Heh. Shifting the subject slightly to beers, my wife absolutely loves sour browns and similar sour beers. She's often cautioned when she tries to order them, to make sure she knows what it is she's getting into.
One of the strangest Cr. arguments is that life never evolved from scratch in a sealed peanut butter jar. Despite being silly, it got me thinking: what would happen if it did?
Well, between the salt and the other preservatives in peanut butter, it's probably a rather poor candidate for primordial soup. That and even the oldest jar of peanut butter hasn't had the potential to be around for more than possibly a few thousand years tops, let alone the few million years even the most optimistic evolutionist would say it would need to be...
They *do* have books about string theory published for the masses, you know. General background, no math at all. Lots of descriptive stuff and talk of 11 dimensions, predictions, energy levels, and that sort of thing.
I actually like the parent's Doritos analogy - it's true when you think of it that way
If the weight of a packet of crisps diminished the further away you got from the shop, it would not only be perfectly legal, but prudent to advertise as "up to 200 grams". So the Analogy is terrible
Agreed. You just can't compare the delivery of a physical product that the manufacturer has complete control over to the delivery of a service that can be affected by a multitude of outside influences. Bad logic all around. It's like asking, "If Doritos can put the right weight of chips in the bag, why does my shower have to get hot when someone flushes the toilet?" The situations aren't even close.
(Realizing, of course, that many modern houses don't have that problem, but clearly the internet still does.)
Hm. I would have thought the appropriate car analogy was the advertised gas mileage, where they do indeed advertise "up to" X MPG on cars. They do this because environmental factors and personal driving tendencies do affect the mileage you get, and are not directly under the control of the original manufacturer.
For reference, my 97' Honda Civic was advertised as getting something like "up to 35 MPG highway/28 MPG city." In practice, I don't usually quite hit those numbers. 30/25 might be more realistic as the average. In heavy traffic in Chicago I probably had really bad weeks were I was closer to 20 MPG. On the highway, in bad conditions or when driving too fast, I've seen 30 MPG. On the other hand, on a good day I've actually been over 40 MPG when driving in certain conditions (cruising slowly on mountain highways, for instance).
It is of course absurd (and illegal) to advertise a rate that it's not possible for the customer to get, but it would also be absurd (and probably shooting yourself in the foot) to only advertise your mean or median value when in good conditions you can get a lot more. Whether it's criminal, a lie, good business, or accurate enough -- I would imagine there are standards for determining that, but I don't know what they are.
Now, I personally *would* argue that the numbers I cited for my car are close enough to the advertised numbers that I think Honda gave me good information, and I would argue that the numbers cited for broadband rates are NOT close enough to the advertised rates to be truthful advertising. Still, I'd expect broadband speeds to have to have a wider standard deviation than mileage -- there are a lot more outside influences to slow things down. To counteract that, though, I'd expect broadband to be advertised with a rate under the real theoretical max, so that your good days could start to make up for the bad days.
Really? So ( )*9=72, you think the difference between treating ( ) as x vs. 0 is "pretty inconsequential"?
Actually, no, that's not what I was saying at all. The notation in the example given here is horrid, but as other posters have pointed out, the notation given in the summary is NOT the notation given to the students in the actual problem.
What I was talking about was in "real life" (not this study), where the phrases "X is an arbitrary variable with no assigned value for the moment" and "X has been assigned a value of 0" can often harmlessly amount to the same thing.
I'm right there with you. I make this mistake all the time. Probably my most frequent programming error, besides leaving out a trailing semicolon here and there.
The difference between "unassigned value" and 0 is pretty inconsequential for most people in most real-world situations, and seems pretty pedantic to discuss, but it has bitten me several times when coding in the most frustrating ways. Equally confusing, potentially, is the convention that 0 means false. I'm struggling to remember the precise situation, but spent half an hour debugging a little scriptlet that kept failing if the variable equaled zero, because another part of the script thought the variable was false and didn't exist.
I'm not too worried about the article in terms of what will or won't charge Apple's dominance, but knowing there's going to be a ridiculous storm of these things is pretty important for planning at the office. We've already had some executives just show up with personal iPads and ask to be able to use them at the office. As the market grows, it's increasingly likely that supporting some (or many) of these devices is going to become a business necessity. We're scrambling now to figure out how they work in our environment, how to keep them and their data secure, and quickly trying to come up with some sort of useful set of policies so we can let the rest of the business know what to expect from us (tech support) and from the devices.
When a college friend of mine died a few years ago, some other friends created a page (or revised her existing page; not entirely sure) to be a memorial for her. Thought it was a nice touch. I'd been a bit out of the loop for several years, and though I'd actually heard about this particular incident, I could imagine other people like me trying to look her up on facebook and appreciating they could find out what had happened.
Thank you, both for a good analysis of what sounded like a very unlikely theory, and also possibly the recommendation for a book that sounds like something I've been looking for.
First time I played Doom was in a dark basement at my friend's house. Even on the early levels, when you'd hear the snorts and small sounds indicating a creature was either just around a corner or waiting behind a hidden door, I was wired-tense and literally leaning in my seat, trying to look around the monitor to see around the next corner because I knew something horrific was about to jump out at me. Took me a while to get used to the controls enough to have the character peek around corners instead of trying to do it myself.
I'm in the same age group (actually pushing the high end) but I mostly grew up on a Mac. Despite not fiddling with DOS, and generally having click-and-install stuff working, I've still come out techie, so I think there's more to it than just that.
My earliest electronic device memory is playing my uncle's Atari. And my earliest computer memory is playing MathBlaster and messing with PrintShop on my cousin's computer. I know we played with Apple II's a little in elementary school, including the nearly obligatory Logo programming, and I spent a lot of recesses playing Where In the World is Carmen Sandiego. Does owning a TRS-80 count? I could play Zaxxon from tape, and that's about it. I absolutely loved computers from the very beginning, but none of that really required any troubleshooting.
Most of what I did on the Macs was application-based: gaming or Word and Pagemaker for journalism in high school... and paper writing and more gaming in college.
It wasn't until college that I actually touched a command line, and that's because all of the college email stations were VAX terminals. Through my studies in physics I did get introduced to some Unix systems, and became comfortable enough with command lines to get my way around, but even now I can't say I really like them and don't use them unless necessary. Took a couple of programming courses in college for fun (FORTRAN and C++), but didn't do much with it at the time.
Still, journalism turned into web design, and web design turned into tech support, and that turned into system administration. I didn't really touch Windows until XP was out, as I was transitioning into tech support.
Just an anecdote, certainly not data, but I think I'm trying to illustrate if you're technically minded and like the subject you'll find your way in, even if presented with limited options. If being low-key Mac user in my childhood didn't stop me, being primarily a smartphone user now shouldn't stop today's techie kids. But of course the non-techies aren't going to dig in whatever they have to work with.
They do. I spend a year arguing on and off with a design firm copy editor about it. (This is back in '98, when they'd been doing print for years and were just starting web.) She kept telling me to add two spaces after all the sentences, and didn't want to believe me that it was out of my control.
She also got really fussy about commas after italicized words, where the choice was either to make the comma also italic and not have some extra space, or to make the comma not italic, and live with the additional little space the browser would insert.
I thought that for a moment (picked up a Nook about a month ago), but ePub is a viable format used by many readers, and you don't need anything special about B&N to get plenty of them from other sources. Between classics, free books loaned from the library, and places like the Baen site, the BN.com had never been one of my intended primary sources of books.
I'm all for practical education, but while I was working on my physics degree (not nearly as practical as I thought it would be), I have to say that the most entertaining, educational, eye-opening, and engaging classes I took in four year of college were my two art history courses. I liked them so much I'll tell any student who will listen they should take one. For me it was just one of those "see the world a completely different way" kind of experiences. Third and fourth favorite were two history courses I took. Fifth favorite was a philosophy class (basically "modern social issues") that did more for my critical thinking, discussion, and communication abilities than all my physics classes put together.
A lot of the liberal arts classes that you dismiss as snobbery and fluff are geared at enhancing context (know history so you don't repeat it) and communication (get your point across effectively). They're also often kind of fun and very different kind of work -- a fantastic change of pace and a welcome relief when you're loaded up on math and physics, say.
I'm 100% confident there's room for some of that in a college curriculum, in addition to practical, career-based stuff.
I'm tempted to agree, but I've also been on the other side of the transaction. If you have the right of way and someone coming up to the intersection tries to perform a rolling stop, even if they see you and do actually stop, it often looks to you like they're going to run into the intersection and you need to take defensive action.
Yes, many of the worst cases of this involve people who aren't going 5 mph but more like 15, and they're coming to a stop well beyond the stop sign -- often half a car length or a full length, putting them right at the edge of the intersection. You might be able to argue (and legislate) a middle ground where if you're going 5 mph and properly come to a stop *at* the stop sign you're doing it okay, and if you're going 15 and stop beyond the stop sign you're not, but I simply don't think enough drivers are good enough to make that distinction.
For one thing, stop signs are often placed where you can't really make a proper judgment call. A "legal" driver would stop at the sign, then inch forward, while verifying the way is clear. A "good" driver might roll past the stop sign at 5 mph, ready to brake at any sign of traffic, and properly stop or go as the situation dictates, without giving the impression they're definitely going into the intersection regardless. A "typical" driver rolls through much faster and gives the impression that they assume the intersection is clear and are about to barrel in -- the fact that most of them will actually slam on the brakes at the last second doesn't matter, because they've already scared the bejeezus out of cross traffic.
I wouldn't be opposed to legalizing a rolling stop, as long as it could still adequately protect pedestrians and prevent scaring the bejeezus out of cross traffic -- but I'd like to see the results of a lot of tests before assuming that's even possible.
Hm. My town has a couple of roundabouts, and I find them exceptionally dangerous in winter. Instead of being able to drive straight through the intersection, you're forced to drive in a big, looping arc where it's easier to skid out of control. And if someone's in the roundabout and you need to yield, you still risk sliding into traffic if you can't slow down or stop properly.
Plus neither drivers nor pedestrians seem to be able to use them properly, which dramatically increases the risk of collisions.
Lucky you. I had an employer miscalculate my paychecks (plugged in 24/year instead of the 26 pay periods years actually have). They had no compunctions about printing me a small check to make up the balance once they figured out what was going on. They were nice enough to apologize, but that hardly makes up for several hundred dollars.
Generally the initial $10 charge is testing the account before they come back and start charging hundreds or thousands of dollars, or whatever they can get away with. If your account has been compromised to have one charge, it generally means more are coming.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh. Shifting the subject slightly to beers, my wife absolutely loves sour browns and similar sour beers. She's often cautioned when she tries to order them, to make sure she knows what it is she's getting into.
One of the strangest Cr. arguments is that life never evolved from scratch in a sealed peanut butter jar. Despite being silly, it got me thinking: what would happen if it did?
Well, between the salt and the other preservatives in peanut butter, it's probably a rather poor candidate for primordial soup. That and even the oldest jar of peanut butter hasn't had the potential to be around for more than possibly a few thousand years tops, let alone the few million years even the most optimistic evolutionist would say it would need to be ...
They *do* have books about string theory published for the masses, you know. General background, no math at all. Lots of descriptive stuff and talk of 11 dimensions, predictions, energy levels, and that sort of thing.
If the weight of a packet of crisps diminished the further away you got from the shop, it would not only be perfectly legal, but prudent to advertise as "up to 200 grams". So the Analogy is terrible
Agreed. You just can't compare the delivery of a physical product that the manufacturer has complete control over to the delivery of a service that can be affected by a multitude of outside influences. Bad logic all around. It's like asking, "If Doritos can put the right weight of chips in the bag, why does my shower have to get hot when someone flushes the toilet?" The situations aren't even close.
(Realizing, of course, that many modern houses don't have that problem, but clearly the internet still does.)
For reference, my 97' Honda Civic was advertised as getting something like "up to 35 MPG highway/28 MPG city." In practice, I don't usually quite hit those numbers. 30/25 might be more realistic as the average. In heavy traffic in Chicago I probably had really bad weeks were I was closer to 20 MPG. On the highway, in bad conditions or when driving too fast, I've seen 30 MPG. On the other hand, on a good day I've actually been over 40 MPG when driving in certain conditions (cruising slowly on mountain highways, for instance).
It is of course absurd (and illegal) to advertise a rate that it's not possible for the customer to get, but it would also be absurd (and probably shooting yourself in the foot) to only advertise your mean or median value when in good conditions you can get a lot more. Whether it's criminal, a lie, good business, or accurate enough -- I would imagine there are standards for determining that, but I don't know what they are.
Now, I personally *would* argue that the numbers I cited for my car are close enough to the advertised numbers that I think Honda gave me good information, and I would argue that the numbers cited for broadband rates are NOT close enough to the advertised rates to be truthful advertising. Still, I'd expect broadband speeds to have to have a wider standard deviation than mileage -- there are a lot more outside influences to slow things down. To counteract that, though, I'd expect broadband to be advertised with a rate under the real theoretical max, so that your good days could start to make up for the bad days.
I'll add that one to the list, too. Thanks!
Really? So ( )*9=72, you think the difference between treating ( ) as x vs. 0 is "pretty inconsequential"?
Actually, no, that's not what I was saying at all. The notation in the example given here is horrid, but as other posters have pointed out, the notation given in the summary is NOT the notation given to the students in the actual problem.
What I was talking about was in "real life" (not this study), where the phrases "X is an arbitrary variable with no assigned value for the moment" and "X has been assigned a value of 0" can often harmlessly amount to the same thing.
Phew! For a second there I thought you were about to announce you'd beaten me to *my* new theory that I will soon propose: Global Worming.
I'm right there with you. I make this mistake all the time. Probably my most frequent programming error, besides leaving out a trailing semicolon here and there.
The difference between "unassigned value" and 0 is pretty inconsequential for most people in most real-world situations, and seems pretty pedantic to discuss, but it has bitten me several times when coding in the most frustrating ways. Equally confusing, potentially, is the convention that 0 means false. I'm struggling to remember the precise situation, but spent half an hour debugging a little scriptlet that kept failing if the variable equaled zero, because another part of the script thought the variable was false and didn't exist.
I'm not too worried about the article in terms of what will or won't charge Apple's dominance, but knowing there's going to be a ridiculous storm of these things is pretty important for planning at the office. We've already had some executives just show up with personal iPads and ask to be able to use them at the office. As the market grows, it's increasingly likely that supporting some (or many) of these devices is going to become a business necessity. We're scrambling now to figure out how they work in our environment, how to keep them and their data secure, and quickly trying to come up with some sort of useful set of policies so we can let the rest of the business know what to expect from us (tech support) and from the devices.
When a college friend of mine died a few years ago, some other friends created a page (or revised her existing page; not entirely sure) to be a memorial for her. Thought it was a nice touch. I'd been a bit out of the loop for several years, and though I'd actually heard about this particular incident, I could imagine other people like me trying to look her up on facebook and appreciating they could find out what had happened.
Thank you, both for a good analysis of what sounded like a very unlikely theory, and also possibly the recommendation for a book that sounds like something I've been looking for.
First time I played Doom was in a dark basement at my friend's house. Even on the early levels, when you'd hear the snorts and small sounds indicating a creature was either just around a corner or waiting behind a hidden door, I was wired-tense and literally leaning in my seat, trying to look around the monitor to see around the next corner because I knew something horrific was about to jump out at me. Took me a while to get used to the controls enough to have the character peek around corners instead of trying to do it myself.
Don't be silly: Marconi played the mamba. Listen to the radio. We built this city, we built this city on rock and roll.
My earliest electronic device memory is playing my uncle's Atari. And my earliest computer memory is playing MathBlaster and messing with PrintShop on my cousin's computer. I know we played with Apple II's a little in elementary school, including the nearly obligatory Logo programming, and I spent a lot of recesses playing Where In the World is Carmen Sandiego. Does owning a TRS-80 count? I could play Zaxxon from tape, and that's about it. I absolutely loved computers from the very beginning, but none of that really required any troubleshooting.
Most of what I did on the Macs was application-based: gaming or Word and Pagemaker for journalism in high school ... and paper writing and more gaming in college.
It wasn't until college that I actually touched a command line, and that's because all of the college email stations were VAX terminals. Through my studies in physics I did get introduced to some Unix systems, and became comfortable enough with command lines to get my way around, but even now I can't say I really like them and don't use them unless necessary. Took a couple of programming courses in college for fun (FORTRAN and C++), but didn't do much with it at the time.
Still, journalism turned into web design, and web design turned into tech support, and that turned into system administration. I didn't really touch Windows until XP was out, as I was transitioning into tech support.
Just an anecdote, certainly not data, but I think I'm trying to illustrate if you're technically minded and like the subject you'll find your way in, even if presented with limited options. If being low-key Mac user in my childhood didn't stop me, being primarily a smartphone user now shouldn't stop today's techie kids. But of course the non-techies aren't going to dig in whatever they have to work with.
darn it. Fake HTML with "oy" and "vey" and "/chutzpah" were trimmed out by the software. Dunno what I was thinking.
Would Semitic markup just be filled with lots of and and the like?
They do. I spend a year arguing on and off with a design firm copy editor about it. (This is back in '98, when they'd been doing print for years and were just starting web.) She kept telling me to add two spaces after all the sentences, and didn't want to believe me that it was out of my control.
She also got really fussy about commas after italicized words, where the choice was either to make the comma also italic and not have some extra space, or to make the comma not italic, and live with the additional little space the browser would insert.
I thought that for a moment (picked up a Nook about a month ago), but ePub is a viable format used by many readers, and you don't need anything special about B&N to get plenty of them from other sources. Between classics, free books loaned from the library, and places like the Baen site, the BN.com had never been one of my intended primary sources of books.
A lot of the liberal arts classes that you dismiss as snobbery and fluff are geared at enhancing context (know history so you don't repeat it) and communication (get your point across effectively). They're also often kind of fun and very different kind of work -- a fantastic change of pace and a welcome relief when you're loaded up on math and physics, say.
I'm 100% confident there's room for some of that in a college curriculum, in addition to practical, career-based stuff.
Yes, many of the worst cases of this involve people who aren't going 5 mph but more like 15, and they're coming to a stop well beyond the stop sign -- often half a car length or a full length, putting them right at the edge of the intersection. You might be able to argue (and legislate) a middle ground where if you're going 5 mph and properly come to a stop *at* the stop sign you're doing it okay, and if you're going 15 and stop beyond the stop sign you're not, but I simply don't think enough drivers are good enough to make that distinction.
For one thing, stop signs are often placed where you can't really make a proper judgment call. A "legal" driver would stop at the sign, then inch forward, while verifying the way is clear. A "good" driver might roll past the stop sign at 5 mph, ready to brake at any sign of traffic, and properly stop or go as the situation dictates, without giving the impression they're definitely going into the intersection regardless. A "typical" driver rolls through much faster and gives the impression that they assume the intersection is clear and are about to barrel in -- the fact that most of them will actually slam on the brakes at the last second doesn't matter, because they've already scared the bejeezus out of cross traffic.
I wouldn't be opposed to legalizing a rolling stop, as long as it could still adequately protect pedestrians and prevent scaring the bejeezus out of cross traffic -- but I'd like to see the results of a lot of tests before assuming that's even possible.
Plus neither drivers nor pedestrians seem to be able to use them properly, which dramatically increases the risk of collisions.
Lucky you. I had an employer miscalculate my paychecks (plugged in 24/year instead of the 26 pay periods years actually have). They had no compunctions about printing me a small check to make up the balance once they figured out what was going on. They were nice enough to apologize, but that hardly makes up for several hundred dollars.
Generally the initial $10 charge is testing the account before they come back and start charging hundreds or thousands of dollars, or whatever they can get away with. If your account has been compromised to have one charge, it generally means more are coming.