Matlab (and/or Octave) rock. It's great - you spend a few hours at a whiteboard solving your problem, and finally get it down to a matrix computation like A*B*C, then you spend all of 5 minutes in Matlab, and your problem is solved.
You don't need to worry about trivial stuff that is unrelated to your problem like including libraries, or floating point issues, or reading up on the fastest matrix diagonalization methods, or memory management, etc. That is all done under the hood, so you can concentrate on solving your problem. If you have a bug, its probably because you did the math wrong before starting to code. This is why scientists and engineers like Matlab so much.
Everyone knows all about the RIAA and hates them. What good would a protest do?
On the other hand, most people dismiss scientology as simply silly - all that people know about the scientology is that Tom Cruise is one, and that they have some weird space alien belifs. However, people don't know about the supression of criticism through harassment and abuse of the legal system, such as happened with Paulette Cooper and Keith Henson. People don't know about the inhumane way scientologists treat some members such as Lisa McPherson. People don't know about the way Scientology simultaneously hides it's teachings through copyright, charges members ridiculous fees ($380,000 to get through the levels), and then claims tax exemption! People don't know that Scientology orchestrated the largest infiltration of the US government ever resulting in 11 senior members including the founder's wife went to prison.
This is one case where the oft-touted "awareness" can actually work.
Moreover, Anonymous is particularly suited to make it happen. Anonymous functions as a powerful grassroots PR and marketing organization, as strange as that may seem. They are the guys who started lolcats, orly, and many other huge memes. Now instead of promoting trivial stuff, they are going to work on Scientology. Plus, the fact that they are anonymous makes them impervious to Scientology's standard methods of attack (harassment and spurious legal harassment).
Thus Anonymous actually has a chance to make a difference(!) against Scientology, whereas their efforts against the RIAA would be epic fail.
I thought this was a troll to, until I did a quick search and found out they were correct.
'Jazz' is not a bad word now, but almost certainly is of extremely low origin, referring to copulation before it was applied to music, dancing, and nonsense (i.e., all that Jazz). The vulgar word was in general currency in dance halls thirty years or more ago" (Clay Smith, Etude 9/24). "According to Raven I. McDavid Sr. of Greenville, S.C., the 1919 announcement of the first 'Jazz band' to play in Columbia, where he was then serving in the state legislature, inspired feelings of terror among the local Baptists such as what might have been aroused by a personal appearance of Yahweh. Until that time 'Jazz' had never been heard in the Palmetto States except as a verb meaning to copulate" (H. L. Mencken, The American Language Raven I. McDavid Jr. 1963). "She never stepped out of line once in all the years we been teamed up. I can't sell her on jazzing the chump now" (William Lindsay Gresham, Nightmare Alley 1946).
Similar results have been found in Chess Grandmasters, Mathematicians (Gustin 1985), and world-class athletes (Helsen et al 1998).
Many people look at the greats like Euler, Newton, Bobby Fischer, Ronaldinho*, etc, and think "oh, they did what they did because of such great natural talent," but in reality those guys worked HARD. Certainly some people are incapable of their achievement - mentally retarded people, or those who have developed a learned helplesness in the face of tough problems - but after some point all human brains are in some sense "turing equivalent". At the high levels pure speed of thought is less important than thorough understanding - most prodigious mental calculators and memory savants fail to make good mathematicians.
I would hypothesize that most readers of this site, if they dedicated 10 hours per day to directed practice from age 15** for 40 years straight***, would do similarly amazing things.
* Soccer is a sport where physical genetic characteristics appear to have little effect on achievement at the highest level, and mental training (game tactics, decision making, and muscle coordination) is of key importance. Tall, short, heavyset, lanky, even people with physical deformities (eg: Garrincha) have risen to the top level of the game. Apparently soccer is deep enough to allow a role for people of different body types, whereas natural gifts like height would render my argument false for a game like basketball.
** Start at age 10 and continue for 25 years for athletes
*** not just trying the same failed strategies again and again but actually making effort to understand and learn at every step
Similar results have been found in Chess Grandmasters, Mathematicians (Gustin 1985), and world-class athletes (Helsen et al 1998).
Many people look at the greats like Euler, Newton, Bobby Fischer, Ronaldinho*, etc, and think "oh, they did what they did because of such great natural talent," but in reality those guys worked HARD. Certainly some people are incapable of their achievement - mentally retarded people, or those who have developed a learned helplesness in the face of tough problems - but after some point all human brains are in some sense "turing equivalent". At the high levels pure speed of thought is less important than thorough understanding - most prodigious mental calculators and memory savants fail to make good mathematicians.
I would hypothesize that most readers of this site, if they dedicated 10 hours per day to directed practice from age 15** for 40 years straight***, would do similarly amazing things.
* Soccer is a sport where physical genetic characteristics appear to have little effect on achievement at the highest level, and mental training (game tactics, decision making, and muscle coordination) is of key importance. Tall, short, heavyset, lanky, even people with physical deformities (eg: Garrincha) have risen to the top level of the game. Apparently soccer is deep enough to allow a role for people of different body types, whereas natural gifts like height would render my argument false for a game like basketball.
** Start at age 10 and continue for 25 years for athletes
*** not just trying the same failed strategies again and again but actually making effort to understand and learn at every step
2 years ago I was in the same boat as you - very proficient with 3DSMax and Maya, doing high quality work for mods, and hating blender for the UI. Then as a result of my work on mods I got hired by a small game company to create models for their game. The agreement was that I bring my own tools as an independent contractor, but what I didn't tell them was that I don't own professional licenses for Max or Maya (I was just pumped about even getting the job). To avoid legal trouble, I gave Blender another shot.
At that point I said "what the hell", and then spent about 4 days times 12 hours per day just memorizing hotkeys and practicing using the interface for various standard tasks until everything was in my mind and the hotkeys were all at my fingertips. (repitition of simple tasks, analogous to the basketball player practicing free throws) It got to the point where if I even had the slightest inlking to perform an operation, magically the appropriate tool and mode was already right there on the screen, my left hand had typed the commands without even consiously thinking about it.
Now that I put in the time and did the memorization, I am actually far more proficient in Blender than any other 3d program for low to mid poly range. The Blender interface just gets the hell out of the way and lets you connect directly to what you are modeling. The right hand on the mouse is reserved for spatial tasks, while the left hand on the keyboard is controlling the tools and modifiers that are used - the mouse is never used for scrolling through menus or clicking on icons.
So, the conclusion I draw is that Blender's UI is excellent for the expert and horrible for the newbie. It's not the sort of program you would want to _learn_ 3D on, and even if you already know 3D, it will take approx 48 hours of hard work before the advantages really shine.
In this age of open communication and online access to articles, there is no reason to artificially restrict access to research results. With a movie or a song, I can understand the argument for temporarily restricting free access to fictitous "intellectual property" as part of a broader scheme to encourage art. But when we are talking about paying to view the results of a labratory experiment, what the fuck?
What many people don't know is that researchers have to pay journals to be published, usually on the order of $1000-2000.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't believe they're extending the deadline after making this announcement.
The submitter could at least have linked to the YouTube Video of the projector prototype.
Here is the time-lapse video mentioned in TFA. It shows the yellow binary stars orbiting each other.
Matlab (and/or Octave) rock. It's great - you spend a few hours at a whiteboard solving your problem, and finally get it down to a matrix computation like A*B*C, then you spend all of 5 minutes in Matlab, and your problem is solved.
You don't need to worry about trivial stuff that is unrelated to your problem like including libraries, or floating point issues, or reading up on the fastest matrix diagonalization methods, or memory management, etc. That is all done under the hood, so you can concentrate on solving your problem. If you have a bug, its probably because you did the math wrong before starting to code. This is why scientists and engineers like Matlab so much.
I would just like to point out that the Federalist Papers were posted under an anonymous pseudonym.
Everyone knows all about the RIAA and hates them. What good would a protest do?
On the other hand, most people dismiss scientology as simply silly - all that people know about the scientology is that Tom Cruise is one, and that they have some weird space alien belifs.
However, people don't know about the supression of criticism through harassment and abuse of the legal system, such as happened with Paulette Cooper and Keith Henson.
People don't know about the inhumane way scientologists treat some members such as Lisa McPherson.
People don't know about the way Scientology simultaneously hides it's teachings through copyright, charges members ridiculous fees ($380,000 to get through the levels), and then claims tax exemption!
People don't know that Scientology orchestrated the largest infiltration of the US government ever resulting in 11 senior members including the founder's wife went to prison.
This is one case where the oft-touted "awareness" can actually work.
Moreover, Anonymous is particularly suited to make it happen. Anonymous functions as a powerful grassroots PR and marketing organization, as strange as that may seem. They are the guys who started lolcats, orly, and many other huge memes. Now instead of promoting trivial stuff, they are going to work on Scientology. Plus, the fact that they are anonymous makes them impervious to Scientology's standard methods of attack (harassment and spurious legal harassment).
Thus Anonymous actually has a chance to make a difference(!) against Scientology, whereas their efforts against the RIAA would be epic fail.
http://www.apassion4jazz.net/etymology.html
Also, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jazz_(word)#Etymology
Whoops, reposting with correct formatting:
Similar results have been found in Chess Grandmasters, Mathematicians (Gustin 1985), and world-class athletes (Helsen et al 1998).
Many people look at the greats like Euler, Newton, Bobby Fischer, Ronaldinho*, etc, and think "oh, they did what they did because of such great natural talent," but in reality those guys worked HARD. Certainly some people are incapable of their achievement - mentally retarded people, or those who have developed a learned helplesness in the face of tough problems - but after some point all human brains are in some sense "turing equivalent". At the high levels pure speed of thought is less important than thorough understanding - most prodigious mental calculators and memory savants fail to make good mathematicians.
I would hypothesize that most readers of this site, if they dedicated 10 hours per day to directed practice from age 15** for 40 years straight***, would do similarly amazing things.
* Soccer is a sport where physical genetic characteristics appear to have little effect on achievement at the highest level, and mental training (game tactics, decision making, and muscle coordination) is of key importance. Tall, short, heavyset, lanky, even people with physical deformities (eg: Garrincha) have risen to the top level of the game. Apparently soccer is deep enough to allow a role for people of different body types, whereas natural gifts like height would render my argument false for a game like basketball.
** Start at age 10 and continue for 25 years for athletes
*** not just trying the same failed strategies again and again but actually making effort to understand and learn at every step
Similar results have been found in Chess Grandmasters, Mathematicians (Gustin 1985), and world-class athletes (Helsen et al 1998). Many people look at the greats like Euler, Newton, Bobby Fischer, Ronaldinho*, etc, and think "oh, they did what they did because of such great natural talent," but in reality those guys worked HARD. Certainly some people are incapable of their achievement - mentally retarded people, or those who have developed a learned helplesness in the face of tough problems - but after some point all human brains are in some sense "turing equivalent". At the high levels pure speed of thought is less important than thorough understanding - most prodigious mental calculators and memory savants fail to make good mathematicians. I would hypothesize that most readers of this site, if they dedicated 10 hours per day to directed practice from age 15** for 40 years straight***, would do similarly amazing things. * Soccer is a sport where physical genetic characteristics appear to have little effect on achievement at the highest level, and mental training (game tactics, decision making, and muscle coordination) is of key importance. Tall, short, heavyset, lanky, even people with physical deformities (eg: Garrincha) have risen to the top level of the game. Apparently soccer is deep enough to allow a role for people of different body types, whereas natural gifts like height would render my argument false for a game like basketball. ** Start at age 10 and continue for 25 years for athletes *** not just trying the same failed strategies again and again but actually making effort to understand and learn at every step
2 years ago I was in the same boat as you - very proficient with 3DSMax and Maya, doing high quality work for mods, and hating blender for the UI. Then as a result of my work on mods I got hired by a small game company to create models for their game. The agreement was that I bring my own tools as an independent contractor, but what I didn't tell them was that I don't own professional licenses for Max or Maya (I was just pumped about even getting the job). To avoid legal trouble, I gave Blender another shot.
At that point I said "what the hell", and then spent about 4 days times 12 hours per day just memorizing hotkeys and practicing using the interface for various standard tasks until everything was in my mind and the hotkeys were all at my fingertips. (repitition of simple tasks, analogous to the basketball player practicing free throws) It got to the point where if I even had the slightest inlking to perform an operation, magically the appropriate tool and mode was already right there on the screen, my left hand had typed the commands without even consiously thinking about it.
Now that I put in the time and did the memorization, I am actually far more proficient in Blender than any other 3d program for low to mid poly range. The Blender interface just gets the hell out of the way and lets you connect directly to what you are modeling. The right hand on the mouse is reserved for spatial tasks, while the left hand on the keyboard is controlling the tools and modifiers that are used - the mouse is never used for scrolling through menus or clicking on icons.
So, the conclusion I draw is that Blender's UI is excellent for the expert and horrible for the newbie. It's not the sort of program you would want to _learn_ 3D on, and even if you already know 3D, it will take approx 48 hours of hard work before the advantages really shine.
Seriously. They still hate libraries. You'd think they'd get over it after 100+ years, but they haven't.
In this age of open communication and online access to articles, there is no reason to artificially restrict access to research results. With a movie or a song, I can understand the argument for temporarily restricting free access to fictitous "intellectual property" as part of a broader scheme to encourage art. But when we are talking about paying to view the results of a labratory experiment, what the fuck? What many people don't know is that researchers have to pay journals to be published, usually on the order of $1000-2000.