Independant Confirmation
on
Uncle Tungsten
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I received this book for Christmas last year. I found it very interesting, albeit slightly slow.
One of the things that made the book enjoyable was that Sacks is an excellent writer: He is able to hold his own in both fiction and non-fiction, as scientists often tend to.
Uncle Tungsten gets top marks, especially for an autobiography, which I usually find godawful.
This is NOT an example of how to translate useful scientific information into journalism that is acceptable to the masses. Yet another telltale sign that professionalism has been overly segregated. No longer is it possible to be a journalism proficient in science and mathematics or a poet-engineer!
I write news for the paper at my University (U of Calgary, Canada)and it the inability of journalists to write about science is consistently shocking. I like to cover a broad range of stories, but because of my academic background, I am often assigned to stories of a scientific nature. Occaisionally, these end up being really important stories that are covered by the international media.
For instance, I covered this story, which was reported by every major new outfit in the country (though I'm not sure if it made it south of the border.
My point (I know it's here somewhere) is that no one has heard about it since the initial press release. Why? Because there was a major flaw that the primary researcher spoke explicitly about at the press conference. Why is this a problem? Because of every story I read in all of Canada, mine was the only one to mention the flaw. In fact, after the press conference a reporter from one of Canada's national television networks (C*C) approached me and said "You shouldn't ask so many confusing questions with big long words because it makes the rest of us look bad." Cripes!
Frankly, we all put way too much stock in the news media. This is a problem that won't be rectified until the owners of newspapers and TV networks wake up and realize that the onus is on them to provide even the most menial of educations to their reporters before sending them out into the fray.
This is a really cool idea and I'm glad it's beginning to pan out. If the global scientific community wants to continue to move forward during this century as rapidly as it did during the last, it needs to tackle problems with innovations like these instead of simply trying to ameliorate other people's ideas.
For instance, a friend of mine thinks that the future of the computer industry lies in abandonning the binary basis that has been established and beginning to work with, perhaps, a 4-state diode... Granted, it's not exactly the best idea, but a good example to illustrate my point: it's only a matter of time before old ideas get stale. How many of us have even considered Base n != 2 computing?
As a computer engineering student at another Canadian institution, the U of C, I watch my classmates struggle with assembly language day after day because, for the most part, their first programming experience was with a relatively high-level language like C.
Shifting the focus to an application development language like C# is completely ludicrous and it will only work to depreciate the already sinking value of a U of W education.
Designing applications in C# or Visual Basic is not the job of a Computer Engineer and it is not EVEN CLOSE to the job of an Electrical Engineer. Perhaps, I could see the relevance of this tool for Software Engg and CS students who don't give a shit about instruction throughput or pipelining, but even that's a bit of a stretch.
VBasic and C# may be great tools for quickly developping pretty applications (on Windows, at least) but they provide no solid foundation for the understanding the low-level mechanics of computers. VBasic doesn't even use short-circuit logic!
Besides, even if this were a valid academic pursuit, it's not really the place of a corporation like Microsoft to buy their way into post-secondary course content. If Putnam Berkley came to a University English Department and gave them an exorbitant amount of money to make a "Tom Clancey Appreciation" Course mandatory, the staff and students of the department would be up in arms!
In the good old days, a tenured prof would refuse to teach this material on the basis of ethical conflict. To me, this is yet another sign of the erosion of the value of tenure in the technical disciplines, especially ECE and CS.
Jeez... Not only is this stupid, but it's largely incorrect: not too many of these are actually ways to *skin* a cat! Dousing Mr Meow in gasoline and using him to ignite a billboard would get rid of a lot more than just his skin.
One of the defining features of my youth has been reading old, ragged copies of my mother's books. She was an English major at University and she took notes in the margins of books like Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, Heller's Catch-22, the Complete Works of William Shakespeare, the First Edition of LOTR, and Joyce's Ulysses.
I am an engineering student, but I love to read. Her insights (especially while reading Ulysses) are wonderfully helpful to someone who has a limited knowledge of literature. To boot, I have something that I can really associate with my mother about.
There's something intangible about picking up a 30-year old copy of your favourite novel and knowing that 5 or 6 other people have enjoyed it as well. This might seem sappy, but reading something from a monitor (or even from the screen of an iPaq) just doesn't have the same soul as reading from paper. It's the same reason why the National Post (a Canadian newspaper, eh?) will ALWAYS be better than The National Post.
Let's keep books of literature and education alive and relegate more soul-less forms of communication (like porn) to the computer world.
Hmmm... I didn't add the signature (below, in italics) until after that message was posted, hence the strange syntax of the end of the message... Does the signature apply itself post-humously to already-posted messages?
This has already been said... but it's "ludicrous", dude. "Ludacris" is a rapper, and a bad one at that. Butchery!
(Can we get a Pop-culture grammar filter over here please?)
Do yourself a favour and buy yourself a copy of the Oxford English Dictionary... perhaps one with large print?
[SPEAKING OF dictionaries: someone told me that the 1st Edition of Merriam-Webster's Dictionary was edited by a tenant of an insane asylum. Can anyone confirm/refute this as truth/myth?]
WS
Trout wrote of Eva Braun, "Her only crime was to have allowed a monster to ejaculate in her birth canal. These things happen to the best of women." --Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions
Actually, this IS my first experience with Windows programming. Everything I had done until I started here (I'm a summer student) was on Linux machines at school using emacs/gcc.
One problem I found with the documentation is that it's too scattered. They break up one topic into 9 or 10 different documents. This makes printing stuff off and putting it into a binder for future VBasic learners (this is a part of my job) a real pain in the ass. Is there an easy way to get around this?
True... I must admit that since I started *using*.NET (my employer decided that I should know how to use VB.NET) as opposed to just observing their hideously bad advertising campaign, it makes a lot more sense.
As for the documentation, I'll admit that it's thorough (and that I bitch about it more than I talk about how helpful it can be), but doesn't anyone else find the tangled mass of hotlinks more than mildly aggravating?
Is if someone at Microsoft can explain what the mythological construct of.NET is supposed to be. To me,.NET seems to be a generation of software, a plan to end all plans, a poorly woven mesh to weave together MS's myriad products, OR a documentation nightmare. Are they perhaps putting all of their eggs in the.NET basket?
The low quality of Bernard's grammar, given his threats of legal recourse, is mind boggling.
I myself have never filed a law suit, but I'm sure that if I did intend to, I would make that AT LEAST I had a thorough understanding of Fourth-Grade concepts such as proper apostrophe use.
I am an Engineering student at the University of Calgary, in Canada. As a writer for the student newspaper, I had the chance to write a story about a project called the AUTO21 project.
This is a multi-million dollar venture by the Canadian government that involves researchers in all fields, including sciences and humanities. Essentially what they are trying to achieve is a car that drives itself.
I interviewed the head of the U of C's Geomatics department, Dr. Gerard Lachapelle. He mentioned the European "rival" to GPS (he called it "Galileo"), but he did not seem to think of it as a rivalry at all. Quite on the contrary, he and his department plan on using both technologies extensively in their coming work on the project.
All the same, he seemed extremely excited about the prospect of a second system.
I'm not absolutely sure that it's eligible, but Charles Taylor's recent article on Salon.com entitled "The Morality Police" is definitely the best piece of online journalism that I have ever read.
Salon is unique in that it's authors have differing opinions: they don't all fit into their editor's socio-political mindset. I write for my University's newspaper and one thing that I notice every time that I attend a press conference is that most media employees are simply toeing the company line, not really expressing themselves as journalists. How sad.
The thing about Taylor's article is that it is insightful and it is not afraid of questioning norms and "established" values in order to get his point across. He even goes so far as to directly contradict another Salon.com article, a move that would be unprecedented in today's news media.
Amen. Lucas is nefarious for building up hype: I was way more excited downloading the trailers for episode 1 than when I actually saw the movie. To be quite honest, I'm sick of the fat man's self-indulgent crap. I can only think of one reason why he'd be opposed to DVD, and that is to attract attention to his "uniqueness". Let's hope that he wises up and concentrates on making Episode 2 a decent film.
Slashdot Mirror
I received this book for Christmas last year. I found it very interesting, albeit slightly slow.
One of the things that made the book enjoyable was that Sacks is an excellent writer: He is able to hold his own in both fiction and non-fiction, as scientists often tend to.
Uncle Tungsten gets top marks, especially for an autobiography, which I usually find godawful.
Rascist, ignorant trash like this is the reason for which censorship was invented
Seeing this post made me feel physically ill.
What a shitty article!
This is NOT an example of how to translate useful scientific information into journalism that is acceptable to the masses. Yet another telltale sign that professionalism has been overly segregated. No longer is it possible to be a journalism proficient in science and mathematics or a poet-engineer!
I write news for the paper at my University (U of Calgary, Canada)and it the inability of journalists to write about science is consistently shocking. I like to cover a broad range of stories, but because of my academic background, I am often assigned to stories of a scientific nature. Occaisionally, these end up being really important stories that are covered by the international media.
For instance, I covered this story, which was reported by every major new outfit in the country (though I'm not sure if it made it south of the border.
My point (I know it's here somewhere) is that no one has heard about it since the initial press release. Why? Because there was a major flaw that the primary researcher spoke explicitly about at the press conference. Why is this a problem? Because of every story I read in all of Canada, mine was the only one to mention the flaw. In fact, after the press conference a reporter from one of Canada's national television networks (C*C) approached me and said "You shouldn't ask so many confusing questions with big long words because it makes the rest of us look bad." Cripes!
Frankly, we all put way too much stock in the news media. This is a problem that won't be rectified until the owners of newspapers and TV networks wake up and realize that the onus is on them to provide even the most menial of educations to their reporters before sending them out into the fray.
Sorry about the rant,
ws
This is a really cool idea and I'm glad it's beginning to pan out. If the global scientific community wants to continue to move forward during this century as rapidly as it did during the last, it needs to tackle problems with innovations like these instead of simply trying to ameliorate other people's ideas.
For instance, a friend of mine thinks that the future of the computer industry lies in abandonning the binary basis that has been established and beginning to work with, perhaps, a 4-state diode... Granted, it's not exactly the best idea, but a good example to illustrate my point: it's only a matter of time before old ideas get stale. How many of us have even considered Base n != 2 computing?
As a computer engineering student at another Canadian institution, the U of C, I watch my classmates struggle with assembly language day after day because, for the most part, their first programming experience was with a relatively high-level language like C.
Shifting the focus to an application development language like C# is completely ludicrous and it will only work to depreciate the already sinking value of a U of W education.
Designing applications in C# or Visual Basic is not the job of a Computer Engineer and it is not EVEN CLOSE to the job of an Electrical Engineer. Perhaps, I could see the relevance of this tool for Software Engg and CS students who don't give a shit about instruction throughput or pipelining, but even that's a bit of a stretch.
VBasic and C# may be great tools for quickly developping pretty applications (on Windows, at least) but they provide no solid foundation for the understanding the low-level mechanics of computers. VBasic doesn't even use short-circuit logic!
Besides, even if this were a valid academic pursuit, it's not really the place of a corporation like Microsoft to buy their way into post-secondary course content. If Putnam Berkley came to a University English Department and gave them an exorbitant amount of money to make a "Tom Clancey Appreciation" Course mandatory, the staff and students of the department would be up in arms!
In the good old days, a tenured prof would refuse to teach this material on the basis of ethical conflict. To me, this is yet another sign of the erosion of the value of tenure in the technical disciplines, especially ECE and CS.
This "donation" sets a dangerous precedent.
ws
I am an engineering student, but I love to read. Her insights (especially while reading Ulysses) are wonderfully helpful to someone who has a limited knowledge of literature. To boot, I have something that I can really associate with my mother about.
There's something intangible about picking up a 30-year old copy of your favourite novel and knowing that 5 or 6 other people have enjoyed it as well. This might seem sappy, but reading something from a monitor (or even from the screen of an iPaq) just doesn't have the same soul as reading from paper. It's the same reason why the National Post (a Canadian newspaper, eh?) will ALWAYS be better than The National Post.
Let's keep books of literature and education alive and relegate more soul-less forms of communication (like porn) to the computer world.
Windside
--------
Thanks for the tip!
Hmmm... I didn't add the signature (below, in italics) until after that message was posted, hence the strange syntax of the end of the message... Does the signature apply itself post-humously to already-posted messages?
(Can we get a Pop-culture grammar filter over here please?)
Do yourself a favour and buy yourself a copy of the Oxford English Dictionary... perhaps one with large print?
[SPEAKING OF dictionaries: someone told me that the 1st Edition of Merriam-Webster's Dictionary was edited by a tenant of an insane asylum. Can anyone confirm/refute this as truth/myth?]
WS
Trout wrote of Eva Braun, "Her only crime was to have allowed a monster to ejaculate in her birth canal. These things happen to the best of women." --Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions
Actually, this IS my first experience with Windows programming. Everything I had done until I started here (I'm a summer student) was on Linux machines at school using emacs/gcc. One problem I found with the documentation is that it's too scattered. They break up one topic into 9 or 10 different documents. This makes printing stuff off and putting it into a binder for future VBasic learners (this is a part of my job) a real pain in the ass. Is there an easy way to get around this?
True... I must admit that since I started *using* .NET (my employer decided that I should know how to use VB .NET) as opposed to just observing their hideously bad advertising campaign, it makes a lot more sense.
As for the documentation, I'll admit that it's thorough (and that I bitch about it more than I talk about how helpful it can be), but doesn't anyone else find the tangled mass of hotlinks more than mildly aggravating?
Is if someone at Microsoft can explain what the mythological construct of .NET is supposed to be. To me, .NET seems to be a generation of software, a plan to end all plans, a poorly woven mesh to weave together MS's myriad products, OR a documentation nightmare. Are they perhaps putting all of their eggs in the .NET basket?
Wow.
The low quality of Bernard's grammar, given his threats of legal recourse, is mind boggling.
I myself have never filed a law suit, but I'm sure that if I did intend to, I would make that AT LEAST I had a thorough understanding of Fourth-Grade concepts such as proper apostrophe use.
Sheesh,
~windside~
Et si vous êtes suprèmes comme vous la dites, pourquoi n'osez vous pas discuter vos affaires en votre lange maternelle?
It's chauvenism, actually.
~windside~
I am an Engineering student at the University of Calgary, in Canada. As a writer for the student newspaper, I had the chance to write a story about a project called the AUTO21 project.
This is a multi-million dollar venture by the Canadian government that involves researchers in all fields, including sciences and humanities. Essentially what they are trying to achieve is a car that drives itself.
I interviewed the head of the U of C's Geomatics department, Dr. Gerard Lachapelle. He mentioned the European "rival" to GPS (he called it "Galileo"), but he did not seem to think of it as a rivalry at all. Quite on the contrary, he and his department plan on using both technologies extensively in their coming work on the project.
All the same, he seemed extremely excited about the prospect of a second system.
~windside
I'm not absolutely sure that it's eligible, but Charles Taylor's recent article on Salon.com entitled "The Morality Police" is definitely the best piece of online journalism that I have ever read.
Salon is unique in that it's authors have differing opinions: they don't all fit into their editor's socio-political mindset. I write for my University's newspaper and one thing that I notice every time that I attend a press conference is that most media employees are simply toeing the company line, not really expressing themselves as journalists. How sad.
The thing about Taylor's article is that it is insightful and it is not afraid of questioning norms and "established" values in order to get his point across. He even goes so far as to directly contradict another Salon.com article, a move that would be unprecedented in today's news media.
So cast my vote for "The Morality Police".
--windside
Amen. Lucas is nefarious for building up hype: I was way more excited downloading the trailers for episode 1 than when I actually saw the movie. To be quite honest, I'm sick of the fat man's self-indulgent crap. I can only think of one reason why he'd be opposed to DVD, and that is to attract attention to his "uniqueness". Let's hope that he wises up and concentrates on making Episode 2 a decent film.