You might be familiar with the 'candle test' -- high monetary incentives induce better performance on mechanical tasks but significantly *worse* performance on creative tasks. Using a variant of that experiment they found that reading speed and comprehension were unaffected by type and layout, but people's mood and cognitive reserve were noticeably improved by the good typography.
I suspect this doesn't say as much about type as it does about school -- that the bad typography, by slowing down reading, improves rote mechanical recall; and that if they tested for synthesis and creativity, good typography would out-perform bad.
bash, {bin,file,sh,text}utils, gcc et al., X windows -- all for free from redhat and your friendly neighborhood free software hackers. Most any X or command line utility will respond to the standard "./compile; make" dance.
Just because you use Windows doesn't mean you don't deserve a real commandline...
This made me immediately think of the 'redundant/unused code' conundrum in biology (Sorting through DNA). Surprisingly little of the DNA string seems to be 'active' code, where active means 'codes for a gene.' Most of it is either has no use, or uses that are not clear to us now. One pedestrian use for this 'dead' code is simply to separate the genes logically and spatially; this reduces the probability of simultaneous defects in multiple genes.
In case you think he's kidding about the 6 dildo law, please read this article (from the austin chronicle). An excerpt:
...The humble dildo is legally verboten in the state of Texas. According to the Texas Penal Code, which details what devices good, law-abiding Texans may and may not purchase for their personal pleasure, dildos (and all other items made specifically to stimulate the genitals) can't be collected, bought, or sold in the state.
The law is a harsh, unforgiving mistress, but what it says is fairly simple: "Obscene devices" -- defined as anything, including a dildo, vibrator, or artificial vagina, "designed or marketed as useful primarily for the stimulation of human genital organs" -- can't be sold in the state of Texas (or in Georgia, for those keeping track), except for "a bona fide medical, psychiatric, judicial, legislative, or law enforcement purpose." If you can prove you're using those models to demonstrate how to put on a condom, that's fine. If you're thinking about using them for a more personal sort of education, that's not. (Oddly, the law doesn't prevent people from owning sexual devices; it just makes selling them illegal. But don't let your collection get out of hand: If you're hiding more than six dongs in your closet, that's intent to "promote" -- a class A misdemeanor.)
Also, in case you think this is simply a vestige of some antediluvian puritanical statute, please note that the law was passed in 1973 and applies to all of Texas. You may carry a concealed weapon but not a dong.
This theory would imply that only a minimal shock wave should be transmitted into the water, since the explosion would be happening well above the surface, as the picture seems to show. Unfortunately that theory is not supported by the fact that the metal bucket was split at the seams, even though less than an inch of rim extended over the level of the water.
Water is (nigh) incompressible -- so a small shock wave goes a long way. Since air has such a small bulk modulus (large compressibility) lots of energy can be stored in compressing the air and in adiabatically heating it. Since the water has a huge bulk modulus, there is no opportunity for the downward portion of the shock wave to dissipate -- that is, until it reaches the seams of the bucket and causes it to bust (dissipating energy as plastic deformation of the metal).
This is also why lighting and flushing a cherry bomb is so enjoyable for non-janitors: the shock wave goes into plumes of water and wrecking the sewer system, not harmlessly into the air.
I am an nth year grad student at UTexas-Austin. Here are my suggestions:
QED by Richard Feynman
QED stands for Quantum Electrodynamics -- the modern theory of how light travels and interacts with matter. It also stands for Quod Erat Demonstratum -- the phrase mathematicians use to show the successful completion of a proof. QED (the theory) is one of the most beautiful and precisely verified theories in all of science; the author is not only one of the principal architects of that theory but its clearest expositor. Feynman carefully paints a clear, physical picture of a mindblowing esoteric landscape populated by particles that spring into existence or annihilate into photons, taking all possible paths in order to find the 'natural' one. This is the best science book for a general audience I have read.
Any educated person with an appreciation and interest for science should enjoy this book.
The Feynman Lectures on Physics, vol. 1
by R.P. Feynman and R. Leighton
For the more serious and technical reader, the first volume of the Feynman Lectures serve as an excellent self-study textbook. Reading these books made me change my major to physics. I referred to them consistently well into my graduate studies, since they do the best job of describing a tangible, physical model of what is happening. For example, the chapter on conservation of energy does the best job I have seen of not only describing the principle but explaining the importance and relevance of conservation principles. Six chapters of this book are sold as 'Six Easy Pieces' -- but anyone geeky enough for Slashdot should spring for the real thing.
Any person with a technical background and college mathematics will enjoy and refer to this book -- especially as a supplement to lesser textbooks.
Nobel Lectures in Physics 1901-1921, pub. Elsevier 1967 Nobel Lectures in Physics 1922-1941, pub. Elsevier 1967
(possibly out of print; try BookFinder or similar)
Each Nobel Laureate gives a talk that is supposed to describe the science behind the prize at a general level. Most of them succeed in doing quite a good job. The science from these first four decades of modern physics is well described elsewhere, but these lectures give you a first-hand account that complements the textbook approach, and can be quite enlightening scientifically as well as giving a history, social, and scientific context.
All the heavy hitters are here:
Laureates in vol. 1 include Roentgen, for X-rays; Becquerel and the Curies, for discovering radioactivity; JJ Thomson, for discovery of the electron; Michelson (of the Michelson-Morley experiment and the precision measurement of the speed of light); Laue, and later the Braggs, for X-Ray diffraction; Max Planck, for the quantum hypothesis; and some dude named Albert Einstein (who won for his theory of the photoelectric effect but gave his lecture on relativity, which was understood to be more important but was still speculative at the time).
Laureates in vol. 2 include Bohr, for the structure of the atom; Millikan, for determining Planck's constant; Franck and Hertz, for verifiying Bohr's quantum model of the atom; DeBroglie, for matter waves; Heisenberg, Schroedinger, and Dirac, for quantum mechanics; Davisson and Thomson, for demonstrating that electrons are waves as well as particles; and Fermi, for artificial radioactivity.
Any person who wants a first-hand account of the story and the science behind the great developments in physics will enjoy these books.
The Flying Circus of Physics by J Diamond
This book simply contains a series of single paragraphs, each of which describes an ordinary or extraordinary physical phenomenon followed by a series of general questions on that topic. (For example: Why are sunsets usually more colorful than sunrises?) Some conundra would make good science fair project for a middle-to-high school student, or amateur hobbyist; most can provide a group of geeks with solid dinner-conversation material as they puzzle out the answer. Even a physics professor will have to think carefully before answering each question, but they all depend on basic physics -- an elementary physics student with motivation has the tools to answer any given question. The back of the book contains a brief answer to each question and pointers to journals or books giving more information. However, the real value of the book is to make you sweat out the physics and sharpen your intuition, so looking at the answers is cheating (early versions of the book had none).
Physics majors or students taking college physics classes who want to plumb the depths of their understanding or find jumping-off points for independent study should get this book.
The crop circles were made by a couple of fellows from Winchester named Doug Bower and Dave Chorley. They made the circles for years at night, and Bower even kept the secret from his wife for seven years. When they finally told the public, few people believed them, and the UFO crowd still insists that the hoax was not the crop circles but the claim of authorship. (ObNeologism: ("cereology" -- those who study crop circles.) Never mind that Bower and Chorley have the original designs and dates, signed the drawings with "DD," and other supporting evidence. Of course, there is also Doug Bower's statement that he was programmed by UFOs to make the circles. Sigh.
I use the cygwin/XFree86 programs daily, and have been for several months now. It is truly a beautiful thing to be able to use bash _and_ windows explorer to manage files, or to Alt-TAB from emacs to CorelDraw to FrontPage when web editing.
Actually, though, what I use are Xclients compiled against the XFree86 libraries. The XFree86 X server doesn't yet have a useable multiple-window mode -- that is, one in which XP is your window manager and each program appears in a separate Windows window. <FLAMESUIT>Since what I want is the superior windows UI with the superior GNU utilities power, the separate window mode is pretty essential. Thus I still use eXceed as my Xserver. </FLAMESUIT>
Work on this capability is proceeding; it is, in fact, the top item on the Cygwin/XFree TODO list:
Seamless integration with Windows: Create a Cygwin/XFree86 window manager to display each X client in its own Win32 window. Such a window manager will be a stand-alone client, but it may require some internal modifications to the Cygwin/XFree86 server to allow drawing to be redirected to various Win32 windows, depending on which client is being drawn.
By the way, if you are setting up Cygwin for the first time, I highly recommend following the procedures outlined at
Tick: C'mon Arthur! Evil is Afoot!
Arthur: Really, that's very philosophical, Tick. A foot? I always envisioned evil as a dark, brooding shape with squinty eyes... (Villains, inc)
and
"Isn't sanity just a one trick pony anyway? I mean, all you get is one trick; rational thinking. But when you're good and crazy, well, the sky's the limit!" (Ants in Pants)
To the slashteam -- great job handling the massive server load.
Have you guys considered sceduling your own crapstorm? That is, letting all slashdot users know that on October xx between 12 and 1 eastern time they should reload, search, and generally abuse the server as much as possible. Set up a testing thread and see how many comments it will rack up.
It might allow you to feel that much more confident about future occasions when Slashdot is, well, slashdotted...
The Encylopedia Brittanica has a rich set of guidelines to fair use and citation of their material. Furthermore, every article on EB has a link, at the bottom, for "How to cite this article." The Slashdot maintainers should consider posting such a guideline.
In my opinion, the journalizm community has a deep understanding and commitment to copyright and fair use issues. If the comments were not given due credit, it is probably because it was not clear enough what comprises due credit. The reputation and continued success of a journalist depends on his fair treatment of sources. If we make it clear exactly what the Slashdot community considers fair treatment, I beleive that most reporters will respect it.
Here are some thoughts for possible fair use guidelines:
If your article is largely based on a slashdot discussion thread, please give the URL for that thread in the text of your article, or porvide a link at the end. The format for such a URL is
(where the date/unique number is replaced with the appropriate value).
If you quote a slashdot post, give the real name or nickname of that poster. It is generally inappropraite to refer to "a Slashdot poster" if that person's name could reasonably be used as well. In an online article, please link the user's name to his or her slashdot "User Info" page. Such a link appears below each post, and has the format
Homunq, "Two words: Fair Use," opinion expressed in Slashdot Discussion "Mainstream Media on Slashdot and Microsoft." http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/11/08/122625 5&mode=thread [Nov 8, 1999].
If you wish to report the representative sense of the slashdot community, please note the mechnaisms by which the community assigns trust to opinions. Posts that have been moderated up, and those by users with high karma, should be given higher weight and maybe considered representative. It is a disservice to the truth and to slashdot to reprint the flamebait ramblings of an anonymous coward as representative views.
Anonymous Cowards are a necessary evil, but their comments are neither authoritative nor accountable. If you repeat the opinions of an AC, please make it clear that those opinions are in no way representative of the slashdot community. Before you choose to repeat the posts of an anonymous poster, strongly consider whether it is appropriate. (An exception may be made if an AC post has been strongly moderated up, to +2 or above; such a post may be considered representative).
Keep in mind that comments are owned by the poster. It is fair use to quote them, in context, in a story or paper. For deeper questions on the copyright limitations and freedoms, see Stanford's copyright FAQ.
You can bet that a stock will drop precipitously. It is known as "selling short;" you sell a stock at the current price, but agree that the actual sale will not take place until some time in the future. Therefore, I lock in today's price, then wait until the day of the actual tranfer and buy at that price.
So for instance, if I thought that MS stock would go down, I could have sold short on thursday, with the transfer date of tuesday. Say the stock was at $100 on Thu, but dropped to $95 on Tuesday, and that I sold 1000 shares short. I sell the stock for $100, but buy it for $95, making $5000.
The problem is that your losses are not capped: you are liable for potentially infinite penalties. If instead the stock rose to $150, I would be out $50,000...
What I think would be interesting would be to match all of mankind against all of computerdom: have a distributed computing effort compete against a collaborative world effort.
Slashdot Mirror
This talk by Kevin Larson at the MIX10 conference (applicable part starts at ~ 69:00) has some great stuff about the cognitive and emotional impact of good typography.
You might be familiar with the 'candle test' -- high monetary incentives induce better performance on mechanical tasks but significantly *worse* performance on creative tasks. Using a variant of that experiment they found that reading speed and comprehension were unaffected by type and layout, but people's mood and cognitive reserve were noticeably improved by the good typography.
I suspect this doesn't say as much about type as it does about school -- that the bad typography, by slowing down reading, improves rote mechanical recall; and that if they tested for synthesis and creativity, good typography would out-perform bad.
Got Cygwin?
bash, {bin,file,sh,text}utils, gcc et al., X windows -- all for free from redhat and your friendly neighborhood free software hackers. Most any X or command line utility will respond to the standard "./compile; make" dance.
Just because you use Windows doesn't mean you don't deserve a real commandline...
so, for instance, you would decode his hint above with the command
Of course, you can also go to http://www.rot13.com/ and enter your text thar.
DNA code also has high redundancy, which allows error-correcting transcription and other hacks ( see Parity Code And DNA or DNA's Error Detecting Code)
In both cases factors yielding robust DNA code are found to indicate bad digital computer code.
flip
(background: Ars Technica's Computational DNA primer
Water is (nigh) incompressible -- so a small shock wave goes a long way. Since air has such a small bulk modulus (large compressibility) lots of energy can be stored in compressing the air and in adiabatically heating it. Since the water has a huge bulk modulus, there is no opportunity for the downward portion of the shock wave to dissipate -- that is, until it reaches the seams of the bucket and causes it to bust (dissipating energy as plastic deformation of the metal).
This is also why lighting and flushing a cherry bomb is so enjoyable for non-janitors: the shock wave goes into plumes of water and wrecking the sewer system, not harmlessly into the air.
flip
I am an nth year grad student at UTexas-Austin. Here are my suggestions:
QED by Richard Feynman
QED stands for Quantum Electrodynamics -- the modern theory of how light travels and interacts with matter. It also stands for Quod Erat Demonstratum -- the phrase mathematicians use to show the successful completion of a proof. QED (the theory) is one of the most beautiful and precisely verified theories in all of science; the author is not only one of the principal architects of that theory but its clearest expositor. Feynman carefully paints a clear, physical picture of a mindblowing esoteric landscape populated by particles that spring into existence or annihilate into photons, taking all possible paths in order to find the 'natural' one. This is the best science book for a general audience I have read.
Any educated person with an appreciation and interest for science should enjoy this book.
The Feynman Lectures on Physics, vol. 1
by R.P. Feynman and R. Leighton
For the more serious and technical reader, the first volume of the Feynman Lectures serve as an excellent self-study textbook. Reading these books made me change my major to physics. I referred to them consistently well into my graduate studies, since they do the best job of describing a tangible, physical model of what is happening. For example, the chapter on conservation of energy does the best job I have seen of not only describing the principle but explaining the importance and relevance of conservation principles. Six chapters of this book are sold as 'Six Easy Pieces' -- but anyone geeky enough for Slashdot should spring for the real thing.
Any person with a technical background and college mathematics will enjoy and refer to this book -- especially as a supplement to lesser textbooks.
Nobel Lectures in Physics 1901-1921, pub. Elsevier 1967
Nobel Lectures in Physics 1922-1941, pub. Elsevier 1967
(possibly out of print; try BookFinder or similar)
Each Nobel Laureate gives a talk that is supposed to describe the science behind the prize at a general level. Most of them succeed in doing quite a good job. The science from these first four decades of modern physics is well described elsewhere, but these lectures give you a first-hand account that complements the textbook approach, and can be quite enlightening scientifically as well as giving a history, social, and scientific context.
All the heavy hitters are here:
Laureates in vol. 1 include Roentgen, for X-rays; Becquerel and the Curies, for discovering radioactivity; JJ Thomson, for discovery of the electron; Michelson (of the Michelson-Morley experiment and the precision measurement of the speed of light); Laue, and later the Braggs, for X-Ray diffraction; Max Planck, for the quantum hypothesis; and some dude named Albert Einstein (who won for his theory of the photoelectric effect but gave his lecture on relativity, which was understood to be more important but was still speculative at the time).
Laureates in vol. 2 include Bohr, for the structure of the atom; Millikan, for determining Planck's constant; Franck and Hertz, for verifiying Bohr's quantum model of the atom; DeBroglie, for matter waves; Heisenberg, Schroedinger, and Dirac, for quantum mechanics; Davisson and Thomson, for demonstrating that electrons are waves as well as particles; and Fermi, for artificial radioactivity.
Any person who wants a first-hand account of the story and the science behind the great developments in physics will enjoy these books.
The Flying Circus of Physics by J Diamond
This book simply contains a series of single paragraphs, each of which describes an ordinary or extraordinary physical phenomenon followed by a series of general questions on that topic. (For example: Why are sunsets usually more colorful than sunrises?) Some conundra would make good science fair project for a middle-to-high school student, or amateur hobbyist; most can provide a group of geeks with solid dinner-conversation material as they puzzle out the answer. Even a physics professor will have to think carefully before answering each question, but they all depend on basic physics -- an elementary physics student with motivation has the tools to answer any given question. The back of the book contains a brief answer to each question and pointers to journals or books giving more information. However, the real value of the book is to make you sweat out the physics and sharpen your intuition, so looking at the answers is cheating (early versions of the book had none).
Physics majors or students taking college physics classes who want to plumb the depths of their understanding or find jumping-off points for independent study should get this book.
The crop circles were made by a couple of fellows from Winchester named Doug Bower and Dave Chorley. They made the circles for years at night, and Bower even kept the secret from his wife for seven years. When they finally told the public, few people believed them, and the UFO crowd still insists that the hoax was not the crop circles but the claim of authorship. (ObNeologism: ("cereology" -- those who study crop circles.) Never mind that Bower and Chorley have the original designs and dates, signed the drawings with "DD," and other supporting evidence. Of course, there is also Doug Bower's statement that he was programmed by UFOs to make the circles. Sigh.
Some links:
An interview with Doug Bower
An article by Carl Sagan on crop circles
Circlemakers, an art group creating crop circles
flip
Actually, though, what I use are Xclients compiled against the XFree86 libraries. The XFree86 X server doesn't yet have a useable multiple-window mode -- that is, one in which XP is your window manager and each program appears in a separate Windows window. <FLAMESUIT>Since what I want is the superior windows UI with the superior GNU utilities power, the separate window mode is pretty essential. Thus I still use eXceed as my Xserver. </FLAMESUIT>
Work on this capability is proceeding; it is, in fact, the top item on the Cygwin/XFree TODO list:
By the way, if you are setting up Cygwin for the first time, I highly recommend following the procedures outlined at (which largely consists of instructions for ssh/sshd with Cygwin, but has many other excellent setup tips).My favorites:
Tick: C'mon Arthur! Evil is Afoot!
Arthur: Really, that's very philosophical, Tick. A foot? I always envisioned evil as a dark, brooding shape with squinty eyes... (Villains, inc)
and
"Isn't sanity just a one trick pony anyway? I mean, all you get is one trick; rational thinking. But when you're good and crazy, well, the sky's the limit!" (Ants in Pants)
To the slashteam -- great job handling the massive server load.
Have you guys considered sceduling your own crapstorm? That is, letting all slashdot users know that on October xx between 12 and 1 eastern time they should reload, search, and generally abuse the server as much as possible. Set up a testing thread and see how many comments it will rack up.
It might allow you to feel that much more confident about future occasions when Slashdot is, well, slashdotted...
flip
In my opinion, the journalizm community has a deep understanding and commitment to copyright and fair use issues. If the comments were not given due credit, it is probably because it was not clear enough what comprises due credit. The reputation and continued success of a journalist depends on his fair treatment of sources. If we make it clear exactly what the Slashdot community considers fair treatment, I beleive that most reporters will respect it.
Here are some thoughts for possible fair use guidelines:
- http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/11/08/122
6 255&mode=thread
(where the date/unique number is replaced with the appropriate value).- http://slashdot.org/users.pl?op=userinfo&nick=c
m drtaco
(where the text following "nick" is replace by the user's nickname). Please do not link to the poster's email address, even if it appears in the post.- "Discussion title." Slashdot Discussion. [Accessed date].
For example,To cite a post, use the format
- Poster Name, "Post Title," opinion expressed in Slashdot Discussion "Discussion title." [Accessed date].
For example,So for instance, if I thought that MS stock would go down, I could have sold short on thursday, with the transfer date of tuesday. Say the stock was at $100 on Thu, but dropped to $95 on Tuesday, and that I sold 1000 shares short. I sell the stock for $100, but buy it for $95, making $5000.
The problem is that your losses are not capped: you are liable for potentially infinite penalties. If instead the stock rose to $150, I would be out $50,000...
What I think would be interesting would be to match all of mankind against all of computerdom: have a distributed computing effort compete against a collaborative world effort.
Where can I find the "Slashdot" (Caliseo?) font? Preferably in TrueType format. Any help appreciated. flip
Discovery == the legal term: prosecution is required to reveal the documents and arguments they will make to the defense.
:)
This means they lose a big legal advantage on the final decision if he drags ass.
It doesn't mean he can't discover anything new