I am also a new faculty member at a very well-ranked university. My background is in computer science and biology. I cannot imagine doing any biology (*forget* physics) without knowing how to program.
There is only one language that is required: MATLAB. That's it.
Unfortunately, MATLAB provides a very good environment for doing scientific calculations, but it isn't a particularly good language from the CS viewpoint, and it really isn't very efficient at all. So to manage big data sets (as I encounter from time to time in biology, and imagine that you would see in physics), you need to be able to program in something like C/C++ for efficiency. Most people don't however. I've known one colleague who had absolutley no programming knowledge, and he got by through hiring a programmer. Not the best of situations.
A good physics curriculum, being more closely related to mathematics than biology by a long shot, should include proper training in higher level languages. Choose what you want, but Scheme is a fantastic educational tool and has a better developed pedagogy than any other language (note I wrote "better developed" not "more extensive"; quantity is not the same as quality). It also has been used to solve some really hairy physics problems (eg, proving that the orbit of Pluto is chaotic by doing extremely high fidelity N-body simulations spanning millions of years).
But since you're probably not at MIT, teaching C++ is probably as good as you're going to get for a theoretically somewhat advanced language. MATLAB, however, will have much more practical utility.
Just scan through Science or Nature and check, when the authors specify, which language they use. It will be either MATLAB or LabView. I find LabView difficult to do anything more than toy applications (and I'm not alone in this, having seen two separate teams of colleagues struggle with their large computationally intensive projects in LabView). And MATLAB is the Lingua Franca of scientific analysis.
The kapton tube does not swing in response to wind, it just deflects. The stronger the wind, the more it deflects. Imagine that it's a spring. Ever seen a car's radio antenna flex on the highway? Same idea.
Insects use exactly the same sort of mechanism to detect gentle air movements. This is one reason it's so hard to catch a fly with your hand when the fly has landed somewhere: the air currents generated by your comparatively large and slow-moving hand are easily detected by the fly.
(a) tell tale: simple; robust to launching forces; reliable; lightweight; works well as long as winds are relatively constant; works poorly if winds are turbulent; gives wind speed AND direction
(b) weather vane: has moving parts including bearings that require protection from the elements; delicate structure that needs to be made robust to launching forces; heavier than tell tale; works well in any winds, although the mass of vane averages, and therefore can mask, turbulence; unless paired with anemometer (those spinning things), only gives wind direction
I'm betting that the fine engineers at NASA who are working within parameters like keeping weight down to absolute minimum, not being able to repair anything at Mars, wanting something that might potentially work for years to come, and not knowing what the range of winds they might encounter would be making a pretty good decision in selecting a tell tale style design.
But what do I know? I'm just a guy who was at Caltech for graduate school and knew people who worked at JPL.
Somebody with as low a UID as you ought to know better.
Someone with an ID in the 300,000 block is told he has a low ID. Wow, I suddenly feel... I donno... prematurely decrepit. And yet, my younger brother has a *really* low ID. Something's out of balance here.
My understanding is that the notation [sic] is used when you want to present a quotation, that is, text you did not compose, containing an error, and you wish to reproduce the quotation accurately without giving the impression that an error has been introduced.
Available cross-platform, is the poster child for Open Source, is extensible to add whatever specialized field searching you want (if basic C-s isn't good enough), lets you use your own format, heaps better than Notepad, smaller than OpenOffice, etc.
Or, if you want something smaller, use nano, jove, or one of the small Emacs work-alikes. Notepad, while available on every Windows system, isn't a very good editor, and it sounds like you just need a better editor.
I have. I'm a visual neuroscientist and my research involves accurate measurement of eye position. I also own a relatively high-end SLR camera that senses eye position to control focus (this is not a coincidence). Humans have exquisite control over their eyes. With a good low-latency mechanism to read gaze position, system control (camera, computer, whatever) becomes incredibly quick, efficient, and fluid. The only problem is that you do NOT want the cursor to always track your eye position, you need a switch: sometimes you want the cursor where you are looking, sometimes you want to leave the cursor in place and look around. But this switch is no more than the equivalent of a mouse button, a shift key on a keyboard, or a foot switch. All work, although I prefer the keyboard approach.
I'm a new professor at a Major Research Institution, part of a Large University You Have Heard Of That Begins With H.
No one gets to this level just being a PHB. No one heads a lab who has stumbled into it from middle management somewhere else. That just does not happen. (1) The vetting process to get these jobs is pretty hairy, and (2) the competition for them is insane. Then, once you get the job, (3) the competition to get funding is even MORE insane, and people who are just managers (that is, people who are not really good scientists with excellent ideas and long-term vision) are not going to raise money. Labs exist only -- ONLY -- because they can raise grant money. Don't let anyone try to convince you otherwise.
That said, as a new first-rung member of a lab, know this: you are building relationships that will potentially highly influence your future career for many years to come, potentially both for the good and the bad. Go to lunch with someone each and every day. Attend the weekly departmental seminars. Attend the journal clubs (and READ THE PAPER BEFORE GOING!). Attend the lab meetings. Make nice with the lab secretary / lab manager. Make nice with the HR people. If you're assigned a direct manager (perhaps a post-doc or graduate student), make extra nice with them. Attend every social event from the lab. Listen. Be humble. You know squat compared to the people who have been doing this work for possibly longer than you have been alive.
You will make mistakes. Make sure they aren't big ones. And make sure you aren't going to break any expensive equipment: IF YOU DO NOT KNOW HOW TO OPERATE EQUIPMENT THEN ASK FIRST. If you need to learn some skill, and there's someone in the lab who is good at it, ask them to show you. And then practice. You are there to learn.
If you find yourself with nothing to do, then READ. There are not enough hours in the day to read what you will need to know. Start with the papers published by the lab (if you haven't already read all of them... and shame on you if you haven't!). Read Science and Nature every week. You don't have to read all of the hard articles, but be sure to read the encapsulations of each article that's published in your field.
And read Slashdot on your own time. At home. Stay off of email, IM, and everything else at work.
The best advice I was ever given on being a scientist: be the colleague you wish you had.
Run away from any CS program that teaches you specific languages as part of their curriculum, rather than expecting you to pick up languages as part of teaching you some IDEAS. [In my undergraduate EE/CS program, I was expected to learn over a dozen different computer languages, often multiple languages in a given 1-term course; none of these languages were in themselves an educational goal, rather, using them to express different important ideas were the goals.] If there are courses called "Introduction to PHP" or "Advanced C++" then dump the school.
As a potential employer, I don't care if you can write in J++/COBOL/APL/Ruby/Lisp/Perl; I care if you have learned how to program and that is largely independent of the language is used. As a future recent college graduate with almost zero experience, you're going to have to learn a lot in any case, for any job, and if all you have shown classroom proficiency in a handful of specific languages, that's a serious ding. If you have shown classroom proficiency in database structures, software engineering, and algorithms, that's far more attractive.
If you want better than a vocational education, you should treat college as an opportunity to learn how to learn, not to be trained in a specific task.
Point well taken (and goes to show how complicated things really are!), but I believe the Old Calendarists are in the minority within Orthodoxy, rather than the New Caldenarists.
There are millions of people who did not celebrate Easter today (23 March 2008) because they will be celebrating on 27 April 2008 (yep, 5 weeks later... this is an unusual year). Orthodox Easter is computed to always fall after Passover (because, recall, the Last Supper was a Passover Seder).
One of the main differences between the calculations for Roman Catholic Easter and Eastern Orthodox Easter is in which calendar (Gregorian or Julian) is used. Use Google. It's actually quite interesting because of all the history and politics involved. It's not just simple (eg, exactly when is the moon full? over which point on the earth?) as one might think.
Why wrap dating, a personal choice that is driven by forces we have little control over, with how we intellectually chose to value people?
For a long time I perferentialy dated blond women. Does that make me a bigot? No, it means that there's some part of my lower brain function that found them more physically attractive than the alternatives (ie, non-blond women, or non-women). No matter how I might have rationalized it, there was no real choice in the matter for me.
For a comparably long time I have refused to engage in more than trite conversations with people who believe that the positions of the planets determine our lives in a meaningful way. Does that make me a bigot? In this case it probably does, because I have intellectually, and rationally, decided that everyone will be better off if I spend my limited time on earth improving society using other means.
Dating and intellectual engagement are two different things. They might on occasion overlap, but they are driven by two wholly different forces.
A far better question is: should we, as self-appointed keepers of rational examination of the universe, spend our time educating the ignorant, and working against forces counter to our views like, in this case, astrology? For some the answer is yes, for some the answer is no, and that makes for an interesting discussion.
Well said. From the article: "Some providers screen only for one or two pharmaceuticals, leaving open the possibility that others are present."
Or, to over-emphatically paraphrase this bit of reporting tripe: OH-MY-GOD there's a POSSIBILITY that there are TOXIC SUBSTANCES like PLUTONIUM and ANTHRAX in our drinking water BECAUSE WE DO NOT TEST FOR THEM!!1!
Although I applaud the amount of work and devotion to the subject -- one that does have serious potential consequences -- the reporters could have done a much better job of writing calm, reasoned prose, instead of the sensationalistic crud they did. The environmental presence of feminizing compounds, as one example, is worrisome and we need to understand it. But if these reporters were doing their job correctly, they might have pointed out that recreational drugs are also present in the water supply (in trace amounts, although much less than in the waste stream where they are rampant), rather than just pharmaceuticals.
As another example of sensationalism in the article, "In several cases, officials at municipal or regional water providers told the AP that pharmaceuticals had not been detected, but the AP obtained the results of tests conducted by independent researchers that showed otherwise. For example, water department officials in New Orleans said their water had not been tested for pharmaceuticals, but a Tulane University researcher and his students have published a study that found the pain reliever naproxen, the sex hormone estrone and the anti-cholesterol drug byproduct clofibric acid in treated drinking water." The implication OH-MY-GOD is that the interviewed water officials in New Orleans were aware of this study, and were covering it up, when the far more likely situation is that the water officials, being civil servants and all, probably didn't read academic journals about their field. It's not like the Tulane graduate students had to ask the New Orleans Water Commission (or whatever they call it there) for a sample of the water to test. Quite likely that the entire study happened without the knowledge of the N.O. officials. And that contrived example is the BEST instance the reporters could find of a possible cover-up? This is sloppy, sensationalistic journalism. No, sorry, it's not journalism, it's something else that we're being asked to think is journalism.
And to what level of nonsense have we raised ourselves when people working at public water purification plants hide behind, "post-9/11 security concerns," in refusing to answer questions about how the drinking water is tested? Shouldn't that be entirely public information open to scrutiny and criticism? Don't I, as a citizen of the town where I reside, have the right to know what steps are taken to ensure the water provided through my tax dollars and usage fees is safe to drink?
Feh. I'm going to crawl back into my cave. Call me when this hysteria has passed.
could we put a satellite in orbit around our moon?
We already have, many times, starting with Apollo 8 which orbited around the moon. Actually, I'm not 100% certain that was the first. Nevertheless, we have put satellites in orbit, that is, man-made objects in stable orbital configurations, around the moon already. We even did it with slide-rules and computers far less powerful than what's in your cell phone.
On another note, I think anyone claiming 99.999% on POTS is anecdotal. Growing up, I had my power cut out at least twice a year, and the phone system was hardly 99.999%. Trees fall on lines, and people cut buried lines for all sorts of accidental reasons.
Five Nines (99.999%) works out to about 5 minutes per year of downtime. If your phone lines -- remember, we're talking about POTS -- were hit by lightning, a falling tree, etc., that would take, let's guess, 4 hours to repair. If it happened once per year, it would be 99.95% uptime. I can recall the power going out once or twice per year when I grew up, but the phone? Never.
IAAPP (I am a professional programmer, that is, I get paid to code). I was educated at an elite school in their computer science department. Of the people I've known in my professional life, the superstars -- the one-in-a-thousands, and I most certainly do not count myself among them -- over half were educated at elite universities.
This means two things, first, you can find superstar programmers that were not educated at places like MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, etc. But it also means that you'll have a good chance of finding them by recruiting at places like that.
If you ask elite universities the best way to recruit there, they'll push you toward their careers office. That will get you the good programmers. You'll only get the superstars by having a relationship with a faculty member -- perhaps your old professor -- and getting them to give you the inside scoop.
Superstars don't go through the normal hiring mechanisms. They don't need to.
It's a Well Known Fact that there are far more research grants for proving already-known scientific laws than there are for efforts to find out things we don't know. Plus, look at what the Nobel prizes are always for: the 2007 prize in Chemistry was for a demonstration that NaCL dissolves in H20, the one in Medicine was for a proof that the ankle bone is connected to the leg bone, and the prize in Economics was for a treatise on how buying low and selling high makes one wealthier. The key to fame and fortune in research science clearly lies in defending the status quo.
I realize this quotation was said with sarcasm, but you're missing an important point: Nobel Prizes in the sciences are given many years after the initial discovery because the discovery has to be demonstrated to have deeply affected our understanding of the particular field. In other words, the Prizes are given for discoveries that create dogma. So, by the time a Prize gets conveyed, many of the ideas have achieved, "well, duh," status. And is a good thing, not a bad one, that we recognize them.
Your computer's chassis is not at ground, and the AC present on it is being transmitted to your external devices through the common ground line. Yes, there is only 5V power between the Vcc and GND lines on the USB cable, but the entire cable is going up and down together. Remember, voltage is measured between two points. I would suspect the outlet your computer is plugged into either has a faulty ground or is otherwise mis-wired, or you're using a 3-to-2 pin adapter on the line, or your computer is plugged into a faulty power strip. Or some combination thereof. Those are the most common issues. Less common, but still possible, is that your computer's internal power supply is of poor design and is allowing leakage from the mains line onto the chassis.
It doesn't feel so much like a jolt or a tingle, however, as that the surface feels strange.. almost like it's vibrating at a high frequency; but only when touched very, very lightly
Run do not walk away from any situation where this is true. The casing you are touching is not at ground, and you are feeling the 50 or 60 Hz current (that's the high frequency vibration you're feeling) flowing through you. Don't believe me? Next time you experience this, put an AC voltmeter between the pseudo-vibrating chassis and ground. You'll see between 6 and 20 VAC (at least that's the range I've observed). This is the mains current leaking onto the chassis.
There are many reasons for this, but they almost all boil down to poor design of the equipment or inexpert wiring of the mains outlet. Often the fix is to unplug the two-pronged plug and re-plug it in the other way around. This isn't always possible with polarized plugs (which were *supposed* to make this not nearly as much of an issue, but then, that relies upon all outlets being wired correctly and my experience is that only about 80% of them are).
Do not ignore this when you find it. It is a potential danger. If you're in a country where they use 220/240 VAC, it is of particular concern.
Yep. Diamonds are what is known as a four-neighbor three-dimensional (4N3D) mesh in computer architecture. They have the same crystal structure as other elements in the same column of the periodic table (most notably Silicon). The hardness that these crystals share comes from the very rigid lattice structure. 4N3D meshes are like triangular trusses built in three dimensions. Really, really strong.
Apple does not have server-class hardware. This is the real reason you will not switch your back-end servers. Or, it is the real reason you would switch back, if you tried and didn't already know. Yes, Apple sells server-class hardware, but it is not up to the task.
My brother's company, which runs a top 100 web site (as measured by Alexa), used to run some NetApp hardware and some Apple hardware in the same functional part of the web site architecture. The Apple hardware has all -- ALL -- been decommissioned because it did not prove reliable. The NetApp hardware still runs strong. The company uses, to my knowledge, a fair number of Apple laptops, but that's about it from that vendor.
Slashdot Mirror
I am also a new faculty member at a very well-ranked university. My background is in computer science and biology. I cannot imagine doing any biology (*forget* physics) without knowing how to program.
There is only one language that is required: MATLAB. That's it.
Unfortunately, MATLAB provides a very good environment for doing scientific calculations, but it isn't a particularly good language from the CS viewpoint, and it really isn't very efficient at all. So to manage big data sets (as I encounter from time to time in biology, and imagine that you would see in physics), you need to be able to program in something like C/C++ for efficiency. Most people don't however. I've known one colleague who had absolutley no programming knowledge, and he got by through hiring a programmer. Not the best of situations.
A good physics curriculum, being more closely related to mathematics than biology by a long shot, should include proper training in higher level languages. Choose what you want, but Scheme is a fantastic educational tool and has a better developed pedagogy than any other language (note I wrote "better developed" not "more extensive"; quantity is not the same as quality). It also has been used to solve some really hairy physics problems (eg, proving that the orbit of Pluto is chaotic by doing extremely high fidelity N-body simulations spanning millions of years).
But since you're probably not at MIT, teaching C++ is probably as good as you're going to get for a theoretically somewhat advanced language. MATLAB, however, will have much more practical utility.
Just scan through Science or Nature and check, when the authors specify, which language they use. It will be either MATLAB or LabView. I find LabView difficult to do anything more than toy applications (and I'm not alone in this, having seen two separate teams of colleagues struggle with their large computationally intensive projects in LabView). And MATLAB is the Lingua Franca of scientific analysis.
The kapton tube does not swing in response to wind, it just deflects. The stronger the wind, the more it deflects. Imagine that it's a spring. Ever seen a car's radio antenna flex on the highway? Same idea.
Insects use exactly the same sort of mechanism to detect gentle air movements. This is one reason it's so hard to catch a fly with your hand when the fly has landed somewhere: the air currents generated by your comparatively large and slow-moving hand are easily detected by the fly.
Design choices:
(a) tell tale: simple; robust to launching forces; reliable; lightweight; works well as long as winds are relatively constant; works poorly if winds are turbulent; gives wind speed AND direction
(b) weather vane: has moving parts including bearings that require protection from the elements; delicate structure that needs to be made robust to launching forces; heavier than tell tale; works well in any winds, although the mass of vane averages, and therefore can mask, turbulence; unless paired with anemometer (those spinning things), only gives wind direction
I'm betting that the fine engineers at NASA who are working within parameters like keeping weight down to absolute minimum, not being able to repair anything at Mars, wanting something that might potentially work for years to come, and not knowing what the range of winds they might encounter would be making a pretty good decision in selecting a tell tale style design.
But what do I know? I'm just a guy who was at Caltech for graduate school and knew people who worked at JPL.
Somebody with as low a UID as you ought to know better.
... I donno ... prematurely decrepit. And yet, my younger brother has a *really* low ID. Something's out of balance here.
Someone with an ID in the 300,000 block is told he has a low ID. Wow, I suddenly feel
The site ideaspike.com seems to be slashdotted. Anyone have a copy of dbtxt mirrored anywhere?
My understanding is that the notation [sic] is used when you want to present a quotation, that is, text you did not compose, containing an error, and you wish to reproduce the quotation accurately without giving the impression that an error has been introduced.
Thus, the notation does not apply here.
Emacs is your friend.
Available cross-platform, is the poster child for Open Source, is extensible to add whatever specialized field searching you want (if basic C-s isn't good enough), lets you use your own format, heaps better than Notepad, smaller than OpenOffice, etc.
Or, if you want something smaller, use nano, jove, or one of the small Emacs work-alikes. Notepad, while available on every Windows system, isn't a very good editor, and it sounds like you just need a better editor.
Have you tried? Sounds like maybe you have not.
I have. I'm a visual neuroscientist and my research involves accurate measurement of eye position. I also own a relatively high-end SLR camera that senses eye position to control focus (this is not a coincidence). Humans have exquisite control over their eyes. With a good low-latency mechanism to read gaze position, system control (camera, computer, whatever) becomes incredibly quick, efficient, and fluid. The only problem is that you do NOT want the cursor to always track your eye position, you need a switch: sometimes you want the cursor where you are looking, sometimes you want to leave the cursor in place and look around. But this switch is no more than the equivalent of a mouse button, a shift key on a keyboard, or a foot switch. All work, although I prefer the keyboard approach.
Good profs are not PHBs.
... and shame on you if you haven't!). Read Science and Nature every week. You don't have to read all of the hard articles, but be sure to read the encapsulations of each article that's published in your field.
I'm a new professor at a Major Research Institution, part of a Large University You Have Heard Of That Begins With H.
No one gets to this level just being a PHB. No one heads a lab who has stumbled into it from middle management somewhere else. That just does not happen. (1) The vetting process to get these jobs is pretty hairy, and (2) the competition for them is insane. Then, once you get the job, (3) the competition to get funding is even MORE insane, and people who are just managers (that is, people who are not really good scientists with excellent ideas and long-term vision) are not going to raise money. Labs exist only -- ONLY -- because they can raise grant money. Don't let anyone try to convince you otherwise.
That said, as a new first-rung member of a lab, know this: you are building relationships that will potentially highly influence your future career for many years to come, potentially both for the good and the bad. Go to lunch with someone each and every day. Attend the weekly departmental seminars. Attend the journal clubs (and READ THE PAPER BEFORE GOING!). Attend the lab meetings. Make nice with the lab secretary / lab manager. Make nice with the HR people. If you're assigned a direct manager (perhaps a post-doc or graduate student), make extra nice with them. Attend every social event from the lab. Listen. Be humble. You know squat compared to the people who have been doing this work for possibly longer than you have been alive.
You will make mistakes. Make sure they aren't big ones. And make sure you aren't going to break any expensive equipment: IF YOU DO NOT KNOW HOW TO OPERATE EQUIPMENT THEN ASK FIRST. If you need to learn some skill, and there's someone in the lab who is good at it, ask them to show you. And then practice. You are there to learn.
If you find yourself with nothing to do, then READ. There are not enough hours in the day to read what you will need to know. Start with the papers published by the lab (if you haven't already read all of them
And read Slashdot on your own time. At home. Stay off of email, IM, and everything else at work.
The best advice I was ever given on being a scientist: be the colleague you wish you had.
Run away from any CS program that teaches you specific languages as part of their curriculum, rather than expecting you to pick up languages as part of teaching you some IDEAS. [In my undergraduate EE/CS program, I was expected to learn over a dozen different computer languages, often multiple languages in a given 1-term course; none of these languages were in themselves an educational goal, rather, using them to express different important ideas were the goals.] If there are courses called "Introduction to PHP" or "Advanced C++" then dump the school.
As a potential employer, I don't care if you can write in J++/COBOL/APL/Ruby/Lisp/Perl; I care if you have learned how to program and that is largely independent of the language is used. As a future recent college graduate with almost zero experience, you're going to have to learn a lot in any case, for any job, and if all you have shown classroom proficiency in a handful of specific languages, that's a serious ding. If you have shown classroom proficiency in database structures, software engineering, and algorithms, that's far more attractive.
If you want better than a vocational education, you should treat college as an opportunity to learn how to learn, not to be trained in a specific task.
Point well taken (and goes to show how complicated things really are!), but I believe the Old Calendarists are in the minority within Orthodoxy, rather than the New Caldenarists.
There are millions of people who did not celebrate Easter today (23 March 2008) because they will be celebrating on 27 April 2008 (yep, 5 weeks later ... this is an unusual year). Orthodox Easter is computed to always fall after Passover (because, recall, the Last Supper was a Passover Seder).
Here's a web site that is more, um, shall we say, enlightened: http://www.assa.org.au/edm.html
One of the main differences between the calculations for Roman Catholic Easter and Eastern Orthodox Easter is in which calendar (Gregorian or Julian) is used. Use Google. It's actually quite interesting because of all the history and politics involved. It's not just simple (eg, exactly when is the moon full? over which point on the earth?) as one might think.
Gives new meaning to the phrase, "flying spaghetti monster," doesn't it?
Why wrap dating, a personal choice that is driven by forces we have little control over, with how we intellectually chose to value people?
For a long time I perferentialy dated blond women. Does that make me a bigot? No, it means that there's some part of my lower brain function that found them more physically attractive than the alternatives (ie, non-blond women, or non-women). No matter how I might have rationalized it, there was no real choice in the matter for me.
For a comparably long time I have refused to engage in more than trite conversations with people who believe that the positions of the planets determine our lives in a meaningful way. Does that make me a bigot? In this case it probably does, because I have intellectually, and rationally, decided that everyone will be better off if I spend my limited time on earth improving society using other means.
Dating and intellectual engagement are two different things. They might on occasion overlap, but they are driven by two wholly different forces.
A far better question is: should we, as self-appointed keepers of rational examination of the universe, spend our time educating the ignorant, and working against forces counter to our views like, in this case, astrology? For some the answer is yes, for some the answer is no, and that makes for an interesting discussion.
Excellent example, but don't you mean 150 m across? (6 * (150/2)^2 * 3.1415 = 106030, or thereabouts).
this whole issue is nothing but sensationalism
Well said. From the article: "Some providers screen only for one or two pharmaceuticals, leaving open the possibility that others are present."
Or, to over-emphatically paraphrase this bit of reporting tripe: OH-MY-GOD there's a POSSIBILITY that there are TOXIC SUBSTANCES like PLUTONIUM and ANTHRAX in our drinking water BECAUSE WE DO NOT TEST FOR THEM!!1!
Although I applaud the amount of work and devotion to the subject -- one that does have serious potential consequences -- the reporters could have done a much better job of writing calm, reasoned prose, instead of the sensationalistic crud they did. The environmental presence of feminizing compounds, as one example, is worrisome and we need to understand it. But if these reporters were doing their job correctly, they might have pointed out that recreational drugs are also present in the water supply (in trace amounts, although much less than in the waste stream where they are rampant), rather than just pharmaceuticals.
As another example of sensationalism in the article, "In several cases, officials at municipal or regional water providers told the AP that pharmaceuticals had not been detected, but the AP obtained the results of tests conducted by independent researchers that showed otherwise. For example, water department officials in New Orleans said their water had not been tested for pharmaceuticals, but a Tulane University researcher and his students have published a study that found the pain reliever naproxen, the sex hormone estrone and the anti-cholesterol drug byproduct clofibric acid in treated drinking water." The implication OH-MY-GOD is that the interviewed water officials in New Orleans were aware of this study, and were covering it up, when the far more likely situation is that the water officials, being civil servants and all, probably didn't read academic journals about their field. It's not like the Tulane graduate students had to ask the New Orleans Water Commission (or whatever they call it there) for a sample of the water to test. Quite likely that the entire study happened without the knowledge of the N.O. officials. And that contrived example is the BEST instance the reporters could find of a possible cover-up? This is sloppy, sensationalistic journalism. No, sorry, it's not journalism, it's something else that we're being asked to think is journalism.
And to what level of nonsense have we raised ourselves when people working at public water purification plants hide behind, "post-9/11 security concerns," in refusing to answer questions about how the drinking water is tested? Shouldn't that be entirely public information open to scrutiny and criticism? Don't I, as a citizen of the town where I reside, have the right to know what steps are taken to ensure the water provided through my tax dollars and usage fees is safe to drink?
Feh. I'm going to crawl back into my cave. Call me when this hysteria has passed.
could we put a satellite in orbit around our moon?
We already have, many times, starting with Apollo 8 which orbited around the moon. Actually, I'm not 100% certain that was the first. Nevertheless, we have put satellites in orbit, that is, man-made objects in stable orbital configurations, around the moon already. We even did it with slide-rules and computers far less powerful than what's in your cell phone.
Step 1: observe that board games are a dying market
Step 2: actively and repeatedly suppress on-line implementations, despite the obvious unmet market need and potential source of revenue
Step 3: when a wildly popular implementation pops up, instead of licensing it and splitting the revenue, try to squash it on shaky legal grounds
Step 4: hire a big gaming company in the US to implement a new version at 10x the cost of licensing the developing-country version
Did I miss anything? Sounds like a broken strategy, Mattel.
On another note, I think anyone claiming 99.999% on POTS is anecdotal. Growing up, I had my power cut out at least twice a year, and the phone system was hardly 99.999%. Trees fall on lines, and people cut buried lines for all sorts of accidental reasons.
Five Nines (99.999%) works out to about 5 minutes per year of downtime. If your phone lines -- remember, we're talking about POTS -- were hit by lightning, a falling tree, etc., that would take, let's guess, 4 hours to repair. If it happened once per year, it would be 99.95% uptime. I can recall the power going out once or twice per year when I grew up, but the phone? Never.
IAAPP (I am a professional programmer, that is, I get paid to code). I was educated at an elite school in their computer science department. Of the people I've known in my professional life, the superstars -- the one-in-a-thousands, and I most certainly do not count myself among them -- over half were educated at elite universities.
This means two things, first, you can find superstar programmers that were not educated at places like MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, etc. But it also means that you'll have a good chance of finding them by recruiting at places like that.
If you ask elite universities the best way to recruit there, they'll push you toward their careers office. That will get you the good programmers. You'll only get the superstars by having a relationship with a faculty member -- perhaps your old professor -- and getting them to give you the inside scoop.
Superstars don't go through the normal hiring mechanisms. They don't need to.
It's a Well Known Fact that there are far more research grants for proving already-known scientific laws than there are for efforts to find out things we don't know. Plus, look at what the Nobel prizes are always for: the 2007 prize in Chemistry was for a demonstration that NaCL dissolves in H20, the one in Medicine was for a proof that the ankle bone is connected to the leg bone, and the prize in Economics was for a treatise on how buying low and selling high makes one wealthier. The key to fame and fortune in research science clearly lies in defending the status quo.
I realize this quotation was said with sarcasm, but you're missing an important point: Nobel Prizes in the sciences are given many years after the initial discovery because the discovery has to be demonstrated to have deeply affected our understanding of the particular field. In other words, the Prizes are given for discoveries that create dogma. So, by the time a Prize gets conveyed, many of the ideas have achieved, "well, duh," status. And is a good thing, not a bad one, that we recognize them.
Your computer's chassis is not at ground, and the AC present on it is being transmitted to your external devices through the common ground line. Yes, there is only 5V power between the Vcc and GND lines on the USB cable, but the entire cable is going up and down together. Remember, voltage is measured between two points. I would suspect the outlet your computer is plugged into either has a faulty ground or is otherwise mis-wired, or you're using a 3-to-2 pin adapter on the line, or your computer is plugged into a faulty power strip. Or some combination thereof. Those are the most common issues. Less common, but still possible, is that your computer's internal power supply is of poor design and is allowing leakage from the mains line onto the chassis.
It doesn't feel so much like a jolt or a tingle, however, as that the surface feels strange.. almost like it's vibrating at a high frequency; but only when touched very, very lightly
Run do not walk away from any situation where this is true. The casing you are touching is not at ground, and you are feeling the 50 or 60 Hz current (that's the high frequency vibration you're feeling) flowing through you. Don't believe me? Next time you experience this, put an AC voltmeter between the pseudo-vibrating chassis and ground. You'll see between 6 and 20 VAC (at least that's the range I've observed). This is the mains current leaking onto the chassis.
There are many reasons for this, but they almost all boil down to poor design of the equipment or inexpert wiring of the mains outlet. Often the fix is to unplug the two-pronged plug and re-plug it in the other way around. This isn't always possible with polarized plugs (which were *supposed* to make this not nearly as much of an issue, but then, that relies upon all outlets being wired correctly and my experience is that only about 80% of them are).
Do not ignore this when you find it. It is a potential danger. If you're in a country where they use 220/240 VAC, it is of particular concern.
Yep. Diamonds are what is known as a four-neighbor three-dimensional (4N3D) mesh in computer architecture. They have the same crystal structure as other elements in the same column of the periodic table (most notably Silicon). The hardness that these crystals share comes from the very rigid lattice structure. 4N3D meshes are like triangular trusses built in three dimensions. Really, really strong.
Apple does not have server-class hardware. This is the real reason you will not switch your back-end servers. Or, it is the real reason you would switch back, if you tried and didn't already know. Yes, Apple sells server-class hardware, but it is not up to the task.
My brother's company, which runs a top 100 web site (as measured by Alexa), used to run some NetApp hardware and some Apple hardware in the same functional part of the web site architecture. The Apple hardware has all -- ALL -- been decommissioned because it did not prove reliable. The NetApp hardware still runs strong. The company uses, to my knowledge, a fair number of Apple laptops, but that's about it from that vendor.