The art director at Blizzard, Samwise Didier, has been making panda related images for a long time now. They crept into Warcraft 3 as a panda hero, and since become a full-blown race in the lore.
What you describe is not unsimiliar for sciences (my experience is with math). For any given position there are several hundred applicants, and most tenure-track positions with research as one of your responsiblities are very hard to get without a post-doc. There's some talk that the field is moving towards having two post-docs as a requirement to getting your foot in the door. That's three to six years of work after your PhD, with no guarantee that there will actually be any positions for you afterwards. Depending on your specialization in math, your knowledge may be non-transferrable to outside of academia (your general skills of abstraction, problem-solving, etc are useful of course, but you're pretty well versed in those by the end of grad school). That's not the most exciting path to undertake.
I know some graduating PhDs that have applied to about 150 schools this year with one or two phone interviews, no follow-up, as the response. Grad students that are only prepared for academia (even just teaching) are setup for a high chance of misery.
The Yamamono, the Fore, the Andamanese, the Koi-san all fight all the time and they fight to kill. With ambush imminent at any time and raids being very common, they could not develop sedentism, living in one place. They have to be constantly on the move.
Do you mean the Yanomamo? (there's no such group as the "Yamamono")
As someone who has been taught by an anthropologist who has spent considerable time living with the Yanomamo, your characterization is incorrect. The Yanomamo do, in fact, live in one place for extended periods of time (2 years-ish). The reason they move is because their staple food is bananas, which take some time to grow and produce exactly one bunch per tree. Staggered planting helps, but the soil is quickly exhausted. They live in one area until they start to exhaust the resources, and then move on to a new area. One particular thing to note is that they prepare a new area ahead of time by planting bananas there. In fact, they have several areas prepared in various stages of readiness so that when they need to move, they can move to an area that has bananas ready for consumption. They have reasonably sophisticated agricultural techniques, but their environment and the types of crops available force them to relocate, regardless of whether they have a domesticated guard-animal.
That is because they are not mammals... they are marsupials..
Uh... no. Let me also cite wikipedia: On the very page you link it says "Class: Mammalia". On the very first line of Marsupial it says "Marsupials are an infraclass of mammals".
I believe they have said that major bosses will do separate drops for each player. This was a while ago, and I can't seem to find the reference again, so it may have changed or I might be misremembering.
Any one is free to open up their own firefighting company to provide service to these areas that fall outside of the city limits. Where's the competing services? Sounds like it's a case of free market failure to me.
Without more information it's hard to figure out what was going on, but several people have had problems like this because the wiring in their house is not properly grounded. Obviously this isn't the sole cause if you got shocks while running on battery power (you didn't say), but getting shocks while touching a MBP may have nothing at all to do with the MBP.
Health-wise, the shocks probably have a neutral impact but they are symptomatic of the potential for dangerous situations to occur later.
This is a little unusual perhaps, but not so rare. Around where I live we have significant periods of time with temperatures around 0F. Unless you heat your house up significantly in the day or run the heater overnight, you'll wind up with roughly 5C come morning. Especially for the large number of people living in a rural home, where there are fewer heat sources nearby and there is less to block the wind.
Your summation doesn't make sense. We have 1/0.01 = 100 = 10000%, so the total energy is 10000% of what it started as? The very first term in the series should be a clue that something is wrong: 0.99^0 = 1 = 100% already.
Sorry, I just re-read my post and I sounded like a bit of a jerk compared to your completely reasonable post. I had just scrolled through enough posts like "calculus is useless! statistics 4ever!" to be somewhat irritated.
You're quite right that direct computation of derivatives or integrals is rarely done by people nowadays (and it should really be this way in calculus classes as well, but I digress). My poorly phrased point is that the knowledge of what an integral is and how it behaves is of great value when thinking statistically, even if you don't do any integration.
I think many people undervalue the conceptual understanding to their detriment, but I'm going to cut myself off before I start ranting again.
Re:If you can't handle calculus, science isnt for
on
Help Me Get My Math Back?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
As a mathematician with a statistician wife, I'm surprised by the number of responses like yours. Many people here are asserting that they never use calculus but constantly use statistics. Do they never work with a continuous distribution? No z-tests, f-tests, t-test, chi^2-tests? No exponential, gamma, beta, gaussian, log-normal, logistic distributions?
Or maybe they just don't know that probability theory is based on integration, and every time they compute an expected value, correlation, variance, co-variance, skewness, kurtosis, regression, etc. they are using calculus-based techniques and results. That would go a long way to explaining why my wife is consistently busy consulting with scientists who have worked themselves into a corner with their data. They designed their experiment to produce sub-optimal data and can't do the analyses to extract the meager conclusions their design entails.
Sorry, I don't mean to pick on you in particular, but to say that one uses statistics all the time and never uses calculus is preposterous.
Has the River gotten any better? I used to listen to it all the time as my preferred station, but I eventually got to the point that I couldn't stand listening to the constant advertisements, and for those that don't know: it's a "commercial-free" station!
Despite the fact that the station was supported mainly by donations, they still had interruptions every 10-15 minutes plugging various of their programs, or upcoming concerts, or thanks to sponsoring organizations, etc. I'm done with radio in general because of this. I listened to certain podcasts for a while, but even then I've had to drop some of those due to constant advertisements. Bandana blues is just about the only one with consistently good quality that I still enjoy.
But where do they get the natural gas? This is basically a generator that runs on natural gas, albeit somewhat more efficiently. Small pacific islands would be better served by low-cost solar power.
Interestingly, strong profiling by overly targeting a group, Muslims for example, actually makes searching LESS effective than random selection. People who seem to be Muslim but are not terrorists, like the grand-parent poster, get searched almost every time. Searches become very ineffective because we search the same innocent people over and over and over again.
The optimal method is a form of weak profiling, where a Muslim would be targeted for searches with a probability slightly higher than a non-Muslim. This way searches get spread out among people we haven't already checked. You can read technical details here [PDF].
I think you're just illustrating the GP's point. You had a laptop with 256 MB running Windows Home that was super slow. In order to get more acceptable performance you had to quadruple the RAM. Hence the GP's assertion that Microsoft will miss out on all the smaller devices that don't have huge chunks of RAM.
This is somehow worse than if someone broke a compact florescent lightbulb and wiped mercury on their pants? We still sell CFLs to anyone that wants one, even if they're going to toss them in trash when they're done. And unlike low-level radiation, your body has no protective mechanism from mercury.
At least radioactive contamination tells you that it's there by helpfully announcing its presence. Good luck trying to find the mercury smears random Joe left behind everywhere.
Losing heat by radiation is only slow when there's lots of stuff around you radiating back. According to this humans lose between 50% and 60% of their heat from radiation. When you are floating exposed in space NONE of that heat comes back. It's not instant freezing, but it's not exactly slow either.
I think they mean the usual id procedure of open sourcing old engines. You can find the source, as well as the last supported release version, on id's site.
I noticed the summary mentioned several attempts that have failed, but makes no mention of other ISPs that are still doing it. Time Warner Cable is one that has been doing this for a while now (maybe a year?). Anyone know of others?
You're totally right about reprocessing fuel: if it's still (radioactively) hot then there is useful energy in there. But it's not right to say that we'd have waste with a half-life of decades instead of centuries. Radioactivity and half-life are inversely proportional. Something that is very radioactive has a short half-life (it's so active because it's decaying quickly). The more we reprocess the longer the half-life of the leftovers gets because we are taking out all the short half-life materials to be used as fuel. So after lots of reprocessing we'd more likely end up with waste that has a half-life in the millions of years than decades.
But that's really okay, because long half-life things aren't all that radioactive. Given a long enough half-life, you could carry radioactive waste around in your pocket and never receive any radiation from it in your lifetime, just because it takes so long for it to decay at all.
Amen to this. I was actually a little disappointed to hear that LucasArts would be going with Steam as I only buy DRM-free versions via GOG.
I know, I know. Steam has minimal intrusion and they promise they'll release patches to remove the DRM if they go out of business. I, however, much prefer the no-intrusion system where I don't have take any promises on faith.
Interesting point. To come back to the child porn situation, what if someone had put Miley's face on an image of a nude man? Based on the interpretation of the law that the prosecutor seems to have, this should also count as child porn, but I dare to bet that most people wouldn't put it in the same context as when it's a nude female body. They'd see it as the dumb trick that it is.
Or what if there was a nature photo of two buffalo (or whatever) having sex, and someone put Miley's face on one of them? Is that bestiality? Is that child porn? Or is it just a stupid cut and paste?
What if Miley's face didn't cover the original model's face, but was added on somewhere else? Like a two-headed nude woman or something. Does that count as child porn?
There's all sorts of variations that might run afoul of interpreting the law this way, but pretty clearly are not situations that we should be worried about.
It's not just about throughput, but also latency. As far as gaming goes, the latency is the more important factor. There's no way you can get an internet connection to be comparable to a LAN in latency. It's a question of at least 100ms versus 5ms round-trip time. And when the server on the other end gets busy, it gets even worse.
I'm a big fan of Blizzard titles (but then, who isn't?). My friends and I still get together on at least a monthly basis to play Starcraft or War3 on a LAN. Given that, it should be no surprise that I think this is a very bad move by Blizzard. There's no way my friend's place is going to get an internet connection that is capable of handling all of us simultaneously, with latency comparable to a LAN.
If they keep on this path, Starcraft2 will be largely irrelevant as far as I'm concerned. I doubt it will have the staying power of Starcraft 1 simply because you can't play a pick-up game with friends. Yes, I'll probably still get it eventually for the single-player and occasion B.net game, but you can bet that the pirated version cracked to include a B.net clone for LAN is looking mighty good in comparison.
While we don't yet know what "super" features B.net 2.0 is going to have that are supposed to make up for LAN play, it has been confirmed that B.net play will be free for Starcraft 2 purchasers. However, rumors are starting to fly that B.net will not be free for Diablo3. The statement that SC2 play will be free was carefully worded, and Blizzard responses on D3 have evasive, but with not re-assuring implications.
Given that Diablo3 also has been confirmed to lack LAN play, the only way to play multiplayer is via B.net. If the rumors are true, then the only way to get D3 multiplayer is to pay for it. This is a total reverse from the old days of "spawned" copies of Blizzard games where you could have several players all using the same copy of the game.
I think the removal of LAN play signals the decline of Blizzard as a long-term game maker. Which is too bad as they have wonderful legacy support. SC2 and D3 will still sell like crazy I'm sure, but 10 years from now we'll probably still be playing Starcraft 1 at LAN parties. That or some enterprising pirate will save the day.
Anyway, there's a petition to include LAN play, not that it will do much good. Doesn't hurt to try.
Slashdot Mirror
The art director at Blizzard, Samwise Didier, has been making panda related images for a long time now. They crept into Warcraft 3 as a panda hero, and since become a full-blown race in the lore.
What you describe is not unsimiliar for sciences (my experience is with math). For any given position there are several hundred applicants, and most tenure-track positions with research as one of your responsiblities are very hard to get without a post-doc. There's some talk that the field is moving towards having two post-docs as a requirement to getting your foot in the door. That's three to six years of work after your PhD, with no guarantee that there will actually be any positions for you afterwards. Depending on your specialization in math, your knowledge may be non-transferrable to outside of academia (your general skills of abstraction, problem-solving, etc are useful of course, but you're pretty well versed in those by the end of grad school). That's not the most exciting path to undertake.
I know some graduating PhDs that have applied to about 150 schools this year with one or two phone interviews, no follow-up, as the response. Grad students that are only prepared for academia (even just teaching) are setup for a high chance of misery.
The Yamamono, the Fore, the Andamanese, the Koi-san all fight all the time and they fight to kill. With ambush imminent at any time and raids being very common, they could not develop sedentism, living in one place. They have to be constantly on the move.
Do you mean the Yanomamo? (there's no such group as the "Yamamono")
As someone who has been taught by an anthropologist who has spent considerable time living with the Yanomamo, your characterization is incorrect. The Yanomamo do, in fact, live in one place for extended periods of time (2 years-ish). The reason they move is because their staple food is bananas, which take some time to grow and produce exactly one bunch per tree. Staggered planting helps, but the soil is quickly exhausted. They live in one area until they start to exhaust the resources, and then move on to a new area. One particular thing to note is that they prepare a new area ahead of time by planting bananas there. In fact, they have several areas prepared in various stages of readiness so that when they need to move, they can move to an area that has bananas ready for consumption. They have reasonably sophisticated agricultural techniques, but their environment and the types of crops available force them to relocate, regardless of whether they have a domesticated guard-animal.
That is because they are not mammals... they are marsupials..
Uh... no. Let me also cite wikipedia: On the very page you link it says "Class: Mammalia". On the very first line of Marsupial it says "Marsupials are an infraclass of mammals".
I believe they have said that major bosses will do separate drops for each player. This was a while ago, and I can't seem to find the reference again, so it may have changed or I might be misremembering.
Any one is free to open up their own firefighting company to provide service to these areas that fall outside of the city limits. Where's the competing services? Sounds like it's a case of free market failure to me.
Without more information it's hard to figure out what was going on, but several people have had problems like this because the wiring in their house is not properly grounded. Obviously this isn't the sole cause if you got shocks while running on battery power (you didn't say), but getting shocks while touching a MBP may have nothing at all to do with the MBP.
Health-wise, the shocks probably have a neutral impact but they are symptomatic of the potential for dangerous situations to occur later.
This is a little unusual perhaps, but not so rare. Around where I live we have significant periods of time with temperatures around 0F. Unless you heat your house up significantly in the day or run the heater overnight, you'll wind up with roughly 5C come morning. Especially for the large number of people living in a rural home, where there are fewer heat sources nearby and there is less to block the wind.
Your summation doesn't make sense. We have 1/0.01 = 100 = 10000%, so the total energy is 10000% of what it started as? The very first term in the series should be a clue that something is wrong: 0.99^0 = 1 = 100% already.
Sorry, I just re-read my post and I sounded like a bit of a jerk compared to your completely reasonable post. I had just scrolled through enough posts like "calculus is useless! statistics 4ever!" to be somewhat irritated.
You're quite right that direct computation of derivatives or integrals is rarely done by people nowadays (and it should really be this way in calculus classes as well, but I digress). My poorly phrased point is that the knowledge of what an integral is and how it behaves is of great value when thinking statistically, even if you don't do any integration.
I think many people undervalue the conceptual understanding to their detriment, but I'm going to cut myself off before I start ranting again.
As a mathematician with a statistician wife, I'm surprised by the number of responses like yours. Many people here are asserting that they never use calculus but constantly use statistics. Do they never work with a continuous distribution? No z-tests, f-tests, t-test, chi^2-tests? No exponential, gamma, beta, gaussian, log-normal, logistic distributions?
Or maybe they just don't know that probability theory is based on integration, and every time they compute an expected value, correlation, variance, co-variance, skewness, kurtosis, regression, etc. they are using calculus-based techniques and results. That would go a long way to explaining why my wife is consistently busy consulting with scientists who have worked themselves into a corner with their data. They designed their experiment to produce sub-optimal data and can't do the analyses to extract the meager conclusions their design entails.
Sorry, I don't mean to pick on you in particular, but to say that one uses statistics all the time and never uses calculus is preposterous.
Has the River gotten any better? I used to listen to it all the time as my preferred station, but I eventually got to the point that I couldn't stand listening to the constant advertisements, and for those that don't know: it's a "commercial-free" station!
Despite the fact that the station was supported mainly by donations, they still had interruptions every 10-15 minutes plugging various of their programs, or upcoming concerts, or thanks to sponsoring organizations, etc. I'm done with radio in general because of this. I listened to certain podcasts for a while, but even then I've had to drop some of those due to constant advertisements. Bandana blues is just about the only one with consistently good quality that I still enjoy.
But where do they get the natural gas? This is basically a generator that runs on natural gas, albeit somewhat more efficiently. Small pacific islands would be better served by low-cost solar power.
Interestingly, strong profiling by overly targeting a group, Muslims for example, actually makes searching LESS effective than random selection. People who seem to be Muslim but are not terrorists, like the grand-parent poster, get searched almost every time. Searches become very ineffective because we search the same innocent people over and over and over again.
The optimal method is a form of weak profiling, where a Muslim would be targeted for searches with a probability slightly higher than a non-Muslim. This way searches get spread out among people we haven't already checked. You can read technical details here [PDF].
I think you're just illustrating the GP's point. You had a laptop with 256 MB running Windows Home that was super slow. In order to get more acceptable performance you had to quadruple the RAM. Hence the GP's assertion that Microsoft will miss out on all the smaller devices that don't have huge chunks of RAM.
This is somehow worse than if someone broke a compact florescent lightbulb and wiped mercury on their pants? We still sell CFLs to anyone that wants one, even if they're going to toss them in trash when they're done. And unlike low-level radiation, your body has no protective mechanism from mercury.
At least radioactive contamination tells you that it's there by helpfully announcing its presence. Good luck trying to find the mercury smears random Joe left behind everywhere.
Losing heat by radiation is only slow when there's lots of stuff around you radiating back. According to this humans lose between 50% and 60% of their heat from radiation. When you are floating exposed in space NONE of that heat comes back. It's not instant freezing, but it's not exactly slow either.
Oh wait, I just learned to read a little better. That point release version requires a full install of Quake3 to be present already. Oops.
I think they mean the usual id procedure of open sourcing old engines. You can find the source, as well as the last supported release version, on id's site.
I noticed the summary mentioned several attempts that have failed, but makes no mention of other ISPs that are still doing it. Time Warner Cable is one that has been doing this for a while now (maybe a year?). Anyone know of others?
You're totally right about reprocessing fuel: if it's still (radioactively) hot then there is useful energy in there. But it's not right to say that we'd have waste with a half-life of decades instead of centuries. Radioactivity and half-life are inversely proportional. Something that is very radioactive has a short half-life (it's so active because it's decaying quickly). The more we reprocess the longer the half-life of the leftovers gets because we are taking out all the short half-life materials to be used as fuel. So after lots of reprocessing we'd more likely end up with waste that has a half-life in the millions of years than decades.
But that's really okay, because long half-life things aren't all that radioactive. Given a long enough half-life, you could carry radioactive waste around in your pocket and never receive any radiation from it in your lifetime, just because it takes so long for it to decay at all.
Amen to this. I was actually a little disappointed to hear that LucasArts would be going with Steam as I only buy DRM-free versions via GOG.
I know, I know. Steam has minimal intrusion and they promise they'll release patches to remove the DRM if they go out of business. I, however, much prefer the no-intrusion system where I don't have take any promises on faith.
Interesting point. To come back to the child porn situation, what if someone had put Miley's face on an image of a nude man? Based on the interpretation of the law that the prosecutor seems to have, this should also count as child porn, but I dare to bet that most people wouldn't put it in the same context as when it's a nude female body. They'd see it as the dumb trick that it is.
Or what if there was a nature photo of two buffalo (or whatever) having sex, and someone put Miley's face on one of them? Is that bestiality? Is that child porn? Or is it just a stupid cut and paste?
What if Miley's face didn't cover the original model's face, but was added on somewhere else? Like a two-headed nude woman or something. Does that count as child porn?
There's all sorts of variations that might run afoul of interpreting the law this way, but pretty clearly are not situations that we should be worried about.
It's not just about throughput, but also latency. As far as gaming goes, the latency is the more important factor. There's no way you can get an internet connection to be comparable to a LAN in latency. It's a question of at least 100ms versus 5ms round-trip time. And when the server on the other end gets busy, it gets even worse.
I'm a big fan of Blizzard titles (but then, who isn't?). My friends and I still get together on at least a monthly basis to play Starcraft or War3 on a LAN. Given that, it should be no surprise that I think this is a very bad move by Blizzard. There's no way my friend's place is going to get an internet connection that is capable of handling all of us simultaneously, with latency comparable to a LAN.
If they keep on this path, Starcraft2 will be largely irrelevant as far as I'm concerned. I doubt it will have the staying power of Starcraft 1 simply because you can't play a pick-up game with friends. Yes, I'll probably still get it eventually for the single-player and occasion B.net game, but you can bet that the pirated version cracked to include a B.net clone for LAN is looking mighty good in comparison.
While we don't yet know what "super" features B.net 2.0 is going to have that are supposed to make up for LAN play, it has been confirmed that B.net play will be free for Starcraft 2 purchasers. However, rumors are starting to fly that B.net will not be free for Diablo3. The statement that SC2 play will be free was carefully worded, and Blizzard responses on D3 have evasive, but with not re-assuring implications.
Given that Diablo3 also has been confirmed to lack LAN play, the only way to play multiplayer is via B.net. If the rumors are true, then the only way to get D3 multiplayer is to pay for it. This is a total reverse from the old days of "spawned" copies of Blizzard games where you could have several players all using the same copy of the game.
I think the removal of LAN play signals the decline of Blizzard as a long-term game maker. Which is too bad as they have wonderful legacy support. SC2 and D3 will still sell like crazy I'm sure, but 10 years from now we'll probably still be playing Starcraft 1 at LAN parties. That or some enterprising pirate will save the day.
Anyway, there's a petition to include LAN play, not that it will do much good. Doesn't hurt to try.