Oh, I've definitely had those curly brace arguments. With my advisor, even.:) The same advisor I got into knock-down drag-out fights with over comma placements, too.
The thing is, the really arbitrary rules are generally optional. These rules tend to apply to commas, hyphens, and word order. Even spelling can be flexible when multiple traditions developed separately (as in the US, UK, Ireland, Canada, and Australia) But it's to everyone's benefit to have as much agreement as possible, and it is to your particular benefit (if only occasionally) to know and use the most common spellings. Try looking up "grammer" and "grammar" in Wikipedia sometime.
But when there are plain, hard-and-fast rules, it is simply ignorance or laziness to not follow them. Pluralization and the use of apostrophes in contractions are such cases. It has never been correct to write "its" in place of "it is", or "it's" to indicate that a thing belongs to some "it". If you stop and think about it, it's clear which to use -- and your writing becomes that much more readable. As it is, people who actually know the difference see these errors and write off the writer as lazy, whereas people who do not know the difference will not care. It's the same philosophy behind wearing clean clothes and not smelling bad. You can argue that these things are irrelevent to whether people ought to take you seriously, but that's kind of beside the point. (OK, OK, some will say that it's actually the same philosophy behind using the right fork at dinner, but I tend to equate that more with writing "GNU/Linux" rather than "Linux" when writing somewhere RMS might see.)
I highly recommend the book "Eats, Shoots and Leaves" by Lynne Truss. It's pedantic as hell, but entertaining and informative. Possibly persuasive, too;)
Being able to spell correctly and compose logical, grammatically-correct English is a great ability, but it has it's time and place!
Misplaced apostrophe. "it's" is shorthand for "it is" or "it has". The proper posessive of "it" is "its".
If this were a spoken forum, then you would be correct. However, the internet relies on written communication, and just as being well-spoken helps a person get his point across in person, punctuating and spelling properly helps in text.
It's never made sense to me that geeks in general aren't stricter about these things. The very nature of programming would seem to train us for it. When the syntax checker complains about a stray or missing semicolon, we don't say, "Oh, stop being so pedantic! You know what I mean!" We go back and fix the error.
Now that I think about it, maybe this stubborn clinging to semi-literacy on Slashdot is a way of getting back at our compilers...
I haven't seen these folks mentioned: Tycho Brahe (Silver noses and burst bladders) Charles Steinmetz (dwarfism, socialism, and alternating current! Oh, my!) Benjamin Franklin (A little inventing, a little politics, and a lot of great one-liners) Archimedes (just plain awesome)
I would recommend getting an MS or PhD with a professor who already does robotics and publishes. The various alumni of CMU's Robot Lab would be good for this, as they have solid experience and lots of connections. (Most graduate students get their first job through their advisor, after all) And the larger, more established programs often keep a listing of their alumni. Since the newer ones are going to be trying to get tenure, they're going to be driven to publish. This can be good or bad, since it means that they'll be very enthusiastic... but your own interests may get swept aside.
Now, the actual degree is immaterial. Many of them are CS people, but just as many are electrical or computer engineers. There are some mechanical engineers too, and don't shy away from them -- they may need a good programmer for their current project.
Go visit these people in their labs, and ask about their current research, and tell them that you're interested in robotics as a career. Look at what they've published yesterday (Google Scholar is good for this) Talk to their grad students and see what they're working on.
I had thought only a few weren't. But in any case, it's not safe to refer to stainless steel as nonferromagnetic in a discussion of what's OK to have in the vicinity of an MRI machine.
Is it just me, or has the Times's editing just gone to shit these last few years? I'm constantly catching stuff like this (with no way to easily report it) and in a recent MRI article their author actually said that stainless steel was non-ferromagnetic!
I'm all for it -- most "hot new singles" suck. I like iTunes chiefly as a way to get hard-to-find stuff. (Incidentally, that was the main reason I used "free" music sites and programs)
I'm also all for experimenting to find a good price point. "Simple and uniform pricing" is only good if you actually have the right price. 99c a song is still way overpriced for most of the catalog, and I think they'll find that they'd make more money around 75c or 50c than they do now. With classical music, this is particularly the case -- there are umpteen different recordings of the same piece, and the current price is somewhat prohibitive to getting multiple versions to compare.
(And why do I get the feeling Lack made a proctologist joke?)
Let's not forget that Wired would probably have been perfectly happy to continue this tactic, until the SF Chronicle started researching this article.
It's easy to get into the habit of thinking that the media is toothless, but in many ways, the light of publicity can still bring about change for the best.
Re:Edward F. Moore's 1959 self-reproducers
on
Self-Replicating Robots
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I don't see anything coming up for Edward Moore, but there's a June 1959 Scientific American article by L.S. Penrose (Any relation to Roger Penrose?) that seems to fit the bill: "Self-Reproducing Machines"
I haven't read the article though, just seen the title, so maybe Moore had one in the same issue.
This is most certainly NOT the first time the original (gender-based) version of the Turing Test has ever been played. I personally participated in one such test a half-dozen years ago.
They may be the first to conduct a rigorous study of it under controlled conditions, but the claim made by the blog and the writeup to be the first ever to play it is utter bullshit.
You're probably right, and it doesn't help that outsiders also confuse the two. Still, in this case, it seems to be more a case of the French recognising a good thing when they saw it and nobody bothering to ask where it came from.
And really, I think the idea of street vendor french fries is effing brilliant.
Ah, right, the "nitpick and flee" defense. Don't actually offer any evidence to support your claims, or anything other than a smug "they're half right". Speciation has in fact been seen and documented, chiefly in fish and microbes.
And you're right, this isn't a dinosaur thread, this is about the intentional ignorance on matters of science that pervades evangalical American culture right now. People like you who are content to blow off mountains of evidence because you prefer to believe something else, and who judge that evidence based on whether it supports your pet hypothesis or not. You're just like those people who preferred to believe that the Earth was the center of the galaxy, or those who preferred to believe that cigarettes were healthful, or those who preferred to believe that slaves were stupid and happy. I wouldn't care about your willingness to wallow in intentional ignorance, if people like you didn't constantly throw it in everyone's faces.
"countless frauds"? Neither Piltdown Man nor Java Man (which were both intended as money-making frauds, not to prove evolution, which by that point was already well-established and needed no such proof) is used as evidence for evolution. Nothing is changed by them being false (in fact, there would be many more problems if they'd proved true). Yes, dodgy things come up and are proven wrong -- that's how science works, and it was a group of evolutionists who proved that those two things were frauds. It's called intellectual honesty, and I seriously doubt you'd have enough intellectual honesty to recognise evidence that casts doubt on your belief.
And sure, creationists never fabricate evidence -- how can you if you don't ever offer any?
Sorry, that's also wrong. The Amerinds didn't do the whole deep fat frying thing. That requires quantities of relatively pure, high flash-point oil (generally, vegetable oil), iron cooking vessels, and a reasonably even heat source to keep the whole thing significantly above the boiling point of water. In any case, french fries weren't invented until the 19th century. Yes, potatoes came from America, but that doesn't mean that everything made from them does -- would you say that latkes or potato vodka are American inventions?
To make french fries, the potatoes are cut into long square slices and deep-fried twice (once a low temperature to cook, once at high temperature to brown), a method not developed until the 1800's. And whether they were actually invented in Belgium or not, they got the name because they were popular street food in Paris for a time.
The ability to confuse children is not an indicator of truth, one way or the other.
Evolution is *not* bad science. We understand genetic drift, and the principle of natural selection. We've *seen* speciation at work. There is a complex web of evidence and backup evidence supporting these assertions. It *is* proven fact. As a species, we understand how evolution works better than we understand how gravity works. (Do you object to Newtonian mechanics being taught to children as "fact", considering that, really, it's not?)
You, on the other hand, have a single chapter in a book. This book was not intended as a science textbook, and people who read it that way are utterly missing the point. In order to accept the 6-day creationism hypothesis, you have to also accept that God lied like crazy to us in constructing the fossil record (indeed, in constructing one at all!), and the geological record, and the genetic record in DNA and mitochondrial DNA, and all the other mutually supporting evidence.
So I ask myself, which is more likely: that God intentionally fabricated all this stuff in such a way that it leads us directly to a precise but wrong conclusion, or that God glossed over a few things when some pretty damn primitive people started wondering where everything came from, so that he could get on to the important concepts of right-and-wrong rather than get bogged down discussing continental drift, genetics, and orbital mechanics. In other words, is God some demented trickster, or is he a good teacher? Kind of a no-brainer.
For the purposes of a Slashdot thread, on the subject of learning a language, it was sufficient -- any generalities would be wasted on someone not learning the language, and like all generalities, it would soon be discarded by someone making a serious study of the subject.
My advice: ditch the anime for the year in between, and try to learn from live-action movies and newspapers. You really do not want to show up in Japan talking like someone out of anime -- nine times out of ten, the result is that you'll sound like a teenage girl.
Now when I want to decide who in a casino to beat up and rob, I just have to buy a detector, figure out which poor bastard has the most money, and follow him! No more muss or fuss with guessing wrong and going to the trouble of mugging some jerk who's poor.
I'm beginning to think that what's really newsworthy about this is how ignorant most people are about how grant-based research works in this country. I have to wonder whether they'd really approve of how much money the schools themselves take out.
It's a $400k grant with two optional extensions. The school will take half, the profs will take part of their own salaries out of it, and then it'll support a couple PhD and MS students. This is no big deal.
You know, I never can quite get this -- why the heck go to all the trouble of conquering Earth and enslaving everyone when robots are easier and cheaper?
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, I've definitely had those curly brace arguments. With my advisor, even. :) The same advisor I got into knock-down drag-out fights with over comma placements, too.
;)
The thing is, the really arbitrary rules are generally optional. These rules tend to apply to commas, hyphens, and word order. Even spelling can be flexible when multiple traditions developed separately (as in the US, UK, Ireland, Canada, and Australia) But it's to everyone's benefit to have as much agreement as possible, and it is to your particular benefit (if only occasionally) to know and use the most common spellings. Try looking up "grammer" and "grammar" in Wikipedia sometime.
But when there are plain, hard-and-fast rules, it is simply ignorance or laziness to not follow them. Pluralization and the use of apostrophes in contractions are such cases. It has never been correct to write "its" in place of "it is", or "it's" to indicate that a thing belongs to some "it". If you stop and think about it, it's clear which to use -- and your writing becomes that much more readable.
As it is, people who actually know the difference see these errors and write off the writer as lazy, whereas people who do not know the difference will not care. It's the same philosophy behind wearing clean clothes and not smelling bad. You can argue that these things are irrelevent to whether people ought to take you seriously, but that's kind of beside the point. (OK, OK, some will say that it's actually the same philosophy behind using the right fork at dinner, but I tend to equate that more with writing "GNU/Linux" rather than "Linux" when writing somewhere RMS might see.)
I highly recommend the book "Eats, Shoots and Leaves" by Lynne Truss. It's pedantic as hell, but entertaining and informative. Possibly persuasive, too
Being able to spell correctly and compose logical, grammatically-correct English is a great ability, but it has it's time and place!
Misplaced apostrophe. "it's" is shorthand for "it is" or "it has". The proper posessive of "it" is "its".
If this were a spoken forum, then you would be correct. However, the internet relies on written communication, and just as being well-spoken helps a person get his point across in person, punctuating and spelling properly helps in text.
It's never made sense to me that geeks in general aren't stricter about these things. The very nature of programming would seem to train us for it. When the syntax checker complains about a stray or missing semicolon, we don't say, "Oh, stop being so pedantic! You know what I mean!" We go back and fix the error.
Now that I think about it, maybe this stubborn clinging to semi-literacy on Slashdot is a way of getting back at our compilers...
I haven't seen these folks mentioned:
Tycho Brahe (Silver noses and burst bladders)
Charles Steinmetz (dwarfism, socialism, and alternating current! Oh, my!)
Benjamin Franklin (A little inventing, a little politics, and a lot of great one-liners)
Archimedes (just plain awesome)
I would recommend getting an MS or PhD with a professor who already does robotics and publishes. The various alumni of CMU's Robot Lab would be good for this, as they have solid experience and lots of connections. (Most graduate students get their first job through their advisor, after all) And the larger, more established programs often keep a listing of their alumni. Since the newer ones are going to be trying to get tenure, they're going to be driven to publish. This can be good or bad, since it means that they'll be very enthusiastic... but your own interests may get swept aside.
Now, the actual degree is immaterial. Many of them are CS people, but just as many are electrical or computer engineers. There are some mechanical engineers too, and don't shy away from them -- they may need a good programmer for their current project.
Go visit these people in their labs, and ask about their current research, and tell them that you're interested in robotics as a career. Look at what they've published yesterday (Google Scholar is good for this) Talk to their grad students and see what they're working on.
I had thought only a few weren't. But in any case, it's not safe to refer to stainless steel as nonferromagnetic in a discussion of what's OK to have in the vicinity of an MRI machine.
Ahhh... I misread. I was too quick to think ill of the Times! (But it's so easy...)
No, I don't: "The Times" is not plural. Ending in "s" does not change the rule in that regard.
a post.html
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/grammar/g_
Which monkeys, exactly?
Is it just me, or has the Times's editing just gone to shit these last few years? I'm constantly catching stuff like this (with no way to easily report it) and in a recent MRI article their author actually said that stainless steel was non-ferromagnetic!
I'm all for it -- most "hot new singles" suck. I like iTunes chiefly as a way to get hard-to-find stuff. (Incidentally, that was the main reason I used "free" music sites and programs)
I'm also all for experimenting to find a good price point. "Simple and uniform pricing" is only good if you actually have the right price. 99c a song is still way overpriced for most of the catalog, and I think they'll find that they'd make more money around 75c or 50c than they do now. With classical music, this is particularly the case -- there are umpteen different recordings of the same piece, and the current price is somewhat prohibitive to getting multiple versions to compare.
(And why do I get the feeling Lack made a proctologist joke?)
Let's not forget that Wired would probably have been perfectly happy to continue this tactic, until the SF Chronicle started researching this article.
It's easy to get into the habit of thinking that the media is toothless, but in many ways, the light of publicity can still bring about change for the best.
I don't see anything coming up for Edward Moore, but there's a June 1959 Scientific American article by L.S. Penrose (Any relation to Roger Penrose?) that seems to fit the bill: "Self-Reproducing Machines"
I haven't read the article though, just seen the title, so maybe Moore had one in the same issue.
This is most certainly NOT the first time the original (gender-based) version of the Turing Test has ever been played. I personally participated in one such test a half-dozen years ago.
They may be the first to conduct a rigorous study of it under controlled conditions, but the claim made by the blog and the writeup to be the first ever to play it is utter bullshit.
What do you mean, "now"? The last time I reviewed papers for a conference, half of them were bs.
Nothing is off-topic on Slashdot ;)
You're probably right, and it doesn't help that outsiders also confuse the two. Still, in this case, it seems to be more a case of the French recognising a good thing when they saw it and nobody bothering to ask where it came from.
And really, I think the idea of street vendor french fries is effing brilliant.
Ah, right, the "nitpick and flee" defense. Don't actually offer any evidence to support your claims, or anything other than a smug "they're half right". Speciation has in fact been seen and documented, chiefly in fish and microbes.
And you're right, this isn't a dinosaur thread, this is about the intentional ignorance on matters of science that pervades evangalical American culture right now. People like you who are content to blow off mountains of evidence because you prefer to believe something else, and who judge that evidence based on whether it supports your pet hypothesis or not. You're just like those people who preferred to believe that the Earth was the center of the galaxy, or those who preferred to believe that cigarettes were healthful, or those who preferred to believe that slaves were stupid and happy. I wouldn't care about your willingness to wallow in intentional ignorance, if people like you didn't constantly throw it in everyone's faces.
"countless frauds"? Neither Piltdown Man nor Java Man (which were both intended as money-making frauds, not to prove evolution, which by that point was already well-established and needed no such proof) is used as evidence for evolution. Nothing is changed by them being false (in fact, there would be many more problems if they'd proved true). Yes, dodgy things come up and are proven wrong -- that's how science works, and it was a group of evolutionists who proved that those two things were frauds. It's called intellectual honesty, and I seriously doubt you'd have enough intellectual honesty to recognise evidence that casts doubt on your belief.
And sure, creationists never fabricate evidence -- how can you if you don't ever offer any?
Sorry, that's also wrong. The Amerinds didn't do the whole deep fat frying thing. That requires quantities of relatively pure, high flash-point oil (generally, vegetable oil), iron cooking vessels, and a reasonably even heat source to keep the whole thing significantly above the boiling point of water. In any case, french fries weren't invented until the 19th century. Yes, potatoes came from America, but that doesn't mean that everything made from them does -- would you say that latkes or potato vodka are American inventions?
To make french fries, the potatoes are cut into long square slices and deep-fried twice (once a low temperature to cook, once at high temperature to brown), a method not developed until the 1800's. And whether they were actually invented in Belgium or not, they got the name because they were popular street food in Paris for a time.
The ability to confuse children is not an indicator of truth, one way or the other.
Evolution is *not* bad science. We understand genetic drift, and the principle of natural selection. We've *seen* speciation at work. There is a complex web of evidence and backup evidence supporting these assertions. It *is* proven fact. As a species, we understand how evolution works better than we understand how gravity works. (Do you object to Newtonian mechanics being taught to children as "fact", considering that, really, it's not?)
You, on the other hand, have a single chapter in a book. This book was not intended as a science textbook, and people who read it that way are utterly missing the point. In order to accept the 6-day creationism hypothesis, you have to also accept that God lied like crazy to us in constructing the fossil record (indeed, in constructing one at all!), and the geological record, and the genetic record in DNA and mitochondrial DNA, and all the other mutually supporting evidence.
So I ask myself, which is more likely: that God intentionally fabricated all this stuff in such a way that it leads us directly to a precise but wrong conclusion, or that God glossed over a few things when some pretty damn primitive people started wondering where everything came from, so that he could get on to the important concepts of right-and-wrong rather than get bogged down discussing continental drift, genetics, and orbital mechanics. In other words, is God some demented trickster, or is he a good teacher? Kind of a no-brainer.
For the purposes of a Slashdot thread, on the subject of learning a language, it was sufficient -- any generalities would be wasted on someone not learning the language, and like all generalities, it would soon be discarded by someone making a serious study of the subject.
My advice: ditch the anime for the year in between, and try to learn from live-action movies and newspapers. You really do not want to show up in Japan talking like someone out of anime -- nine times out of ten, the result is that you'll sound like a teenage girl.
Now when I want to decide who in a casino to beat up and rob, I just have to buy a detector, figure out which poor bastard has the most money, and follow him! No more muss or fuss with guessing wrong and going to the trouble of mugging some jerk who's poor.
I'm beginning to think that what's really newsworthy about this is how ignorant most people are about how grant-based research works in this country. I have to wonder whether they'd really approve of how much money the schools themselves take out.
It's a $400k grant with two optional extensions. The school will take half, the profs will take part of their own salaries out of it, and then it'll support a couple PhD and MS students. This is no big deal.
You know, I never can quite get this -- why the heck go to all the trouble of conquering Earth and enslaving everyone when robots are easier and cheaper?
If you notice the stream of smoke moving horizontally, my guess is that they have a fume hood or something of the sort.
Or heck, if he's like most hardware engineers he's been breathing solder fumes for a dozen years -- why stop now?