Exactly. Consider the thermostat to be collateral damage.
(Now why the thermostat was running Windows and not a stripped-down application-specific program without even an OS is undoubtedly due to sloth on the part of the thermostat manufacturer. It's a frelling thermostat after all, even if it is remotely controllable over an ethernet connection.)
Lectures are marvelous, if you, the student, has put in enough effort to be able to actually concentrate for a full hour. I've taught a lot. I've won awards for my teaching. I often brag that if I was able to teach my non-mathematically inclined cousin enough algebra to get a B in his college course (we were the same age at the time, so perhaps tutoring is a better term), I can teach just about anyone just about anything. The key is that the student must be motivated.
So, why are lectures good for that? If you can watch a video of a lecture at any point, most students aren't going to bother, or are going to put off watching until the last possible second. When they watch the video, they can be easily distracted by phone calls, tweets, pulling out their phone to surf something else that came into their head, their roommates coming home, their dogs needing to go for a walk, whatever. When you're in lecture (at least one of my lectures), such distractions do not happen. Distractions make learning impossible. Having a live lecture that happens at a given time and at no other, means students must arrange their schedules to be there. A few will make even more effort and will be awake and prepared. I make it clear in my lectures that everyone is expected to be that way: awake and prepared. I call on people, even in the big lecture halls. I'm tough. I expect a lot, I assign a ton of work, and I grade hard. But students learn, and learn a tremendous amount.
Although I can teach, such lectures aren't for everyone, clearly. I don't hand-hold, unless the student absolutely requires it, and then only in a one-on-one session... and usually that brief hand-holding jumpstarts the students out of their overwhelmed haze and they do pretty well.
The thing people remember most about Lisp other than parentheses are CAR and CDR functions. These are named for specific fields in a PDP 36-bit word which were accessible via machine instructions.
Contents of Address Register Contents of Data Register
So you digitize them, do what you can to clean it up, compress with x264. You can ditch the VHS then.
And exactly how are you going to play that tape to digitize it?
The point in having a player for a given format is that there is minimal effort involved in playing content. Converting content to a new format always seems to be problematic. I bought a big box full of classic movies on VHS for next to nothing at a yard sale -- the cost (in time and money) to convert isn't worth the $20 VHS player I have hooked up in my system.
Bear in mind that unlike CDs and DVDs that can be ripped in faster-than-real-time, VHS players don't allow for 10x or 12x (or whatever multiplier DVD drives are up to these days) playback with clean results. Thus, ripping a movie on VHS tape takes a long time. While that doesn't have to be necessarily when you view the content, if it's a tape that will be viewed only once or twice, what's the point of going through that labor when, again, a cheapo VHS player will do the trick just fine.
Re:Something not mentioned -
on
Lake Vostok Reached
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Or, just as short-sighted (and more common) is the idea that somehow that bit of matter got stuck in time and has remained impervious to the forces of random genetic mutation and evolution through the intervening years. Same idea comes across when we land on some asteroid, or explore some new bit of Mars, and loudly declare that it is a sample of matter left over from the birth of the solar system, or some such huey, as if it popped through a portal in time. The forces of nature still act on such things, even if they've been isolated from more large-scale interactions.
Lake Vostok might (we think) have been sealed off for a very long time, but that doesn't mean it's a glimpse into the past, but, rather, a glimpse into a different version of the present.
If you read the linked article, it all sounds very interesting, and reasonable plausible, and even perhaps worth serious investigation. That is, until you hit first the part that sounds like a crank complaining about being ignored by mainstream science, and then the absurd notion that the fusion reaction in stars can only ignite from a running fission core (where did that fissile material come from then?), or the equally absurd notion that thermonuclear bombs are proof that stars can ignite in that way.
That said, I'm glad that someone took the idea of a sustaining nuclear reactor seriously enough to test it.
Ahh, grasshopper, you have forgotten that it is entirely possible to make money from trading stocks in companies you don't like. Forget the political self-consistency that keeps you warm and fuzzy in a delusional bed at night, trading stocks is all about money. Period.
If you believe in a company, that is a sure-fire indication that you should disqualify yourself from buying their stock, because it means you have a biased view. As my stock-broker cousin is fond of saying, people don't lose money in stocks because they're dumb, they lose money because they get emotionally attached.
No one is going to pat you on the back for buying or not buying a given stock. Once Facebook goes on the open market, the right play is to flip: buy immediately, set a stop-loss, and watch as it either goes up and sells at your target, or be thankful that your stop-loss gets triggered when it goes down. If you can spare the effort to actively track it, and it goes up, adjust your stop-loss in real time and then make some money.
Seriously, emoticons? Who ever thought it a good idea to include those in a standard? Should we have an encoding for hearts as dots over lower case i as well? And little horseys, too? And y with a big tail that wraps around to the front of the word?
I imagine that any paper would work well to clean the head, especially if you were to wet it with alcohol or some other solvent.
A number of times I've seen clerks wrap a single layer from a plastic bag around a poorly-reading card to improve the chances of getting a read from it. I suspect that the plastic serves mostly as a spacer to hold the card at a more consistent distance from the head.
What exactly is the advantage to these RFID credit cards?
One advantage is that magnetic stripes wear out. RFID cards won't. Similarly, swipe readers wear out, get gummed up, etc., whereas RF readers don't.
Personally, neither is a compelling enough argument for me as a consumer to get one. If I were responsible for the maintenance of POS terminals for a store, especially one with non-trivial traffic, that might be a different story.
The Hayden Planetarium mentioned in the article (which is in New York) is different than the Hayden Planetarium at the Museum of Science in Boston. They are, however, named for the same benefactor.
Open source is great. I use open source tools whenever possible, but only up to a point. My productivity is more important, because, ultimately, that is what my livelihood, and my family's well-being, is based upon. When a professional-grade open source tool is available, I'll use it preferentially. I'll even *buy* it or make contributions to the developer.
Now, in my experience, Adobe makes excellent products. Really, quite very excellent, and the open-source alternatives are far behind. When I'm still at a level for some task where I'm just screwing around, then open-source grade tools are fine. When I've risen to the level of getting paid for doing that task, and Adobe's asking $300 for a tool that will radically increase either my productivity or the quality of my work product, or both, then that's money well spent (and, depending on circumstance, also a tax deductable expense in the US). Heck, $300 is only a fraction of a billable day. For a highly useful tool? That's an expense hardly worth debating.
Just buy Dreamweaver. If you're being cheap, then find a used copy that's one version old (ie, CS4) on eBay or Craigslist, and somehow justify the extra time to buy that rather than just ordering Dreamweaver immediately.
Whether the distribution is precisely power law or exponential really doesn't really matter that much. With only 52 data points and anything more than trivial noise in the data, every model is going to be an approximation, right?
The bit of profound observation in the paper is surely that there is an aperiodic temporal pattern, and therefore a skewed distribution, that can be modelled with some accuracy. For one killer. And we all know, or should know, the dangers of generalizing from a single example.
An even better alternative is bio-diesel made from algae grown on the combination of CO2 and heat from power plant exhaust gas, and good old sunshine.
See the Wikipedia entry for GreenFuel Technologies... a potentially billion dollar company with really, really good technical people, and, regrettably, sub-par management. Due to the latter, they went out of business. It's such a brilliant approach that I hope someone buys up the IP and tries again.
This is one of the reasons I like going on transcontinental or transoceanic flights. No interruptions, no interactions. Earplugs in or headphones on, stupid backseat entertainment systems to placate the masses turned off, work materials out, and I get to think, think, think, think.
I've done some of my best work ever in the seat of an airplane.
Wait, wait... so if we take the wood and turn it into charcoal by outgassing, compress the charcoal, and then store it in underground caverns, maybe, oh, I don't know, um, old coal mines, the cycle will be complete!
Kidding aside, it sounds like a good idea and, with some effort, could be part of a long-term shift in energy source from coal to processed wood, which is probably a good thing, especially if the outgassing products are trapped and used for raw materials.
I had thought that internal combustion engines worked at peak efficiency when at open throttle. No, I'm not joking. At open throttle, there is far less friction from the intake path, the cylinders get maximum fuel-air load, there's maximum pre-ignition mixing, the fraction of work done by the combusting fuel that goes to moving the car rather than internal friction of the engine and drivetrain is maximized, etc.
The problem with wide-open operation is that it results in maximum acceleration. So driving like a bat out of hell for 50 ft and then coasting until the next stop without applying the brakes (which would result in maximum fuel efficiency) is really hard to do. It's also hard to accurately predict what your maximum speed should be on a given short stretch of secondary road after a full stop, and any acceleration over that is definitely wasted. Finally, maximum acceleration often results in less than optimal operator control.
I have a 40 year old sports car that gets 30 mpg, even when I stomp on it. But the carbs on that were (a) highly engineered to deliver maximum power (making them punishingly expensive when new -- their two banks of three throats cost more than most contemporaneous new cars did), and (b) are kept in tip-top condition like the rest of the engine.
Not sure about ATV tires per se, but shaving the top few mm of tread off of auto tires for racing purposes is standard stuff. There are machines specifically built for it that are not unlike large lathes. I can't imagine that ATV tires would be that different, so if someone describes it as an unpleasant process, they might not be using the right tools for the job.
I'm thinking the limitation will be the amount of power used when communicating with the local network. When transmitting, cell phones blast out a fair bit of RF power, on the order of 1 W, if memory serves. Audio, on the other hand, is easy to do with 10 mW or so when the speaker is near one's ear. Moreover, even in standby mode, phones still periodically connect to the local network which requires bursts of high power.
Because many people do not have $5K to spend on entertainment.
(Personally, if I had a spare $5K, it most assuredly is going to some kind of savings, retirement, or educational fund account. Or to pay down the mortgage. $5K on a nice place to spend an hour a week? Not happening. I can get a sitter and go to the cinema with my wife each week for two years, for that kind of cash.)
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Exactly. Consider the thermostat to be collateral damage.
(Now why the thermostat was running Windows and not a stripped-down application-specific program without even an OS is undoubtedly due to sloth on the part of the thermostat manufacturer. It's a frelling thermostat after all, even if it is remotely controllable over an ethernet connection.)
Lectures are marvelous, if you, the student, has put in enough effort to be able to actually concentrate for a full hour. I've taught a lot. I've won awards for my teaching. I often brag that if I was able to teach my non-mathematically inclined cousin enough algebra to get a B in his college course (we were the same age at the time, so perhaps tutoring is a better term), I can teach just about anyone just about anything. The key is that the student must be motivated.
So, why are lectures good for that? If you can watch a video of a lecture at any point, most students aren't going to bother, or are going to put off watching until the last possible second. When they watch the video, they can be easily distracted by phone calls, tweets, pulling out their phone to surf something else that came into their head, their roommates coming home, their dogs needing to go for a walk, whatever. When you're in lecture (at least one of my lectures), such distractions do not happen. Distractions make learning impossible. Having a live lecture that happens at a given time and at no other, means students must arrange their schedules to be there. A few will make even more effort and will be awake and prepared. I make it clear in my lectures that everyone is expected to be that way: awake and prepared. I call on people, even in the big lecture halls. I'm tough. I expect a lot, I assign a ton of work, and I grade hard. But students learn, and learn a tremendous amount.
Although I can teach, such lectures aren't for everyone, clearly. I don't hand-hold, unless the student absolutely requires it, and then only in a one-on-one session ... and usually that brief hand-holding jumpstarts the students out of their overwhelmed haze and they do pretty well.
The thing people remember most about Lisp other than parentheses are CAR and CDR functions. These are named for specific fields in a PDP 36-bit word which were accessible via machine instructions.
Contents of Address Register
Contents of Data Register
So you digitize them, do what you can to clean it up, compress with x264. You can ditch the VHS then.
And exactly how are you going to play that tape to digitize it?
The point in having a player for a given format is that there is minimal effort involved in playing content. Converting content to a new format always seems to be problematic. I bought a big box full of classic movies on VHS for next to nothing at a yard sale -- the cost (in time and money) to convert isn't worth the $20 VHS player I have hooked up in my system.
Bear in mind that unlike CDs and DVDs that can be ripped in faster-than-real-time, VHS players don't allow for 10x or 12x (or whatever multiplier DVD drives are up to these days) playback with clean results. Thus, ripping a movie on VHS tape takes a long time. While that doesn't have to be necessarily when you view the content, if it's a tape that will be viewed only once or twice, what's the point of going through that labor when, again, a cheapo VHS player will do the trick just fine.
Or, just as short-sighted (and more common) is the idea that somehow that bit of matter got stuck in time and has remained impervious to the forces of random genetic mutation and evolution through the intervening years. Same idea comes across when we land on some asteroid, or explore some new bit of Mars, and loudly declare that it is a sample of matter left over from the birth of the solar system, or some such huey, as if it popped through a portal in time. The forces of nature still act on such things, even if they've been isolated from more large-scale interactions.
Lake Vostok might (we think) have been sealed off for a very long time, but that doesn't mean it's a glimpse into the past, but, rather, a glimpse into a different version of the present.
If you read the linked article, it all sounds very interesting, and reasonable plausible, and even perhaps worth serious investigation. That is, until you hit first the part that sounds like a crank complaining about being ignored by mainstream science, and then the absurd notion that the fusion reaction in stars can only ignite from a running fission core (where did that fissile material come from then?), or the equally absurd notion that thermonuclear bombs are proof that stars can ignite in that way.
That said, I'm glad that someone took the idea of a sustaining nuclear reactor seriously enough to test it.
Ahh, grasshopper, you have forgotten that it is entirely possible to make money from trading stocks in companies you don't like. Forget the political self-consistency that keeps you warm and fuzzy in a delusional bed at night, trading stocks is all about money. Period.
If you believe in a company, that is a sure-fire indication that you should disqualify yourself from buying their stock, because it means you have a biased view. As my stock-broker cousin is fond of saying, people don't lose money in stocks because they're dumb, they lose money because they get emotionally attached.
No one is going to pat you on the back for buying or not buying a given stock. Once Facebook goes on the open market, the right play is to flip: buy immediately, set a stop-loss, and watch as it either goes up and sells at your target, or be thankful that your stop-loss gets triggered when it goes down. If you can spare the effort to actively track it, and it goes up, adjust your stop-loss in real time and then make some money.
Seriously, emoticons? Who ever thought it a good idea to include those in a standard? Should we have an encoding for hearts as dots over lower case i as well? And little horseys, too? And y with a big tail that wraps around to the front of the word?
I imagine that any paper would work well to clean the head, especially if you were to wet it with alcohol or some other solvent.
A number of times I've seen clerks wrap a single layer from a plastic bag around a poorly-reading card to improve the chances of getting a read from it. I suspect that the plastic serves mostly as a spacer to hold the card at a more consistent distance from the head.
What exactly is the advantage to these RFID credit cards?
One advantage is that magnetic stripes wear out. RFID cards won't. Similarly, swipe readers wear out, get gummed up, etc., whereas RF readers don't.
Personally, neither is a compelling enough argument for me as a consumer to get one. If I were responsible for the maintenance of POS terminals for a store, especially one with non-trivial traffic, that might be a different story.
The Hayden Planetarium mentioned in the article (which is in New York) is different than the Hayden Planetarium at the Museum of Science in Boston. They are, however, named for the same benefactor.
Monoprice.com is your friend.
Open source is great. I use open source tools whenever possible, but only up to a point. My productivity is more important, because, ultimately, that is what my livelihood, and my family's well-being, is based upon. When a professional-grade open source tool is available, I'll use it preferentially. I'll even *buy* it or make contributions to the developer.
Now, in my experience, Adobe makes excellent products. Really, quite very excellent, and the open-source alternatives are far behind. When I'm still at a level for some task where I'm just screwing around, then open-source grade tools are fine. When I've risen to the level of getting paid for doing that task, and Adobe's asking $300 for a tool that will radically increase either my productivity or the quality of my work product, or both, then that's money well spent (and, depending on circumstance, also a tax deductable expense in the US). Heck, $300 is only a fraction of a billable day. For a highly useful tool? That's an expense hardly worth debating.
Just buy Dreamweaver. If you're being cheap, then find a used copy that's one version old (ie, CS4) on eBay or Craigslist, and somehow justify the extra time to buy that rather than just ordering Dreamweaver immediately.
Whether the distribution is precisely power law or exponential really doesn't really matter that much. With only 52 data points and anything more than trivial noise in the data, every model is going to be an approximation, right?
The bit of profound observation in the paper is surely that there is an aperiodic temporal pattern, and therefore a skewed distribution, that can be modelled with some accuracy. For one killer. And we all know, or should know, the dangers of generalizing from a single example.
An even better alternative is bio-diesel made from algae grown on the combination of CO2 and heat from power plant exhaust gas, and good old sunshine.
See the Wikipedia entry for GreenFuel Technologies ... a potentially billion dollar company with really, really good technical people, and, regrettably, sub-par management. Due to the latter, they went out of business. It's such a brilliant approach that I hope someone buys up the IP and tries again.
kids were holding on to the back of buses during the winter and "sledding"
Back in the day, that was called bumper sketching.
This is one of the reasons I like going on transcontinental or transoceanic flights. No interruptions, no interactions. Earplugs in or headphones on, stupid backseat entertainment systems to placate the masses turned off, work materials out, and I get to think, think, think, think.
I've done some of my best work ever in the seat of an airplane.
Wait, wait... so if we take the wood and turn it into charcoal by outgassing, compress the charcoal, and then store it in underground caverns, maybe, oh, I don't know, um, old coal mines, the cycle will be complete!
Kidding aside, it sounds like a good idea and, with some effort, could be part of a long-term shift in energy source from coal to processed wood, which is probably a good thing, especially if the outgassing products are trapped and used for raw materials.
I had thought that internal combustion engines worked at peak efficiency when at open throttle. No, I'm not joking. At open throttle, there is far less friction from the intake path, the cylinders get maximum fuel-air load, there's maximum pre-ignition mixing, the fraction of work done by the combusting fuel that goes to moving the car rather than internal friction of the engine and drivetrain is maximized, etc.
The problem with wide-open operation is that it results in maximum acceleration. So driving like a bat out of hell for 50 ft and then coasting until the next stop without applying the brakes (which would result in maximum fuel efficiency) is really hard to do. It's also hard to accurately predict what your maximum speed should be on a given short stretch of secondary road after a full stop, and any acceleration over that is definitely wasted. Finally, maximum acceleration often results in less than optimal operator control.
I have a 40 year old sports car that gets 30 mpg, even when I stomp on it. But the carbs on that were (a) highly engineered to deliver maximum power (making them punishingly expensive when new -- their two banks of three throats cost more than most contemporaneous new cars did), and (b) are kept in tip-top condition like the rest of the engine.
Not sure about ATV tires per se, but shaving the top few mm of tread off of auto tires for racing purposes is standard stuff. There are machines specifically built for it that are not unlike large lathes. I can't imagine that ATV tires would be that different, so if someone describes it as an unpleasant process, they might not be using the right tools for the job.
Cold air doesn't hold that much moisture, and thus is considered dry. Warm air can carry much more water vapor.
I've heard this many times, too, and yet, 91% (the normal high-proof isopropyl that we get around here) stings in cuts more than 70% does.
Also, it would seem that higher proof alcohols, rather than isotonic, would serve to dehydrate a bacterium and thus kill it better.
Morse code for S-M-S. I didn't know that!
I'm thinking the limitation will be the amount of power used when communicating with the local network. When transmitting, cell phones blast out a fair bit of RF power, on the order of 1 W, if memory serves. Audio, on the other hand, is easy to do with 10 mW or so when the speaker is near one's ear. Moreover, even in standby mode, phones still periodically connect to the local network which requires bursts of high power.
Because many people do not have $5K to spend on entertainment.
(Personally, if I had a spare $5K, it most assuredly is going to some kind of savings, retirement, or educational fund account. Or to pay down the mortgage. $5K on a nice place to spend an hour a week? Not happening. I can get a sitter and go to the cinema with my wife each week for two years, for that kind of cash.)