Hmm, it's a while since I've read up on the history of eugenics but I'm pretty sure castration wasn't a favoured method, but rather surgical sterilization (ie cutting the tubes) was used instead. Otherwise, nice post. An always fun fact is that until the Nazis made eugenics their own, the United States led the world in eugenic sterilizations (IIRC, some 70000 in total, the majority in California I think). And it continued in some asylums until the late 1960s or early 1970s.
Yes - yes, I would have. Actually it was only for an honours thesis and the earliest year I was looking at was 1908. I hope to start a PhD next year but still the 19th century will be of no use to me. Damn you, British Library, damn you!
Pianists Seek Curbs on Player Piano Technology
"Roll Sharing" Circles Seen as Threat to Recital Revenues
Actually, I was highly amused to come across a brief
article in a British newspaper ca. 1910 recording the arrest of some hardcore "music pirates" (it actually used that term, IIRC). Pirating sheet music, that is!
A century on and things haven't changed that much. The world's first airline, DELAG, used Zeppelins from 1909-1914 and charged 200 marks per flight. Probably about the same number of passengers (or less), and also mainly used for sightseeing. The main difference is that DELAG carried something like 10000 passengers total (from memory; books are at home) which I suspect is rather more than Zeppelin NT has managed!
By your logic, if 99.999% of the electorate did not vote, then the leader you end up with is all the fault of the 0.001% who did. Cast a protest vote if you don't like any of the candidates, or spoil your ballot paper. But doing nothing at all will change nothing. No one will ever know why you didn't vote. Or care, except psephologists...
Replying to my own post, because as usual after beating my head against a wall for weeks trying to solve this, after posting a question about it I worked out the answer! Moron. Anyway, these preferences ARE controlled from the
Netinfo server via Workgroup Manager, simply by selecting
the relevant workgroup for the lab (ie the "rectangle" tab) and
then Preferences, Applications. Too easy.
Good post. Another variable ancient unit was the hour - of which there were 12 between sunrise and sunset. So the length of an hour depended on latitude and time of year.
This has been bugging me for a while. In OS X 10.2+, you can restrict allowed applications, access to CDROM, etc
from the "Capabilities..." button from the Accounts preference pane. But where is this information actually stored? Doesn't seem to be in Netinfo, the logical place. Or in/Library or (less likely)/System or/etc. Or ~/Library (which would be a silly place to put it, anyway). I have tried making a change to the capabilites and then doing a (command line) find on recently modified files, but this turned up nothing. Tried googling, which usually helps, but not this time. So I'm stumped.
The reason I care is that I have somehow set up a 10.2
lab with restricted application access (which I now need to remove). But I can't remember how I did that. The login account is served from a Netinfo server, so it doesn't show up in the local list of accounts, so capabilities can't be modified there. On the server, there are two Netinfo domains. The root one doesn't have the lab login account, and this is the domain that shows up in the Accounts preference pane. The domain that the account IS in is only accessible from the Workgroup Manager, which DOESN'T have the ability to edit capabilties.
That's hardly the same thing, unless Babbage's plans included things like "device that does computation goes here". As far as I can tell, that was not the case: his designs were complete, just unrealised in his day.
Not so. My non-geeky siblings love Futurama. In fact, my sister was initially put off by the sci-fi geekiness, but after listening to me rave about it she gave it a chance and became a fan. It's not ALL geek jokes. Yes, geeks will the most out of it, but that's similar to the Simpsons, where you have to be an adult to get a lot of the jokes and references. A lot of them fly over my youngest brother's head (he's 16 now), but that's never prevented him from enjoying it. The best cartoons are written on different levels like this, IMHO.
Well... I see what you are saying - in genetics, the Gs, As, Ts and Cs are the raw data. Fair enough (although surely there are levels of data more raw than that). But perhaps we are not comparing like with like. In a sense gene sequencing is a subset of chemistry - when you come down to it, these are just molecules - particularly important, fascinating and complex molecules, but molecules nonetheless. But geneticists aren't interested in all molecules, not are they interested in all chemical properties of the molecules they are interested in. Therefore, when they do their thing, they discard anything and everything which is irrelevant to them, abstracting it all down to combinations of G/A/T/C. But there might be other interesting things in their original samples - other new molecules, a cure for cancer, who knows what. In fact, we'll never know, because all we have is a gene sequence and that's all that goes into GenBank. Astronomers do the same; if they are looking for galaxies, they ignore the foreground stars (and vice versa).
But with a virtual observatory, there is no such filtering going on. So you can use that data to look for almost anything you like - asteroids, variable stars, MACHOs, gravitational lenses - whereas an astronomical equivalent of GenBank would only let you look for new galaxies (or some other equally narrow subset of all astronomical objects). Having looked at your homepage I realise that genomics is your field and it's certainly not mine, so I apologise if I have egregiously mischaracterised its scope.
BTW, I enjoyed your scientific genealogy! I can trace mine via P.A.M. Dirac to Ralph Fowler, who as it happens was Rutherford's son-in-law. I also have people like Fred Hoyle, Stephen Hawking and the current Astronomer Royal in my scientific family tree. But as I only have a master's, I am probably illegitimate or something...
Well, one major difference I can think of is that virtual observatories will include raw data (eg the AUS-VO has 13 years worth of raw observations made by the Australia Telescope Compact Array). So you can look for things in that data that wasn't dreamed of by the astronomers who took it in the first place. For example, those foreground stars may merely be an irritant to someone looking at that background galaxy cluster, but to a stellar dynamicist they might be very interesting.
As I understand it, GenBank is just a catalogue of gene sequences, which is to say, the end results of data analysis. This is equivalent in the astronomy world to a catalogue of galaxies or stars or whatnot (which virtual observatories will also include). Of course you can get new science from such a database, but it's a very different kettle of fish to making available all the raw data that the geneticists used to derive the gene sequences in the first place, which could be even more useful (well, I imagine so, but perhaps it wouldn't be useful at all to other geneticists). So a virtual observatory is not mere hyperbole, IMHO, because it can be used to make what are effectively "new" observations of astronomical objects, as well as datamine previously compiled catalogues (a la GenBank, or in astronomy, NED or SIMBAD).
Erm, well, I'm rambling a bit so I'll shut up now.
OK, so you're a troll, or at the most a flame-baiter. But since you spout rhetoric about my having "zero sense of perspective or history", it may amuse you to know that I'm actually a modern history student and not a "script kiddy programmer". I'll take you on any day of the week when it comes to historical perspective.
But that's irrelevent because the issue I have with your post is the logic - that something has to be as bad as the Holocaust before you should try and stop it. No, 1/10th - or even 1/100th or 1/1000th - as bad as the Holocaust is OK, let's wait until it goes all the way. McCarthyism didn't kill anyone, therefore it was OK and nobody should have lifted a finger to stop it. (And stop blathering about gun rights, I never mentioned anything about the means employed for prevention of tyranny. But the earlier you start, the less need there will be for gunfire.) Sorry to disappoint you, but concerned citizens are perfectly entitled to defend their rights before things get anywhere near as bad as the Holocaust.
PS For your future reference, I'm not an American nor do I live in the USA. So leave me out of your fantasies please.
Yes, by all means you should wait until it's as bad as the Holocaust before doing anything about PATRIOT. Do you need someone to explain to you how utterly insane that is?
Why do you assume the university won't send out his transcript? Surely (and I say this as a long-time student and full-time university employee) they send out incomplete transcripts all the time - eg during your course, and if you transfer to another university before you complete your course (ie so you can get credits). I would expect it would say, as you suggest, that the student had been "dishonourably discharged". Moreover, those subjects he had been shown to be cheating in will be marked "Did Not Finish" or "Cheated His Ass Off" or something. I would assume he could get credits for those subjects where cheating was not proven to have occurred - if any other university would take him. But maybe it's different overseas.
It was criminal negligence for profit - why xray all the weld joints in the plant when you can get paid to xray the same one over and over and no-one will check? It is the textbook example of why you have to have enough people to see if contractors are actually doing the work.
Umm, you are thinking of the Jane Fonda movie The China Syndrome. And no, that wasn't a fictionalised account of the Three Mile Island incident, if that's what you are thinking - the film was released days before the accident. See here.
But Hyams did Capricorn One and 2010 - neither of them great, but still worthy SF movies, better than 90% of the dreck that passes for SF in the cinema. Even Time Cop had its virtues, as I recall - the time travel aspects were handled quite well.
On the other hand, given his track record, it's fair to say A Sound of Thunder is unlikely to be brilliant. A decent job is about the most we can expect.
Well, you are entitled to your opinion, but aside from sharing the very broad theme of mankind getting boosted up to the next stage of evolution with the help of extraterrestrials, Childhood's End and 2001 are otherwise very different in form and tone. The events in "The Sentinal", at least, pretty much forms a single basic plot element of 2001 and is the acknowledged starting point for it. But it's mere hyperbole to say 99% of 2001 is from these two works. Even leaving aside the plot elements which do not appear in the earlier works (the Dawn of Man, the mission to Jupiter, the monoliths), surely HAL alone is more than 1% of 2001 (whatever that means!) ??
Perhaps because Tiberius was also one of those emperors who whole-heartedly espoused colonial expansionism ?
Hey? As I recall, Tiberius basically stopped the expansion of the empire during his reign, despite (or because of) his being an able general who had undertaken several campaigns into Germany during the reign of Augustus. The next major expansion wasn't until Trajan conquered Dacia and Mesopotamia a century later.
See, eg, this, which says that "Tiberius did not expand the empire" and "embarked on no major wars of conquest".
Hmm, while there were some claims of disparities between what Pakistan claimed to have tested and what could be independently verified, according to FAS it seems pretty clear that Pakistan did explode several nuclear weapons.
This is true - I assume you are referring to the fact that the Apple EULA specifies that OS X can only be installed "on a single Apple-labeled computer" (clause 2.A).
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm, it's a while since I've read up on the history of eugenics but I'm pretty sure castration wasn't a favoured method, but rather surgical sterilization (ie cutting the tubes) was used instead. Otherwise, nice post. An always fun fact is that until the Nazis made eugenics their own, the United States led the world in eugenic sterilizations (IIRC, some 70000 in total, the majority in California I think). And it continued in some asylums until the late 1960s or early 1970s.
Yes - yes, I would have. Actually it was only for an honours thesis and the earliest year I was looking at was 1908. I hope to start a PhD next year but still the 19th century will be of no use to me. Damn you, British Library, damn you!
Actually, I was highly amused to come across a brief article in a British newspaper ca. 1910 recording the arrest of some hardcore "music pirates" (it actually used that term, IIRC). Pirating sheet music, that is!
A century on and things haven't changed that much. The world's first airline, DELAG, used Zeppelins from 1909-1914 and charged 200 marks per flight. Probably about the same number of passengers (or less), and also mainly used for sightseeing. The main difference is that DELAG carried something like 10000 passengers total (from memory; books are at home) which I suspect is rather more than Zeppelin NT has managed!
By your logic, if 99.999% of the electorate did not vote, then the leader you end up with is all the fault of the 0.001% who did. Cast a protest vote if you don't like any of the candidates, or spoil your ballot paper. But doing nothing at all will change nothing. No one will ever know why you didn't vote. Or care, except psephologists ...
Yes, that makes perfect sense.
Replying to my own post, because as usual after beating my head against a wall for weeks trying to solve this, after posting a question about it I worked out the answer! Moron. Anyway, these preferences ARE controlled from the Netinfo server via Workgroup Manager, simply by selecting the relevant workgroup for the lab (ie the "rectangle" tab) and then Preferences, Applications. Too easy.
Good post. Another variable ancient unit was the hour - of which there were 12 between sunrise and sunset. So the length of an hour depended on latitude and time of year.
The reason I care is that I have somehow set up a 10.2 lab with restricted application access (which I now need to remove). But I can't remember how I did that. The login account is served from a Netinfo server, so it doesn't show up in the local list of accounts, so capabilities can't be modified there. On the server, there are two Netinfo domains. The root one doesn't have the lab login account, and this is the domain that shows up in the Accounts preference pane. The domain that the account IS in is only accessible from the Workgroup Manager, which DOESN'T have the ability to edit capabilties.
Any ideas?
That's hardly the same thing, unless Babbage's plans included things like "device that does computation goes here". As far as I can tell, that was not the case: his designs were complete, just unrealised in his day.
OK ... maybe you can clue me in here, how is an AB different from a BA? I've wondered about that before. And what's an ABD??
Not so. My non-geeky siblings love Futurama. In fact, my sister was initially put off by the sci-fi geekiness, but after listening to me rave about it she gave it a chance and became a fan. It's not ALL geek jokes. Yes, geeks will the most out of it, but that's similar to the Simpsons, where you have to be an adult to get a lot of the jokes and references. A lot of them fly over my youngest brother's head (he's 16 now), but that's never prevented him from enjoying it. The best cartoons are written on different levels like this, IMHO.
Yeah, that bit always cracks me up too!
But with a virtual observatory, there is no such filtering going on. So you can use that data to look for almost anything you like - asteroids, variable stars, MACHOs, gravitational lenses - whereas an astronomical equivalent of GenBank would only let you look for new galaxies (or some other equally narrow subset of all astronomical objects). Having looked at your homepage I realise that genomics is your field and it's certainly not mine, so I apologise if I have egregiously mischaracterised its scope.
BTW, I enjoyed your scientific genealogy! I can trace mine via P.A.M. Dirac to Ralph Fowler, who as it happens was Rutherford's son-in-law. I also have people like Fred Hoyle, Stephen Hawking and the current Astronomer Royal in my scientific family tree. But as I only have a master's, I am probably illegitimate or something ...
As I understand it, GenBank is just a catalogue of gene sequences, which is to say, the end results of data analysis. This is equivalent in the astronomy world to a catalogue of galaxies or stars or whatnot (which virtual observatories will also include). Of course you can get new science from such a database, but it's a very different kettle of fish to making available all the raw data that the geneticists used to derive the gene sequences in the first place, which could be even more useful (well, I imagine so, but perhaps it wouldn't be useful at all to other geneticists). So a virtual observatory is not mere hyperbole, IMHO, because it can be used to make what are effectively "new" observations of astronomical objects, as well as datamine previously compiled catalogues (a la GenBank, or in astronomy, NED or SIMBAD).
Erm, well, I'm rambling a bit so I'll shut up now.
But that's irrelevent because the issue I have with your post is the logic - that something has to be as bad as the Holocaust before you should try and stop it. No, 1/10th - or even 1/100th or 1/1000th - as bad as the Holocaust is OK, let's wait until it goes all the way. McCarthyism didn't kill anyone, therefore it was OK and nobody should have lifted a finger to stop it. (And stop blathering about gun rights, I never mentioned anything about the means employed for prevention of tyranny. But the earlier you start, the less need there will be for gunfire.) Sorry to disappoint you, but concerned citizens are perfectly entitled to defend their rights before things get anywhere near as bad as the Holocaust.
PS For your future reference, I'm not an American nor do I live in the USA. So leave me out of your fantasies please.
Yes, by all means you should wait until it's as bad as the Holocaust before doing anything about PATRIOT. Do you need someone to explain to you how utterly insane that is?
Why do you assume the university won't send out his transcript? Surely (and I say this as a long-time student and full-time university employee) they send out incomplete transcripts all the time - eg during your course, and if you transfer to another university before you complete your course (ie so you can get credits). I would expect it would say, as you suggest, that the student had been "dishonourably discharged". Moreover, those subjects he had been shown to be cheating in will be marked "Did Not Finish" or "Cheated His Ass Off" or something. I would assume he could get credits for those subjects where cheating was not proven to have occurred - if any other university would take him. But maybe it's different overseas.
Umm, you are thinking of the Jane Fonda movie The China Syndrome. And no, that wasn't a fictionalised account of the Three Mile Island incident, if that's what you are thinking - the film was released days before the accident. See here.
On the other hand, given his track record, it's fair to say A Sound of Thunder is unlikely to be brilliant. A decent job is about the most we can expect.
Urgh. You mean like Bram Stoker's Dracula, by Fred Saberhagen and James V. Hart? That just makes me cringe every time I think of it.
Well, you are entitled to your opinion, but aside from sharing the very broad theme of mankind getting boosted up to the next stage of evolution with the help of extraterrestrials, Childhood's End and 2001 are otherwise very different in form and tone. The events in "The Sentinal", at least, pretty much forms a single basic plot element of 2001 and is the acknowledged starting point for it. But it's mere hyperbole to say 99% of 2001 is from these two works. Even leaving aside the plot elements which do not appear in the earlier works (the Dawn of Man, the mission to Jupiter, the monoliths), surely HAL alone is more than 1% of 2001 (whatever that means!) ??
Hey? As I recall, Tiberius basically stopped the expansion of the empire during his reign, despite (or because of) his being an able general who had undertaken several campaigns into Germany during the reign of Augustus. The next major expansion wasn't until Trajan conquered Dacia and Mesopotamia a century later.
See, eg, this, which says that "Tiberius did not expand the empire" and "embarked on no major wars of conquest".
Hmm, while there were some claims of disparities between what Pakistan claimed to have tested and what could be independently verified, according to FAS it seems pretty clear that Pakistan did explode several nuclear weapons.
This is true - I assume you are referring to the fact that the Apple EULA specifies that OS X can only be installed "on a single Apple-labeled computer" (clause 2.A).