I've always been wondering about that. Why don't we make a moon base first? See how that works out? It certainly seems simpler than going all the way to Mars, you can even let people come back to earth. Or does the tiny bit of atmosphere on Mars make it so much easier to colonize?
Re:Another Significant Hazard: Toxic Mars
on
How To Die On Mars
·
· Score: 1
Why don't we simply send those microbes over there already? We've got plenty of candidate lifeforms that "might" be able to survive on Mars. Just send samples of a bunch of those on a next rover mission to be scattered over some area, then see if any of them stick. Who knows, one of them might evolve into something that actually thrives on Martian soil and colonizes much of the planet. Let nature take care of the rest. Some people may not like the idea of "spoiling" the entire planet by importing life from earth (and possibly rendering the later discovery of indigenous life impossible), but if we can introduce life forms that reproduce exponentially, detoxify the soil and produce useful gases like oxygen, it will certainly make it (slightly) easier to colonize the planet once we're finally ready. Of course we won't be able to turn the planet into a giant forest, but it would be better than nothing. And we'd learn a hell of a lot about the evolution of life.
Also, if any catastrophic event happens here on earth, maybe something might come from those bacteria on Mars so life can go on. Maybe this already happened once on a different planet...
The problem is that, apparently, only two thirds of the females became male. If you would apply this method to a huge number of mosquitoes, there would be a temporary reduction in numbers followed by an explosion of mosquitoes that don't react to NIX. A single mosquito can lay quite a lot of eggs, so the numbers would be up to the old value again in a few generations. The number of mosquitoes is determined more by the environment than by the number of parent mosquitoes.
But how exactly does a planet "snatch" another object? The smaller object starts out at a huge distance from the planet, falls towards it (increasing its kinetic energy), passes by the planet (if it doesn't crash into it), and then... converts its kinetic energy back to the amount of potential energy it started out with, right?
Now if two different bodies would collide while close to the planet, some of the debris might just end up in orbit around the planet. But why would one small object not simply leave the planet again?
(Just an honest question, not saying anyone is wrong, just wondering how it works)
I believe that my God has laid out a story for me in which I don't believe in Him, so I have chosen to obey His will by being atheist. With any luck, I'll even be rewarded with 70 virgins.
Why don't they just use tolet-to-tap water in agriculture then? The plants surely won't mind. And people certainly seem to have accepted the fact that plants eat shit as fertilizer, so why not recycled toilet water?
Actually, my response would be that drinking large quantities of perfectly pure water is not very good for you and can even be dangerous. It strips away essential minerals from your body.
The Earth is not flat therefore Kansas is not flat.
A sphere can still have a flat spot, can't it? Slice a sphere with a plane just inside its radius, and the intersection will be perfectly flat. I don't know much about Kansas, but your logic certainly seems flawed.
I wasn't talking about Duff's device anymore, just the general normal usage of switch statements and the fact that they fall through by default, instead of the more logical opposite choice of breaking by default and continuing only by choice with an explicit instruction. Someone replied that falling through was useful if a whole list of values needed the same treatment, but I think it would have been better to have a standard where a list of values (and possibly ranges) could be provided rather than a silly list of "case x:case y:case z:".
Obviously, if you wanted to use Duff's device with such a modified switch syntax, every case label would need a "continue" to fall through explicitly.
OK, I'll amend my position slightly: they should break by default (and continue as an explicit option) but you should obviously be able to provide a list of values instead of the ridiculous 50 consecutive "case 5:case 6: case 7:...". Better still, they might add ranges while they're at it.
Oh well, I don't imagine them changing the standard for that any time soon, but one can dream...
They really ought to have done it the other way around: break by default, and use "continue" to fall through. It can indeed be useful sometimes, but in the vast majority of cases you want it to break, and forgetting that statement causes all sorts of trouble.
I remember something similar, called Duff's device. Not two overlapping switch statements (I don't think that's possible), but an intertwined loop and switch. I don't see any references to lines in bitmaps, but it's entirely possibe that the same kind of construction was used for that purpose too.
send(to, from, count) register short *to, *from; register count; {
register n = (count + 7) / 8;
switch (count % 8) {
case 0: do { *to = *from++;
case 7: *to = *from++;
case 6: *to = *from++;
case 5: *to = *from++;
case 4: *to = *from++;
case 3: *to = *from++;
case 2: *to = *from++;
case 1: *to = *from++;
} while (--n > 0);
} }
Ideally, you should include a generic version without any hackish optimizations, but it isn't strictly required if you don't think you'll ever change CPUs in the future.
And then your company upgrades its CPUs while you're long gone, and now they need to figure out who the hell wrote that crappy piece of code that keeps crashing on the new CPU, and some other programmer has to rewrite everything from scratch because they can't figure out how your code works and why it's not doing what it's supposed to be doing.
By the way, that other programmer may just be an older version of you who has completely forgotten what the younger version did there... (not that I have any experience with that, cough)
Tell that to people in the US who had their cash, car or even house seized because it might be connected to a crime. Traveling with $10000 cash? Surely that must be drug money, no matter how plausible your excuse is, we'll take it to buy game consoles, zambonis or margarita machines. You can always try to get it back by hiring a lawyer and going to court, good luck.
So you enter someone's name and date of birth on this website, and it gives you all the details? How exactly is this a hack? If I asked the president of the US for the nuclear launch codes, just for laughs, and to my great surprise he would simply give them to me, would I have "hacked" the US nuclear missile system? Would I be thrown in jail for hacking?
This is just plain irresponsible behaviour by PillPack, nothing to do with hacking.
I was just offering an alternative explanation as a possibility, not taking sides. When I use one part of the article to cast doubt on another part, that doesn't mean that I believe one part or the other. I just like to point out other possibilities when people jump to conclusions based on very scant information. Spectacular headlines often turn out to be less than accurate.
I must agree that you can't really say anything useful about this incident without knowing what was in the paper. The title makes it seem like an outrageous situation: "Scientists Have Paper On Gender Bias Rejected Because They Are Both Women". I imagine that what actually happened is probably a lot more nuanced.
It could very well be that the quality of the paper was rather poor. The article says the two female researchers just looked at the number of papers submitted by men and women, the number of jobs they applied to, and how long it took them to get accepted for a position. They then apparently concluded that, since women tended to be less successful, this obviously proves the existence of gender bias because the quality of the work cannot possibly be different, you know, men and women being equal and all.
I know that the article only gives a brief and possibly distorted summary of the paper, but if this was indeed the content, the reviewer has a perfectly valid point saying the results could also be explained by a lower quality of women's work. That doesn't mean that this is indeed likely to be the case, just that it would be an alternative explanation that must be ruled out before you can conclude anything about gender bias.
There have been other studies on academic gender bias, for example the one where identical papers were sent in with either men or women listed as the authors, and noting the discrepancy in their acceptance. And yes, a bias did indeed show up there, so I certainly don't rule it out, but you have to use proper methods instead of jumping to conclusions.
The remark about including a male co-author is obiously not a very smart one, but I kind of understand the reason for that suggestion too: a paper on the Palestinian conflict written by Jewish and Palestinian co-authors is more likely to be neutral than a paper written by only Jews or only Palestinians. So for this particular issue, having a male co-author is probably not a bad idea. Especially if they jumped to a conclusion about gender bias without ruling out alternative explanations, which would actually suggest gender bias in their work.
Once again, I haven't seen the paper so this is all just speculation on my part. The reviewer certainly could have phrased his comments a little better, though. Maybe he was just poking fun at them for writing an obviously flawed paper, but it clearly didn't get interpreted that way.
You could put on three spheres, so that any objects are always visible by at least two of them. Then you can do some processing (quite a lot of processing, actually) to synthesize the images that would have been seen by two cameras at a fixed distance from each other pointing in any particular direction. I'm not saying it's easy, but certainly feasible with today's processing power. And it would result in less lag than actually having to physically move the cameras. Also, multiple people could use the same feed like popo suggested.
There are obviously some disadvantages, one of them being the much higher bandwidth required to capture 360 degree vision from three cameras in sufficiently high resolution so that a relatively small view window still keeps enough pixels to look good.
But lag is an extremely important issue if you don't want people to get seasick within minutes of using the device.
Yes, because articles on the internet and in newspapers always only contain exactly correct details, no information ever gets lost, misunderstood, or altered in transmission. So if they say the screen was black, it couldn't possibly have been any other shade, and certainly could not have had any text on it, like an error message or something like that. Because journalists never get this kind of thing wrong.
OK, back to reality. Since both the captain's and first officer's iPad "went black" (?) at the same time, and this in multiple airplanes, even after many months without this problem ever occuring in a rather large fleet of airplanes, I imagine this is probably some configuration error related to some sort of DRM, licence expiration or other kind of protection. I doubt multiple iPads would all "crash" at the same time. Maybe the database had an incorrect expiration date, for example. Must not let pilots fly with out of date charts, better give them no charts at all. That sort of thing. Wouldn't be the first time, I've had a few experiences like that in different airline companies.
We've had an airbus grounded because a student pilot had messed with the on board clock, for example. The computers decided that the deadline for flap inspection had passed (based on the incorrect date set by the student) and refused to extend the flaps for take-off. Maintenance action was required before the plane could take off again.
Slashdot Mirror
I've always been wondering about that. Why don't we make a moon base first? See how that works out? It certainly seems simpler than going all the way to Mars, you can even let people come back to earth. Or does the tiny bit of atmosphere on Mars make it so much easier to colonize?
Why don't we simply send those microbes over there already? We've got plenty of candidate lifeforms that "might" be able to survive on Mars. Just send samples of a bunch of those on a next rover mission to be scattered over some area, then see if any of them stick. Who knows, one of them might evolve into something that actually thrives on Martian soil and colonizes much of the planet. Let nature take care of the rest. Some people may not like the idea of "spoiling" the entire planet by importing life from earth (and possibly rendering the later discovery of indigenous life impossible), but if we can introduce life forms that reproduce exponentially, detoxify the soil and produce useful gases like oxygen, it will certainly make it (slightly) easier to colonize the planet once we're finally ready. Of course we won't be able to turn the planet into a giant forest, but it would be better than nothing. And we'd learn a hell of a lot about the evolution of life.
Also, if any catastrophic event happens here on earth, maybe something might come from those bacteria on Mars so life can go on. Maybe this already happened once on a different planet...
The problem is that, apparently, only two thirds of the females became male. If you would apply this method to a huge number of mosquitoes, there would be a temporary reduction in numbers followed by an explosion of mosquitoes that don't react to NIX. A single mosquito can lay quite a lot of eggs, so the numbers would be up to the old value again in a few generations. The number of mosquitoes is determined more by the environment than by the number of parent mosquitoes.
Exactly, and bats are extremely useful animals because they kill lots of mosquitoes. Oh, wait...
They simply enhanced it.
But how exactly does a planet "snatch" another object? The smaller object starts out at a huge distance from the planet, falls towards it (increasing its kinetic energy), passes by the planet (if it doesn't crash into it), and then... converts its kinetic energy back to the amount of potential energy it started out with, right?
Now if two different bodies would collide while close to the planet, some of the debris might just end up in orbit around the planet. But why would one small object not simply leave the planet again?
(Just an honest question, not saying anyone is wrong, just wondering how it works)
I believe that my God has laid out a story for me in which I don't believe in Him, so I have chosen to obey His will by being atheist. With any luck, I'll even be rewarded with 70 virgins.
Why don't they just use tolet-to-tap water in agriculture then? The plants surely won't mind. And people certainly seem to have accepted the fact that plants eat shit as fertilizer, so why not recycled toilet water?
Actually, my response would be that drinking large quantities of perfectly pure water is not very good for you and can even be dangerous. It strips away essential minerals from your body.
The Earth is not flat therefore Kansas is not flat.
A sphere can still have a flat spot, can't it? Slice a sphere with a plane just inside its radius, and the intersection will be perfectly flat. I don't know much about Kansas, but your logic certainly seems flawed.
I wasn't talking about Duff's device anymore, just the general normal usage of switch statements and the fact that they fall through by default, instead of the more logical opposite choice of breaking by default and continuing only by choice with an explicit instruction. Someone replied that falling through was useful if a whole list of values needed the same treatment, but I think it would have been better to have a standard where a list of values (and possibly ranges) could be provided rather than a silly list of "case x:case y:case z:".
Obviously, if you wanted to use Duff's device with such a modified switch syntax, every case label would need a "continue" to fall through explicitly.
OK, I'll amend my position slightly: they should break by default (and continue as an explicit option) but you should obviously be able to provide a list of values instead of the ridiculous 50 consecutive "case 5:case 6: case 7:...". Better still, they might add ranges while they're at it.
Oh well, I don't imagine them changing the standard for that any time soon, but one can dream...
Any decent compiler makes those changes automatically. Probably even with optimisations switched off, since these are such a no-brainer.
They really ought to have done it the other way around: break by default, and use "continue" to fall through. It can indeed be useful sometimes, but in the vast majority of cases you want it to break, and forgetting that statement causes all sorts of trouble.
They probably chose "ugly hack" because they couldn't figure out how to write a regexp that matched "hack" but didn't match "whack", "shack" etc.
Next up, a new study detailing how many puppies are killed by different programming languages, based on the comments in the code.
I remember something similar, called Duff's device. Not two overlapping switch statements (I don't think that's possible), but an intertwined loop and switch. I don't see any references to lines in bitmaps, but it's entirely possibe that the same kind of construction was used for that purpose too.
send(to, from, count)
register short *to, *from;
register count;
{
register n = (count + 7) / 8;
switch (count % 8) {
case 0: do { *to = *from++;
case 7: *to = *from++;
case 6: *to = *from++;
case 5: *to = *from++;
case 4: *to = *from++;
case 3: *to = *from++;
case 2: *to = *from++;
case 1: *to = *from++;
} while (--n > 0);
}
}
Ideally, you should include a generic version without any hackish optimizations, but it isn't strictly required if you don't think you'll ever change CPUs in the future.
And then your company upgrades its CPUs while you're long gone, and now they need to figure out who the hell wrote that crappy piece of code that keeps crashing on the new CPU, and some other programmer has to rewrite everything from scratch because they can't figure out how your code works and why it's not doing what it's supposed to be doing.
By the way, that other programmer may just be an older version of you who has completely forgotten what the younger version did there... (not that I have any experience with that, cough)
Tell that to people in the US who had their cash, car or even house seized because it might be connected to a crime. Traveling with $10000 cash? Surely that must be drug money, no matter how plausible your excuse is, we'll take it to buy game consoles, zambonis or margarita machines. You can always try to get it back by hiring a lawyer and going to court, good luck.
So you enter someone's name and date of birth on this website, and it gives you all the details? How exactly is this a hack? If I asked the president of the US for the nuclear launch codes, just for laughs, and to my great surprise he would simply give them to me, would I have "hacked" the US nuclear missile system? Would I be thrown in jail for hacking?
This is just plain irresponsible behaviour by PillPack, nothing to do with hacking.
I was just offering an alternative explanation as a possibility, not taking sides. When I use one part of the article to cast doubt on another part, that doesn't mean that I believe one part or the other. I just like to point out other possibilities when people jump to conclusions based on very scant information. Spectacular headlines often turn out to be less than accurate.
I must agree that you can't really say anything useful about this incident without knowing what was in the paper. The title makes it seem like an outrageous situation: "Scientists Have Paper On Gender Bias Rejected Because They Are Both Women". I imagine that what actually happened is probably a lot more nuanced.
It could very well be that the quality of the paper was rather poor. The article says the two female researchers just looked at the number of papers submitted by men and women, the number of jobs they applied to, and how long it took them to get accepted for a position. They then apparently concluded that, since women tended to be less successful, this obviously proves the existence of gender bias because the quality of the work cannot possibly be different, you know, men and women being equal and all.
I know that the article only gives a brief and possibly distorted summary of the paper, but if this was indeed the content, the reviewer has a perfectly valid point saying the results could also be explained by a lower quality of women's work. That doesn't mean that this is indeed likely to be the case, just that it would be an alternative explanation that must be ruled out before you can conclude anything about gender bias.
There have been other studies on academic gender bias, for example the one where identical papers were sent in with either men or women listed as the authors, and noting the discrepancy in their acceptance. And yes, a bias did indeed show up there, so I certainly don't rule it out, but you have to use proper methods instead of jumping to conclusions.
The remark about including a male co-author is obiously not a very smart one, but I kind of understand the reason for that suggestion too: a paper on the Palestinian conflict written by Jewish and Palestinian co-authors is more likely to be neutral than a paper written by only Jews or only Palestinians. So for this particular issue, having a male co-author is probably not a bad idea. Especially if they jumped to a conclusion about gender bias without ruling out alternative explanations, which would actually suggest gender bias in their work.
Once again, I haven't seen the paper so this is all just speculation on my part. The reviewer certainly could have phrased his comments a little better, though. Maybe he was just poking fun at them for writing an obviously flawed paper, but it clearly didn't get interpreted that way.
If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, don't call it a chicken.
Except if it's one of these.
You could put on three spheres, so that any objects are always visible by at least two of them. Then you can do some processing (quite a lot of processing, actually) to synthesize the images that would have been seen by two cameras at a fixed distance from each other pointing in any particular direction. I'm not saying it's easy, but certainly feasible with today's processing power. And it would result in less lag than actually having to physically move the cameras. Also, multiple people could use the same feed like popo suggested.
There are obviously some disadvantages, one of them being the much higher bandwidth required to capture 360 degree vision from three cameras in sufficiently high resolution so that a relatively small view window still keeps enough pixels to look good.
But lag is an extremely important issue if you don't want people to get seasick within minutes of using the device.
Yes, because articles on the internet and in newspapers always only contain exactly correct details, no information ever gets lost, misunderstood, or altered in transmission. So if they say the screen was black, it couldn't possibly have been any other shade, and certainly could not have had any text on it, like an error message or something like that. Because journalists never get this kind of thing wrong.
OK, back to reality. Since both the captain's and first officer's iPad "went black" (?) at the same time, and this in multiple airplanes, even after many months without this problem ever occuring in a rather large fleet of airplanes, I imagine this is probably some configuration error related to some sort of DRM, licence expiration or other kind of protection. I doubt multiple iPads would all "crash" at the same time. Maybe the database had an incorrect expiration date, for example. Must not let pilots fly with out of date charts, better give them no charts at all. That sort of thing. Wouldn't be the first time, I've had a few experiences like that in different airline companies.
We've had an airbus grounded because a student pilot had messed with the on board clock, for example. The computers decided that the deadline for flap inspection had passed (based on the incorrect date set by the student) and refused to extend the flaps for take-off. Maintenance action was required before the plane could take off again.