Score: 1
That only solves half the problem. So the UI is native, but the buttons / input fields / combo boxes etc on web pages are still not. So on Mac OS X, a browser like OmniWeb, which is fully native, will always look better than Chimera (the Mac OS X specific Mozilla).
Yes, but it's purpose is to demonstrate security concepts that can be added into linux, not to actually be a secure distribution.
The NSA admits their linux is not secure. However, their definition of secure is very stringent, and it's fair to say that their linux has the potential to be far more secure than either normal linux or Windows.
Re:Some patterns to live by...
on
Bitter Java
·
· Score: 1
According to many of Sun's Java engineers, with the latest hotspot, it is not necessary to be paranoid about object creation. The hotspot compiler is optimized to deal with many short-lived objects.
Yes, I was referring to binary code, not c++ code. I really should double-check my posts for clarity.
Not all compilers support it, god-awful comp errs
on
Downsides to the C++ STL?
·
· Score: 5, Informative
The fact that no compilers support all of STL is admitted by Stroustrop (sp?). However, in practice, most of it indeed works as advertised. You shouldn't have much problem.
But the real bear is the compilation error messages, which can be pages long, and ultimately completely unreadable. This is due to template expansion, especially with STL classes (most of them) that take a large number of arguments, most of which have default values already.
Also, as with all templates in C++, there is code bloat. But it is a tradeoff between having more code or having better type checking. You have to decide what is right for you.
You are incorrect. Scientists who disagree with the majority position are not, in fact, shunned. There are a few (and only a few) respected climatoligists out there that believe global warming is nothing to worry about (one in particular thinks the problem will be self-correcting). In fact, the rewards for speaking out against global warming are enormous - the few dissenters are given a voice way out of proportion to the popularity of their views. See the incredible popularity of the recent book "The Environmental Skeptic" (sorry if I misremember the name).
The thing is, science is not nearly as arbitrary as you make it out to be. Your examples are drawn from scientific theories that have very little evidence to go on, as opposed to climate change, with a huge amount of evidence. You can see that these are clearly two different situations.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, you don't like Glass, and that's fine. Say what you will, his music is beautiful to some (including me).
However, I don't believe you can call the timing of some of his scoring "an error". Perhaps Glass made the decision conciously, perhaps because perfect alignment would be predictable, and putting the music earlier creates some tension because there is no visuals to go along with it. We don't know what he though. But we can't assume it was a simple error, because assuming music changes have to align with scene changes is very simplistic.
In my opinion, everyone should watch this movie once a year. It really puts things in perspective. And besides that, the visual and audio artistry are incredible, although Philip Glass isn't everyone's cup of tea.
Koyaanisqatsi is partly about the modern lifestyle, but in the more general sense, it is about humanity itself. It takes the us out of our routine life, up into a wider viewpoint, where individuality loses its meaning and we can see our lives as closer to what they are. Individual movements blend grossly to show the patterns of life. We are not unique. We follow the same routine. We swarm.
There are great visual ironies to the film. After showing clips of people rushing around like mad, it shows a person playing Robotron like mad. After showing a bird's eye view of a city, it shows a circuit board.
Some say that this movie is an environmentalist, or leftist in some way. I think the movie trancends political viewpoints. Watch it once a year to get back your sense of scale. We are statistics.
No, no, Objectivity is another database altogether. Now you're just confusing things.
Ah, I see I was in fact a bit incorrect. The Food Pyramid was created in 1992 (strange, but I do remember something similar in the 80's).
While there have been some minor changes (butter vs margarine is an excellent example, but really a quibble since both are not good for you), the basic lessons are the same: avoid a high fat diet, eat plenty of fruits and vegetables, and exercise. This is what the government has been telling us for as long as I can remember.
No, the FDA & Surgeon General can in fact make up their mind. What is thought of as good for you today has not changed substantially in the last 50 years. The Food Pyramid is the same as ever.
no, we did use FFT, but I was referring to a particular statistical technique that uses singular value decomposition to break a number of waveforms into a series of component waveforms that are statistically significant.
From having worked with EEG's before, both on the recording end, and the analyzing end, I can tell you it is amazingly difficult.
We were doing something that would get much better results anything they can do in airports, which is fitting an cap of about 30 electrodes on the head, and meticulously calibrating them so they are in good contact with the scalp. It requires a special gel to get good conductivity.
Even so, the data was very difficult to analyze. There is a low signal to noise ratio. In our case we didn't have a lot of outside electrical noise, but there just is a lot going on inside a persons head. And different people have different EEG's, some very strong, others weak and hard to analyze. Analysis frequently requires advanced techniques such as wave decomposition (I'm forgetting the real term for this, though).
What this is about is signal detection. My personal view is that the signal to noise ratio will be incredibly low, making this detection fairly useless. Either there will be too many false alarms, or not enough hits. So i wouldn't start worrying yet.
According to The Third Chimpanzee by Jared Diamond, diamonds are a form of self-destructive competion for mates.
It's a similar situation to male peacock's tail feathers, which are obtrusive and make it difficult to walk around. A female, upon seeing such a male, will see that the bird has survived so far despite this massive tail that hinders its movements. Obviously it might be superior to a peacock that did not have such large tail-feathers, since that one did not have such a hurdle to go through. Sort of like if you see a skier with one leg, and a skier with two legs skiing down the mountain, you may assume the skier with one leg is a better skier, even though both are doing essentially the same thing.
So when you get a diamond, you are sending a signal that you can afford to spend money and still survive. The beautify of it is an extra. You might accomplish the same thing by wasting money in other ways as well.
This is Jared's speculation in this book. I'm not sure if I buy it, but it's an interesting theory anyway.
All of these are great reasons to use COM/OLE/OpenDoc/RPC/XML/Soap etc!
.NET is just another step on the road to ease of integration.
My point is that
Everyone interested in the science of cooking should run out and buy On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee.
He has the same scientific approach as Alton Brown, and this book covers an immense amount of material, from emulsions to the science of kneading dough, to historical recipes showing how the Aztecs really made hot chocolate.
It's a must have.
This is one of my favorite books. On the surface, it's a parody of spys and "military intelligence". Deeper down, it's really about the meaning of life. Replace "what is the mission" with "what is the meaning of life" and you see the parallels.
In another level, it's a great book for programmers. It often has the kind of problems programmers love to solve. You're looking to find out what is going on, and you have a certain number of clues. But every conclusion you draw from those clues violates a subset of them. There is seemingly nothing you can think of that would explain all of them. But are all of the clues important, perhaps some are mere coincidence? These are thoughts that every programmer has had while debugging a particularly nasty problem. It's fun in a way, and maddening in the way. It's what makes this book so special.
If you like that sort of thing, you might want to also checkout Lem's "The Investigation" and also "The Chain of Chance" for some deep mysteries.
Social Networks has been pretty slow to come to open source world. One of the few pieces of software I know that uses them is the R project, which now has some social network analysis tools.
For visualization, though, I'm currently unaware of any open-source tools. Krackplot has a free web interface, and there is a simple Java program that uses spring-based algorithms for node positioning, but I know of nothing open-source that uses Krackplot's simulated annealing algorithm.
In general, social network analysis can be very useful, but it's results are often subject to misinterpretation. For example, a social isolate in a business might be isolated for a good reason (they are doing research, for example), so you wouldn't want to tell them to integrate themselves more. But in general, it's a great tool to get another look at data you would not normally find out about.
By the time it's released for the Mac, the major bugs should be fixed (at least those that would affect both versions). It's always better to wait a little while for these things...
The Bay Area has implemented the same smart card system, which will go into production fairly soon. You can see the readers and add value machines around already - for example at the SF Caltrain Station.
I've used it in Hong Kong, it's a wonderful system . It will be a great thing for the Bay Area. There is no personalization attached to it here that I know of..
The very demographic that has been salivating over nanotechnology is the same demographic least likely to use the sunscreen it has produced. The only thing more ironic would be some sort of nano-technology condom.
Yay! Our stupid spending caused our enemy to mimic our stupidity! We won!
Basically, when Mohammed died, there were two people seen as legitimate successors to him. Those who followed one were Sunni Muslims, and those who followed the other were Shi'ite Muslims.
That only solves half the problem. So the UI is native, but the buttons / input fields / combo boxes etc on web pages are still not. So on Mac OS X, a browser like OmniWeb, which is fully native, will always look better than Chimera (the Mac OS X specific Mozilla).
Yes, but it's purpose is to demonstrate security concepts that can be added into linux, not to actually be a secure distribution.
The NSA admits their linux is not secure. However, their definition of secure is very stringent, and it's fair to say that their linux has the potential to be far more secure than either normal linux or Windows.
According to many of Sun's Java engineers, with the latest hotspot, it is not necessary to be paranoid about object creation. The hotspot compiler is optimized to deal with many short-lived objects.
Yes, I was referring to binary code, not c++ code. I really should double-check my posts for clarity.
The fact that no compilers support all of STL is admitted by Stroustrop (sp?). However, in practice, most of it indeed works as advertised. You shouldn't have much problem.
But the real bear is the compilation error messages, which can be pages long, and ultimately completely unreadable. This is due to template expansion, especially with STL classes (most of them) that take a large number of arguments, most of which have default values already.
Also, as with all templates in C++, there is code bloat. But it is a tradeoff between having more code or having better type checking. You have to decide what is right for you.
Try Andrew Choi's patched emacs. It's a bit flaky, not 21.2 yet, but mostly usable.
Do you have a cite for that assertion?
You are incorrect. Scientists who disagree with the majority position are not, in fact, shunned. There are a few (and only a few) respected climatoligists out there that believe global warming is nothing to worry about (one in particular thinks the problem will be self-correcting). In fact, the rewards for speaking out against global warming are enormous - the few dissenters are given a voice way out of proportion to the popularity of their views. See the incredible popularity of the recent book "The Environmental Skeptic" (sorry if I misremember the name).
The thing is, science is not nearly as arbitrary as you make it out to be. Your examples are drawn from scientific theories that have very little evidence to go on, as opposed to climate change, with a huge amount of evidence. You can see that these are clearly two different situations.