You could replace this statement with 'I found jesus' and it would have the same meaning. Just because you have a family now doesn't mean you're in bliss, and it doesn't mean that others would be too. The only thing you did was replace one burden with another.
Do you have a spouse? Kids? Because the grandparent is exactly right - You don't replace a burden with another burden. You remove a burden by realizing that other stuff is more important. Stuff like pushing your kid on the swing or having a glass of wine with your wife after you've read the kids bedtime stories and tucked them in. So your OCD database of your comic book collection is out of date, and your DVDs aren't alphabetical. So what? If you choose to have a family you'll discover that stuff was just a waste of your life... Just ask your parents or your grandparents...
I have a spouse. I have a kid.
I also wish I had journals, newspaper clippings, sketches, draft manuscripts, etc., from my grandparents who passed away either before I was born, or when I was very young. I either didn't know at all, or barely knew my grandparents. The only way I can know them now is through stories from my parents or the few fragments of recorded history or possession that remain. One of my very utmost prized possessions is a 1/4-inch reel-to-reel tape of my grandmother reading to one of her grandchildren. This is a tape without any real content or value by objective metrics. And yet I wish I had hundreds of them. I cannot have my grandmother back, but I can hear her voice on this one tape. I wish that I could hear it for hours upon end even if it were speaking about the most mundane aspects of daily life.
It is because of the lack of historical links to my past that I have been far more defensive of keeping my personal record. I do not keep it for me, I keep it for my children and their children. Not because I think so highly of myself, but because if they share my curiosity about the past, I want them to have something I did not. I protect the family archives, those few images, letters, and drawings that remain -- many of which were lost during WWII for the same reason. Just recently, we re-discovered a parchment diploma from a great-great-...-grandfather of mine conferred upon the occasion of his graduation from medical school over 150 years ago. I was *thrilled* to be able to see that document. My ancestor, a doctor when they were few and far between!
I have a five-entry journal from one grandmother that was started when she evacuated the Old Country because of the WWII German invasion. I wish I had more. I know my family suffered through WWI as well as WWII, but have no records from that time.
So, to all the people here who are saying, 'throw things out', I will staunchly go against this conventional wisdom and retain everything that I can, and I will bequeath it to my grandchildren.
No matter what that A4-sized page still doesn't fit in a readable manner on the monitor(s)...
Take a bog-standard, old 1600x1200 LCD monitor (doesn't even have to be an LCD, but they tend to fare better with what I'm about to suggest) and rotate it 90 degrees clockwise. Some mounts allow this, some do not; you may need to purchase a new mount. Then, assuming you have a reasonably modern driver and video card combination, tick the box to accommodate the rotation. Reboot or restart your display manager as indicated.
Voila, a very nice fit for a single-sheet of A4 or US Letter paper at essentially life-size.
I have three monitors on my office desk, one of which is always in portrait mode like this specifically for filling out the endless forms demanded by the bureaucracy where I work. Makes life much, much more pleasant.
Remember that the First Amendment to the US Constitution is all about preventing the government from restricting your rights to speak freely. It says nothing whatsoever about preventing individuals from restricting other individuals' rights. That's why a corporation can, and does, demand that you agree to certain terms that include privacy (they are agreeing to honor or abuse the information you give them as the case may be), and it's perfectly legal. For the most part.
So blanket stances don't, unfortunately, carry much meaning. Even when you're trolling.
... and yet the Voyager probes are out there, returning good data despite your strong argument that it would not have been worth launching them. I, personally, am very glad the people in charge of those missions do not think the way you do.
There are two major holes in your argument: (1) there will always be sufficient political will to start such a project, and (2) the ends of all such projects are identical and reaching the destination is the only goal, so overtaking is all that matters.
The first assumption is clearly invalid, as we now can see. The heyday of American space exploration is gone, because there has been no military threat for a couple of decades now, and we've been doing a so-so job of converting the US program from a public to a private enterprise. NASA has not lacked for good leaders, but Congress and the US public have lacked for boogeymen that drive the need for greatness, like an Apollo Project. We've had Mars projects of one form or another many times over the last few US presidents, and none have gone very far because there is no perceived need within the public, and plenty of need elsewhere.
The second assumption is idiotic. Do I really have to spell it out? You have assumed that nothing is learned on any given mission, even if it is physically overtaken or bested in some way by a subsequent mission. We know far more about the inner and outer solar system now than we did in the mid-70s when the Voyagers launched. Yes, we can build probes now that would catch up very quickly, with much better sensors, but new probes would not suddenly erase or invalidate the knowledge gained from the last four decades of Voyager reports. Furthermore, sending a probe along one path, and another along a different path will most certainly mean we will learn different things because -- liking it or not -- space is not isotropically filled with a homogeneous medium. As an example, our solar system is mostly flat. Sending a probe straight out of the ecliptic is something we need to do, but (to the best of my knowledge) have not yet accomplished (and there are *two* directions to head!). Visiting the outer planets now, even though we've been there before, is still a good idea because -- again, like it or not -- things are not static in time. Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus, and all of the other outer bodies, are constantly changing, just as the Earth is not perfectly static (read: we have weather!) and the differences are fascinating. Until there is nothing left to learn along the way, this second assumption is not just wrong, but misguided.
It is *always* a good idea to start a long-term project in the immediate future rather than waiting, as you can never, ever know what advances will, or will not, come along. To quote one of my favorite cartoon strips that shows one young character totalling up the time required to attend college, medical school, intern, residency, and realizing it would take 20 years to become a functioning specialist, but retored to his chiding sibling, "20 years is just as long if I don't do it."
Canned tomatoes? Have your taste buds fallen off? Can em yourself in jars if you're planning for some nuclear winter.
I cook. A lot. About 5-6 dinners per week for my family (yes, married with kid --- geeks can get lucky) plus lunches on weekends. Many recipes work best with canned tomatoes, and tomato paste. Tomato pasta sauce would be an alternative, since it's nominally available in glass jars still, but what we've been able to find in our area is a lot more than just tomatoes so can't be used in many recipes. That is, unless you want your chicken cacciatore, briam, or arni kokkinisto to taste like pasta sauce (hint: you probably don't). It's possible, although difficult, to find tomato paste in glass jars, but I haven't found a good alternative for canned tomatoes.
And we do grow our own fresh tomatoes, but since our access to arable land is limited to a few pots on the balcony, the yield isn't high enough to create a stock for the rest of the year. Next summer, though, I'm going to try to buy a boatload of tomatoes from the good organic farm we recently found and try canning our own sauce for the off season. But that doesn't solve the problem for this fall-through-spring.
I'm pretty certain they'll come out with a BPA-free plastic version instead, since that's all the rage in bottles and food containers for infants.
Personally, I'd be happy to have a world free of BPA. Unfortunately, that's going to be very difficult as it's found in many common items. For some, there are plastics that are good alternatives, but others, it will be some time before alternates can be found. In particular, epoxy binders used wood-based sheet goods production (particle board, chip board, flooring, etc.) are bad and are going to be around for a long time since there is so much of it installed.
My family and I have stopped eating anything that comes in a can. Not only are cans typically lined with BPA-bearing plastics, but the contents are in intimate contact for a very long time. Avoiding canned foods has been pretty easy with one exception: canned tomatoes. If anyone has a good solution for those, I'd love to hear it.
Although it's an astonishing pressure, it's static, and equilibrated. That is, just as atmospheric pressure is balanced by the pressure in our bodies, and therefore individual cells and organs do not have to withstand much if any of a pressure differential, the same will be true of these creatures despite the massive depths. The creatures aren't pressure vessels: Bringing them to the surface creates a huge pressure differential, causing them to rupture.
What is interesting is that an electric motor has far more torque than does an engine.
That's so generalized as to be inaccurate (e.g., the electric motor in my nephew's toy car does not generate more torque than the gasoline engine in his father's BMW M5).
However, what is true is that an electric motor can produce essentially full torque from zero RPMs, or, in other words, you have maximum acceleration available from a dead stop (OK, OK, there are a gazillion different kinds of electric motors, and not all share this nice characteristic, but most do). Also Gasoline motors typically produce maximum torque when they're at mid-range RPMs, and since they require a transmission to deliver power to the wheels, can apply only substantially less than maximum torque from a dead stop.
Because electric motors can apply full torque from the get-go, electric-powered vehicles have the impression of being very highly powered compared to our broad experience with gasoline-powered vehicles.
Agreed. I use.DOC format files (read: MS Word) when forced to because of collaborative efforts. I have yet to experience a document that did not have some problems with the included figures (except those without any figures). When the figures were drawn using the tools built-in to the word processor, they universally fail horribly at some point along the multi-cycle editing process and must be recreated from scratch in a proper drawing system. Even the crop and scale tools built-in to word processors have a high chance of failure or incompatibility.
The moral of the story: Use the right tool for the job.
This is exactly why I have used emacs / TeX for over 25 years now to typeset countless papers, about 10 sets of course notes, and three books, in addition to hundreds of thousands of lines of code. It is an excellent set of tools that allows you to focus on the issues at hand: content when content is the only thing that matters, format when that is important, and an appropriate mixture in between. Emacs, unlike vi and its derivatives, allows more-or-less straight editing in an intuitive manner (OK, I haven't used vi in a while, maybe they've included support for arrow-key navigation by now, but still I find the idea of a mode-based editor to be deeply broken). Using ed to edit anything other than an.ini file or apply an automated patch is intentionally being a peon ("ooh, I'm cool, I wrote my latest manuscript in yak blood on flattened paper bags, look how much I suffer for my art") since it is in no way an easy task. You might as well be cat-ing directly into a file, as many people have suggested in other replies. It is an exercise in masochism, not writing, unless the self-imposed barrier to ease of use is to force careful wordsmithing before committing to text. Even then, writing longhand with a nice pen and high-quality paper is going to be more pleasurable.
A mark of a skilled professional is one who uses the appropriate tool for the job. Using ed to write a manuscript falls short of that ideal.
this text is better in that it explains that first, a hole is drilled in the scull, then MRI is used to image the brain and these images help to insert a probe that's similar to a pencil in shape into the tumor through the brain, so it looks like this will go through other brain tissue first, and then this device discharges what basically amounts to heat and cooks the tumor.
The same is already done in the clinic using an RF probe to induce localized heating. Gamma knives (see the plethora of other comments) do the same by concentrated radiation damage, although the MRI is done beforehand (and a CT... I once asked a neurosurgeon I work with why use both, and he replied that neither method is as accurate as one might hope, so they combine techniques to reduce measurement errors).
I am sad for you, if you always expect the worst to happen. Even when you cross the road, do you think what someone might do to you?
This particular AC is completely missing the point. The moral is to treat others well because if you are not nice, people will be more vindictive than you imagine.
"... on the next Science"? Hmm... Maybe that means on the next cover of Science? Maybe a little editing could fix that? And maybe typographical errors like "moview" could be fixed? Perhaps by actually reading the summary, Timothy?
A) There is not that much Martian atmosphere to slow the "meteorite" to the point a "soft landing" and I can see no re-entry rockets on said rock; so your reasoning is bollocks.
You are assuming that the rock is at present in the same location as when it impacted. I see no evidence to support that assumption. Given that there are months-long global sand storms on Mars (http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2001/ast11oct_2/), and the area it presently sits is flat and half-covered in sand (a perfectly good lubricant) we cannot rule out that the meteorite -- if it is indeed a meteorite -- has not been moved about by weathering forces.
http://michaelscomments.wordpress.com/2006/11/19/meteorite-hits-car/ Look at the size of that rock. It didn't make a crater the size of a house, all it did was add an easy access hole to someones trunk. And roof. I imagine by the time a rock that size passes through the atmosphere and survives, its moving slow enough to rebound off the surface, or, in this case, get stopped by a car.
Yes, but keep in mind the Martian atmosphere is far less dense than the Earth's. That said, the rock in question on the Martian surface looks like it could well have bounced a fair way away from its impact site as well, and have been blown even farther during storms since it's mostly round and the ground is mostly flat.
It is done as you've guessed, but it's still often obvious who the author is. Don't forget that sometimes a bad review has nothing to do with knowing who the author is. If you come across a paper that's done almost exactly the same work as you have done, or criticises your work, you could choose to give it a false bad review to try to prevent it from being published. I've seen papers that have received three reviews, two that say it's good, and one that says it's nowhere near worthy of being published. You often question the outliers.
Whether the authors are revealed to the reviewers or not varies from journal to journal. All of the large handful of reviews that I've done had the author information presented to all of the reviewers; I've not reviewed for really big name journals though (at least not yet). The reviewers' identities are not made known to the authors, though. It is often, however, rather easy to identify the reviewers because my field is not that large, and personalities can shine right through unedited writing like reviewer's comments. Similarly, even if the author were to be anonymized, it's normally pretty easy to identify the laboratory the work came from based on the references cited, since most labs build on previous work in the lab, so cite their own papers more than others.
Because a regular merchant account is harder to get, and setup initially. Also, a lot of consumers actually prefer Paypal, and simply having Paypal as option is guaranteed to increase conversion rate and overall revenue.
Really? The acceptance rate for various services I was looking into were in the 95% and above range. Doesn't seem that hard to get a merchant account, and given that a business is being transacted (EUR 600,000 gross is a non-trivial amount of money that most banks would be VERY happy to have on deposit and I'm certain many merchant houses would be happy to get their 2-3% of), it would seem reasonable to get a proper merchant account rather than PayPal.
I would like to see an independent study showing that processing through PayPal versus a merchant account increases revenue, and that "a lot of consumers actually prefer PayPal." Sounds too much like that's what PayPal would like you to believe rather than reality.
For a merchant, the certainty is that PayPal is more expensive (about 4% when all is said and done for us, compared with 3% with FirstData/Citi) and has more onerous terms. I can speak with numbers and figures and facts from our review of earlier this calendar year.
In terms of setting up a merchant account, it just isn't that hard. Really. It's about as hard as opening a normal savings / checking account. Even though our business was brand new (with zero history) and was expecting to do less than USD 50,000 in gross receipts, I had merchant providers falling over me to get us signed up.
And now that I think back on the experience, it was significantly harder to get someone at PayPal to answer questions.
Same situation here - running a conference, needed to allow registrations by credit card. Our primary method of payment is Google Checkout. Main difference: A large percentage of our attendees insisted we support PayPal - so we have a PayPal account that we keep at a zero-dollar balance. When people send us money via PayPal, we immediately transfer it out of that account and to our bank. All of our actual money is held at our real, stable, brick-and-mortar bank.
Sweep your balance into another account, ideally at a different bank. PayPal has been known to reach into bank accounts and withdraw money. I have not understood under what pretext that is possible, but imagine that somewhere buried in the terms and conditions fine print you allow them to do just that.
anyone doing any kind of business that generates real money should get setup with credit card processing or some type of real bank. On top of randomly screwing people, paypal also nickle and dime people to death. Never will use paypal again.
Absolutely true. I run a conference where we allow registrations by credit card (actually, we strongly encourage registration by CC, because all other forms of payment except cash are a massive pain). We looked long and hard at different options and while PayPal's merchant processing was one possibility, we went with a standard merchant account through FirstData / Citibank. Never been happier. Excellent service. Clear-as-a-bell charges, although somewhat intricate, and good code support for those who either want to roll their own payment, or integrate with standard shopping carts. The cost was less than PayPal, and the terms better. And that was for our event that processes under USD 50,000 per year.
Why, at the commercial level, anyone would use PayPal, even their so-called professional level service, is beyond me.
"Yes, yes, yes. This is why when I collect data (I'm an experimentalist), I save a COMPLETE copy of the code used to run the experiment along with each day's data."
Do yourself a favour: use any SCM tool (Subversion, Git, heck even CVS) to manage your source code and make your program put its release version (and other interesting data, like parameters used, date, etc.) within the data files. It will not only save you space but will easy management and will bring to you the ability to easily find why the heck data from release 127 doesn't look like data from release 128.
Using a source control system is orthogonal to keeping a copy of the source code with the data. We use CVS. We also copy the entire source tree (it's under 50 MB with all of the associated image files... each day's data is about 1 GB so 50 MB doesn't matter) and archive it. We don't use CVS to answer questions about which data set is subject to which bug, but that's really only because I hadn't thought of it, thanks for the good idea!
Keeping the source code in a complete copy means we can change source control systems and not have to worry about whether we'll still be able to track the code and data. Since we aim to keep data for decades, that's important.
"I'd go one farther: unless space is a serious constraint, store your data files in ASCII."
What's the problem with ASCII output and then compressing the files?
The problem is that you are then dependent on the uncompressing algorithm being available, and if you don't have complete specs on the compression algorithm (who actually does?), the data are lost. Uncompressed ASCII is universal. I've got data files from almost 20 years ago that are perfectly readable and since they're verbose and self-documenting (ie, variable, value pairs) it's easy to create a new parser if the one I currently use is lost, becomes unavailable, etc. And don't think that data files from that long ago aren't important, as just last week, I received a request for a copy from another researcher for whom the data are relevant.
I wish I'd know about LISP 25 years ago. Stupid people told me it was "for processing lists." If only I'd known better. Functional programming gives you wings and a jet engine.
Almost everything we're doing now in modern OSes (except for eyecandy) was done 25-30 years ago for the Lisp Machine.
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You could replace this statement with 'I found jesus' and it would have the same meaning. Just because you have a family now doesn't mean you're in bliss, and it doesn't mean that others would be too. The only thing you did was replace one burden with another.
Do you have a spouse? Kids? Because the grandparent is exactly right - You don't replace a burden with another burden. You remove a burden by realizing that other stuff is more important. Stuff like pushing your kid on the swing or having a glass of wine with your wife after you've read the kids bedtime stories and tucked them in. So your OCD database of your comic book collection is out of date, and your DVDs aren't alphabetical. So what? If you choose to have a family you'll discover that stuff was just a waste of your life... Just ask your parents or your grandparents...
I have a spouse. I have a kid.
I also wish I had journals, newspaper clippings, sketches, draft manuscripts, etc., from my grandparents who passed away either before I was born, or when I was very young. I either didn't know at all, or barely knew my grandparents. The only way I can know them now is through stories from my parents or the few fragments of recorded history or possession that remain. One of my very utmost prized possessions is a 1/4-inch reel-to-reel tape of my grandmother reading to one of her grandchildren. This is a tape without any real content or value by objective metrics. And yet I wish I had hundreds of them. I cannot have my grandmother back, but I can hear her voice on this one tape. I wish that I could hear it for hours upon end even if it were speaking about the most mundane aspects of daily life.
It is because of the lack of historical links to my past that I have been far more defensive of keeping my personal record. I do not keep it for me, I keep it for my children and their children. Not because I think so highly of myself, but because if they share my curiosity about the past, I want them to have something I did not. I protect the family archives, those few images, letters, and drawings that remain -- many of which were lost during WWII for the same reason. Just recently, we re-discovered a parchment diploma from a great-great-...-grandfather of mine conferred upon the occasion of his graduation from medical school over 150 years ago. I was *thrilled* to be able to see that document. My ancestor, a doctor when they were few and far between!
I have a five-entry journal from one grandmother that was started when she evacuated the Old Country because of the WWII German invasion. I wish I had more. I know my family suffered through WWI as well as WWII, but have no records from that time.
So, to all the people here who are saying, 'throw things out', I will staunchly go against this conventional wisdom and retain everything that I can, and I will bequeath it to my grandchildren.
No matter what that A4-sized page still doesn't fit in a readable manner on the monitor(s)...
Take a bog-standard, old 1600x1200 LCD monitor (doesn't even have to be an LCD, but they tend to fare better with what I'm about to suggest) and rotate it 90 degrees clockwise. Some mounts allow this, some do not; you may need to purchase a new mount. Then, assuming you have a reasonably modern driver and video card combination, tick the box to accommodate the rotation. Reboot or restart your display manager as indicated.
Voila, a very nice fit for a single-sheet of A4 or US Letter paper at essentially life-size.
I have three monitors on my office desk, one of which is always in portrait mode like this specifically for filling out the endless forms demanded by the bureaucracy where I work. Makes life much, much more pleasant.
Remember that the First Amendment to the US Constitution is all about preventing the government from restricting your rights to speak freely. It says nothing whatsoever about preventing individuals from restricting other individuals' rights. That's why a corporation can, and does, demand that you agree to certain terms that include privacy (they are agreeing to honor or abuse the information you give them as the case may be), and it's perfectly legal. For the most part.
So blanket stances don't, unfortunately, carry much meaning. Even when you're trolling.
... and yet the Voyager probes are out there, returning good data despite your strong argument that it would not have been worth launching them. I, personally, am very glad the people in charge of those missions do not think the way you do.
There are two major holes in your argument: (1) there will always be sufficient political will to start such a project, and (2) the ends of all such projects are identical and reaching the destination is the only goal, so overtaking is all that matters.
The first assumption is clearly invalid, as we now can see. The heyday of American space exploration is gone, because there has been no military threat for a couple of decades now, and we've been doing a so-so job of converting the US program from a public to a private enterprise. NASA has not lacked for good leaders, but Congress and the US public have lacked for boogeymen that drive the need for greatness, like an Apollo Project. We've had Mars projects of one form or another many times over the last few US presidents, and none have gone very far because there is no perceived need within the public, and plenty of need elsewhere.
The second assumption is idiotic. Do I really have to spell it out? You have assumed that nothing is learned on any given mission, even if it is physically overtaken or bested in some way by a subsequent mission. We know far more about the inner and outer solar system now than we did in the mid-70s when the Voyagers launched. Yes, we can build probes now that would catch up very quickly, with much better sensors, but new probes would not suddenly erase or invalidate the knowledge gained from the last four decades of Voyager reports. Furthermore, sending a probe along one path, and another along a different path will most certainly mean we will learn different things because -- liking it or not -- space is not isotropically filled with a homogeneous medium. As an example, our solar system is mostly flat. Sending a probe straight out of the ecliptic is something we need to do, but (to the best of my knowledge) have not yet accomplished (and there are *two* directions to head!). Visiting the outer planets now, even though we've been there before, is still a good idea because -- again, like it or not -- things are not static in time. Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus, and all of the other outer bodies, are constantly changing, just as the Earth is not perfectly static (read: we have weather!) and the differences are fascinating. Until there is nothing left to learn along the way, this second assumption is not just wrong, but misguided.
It is *always* a good idea to start a long-term project in the immediate future rather than waiting, as you can never, ever know what advances will, or will not, come along. To quote one of my favorite cartoon strips that shows one young character totalling up the time required to attend college, medical school, intern, residency, and realizing it would take 20 years to become a functioning specialist, but retored to his chiding sibling, "20 years is just as long if I don't do it."
You have any references for those numbers?
Canned tomatoes? Have your taste buds fallen off? Can em yourself in jars if you're planning for some nuclear winter.
I cook. A lot. About 5-6 dinners per week for my family (yes, married with kid --- geeks can get lucky) plus lunches on weekends. Many recipes work best with canned tomatoes, and tomato paste. Tomato pasta sauce would be an alternative, since it's nominally available in glass jars still, but what we've been able to find in our area is a lot more than just tomatoes so can't be used in many recipes. That is, unless you want your chicken cacciatore, briam, or arni kokkinisto to taste like pasta sauce (hint: you probably don't). It's possible, although difficult, to find tomato paste in glass jars, but I haven't found a good alternative for canned tomatoes.
And we do grow our own fresh tomatoes, but since our access to arable land is limited to a few pots on the balcony, the yield isn't high enough to create a stock for the rest of the year. Next summer, though, I'm going to try to buy a boatload of tomatoes from the good organic farm we recently found and try canning our own sauce for the off season. But that doesn't solve the problem for this fall-through-spring.
I hope Brita comes out with a glass pitcher...
I'm pretty certain they'll come out with a BPA-free plastic version instead, since that's all the rage in bottles and food containers for infants.
Personally, I'd be happy to have a world free of BPA. Unfortunately, that's going to be very difficult as it's found in many common items. For some, there are plastics that are good alternatives, but others, it will be some time before alternates can be found. In particular, epoxy binders used wood-based sheet goods production (particle board, chip board, flooring, etc.) are bad and are going to be around for a long time since there is so much of it installed.
My family and I have stopped eating anything that comes in a can. Not only are cans typically lined with BPA-bearing plastics, but the contents are in intimate contact for a very long time. Avoiding canned foods has been pretty easy with one exception: canned tomatoes. If anyone has a good solution for those, I'd love to hear it.
Although it's an astonishing pressure, it's static, and equilibrated. That is, just as atmospheric pressure is balanced by the pressure in our bodies, and therefore individual cells and organs do not have to withstand much if any of a pressure differential, the same will be true of these creatures despite the massive depths. The creatures aren't pressure vessels: Bringing them to the surface creates a huge pressure differential, causing them to rupture.
Troll. Not even a very good one.
What is interesting is that an electric motor has far more torque than does an engine.
That's so generalized as to be inaccurate (e.g., the electric motor in my nephew's toy car does not generate more torque than the gasoline engine in his father's BMW M5).
However, what is true is that an electric motor can produce essentially full torque from zero RPMs, or, in other words, you have maximum acceleration available from a dead stop (OK, OK, there are a gazillion different kinds of electric motors, and not all share this nice characteristic, but most do). Also Gasoline motors typically produce maximum torque when they're at mid-range RPMs, and since they require a transmission to deliver power to the wheels, can apply only substantially less than maximum torque from a dead stop.
Because electric motors can apply full torque from the get-go, electric-powered vehicles have the impression of being very highly powered compared to our broad experience with gasoline-powered vehicles.
Agreed. I use .DOC format files (read: MS Word) when forced to because of collaborative efforts. I have yet to experience a document that did not have some problems with the included figures (except those without any figures). When the figures were drawn using the tools built-in to the word processor, they universally fail horribly at some point along the multi-cycle editing process and must be recreated from scratch in a proper drawing system. Even the crop and scale tools built-in to word processors have a high chance of failure or incompatibility.
The moral of the story: Use the right tool for the job.
This is exactly why I have used emacs / TeX for over 25 years now to typeset countless papers, about 10 sets of course notes, and three books, in addition to hundreds of thousands of lines of code. It is an excellent set of tools that allows you to focus on the issues at hand: content when content is the only thing that matters, format when that is important, and an appropriate mixture in between. Emacs, unlike vi and its derivatives, allows more-or-less straight editing in an intuitive manner (OK, I haven't used vi in a while, maybe they've included support for arrow-key navigation by now, but still I find the idea of a mode-based editor to be deeply broken). Using ed to edit anything other than an .ini file or apply an automated patch is intentionally being a peon ("ooh, I'm cool, I wrote my latest manuscript in yak blood on flattened paper bags, look how much I suffer for my art") since it is in no way an easy task. You might as well be cat-ing directly into a file, as many people have suggested in other replies. It is an exercise in masochism, not writing, unless the self-imposed barrier to ease of use is to force careful wordsmithing before committing to text. Even then, writing longhand with a nice pen and high-quality paper is going to be more pleasurable.
A mark of a skilled professional is one who uses the appropriate tool for the job. Using ed to write a manuscript falls short of that ideal.
this text is better in that it explains that first, a hole is drilled in the scull, then MRI is used to image the brain and these images help to insert a probe that's similar to a pencil in shape into the tumor through the brain, so it looks like this will go through other brain tissue first, and then this device discharges what basically amounts to heat and cooks the tumor.
The same is already done in the clinic using an RF probe to induce localized heating. Gamma knives (see the plethora of other comments) do the same by concentrated radiation damage, although the MRI is done beforehand (and a CT ... I once asked a neurosurgeon I work with why use both, and he replied that neither method is as accurate as one might hope, so they combine techniques to reduce measurement errors).
I am sad for you, if you always expect the worst to happen. Even when you cross the road, do you think what someone might do to you?
This particular AC is completely missing the point. The moral is to treat others well because if you are not nice, people will be more vindictive than you imagine.
"... on the next Science"? Hmm... Maybe that means on the next cover of Science? Maybe a little editing could fix that? And maybe typographical errors like "moview" could be fixed? Perhaps by actually reading the summary, Timothy?
A) There is not that much Martian atmosphere to slow the "meteorite" to the point a "soft landing" and I can see no re-entry rockets on said rock; so your reasoning is bollocks.
You are assuming that the rock is at present in the same location as when it impacted. I see no evidence to support that assumption. Given that there are months-long global sand storms on Mars (http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2001/ast11oct_2/), and the area it presently sits is flat and half-covered in sand (a perfectly good lubricant) we cannot rule out that the meteorite -- if it is indeed a meteorite -- has not been moved about by weathering forces.
http://michaelscomments.wordpress.com/2006/11/19/meteorite-hits-car/
Look at the size of that rock. It didn't make a crater the size of a house, all it did was add an easy access hole to someones trunk. And roof.
I imagine by the time a rock that size passes through the atmosphere and survives, its moving slow enough to rebound off the surface, or, in this case, get stopped by a car.
Yes, but keep in mind the Martian atmosphere is far less dense than the Earth's. That said, the rock in question on the Martian surface looks like it could well have bounced a fair way away from its impact site as well, and have been blown even farther during storms since it's mostly round and the ground is mostly flat.
It is done as you've guessed, but it's still often obvious who the author is. Don't forget that sometimes a bad review has nothing to do with knowing who the author is. If you come across a paper that's done almost exactly the same work as you have done, or criticises your work, you could choose to give it a false bad review to try to prevent it from being published. I've seen papers that have received three reviews, two that say it's good, and one that says it's nowhere near worthy of being published. You often question the outliers.
Whether the authors are revealed to the reviewers or not varies from journal to journal. All of the large handful of reviews that I've done had the author information presented to all of the reviewers; I've not reviewed for really big name journals though (at least not yet). The reviewers' identities are not made known to the authors, though. It is often, however, rather easy to identify the reviewers because my field is not that large, and personalities can shine right through unedited writing like reviewer's comments. Similarly, even if the author were to be anonymized, it's normally pretty easy to identify the laboratory the work came from based on the references cited, since most labs build on previous work in the lab, so cite their own papers more than others.
Because a regular merchant account is harder to get, and setup initially. Also, a lot of consumers actually prefer Paypal, and simply having Paypal as option is guaranteed to increase conversion rate and overall revenue.
Really? The acceptance rate for various services I was looking into were in the 95% and above range. Doesn't seem that hard to get a merchant account, and given that a business is being transacted (EUR 600,000 gross is a non-trivial amount of money that most banks would be VERY happy to have on deposit and I'm certain many merchant houses would be happy to get their 2-3% of), it would seem reasonable to get a proper merchant account rather than PayPal.
I would like to see an independent study showing that processing through PayPal versus a merchant account increases revenue, and that "a lot of consumers actually prefer PayPal." Sounds too much like that's what PayPal would like you to believe rather than reality.
For a merchant, the certainty is that PayPal is more expensive (about 4% when all is said and done for us, compared with 3% with FirstData/Citi) and has more onerous terms. I can speak with numbers and figures and facts from our review of earlier this calendar year.
In terms of setting up a merchant account, it just isn't that hard. Really. It's about as hard as opening a normal savings / checking account. Even though our business was brand new (with zero history) and was expecting to do less than USD 50,000 in gross receipts, I had merchant providers falling over me to get us signed up.
And now that I think back on the experience, it was significantly harder to get someone at PayPal to answer questions.
Same situation here - running a conference, needed to allow registrations by credit card. Our primary method of payment is Google Checkout. Main difference: A large percentage of our attendees insisted we support PayPal - so we have a PayPal account that we keep at a zero-dollar balance. When people send us money via PayPal, we immediately transfer it out of that account and to our bank. All of our actual money is held at our real, stable, brick-and-mortar bank.
Sweep your balance into another account, ideally at a different bank. PayPal has been known to reach into bank accounts and withdraw money. I have not understood under what pretext that is possible, but imagine that somewhere buried in the terms and conditions fine print you allow them to do just that.
anyone doing any kind of business that generates real money should get setup with credit card processing or some type of real bank. On top of randomly screwing people, paypal also nickle and dime people to death. Never will use paypal again.
Absolutely true. I run a conference where we allow registrations by credit card (actually, we strongly encourage registration by CC, because all other forms of payment except cash are a massive pain). We looked long and hard at different options and while PayPal's merchant processing was one possibility, we went with a standard merchant account through FirstData / Citibank. Never been happier. Excellent service. Clear-as-a-bell charges, although somewhat intricate, and good code support for those who either want to roll their own payment, or integrate with standard shopping carts. The cost was less than PayPal, and the terms better. And that was for our event that processes under USD 50,000 per year.
Why, at the commercial level, anyone would use PayPal, even their so-called professional level service, is beyond me.
No, we'd be using something else.
Quite likely AltaVista.
Also, what is that uninformative picture of coins in a hand doing there? It does not add anything! This is just as bad as a newspaper article!
Especially since they look like euro coins!
"Yes, yes, yes. This is why when I collect data (I'm an experimentalist), I save a COMPLETE copy of the code used to run the experiment along with each day's data."
Do yourself a favour: use any SCM tool (Subversion, Git, heck even CVS) to manage your source code and make your program put its release version (and other interesting data, like parameters used, date, etc.) within the data files. It will not only save you space but will easy management and will bring to you the ability to easily find why the heck data from release 127 doesn't look like data from release 128.
Using a source control system is orthogonal to keeping a copy of the source code with the data. We use CVS. We also copy the entire source tree (it's under 50 MB with all of the associated image files ... each day's data is about 1 GB so 50 MB doesn't matter) and archive it. We don't use CVS to answer questions about which data set is subject to which bug, but that's really only because I hadn't thought of it, thanks for the good idea!
Keeping the source code in a complete copy means we can change source control systems and not have to worry about whether we'll still be able to track the code and data. Since we aim to keep data for decades, that's important.
"I'd go one farther: unless space is a serious constraint, store your data files in ASCII."
What's the problem with ASCII output and then compressing the files?
The problem is that you are then dependent on the uncompressing algorithm being available, and if you don't have complete specs on the compression algorithm (who actually does?), the data are lost. Uncompressed ASCII is universal. I've got data files from almost 20 years ago that are perfectly readable and since they're verbose and self-documenting (ie, variable, value pairs) it's easy to create a new parser if the one I currently use is lost, becomes unavailable, etc. And don't think that data files from that long ago aren't important, as just last week, I received a request for a copy from another researcher for whom the data are relevant.
I wish I'd know about LISP 25 years ago. Stupid people told me it was "for processing lists." If only I'd known better. Functional programming gives you wings and a jet engine.
Almost everything we're doing now in modern OSes (except for eyecandy) was done 25-30 years ago for the Lisp Machine.