At least, a magnetohydrodynamic generator is the only thing I can think of off the top of my head that "directly" converts energy from combustion to electricity. Still doesn't look like it's anywhere close to the efficiency of a good fuel cell, though, and those superconducting magnets would make for an awfully heavy vehicle. (Now, if you used liquid hydrogen for both fuel and cryo-coolant...)
It actually shows the lack of mathematical background.
Computers are mathematical devices, the only thing they can do is mathematics.
The more mathematics the programmer knows the easier the problems become.
Unfortunately, training for the "language of the day/month/year" is that none of the necessary background is provided, and that lack causes the problems/bugs/errors/catastrophes and project failures...
it is also why programs cannot be validated...
LOL. Computers are at the core mechanisms, and they are no more "mathematical" than any other physical device.
Sure, more math can help make you a more effective programmer. But if you rely entirely on mathematical purity, you will in general not be an effective programmer. It's like pointing to the beauty of the closed-form mathematical solution for the two-body problem, and saying "now why don't you do it this way for your n-body problem?"
Well, mostly functional programming does work technically it is working right between your ears.
This is... well, let's call it an unexpected re-interpretation of behaviorism ("it's not useful to talk about 'mental state', just stimuli and responses").
Do you seriously propose that biological systems are stateless? Or are you just proposing that the physical universe is "stateless" or "functional"? This may be an interesting philosophical perspective, but I'm having a hard time seeing how it gets us anywhere.
I take it as an amusing commentary on much of the functional programming debate. "If we assume that whether to use functional programming is a binary choice, then we can't decide to use it in some places and not others, because the middle is excluded in a binary choice!"
"The examples shown here are meant to convince language designers and developers to jump through the mirror and start looking more seriously at fundamentalist functional programming."
Or, perhaps, to acknowledge that it's very hard to do anything useful without side effects.
You can write beautiful, elegant, purely functional code, as long as it doesn't have to touch a storage system, a network, or a user. But, hey, other than that, it's great!
It would seem, though, that we're beyond the realm of basic physics here. Capillary action and surface tension both involve "pulling on a fluid". I don't think of siphons as operating in that realm, but I'm no hydrodynamicist.
Now I have to go get some dry ice and see if I can set up a CO2 siphon. It would be fun to try it with sulfur hexafluoride, but my grocery store still refuses to stock that.
If you can set up a siphon for a dense gas -- and my intuition, which is admittedly out of its depth here, tells me it should work -- that would seem to argue against the "pulling on water" explanation.
(going back to rocking in the corner, hallucinating about my boat sinking into the ocean of superfluid helium as the stuff crawls up over the gunwales and flows down into the hold...)
He demonstrated no such thing. In fact, he demonstrated that the siphon stops working at sufficiently low atmospheric pressure:
When the pressure was reduced further the siphon broke into two columns - in effect becoming two back-to-back barometers.
You can't pull on one end of a column of liquid and drag the whole column up. Something has to push it from the bottom, unless its own inertia can carry it.
Saying "siphons work due to gravity, not atmospheric pressure" is like saying "fire works due to oxygen, not fuel".
I was hoping the link would include an actual self-administered test, with your score reported at the end.
I looked through the "same" pairs a bit. It confirmed that I'm terrible with unfamiliar faces -- on perhaps a third to a half of the pairs, I would've had no idea that both represented the same person. For faces that I've seen hundreds or thousands of times -- Condi Rice, Rumsfeld, Bono, Jimmy Carter -- I guess I do as well as anyone.
For the "different" pairs, I only looked through the first dozen or so, and they all seemed obviously different to me. Also not surprising; I get lots of false negatives (failing to recognize a face), but few false positives (thinking I recognized someone when I really didn't).
I wonder how my life would've turned out differently if I'd grown up with a prosthesis to help me recognize faces. I wonder how much difference it would make if I got one today. I feel like I've come up with reasonable coping strategies, but I wonder...
Yeah, it's worth comparing to Verizon's grand FIOS rollout, too. Nine years ago, I was a Verizon land-line customer in a major metropolitan region, thrilled at the prospect of getting FIOS soon. Five years later, Verizon had sold off their land-line business, and FIOS to anywhere in my state was "not in the foreseeable future". Still not foreseeable, as far as I can tell.
I'm sure they're still making great progress with the anti-municipal-broadband lobbying, though.
B-b-but that's Google Mb/sec! It just means your connection will steal your soul hundreds of times more quickly than your comfortable, benign, managed-by-cuddly-kittens AT&T DSL!
My father paid cash for a fully tricked out Mustang (approx 1 month salary) and got a new 3000+sqft home on a large lot (125x175) for a mortgage equal to 12 months of earnings.
Your dad was doing pretty well for the time -- close to $40K, assuming something like $3200 for the car. (Not sure how "fully tricked out" you mean.) By this inflation calculator, that equates to about $240K today.
Today, one month of an equivalent salary will get you a reasonably nice new car, and one year of an equivalent salary will get you a nice house, unless you live in Silicon Valley, DC, Boston, or another hyperdeveloped area. I'd say that the inflation calculator reflects what's going on with car prices; real-estate prices have outstripped it in many places, but not all. (If he bought a house in Detroit in 1970, you probably wouldn't be seeing a good return on that investment today.)
But, as the Fed inflation-metric apologists always point out, a 1970 car is not the same as a 2014 car. Compare fuel efficiency, safety equipment, reliability, and you can make the case that you get a lot more for the same money today. Real estate? Meh, a third of an acre in 1970 is about the same as a third of an acre today, and I'm not sure the superior insulation and wiring of a 2014 new house compensates for the generally inferior workmanship compared to 1970.
I'm not thinking about my post-apocalyptic sodium intake. I'm thinking about the steady stream of canned goods in my diet, eaten because the stuff doesn't last forever, so you have to rotate it out. So, even better -- stale canned goods, that have been sitting in the bunker long enough to be close to their expiration date. (Yes, I know expiration dates are only suggestions -- but they do indicate something about how the quality of the food changes over time.)
If you're going to keep enough canned goods to let you survive for months -- not what GP was suggesting, I understand, but what a lot of preppers seem to want -- you're going to have to cycle through quite a lot of canned goods as part of your regular diet. If you maintain a six-month supply, and the average shelf life is two years, you're going to be getting at least a quarter of your daily diet out of cans or boxes just to maintain the rotation. I don't know about anybody else, but I find that idea intensely unappealing.
Since you're constantly cycling through canned food for a significant portion of your diet, you're getting a lot more sodium and sugar and a lot less vitamins, phytochemicals and other good stuff; that shortens your lifespan, reducing the amount of time you'll have to suffer in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. And "maintaining preparedness" by eating out of cans all the time instead of enjoying fresh food reduces your quality of life, so you'll be happy that your life is being shortened!
Since before it was cool? No doubt on a bike brand that we probably wouldn't have heard of?
...and I can't tell how how different it looks at the parking lot today - middle-aged men, 20lbs or more overweight, showing up in $100,000 cars with $25,000 bikes...
Leaving aside for a moment the complaints about people spending more money on their toys than you've spent on your car/house/whatever, are you seriously complaining that the middle-aged men with beer bellies are actually getting out and doing something active? Even if they're not very good at it? (And if they aren't, how are they going to get better at it, except through practice?)
It's easy enough to flip this around: "After that last visit to the doctor, I decided I'd rather spend some money on a nice bike than on cardiologists and ICU bills. But whenever I try to go out on it, I get run off the trail by jerks who act like anyone doing less than 25mph on the flats deserves to be roadkill. At least on the weekly rides most of the folks are supportive, and willing to help out beginners. Sure, there's this one guy who shows up a few times a year and spends most of his time shaking his head at us and sighing theatrically, but I've found that the best thing to do is ignore him..."
If your point is so proved and plain, why hide as AC?
Do you want all your email and documents published to the public? If not, what do you have to hide?
"Why do these people always have something to hide" may not be the very stupidest question to ask in this situation, but it's certainly high on the list. Scientific transparency does not require laying your entire online life open to muckrakers.
Assuming this kid doesn't get his tablet smashed as the very next level of bullying...
He needs to record the bullying again, but this time, the recording needs to go directly to all local media outlets, and perhaps directly to social media as well. This may not make much difference to the bullies on the bus, but it's a lot harder for the bullies in the school administration or police department to bury.
It is still possible to shame entrenched bullies out of positions of authority. It doesn't often happen, but it's worth a try. It's certainly a Noble Cause.
Slashdot Mirror
At least, a magnetohydrodynamic generator is the only thing I can think of off the top of my head that "directly" converts energy from combustion to electricity. Still doesn't look like it's anywhere close to the efficiency of a good fuel cell, though, and those superconducting magnets would make for an awfully heavy vehicle. (Now, if you used liquid hydrogen for both fuel and cryo-coolant...)
It's different when you cover algebra before you hit programming.
Algebra teacher: "X + 1 = 2X. Subtract X from both sides. X = 1."
Me: "OK"
BASIC program: "X = X + 1"
Me: "No, it isn't!"
Me, years later, in a class using Prolog: "X = X + 1"
Prolog interpreter: "No, it isn't!"
It actually shows the lack of mathematical background.
Computers are mathematical devices, the only thing they can do is mathematics.
The more mathematics the programmer knows the easier the problems become.
Unfortunately, training for the "language of the day/month/year" is that none of the necessary background is provided, and that lack causes the problems/bugs/errors/catastrophes and project failures...
it is also why programs cannot be validated...
LOL. Computers are at the core mechanisms, and they are no more "mathematical" than any other physical device.
Sure, more math can help make you a more effective programmer. But if you rely entirely on mathematical purity, you will in general not be an effective programmer. It's like pointing to the beauty of the closed-form mathematical solution for the two-body problem, and saying "now why don't you do it this way for your n-body problem?"
Well, mostly functional programming does work technically it is working right between your ears.
This is... well, let's call it an unexpected re-interpretation of behaviorism ("it's not useful to talk about 'mental state', just stimuli and responses").
Do you seriously propose that biological systems are stateless? Or are you just proposing that the physical universe is "stateless" or "functional"? This may be an interesting philosophical perspective, but I'm having a hard time seeing how it gets us anywhere.
I take it as an amusing commentary on much of the functional programming debate. "If we assume that whether to use functional programming is a binary choice, then we can't decide to use it in some places and not others, because the middle is excluded in a binary choice!"
"The examples shown here are meant to convince language designers and developers to jump through the mirror and start looking more seriously at fundamentalist functional programming."
Or, perhaps, to acknowledge that it's very hard to do anything useful without side effects.
You can write beautiful, elegant, purely functional code, as long as it doesn't have to touch a storage system, a network, or a user. But, hey, other than that, it's great!
...never mind.
It would seem, though, that we're beyond the realm of basic physics here. Capillary action and surface tension both involve "pulling on a fluid". I don't think of siphons as operating in that realm, but I'm no hydrodynamicist.
Now I have to go get some dry ice and see if I can set up a CO2 siphon. It would be fun to try it with sulfur hexafluoride, but my grocery store still refuses to stock that.
If you can set up a siphon for a dense gas -- and my intuition, which is admittedly out of its depth here, tells me it should work -- that would seem to argue against the "pulling on water" explanation.
SUPERFLUIDS DON'T COUNT.
(going back to rocking in the corner, hallucinating about my boat sinking into the ocean of superfluid helium as the stuff crawls up over the gunwales and flows down into the hold...)
I'm very sorry that your grade school taught that.
If "the whole amount is bonded together", how do drips happen?
He demonstrated no such thing. In fact, he demonstrated that the siphon stops working at sufficiently low atmospheric pressure:
When the pressure was reduced further the siphon broke into two columns - in effect becoming two back-to-back barometers.
You can't pull on one end of a column of liquid and drag the whole column up. Something has to push it from the bottom, unless its own inertia can carry it.
Saying "siphons work due to gravity, not atmospheric pressure" is like saying "fire works due to oxygen, not fuel".
Kids from lower socioeconomic backgrounds have lower IQs, and some say that the races and genders differ in intelligence.
Some say that miniature invisible alien operatives are trying to control their thoughts. What's your excuse?
I was hoping the link would include an actual self-administered test, with your score reported at the end.
I looked through the "same" pairs a bit. It confirmed that I'm terrible with unfamiliar faces -- on perhaps a third to a half of the pairs, I would've had no idea that both represented the same person. For faces that I've seen hundreds or thousands of times -- Condi Rice, Rumsfeld, Bono, Jimmy Carter -- I guess I do as well as anyone.
For the "different" pairs, I only looked through the first dozen or so, and they all seemed obviously different to me. Also not surprising; I get lots of false negatives (failing to recognize a face), but few false positives (thinking I recognized someone when I really didn't).
I wonder how my life would've turned out differently if I'd grown up with a prosthesis to help me recognize faces. I wonder how much difference it would make if I got one today. I feel like I've come up with reasonable coping strategies, but I wonder...
Interesting, but this was in North Carolina, Time-Warner country.
Yeah, it's worth comparing to Verizon's grand FIOS rollout, too. Nine years ago, I was a Verizon land-line customer in a major metropolitan region, thrilled at the prospect of getting FIOS soon. Five years later, Verizon had sold off their land-line business, and FIOS to anywhere in my state was "not in the foreseeable future". Still not foreseeable, as far as I can tell.
I'm sure they're still making great progress with the anti-municipal-broadband lobbying, though.
B-b-but that's Google Mb/sec! It just means your connection will steal your soul hundreds of times more quickly than your comfortable, benign, managed-by-cuddly-kittens AT&T DSL!
My father paid cash for a fully tricked out Mustang (approx 1 month salary) and got a new 3000+sqft home on a large lot (125x175) for a mortgage equal to 12 months of earnings.
Your dad was doing pretty well for the time -- close to $40K, assuming something like $3200 for the car. (Not sure how "fully tricked out" you mean.) By this inflation calculator, that equates to about $240K today.
Today, one month of an equivalent salary will get you a reasonably nice new car, and one year of an equivalent salary will get you a nice house, unless you live in Silicon Valley, DC, Boston, or another hyperdeveloped area. I'd say that the inflation calculator reflects what's going on with car prices; real-estate prices have outstripped it in many places, but not all. (If he bought a house in Detroit in 1970, you probably wouldn't be seeing a good return on that investment today.)
But, as the Fed inflation-metric apologists always point out, a 1970 car is not the same as a 2014 car. Compare fuel efficiency, safety equipment, reliability, and you can make the case that you get a lot more for the same money today. Real estate? Meh, a third of an acre in 1970 is about the same as a third of an acre today, and I'm not sure the superior insulation and wiring of a 2014 new house compensates for the generally inferior workmanship compared to 1970.
I'm not thinking about my post-apocalyptic sodium intake. I'm thinking about the steady stream of canned goods in my diet, eaten because the stuff doesn't last forever, so you have to rotate it out. So, even better -- stale canned goods, that have been sitting in the bunker long enough to be close to their expiration date. (Yes, I know expiration dates are only suggestions -- but they do indicate something about how the quality of the food changes over time.)
If you're going to keep enough canned goods to let you survive for months -- not what GP was suggesting, I understand, but what a lot of preppers seem to want -- you're going to have to cycle through quite a lot of canned goods as part of your regular diet. If you maintain a six-month supply, and the average shelf life is two years, you're going to be getting at least a quarter of your daily diet out of cans or boxes just to maintain the rotation. I don't know about anybody else, but I find that idea intensely unappealing.
And you get great synergistic effects, too.
Since you're constantly cycling through canned food for a significant portion of your diet, you're getting a lot more sodium and sugar and a lot less vitamins, phytochemicals and other good stuff; that shortens your lifespan, reducing the amount of time you'll have to suffer in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. And "maintaining preparedness" by eating out of cans all the time instead of enjoying fresh food reduces your quality of life, so you'll be happy that your life is being shortened!
I've been riding a bike for more than 30 years...
Since before it was cool? No doubt on a bike brand that we probably wouldn't have heard of?
...and I can't tell how how different it looks at the parking lot today - middle-aged men, 20lbs or more overweight, showing up in $100,000 cars with $25,000 bikes...
Leaving aside for a moment the complaints about people spending more money on their toys than you've spent on your car/house/whatever, are you seriously complaining that the middle-aged men with beer bellies are actually getting out and doing something active? Even if they're not very good at it? (And if they aren't, how are they going to get better at it, except through practice?)
It's easy enough to flip this around: "After that last visit to the doctor, I decided I'd rather spend some money on a nice bike than on cardiologists and ICU bills. But whenever I try to go out on it, I get run off the trail by jerks who act like anyone doing less than 25mph on the flats deserves to be roadkill. At least on the weekly rides most of the folks are supportive, and willing to help out beginners. Sure, there's this one guy who shows up a few times a year and spends most of his time shaking his head at us and sighing theatrically, but I've found that the best thing to do is ignore him..."
If your point is so proved and plain, why hide as AC?
Do you want all your email and documents published to the public? If not, what do you have to hide?
"Why do these people always have something to hide" may not be the very stupidest question to ask in this situation, but it's certainly high on the list. Scientific transparency does not require laying your entire online life open to muckrakers.
"Winners should pick winners in markets."
-Winners in markets
Another "fascinating question". I'd suggest asking some Native Americans, or some descendants of slaves.
Assuming this kid doesn't get his tablet smashed as the very next level of bullying...
He needs to record the bullying again, but this time, the recording needs to go directly to all local media outlets, and perhaps directly to social media as well. This may not make much difference to the bullies on the bus, but it's a lot harder for the bullies in the school administration or police department to bury.
It is still possible to shame entrenched bullies out of positions of authority. It doesn't often happen, but it's worth a try. It's certainly a Noble Cause.