The point of the software is to blind the tests. At the moment, the results are being handed in, and nobody except the organiser knows which sample is which.
It's 128Kbps, mp3 only, because it is one of a series of listening tests. If you ferret around on hydrogenaudio, you'll find lots of tests which include AAC, Ogg Vorbis, and one or two others, at a variety of bitrates.
The point of this one is to see if other mp3 codecs have caught up with LAME, at a bitrate which is still used when space matters, as it still does on flash-based players.
Once it's dry, exposure to direct sunlight will help kill mould. Lots and lots of UV (remembering that window glass is a tolerable UV filter, so if you can expose it directly to sunlight, without any risk of rain falling on it, that's better).
Jesus Fucking Christ, why don't you drive all theists out of science education all together? Precisely this frenzy over a misquotation, perpetuated in the Slashdot summary that calls him a creationist, when he obviously isn't, is the kind of bigotry that is encouraged by Dawkins, who is too narrow-minded to engage with theists who are not raving fundamentalist loonies, and who chooses to believe that they are just giving cover to them.
No, I'm not a theist. I started reading _The God Delusion_ hoping a distinguished evolutionary scientist might offer some explanation as to why belief in gods, or God, or the supernatural, is so common amongst our species. You know, maybe it's like our intuitive physics, which is wrong, but useful in catching and throwing things. No such luck. Maybe he's just concerned with getting TV time and making money, and he knows that joining in a controversy raging in the US (and almost nowhere else) is a better way to attention and money than thoughtful contributions to knowledge.
Anyway, here's a guy who says, "Maybe it's better education to engage with a mistaken point of view than rounding on it and trying to just drown it out with censorship." Sounds a bit like the scientific approach to me. And what happens? A rabid pack forms. Ain't just the Christers that can get intolerant, it seems.
It is, in fact, apparently EXACTLY what he wanted. According to the BBC report, what he was really saying was that when he's teaching biology, if a student raises Creationism, he thinks it's better to take a little time to explain that Creationism has got nothing to do with science. The alternative is to refuse to discuss Creationism, which he believes, hardly unreasonably, is not the most effective way of going about it.
As an Anglican priest, he's also well-place to explain that biblical fundamentalism is also lousy theology, but I guess he'd feel that should NOT happen in science education.
Depends what you mean by "petroleum." If you mean by it what the Brits mean by "petrol," then it's not too hard to see Daimler-Benz doing this over the next 7 years: everything will go diesel (especially the trucks), and the diesel engines will run just fine on bio-diesel.
If we take 15 Mp for a 35 mm frame, which is probably OK, though you might see better with extremely meticulous technique, then you'd expect 6x7 (which is actually 56mm x some other number less than 70) to give a bit over 4 times the number of Megaps.
But 35 mm cameras typically do better than medium format in detail per square unit, because the lenses are easier, and 35mm film lies flatter in the film plane than 120.
So 40 megapixels sounds just about right for practical results with your Mamiya.
Remember to blink. I thought I was getting conjunctivitis doing a crap job that involved a lot of high-stress screen use. Nope. I was just staring, anxiously in my case. Blink to lubricate your eyes, and use eye-drops. And, like SQLGuru says, do look-away breaks, and do get-up-and-walk-around breaks, too.
Colour schemes might help, too, but this one might be PEBKAC.
Get well.
And also, for some people, the eee is in a different category. I happened to see one in an electronics store on a day when my bank account was in reasonable shape, and I just bought it on impulse. Not much storage -- but it takes SD cards, and you can use a USB thumb. And I wouldn't use it for serious work. But it's a real computer for the price of a toy. Just wish it had a bigger screen (within the format of the present case).
OTOH, I look at Vaio models with deep desire, but can't justify spending that money on what would be a luxury. But there's room for both in the market, I hope.
No, I didn't read all of _The God Delusion_, but I didn't skim it either. After reading a bit, carefully, and looking through other pages to see if he engaged in serious debate with serious theists, I chucked it out. This is relevant, because the topic is scientific education, and if Dawkins can infuriate someone who *wants* to learn from him, he's a bad candidate for promoting serious understanding of evolution, however good his own technical work might be.
From your account, he seems to believe that people have religious beliefs because they're taught to have them. Society is to blame. This is the sort of idea some bloody sociologist would have. A better account I have seen is that humans are particularly good at understanding human motivation behind actions (we have evolved to be like this, because we are a social species). We therefore tend to use this ability even when it doesn't correspond to reality, so behind the action of the weather, for instance, we "find" (i.e. invent) the intentions of a quasi-human, aka The Weather God. It's like finding faces in the fire, or pictures of the Virgin in a piece of toast.
That seems like a good idea to me, but as it stands it's an evolutionary Just So Story. I was kind of hoping that Dawkins might be writing as a scientist, producing evidence for or against such speculation, and similar ones, and perhaps considering different kinds of religious belief (like, for instance, developed forms of Judaism, or Buddhism as an example of a perhaps-religious attitude to the world that isn't necessarily theistic). That perhaps he would consider why a lot of people, including some who are at least as clever as himself, believe in some kind of theism. Like, show them where they're wrong, without telling them they're stupid and wicked.
But no. Like some slashdotter, he writes as though there are only two categories -- polemical atheism that doesn't need to think of any serious alternatives to its view of the world, or benighted US fundamentalism. Perhaps Dawkins has forgotten that there is a world outside the US, where the mindset of 19th century rural revivalism isn't a dominant influence. Instead, he seems to prefer to wrestle with pigs and get covered in mud.
This is a pity, because in _The Blind Watchmaker_ he shows how evolution can work by the ordinary action of compound interest. A 1% reproductive advantage, over enough generations, really mounts up. This is a really useful point, because evolutionary accounts of human behaviour are also unpopular with leftist humanities people (i.e. the humanities establishment). They, of course, aren't religious, but they confuse evolutionary theory with Social Darwinism, and therefore believe that if you try to understand human behaviour from an evolutionary perspective, you are therefore in favour of laissez faire and are located somewhere to the right of Ronald Reagan (or alongside Mrs Thatcher). Dawkins' account is really useful in countering this prejudice, in so far as it is more capable of being argued with than the prejudices of the fundies, or of those who believe that to criticise Dawkins is to be soft on evolution. But I guess there's more money in writing controversial books, and polemic takes less work than science.
Absolutely. I am *not* a religious person, though I have friends who are, and Dawkins angers me intensely. I found _The Blind Watchmaker_ in parts fascinating, but damaged by its polemics. I bought _The God Delusion_ in the hope that he would offer some kind of evolutionary account of the rise of religious belief, but instead it's just slagging off the most benighted of fundies. He mentions, at one point, theists with a more subtle understanding of the world, but then rants that they just give credibility to the loonies.
If Dawkins is allowed to be the face of an evolutionary understanding of life, then we're doomed to a slugfest between fundamentalists -- and some of the religious fundamentalists have got better manners than Dawkins.
So, yes, the way to increase knowledge and understanding of scientific thought, and especially evolution, is just to explain it, in its own terms, and not spend time on what beliefs it rules out. An acquaintance of mine is an astronomer and a Christian fundamentalist. He does equations with millions of light years in them, but occasionally puts quote marks round expressions that suggest this gives some idea of the age of the universe. I don't know, beats me, but it would be a waste of time arguing with him about it. The astronomy all works out perfectly well, I understand.
Thank you. And when you generalize this, it's not just *scientific* method. You can say there are two questions: 1. How do we get ideas/hypotheses/interpretations; 2. How do we check them?
There are different ways of checking ideas in different areas of knowledge; I'm not a scientist, but Popper is pretty convincing to me. In the humanities, there are other ways of checking ideas and interpretations, and they're less certain (which is why the humanities are so hard); but there too, people are very resistant to the prospect that their bright idea might be wrong (though there is in literary study a category of Interestingly Wrong, which can be a consolation).
So you can get non-scientists to respect good science more if you can get people to attend to critical thinking, in its various modes.
Wouldn't want to dis the moose, at all. In Australia, they have kangaroos, which can land on top of your car. Not much to be done about that.
BTW, in Australia the sheep are mostly merinos, which must be the dumbest animals ever. When you're driving through a mob of them, they'll wait until the last moment, and then dive under your wheels. The first time I drove through a mob of New Zealand sheep, I couldn't get used to the idea they'd run away from the car. But they're different breeds.
AFAIK the "moose test" is a test of swervability that a ?Swedish motoring magazine did, and only started being called "moose test" after an A-series Mercedes rolled doing it.
The crash tests are crash tests. For lots of good reasons, European cars tend to be smaller than US ones. That's pretty certainly one cause of differences in survivability design and testing. If the cars from one continent do badly in the other continent's tests, certainly it shouldn't be called protectionism.
Another good reason for driving Japanese.
You also gotta convince the insurance industry. Most policies ordinary folks can buy exclude anything with a nuclear or ionizing radiation aspect, and I think the US nuclear industry is only viable because of the Price-Anderson Act, that limits liability.
It's a pity. I believe the arguments that nuclear is safe -- certainly compared with coal. But there is an industry that makes its living out of betting on risk, and they won't touch it. Do they really know something the rest of us don't know, or are they just scaredy-cats. Pretty sure they're not tree huggers, though.
I don't know the marginal cost of a book, precisely, depends on a lot of variables, but it's certainly *way* more than 25c -- that's maybe the marginal cost of a CD.
Books regularly used by kids don't last a century. And you've got to allow for accidental loss and destruction, and deliberate theft -- wherever books are used (did you actually buy every book on your shelves? I've got one or two I never returned).
Maybe a laptop is overkill for pure text delivery. But have you priced memory recently? Know how many metres worth of book shelves you can get into a Gig? And a monochrome LCD display is pretty cheap. Replacement of books is a significant financial part of the value of a cheap device.
The guy *is* a jackass -- and it makes him a lot of money, and he seems to have fun. He started out as a mouthy, iconoclastic(ish) motoring journalist, kind of the P.J. O'Rourke of English motoring TV. But then he got to be a parody of himself. Still occasionally funny, though.
But in this case he shouldn't have been being a jackass. Until recently, I occasionally made purchases with cheques. If it was at B+M, I'd write my address and phone number on the back. Sometimes the assistant would note my driving licence number on the back of the cheque. Everybody did this, and we didn't *think* we were being jackasses. What it shows is that a lot of stuff just happens, without the checks (not cheques) we all thought were in place.
Oh, and the disks he refers to. In the UK there's a BIG scandal about how two CD-ROMs were made of the child benefit database, and sent by regular courier to another Govt. department. When they went missing, they just made another set, and sent them in the internal mail, too. 25 million sets of bank details, names and addresses. Clarkson seems to have been trying to suggest that this wasn't a proper cause for the hysteria that broke out, because the details could have been got in other ways, and weren't especially confidential. Seems he was wrong, but not jackass wrong.
Well, books would cost, probably, an average of USD$20 each. A year's supply would cost $1000 for 50 kids. Depreciation? You'd be lucky to get 3 years from the sort of use you might expect. Then there's the cost of that "near-by" library; if it really is a desperately poor country (which is, of course, as everyone KEEPS ON SAYING, 88**NOT**88 the target for OLPC), that library doesn't exist. So you factor in that, and the cost of money for the books and the library. Then you need to fund the transport, and the administration, which bloats by the laws of educational administration everywhere. I don't know the figures, but you'd be lucky to do minimal text delivery for $20 per year. Just as a replacement for dead trees, a really cheap digital device starts looking pretty cost-effective, when you think of the range of material already available, and that could become available, for essentially no cost.
Over the years, the Media Lab has done a lot of gee-whiz grandstanding, but this idea looks pretty good, and if the price can be brought down further, then you go, Mary Lou.
Slashdot Mirror
It is blind, with the software. There have been plenty of other tests done on HA which test different bitrates, and different codecs.
It's 128Kbps, mp3 only, because it is one of a series of listening tests. If you ferret around on hydrogenaudio, you'll find lots of tests which include AAC, Ogg Vorbis, and one or two others, at a variety of bitrates.
The point of this one is to see if other mp3 codecs have caught up with LAME, at a bitrate which is still used when space matters, as it still does on flash-based players.
Once it's dry, exposure to direct sunlight will help kill mould. Lots and lots of UV (remembering that window glass is a tolerable UV filter, so if you can expose it directly to sunlight, without any risk of rain falling on it, that's better).
No, I'm not a theist. I started reading _The God Delusion_ hoping a distinguished evolutionary scientist might offer some explanation as to why belief in gods, or God, or the supernatural, is so common amongst our species. You know, maybe it's like our intuitive physics, which is wrong, but useful in catching and throwing things. No such luck. Maybe he's just concerned with getting TV time and making money, and he knows that joining in a controversy raging in the US (and almost nowhere else) is a better way to attention and money than thoughtful contributions to knowledge.
Anyway, here's a guy who says, "Maybe it's better education to engage with a mistaken point of view than rounding on it and trying to just drown it out with censorship." Sounds a bit like the scientific approach to me. And what happens? A rabid pack forms. Ain't just the Christers that can get intolerant, it seems.
Nor am I, when I can help it, but maybe I should be a bit more prolific with my use of the Joke tag.
With something like, you know, a blue "e"?
As an Anglican priest, he's also well-place to explain that biblical fundamentalism is also lousy theology, but I guess he'd feel that should NOT happen in science education.
Depends what you mean by "petroleum." If you mean by it what the Brits mean by "petrol," then it's not too hard to see Daimler-Benz doing this over the next 7 years: everything will go diesel (especially the trucks), and the diesel engines will run just fine on bio-diesel.
If we take 15 Mp for a 35 mm frame, which is probably OK, though you might see better with extremely meticulous technique, then you'd expect 6x7 (which is actually 56mm x some other number less than 70) to give a bit over 4 times the number of Megaps.
But 35 mm cameras typically do better than medium format in detail per square unit, because the lenses are easier, and 35mm film lies flatter in the film plane than 120.
So 40 megapixels sounds just about right for practical results with your Mamiya.
Remember to blink. I thought I was getting conjunctivitis doing a crap job that involved a lot of high-stress screen use. Nope. I was just staring, anxiously in my case. Blink to lubricate your eyes, and use eye-drops. And, like SQLGuru says, do look-away breaks, and do get-up-and-walk-around breaks, too. Colour schemes might help, too, but this one might be PEBKAC. Get well.
No one will ever need more than 640 cores.
Internet toaster, case-modded.
OTOH, I look at Vaio models with deep desire, but can't justify spending that money on what would be a luxury. But there's room for both in the market, I hope.
From your account, he seems to believe that people have religious beliefs because they're taught to have them. Society is to blame. This is the sort of idea some bloody sociologist would have. A better account I have seen is that humans are particularly good at understanding human motivation behind actions (we have evolved to be like this, because we are a social species). We therefore tend to use this ability even when it doesn't correspond to reality, so behind the action of the weather, for instance, we "find" (i.e. invent) the intentions of a quasi-human, aka The Weather God. It's like finding faces in the fire, or pictures of the Virgin in a piece of toast.
That seems like a good idea to me, but as it stands it's an evolutionary Just So Story. I was kind of hoping that Dawkins might be writing as a scientist, producing evidence for or against such speculation, and similar ones, and perhaps considering different kinds of religious belief (like, for instance, developed forms of Judaism, or Buddhism as an example of a perhaps-religious attitude to the world that isn't necessarily theistic). That perhaps he would consider why a lot of people, including some who are at least as clever as himself, believe in some kind of theism. Like, show them where they're wrong, without telling them they're stupid and wicked.
But no. Like some slashdotter, he writes as though there are only two categories -- polemical atheism that doesn't need to think of any serious alternatives to its view of the world, or benighted US fundamentalism. Perhaps Dawkins has forgotten that there is a world outside the US, where the mindset of 19th century rural revivalism isn't a dominant influence. Instead, he seems to prefer to wrestle with pigs and get covered in mud.
This is a pity, because in _The Blind Watchmaker_ he shows how evolution can work by the ordinary action of compound interest. A 1% reproductive advantage, over enough generations, really mounts up. This is a really useful point, because evolutionary accounts of human behaviour are also unpopular with leftist humanities people (i.e. the humanities establishment). They, of course, aren't religious, but they confuse evolutionary theory with Social Darwinism, and therefore believe that if you try to understand human behaviour from an evolutionary perspective, you are therefore in favour of laissez faire and are located somewhere to the right of Ronald Reagan (or alongside Mrs Thatcher). Dawkins' account is really useful in countering this prejudice, in so far as it is more capable of being argued with than the prejudices of the fundies, or of those who believe that to criticise Dawkins is to be soft on evolution. But I guess there's more money in writing controversial books, and polemic takes less work than science.
No, I've not watched him in live debates. I've read one and a bit books. He rants.
If Dawkins is allowed to be the face of an evolutionary understanding of life, then we're doomed to a slugfest between fundamentalists -- and some of the religious fundamentalists have got better manners than Dawkins.
So, yes, the way to increase knowledge and understanding of scientific thought, and especially evolution, is just to explain it, in its own terms, and not spend time on what beliefs it rules out. An acquaintance of mine is an astronomer and a Christian fundamentalist. He does equations with millions of light years in them, but occasionally puts quote marks round expressions that suggest this gives some idea of the age of the universe. I don't know, beats me, but it would be a waste of time arguing with him about it. The astronomy all works out perfectly well, I understand.
Thank you. And when you generalize this, it's not just *scientific* method. You can say there are two questions: 1. How do we get ideas/hypotheses/interpretations; 2. How do we check them? There are different ways of checking ideas in different areas of knowledge; I'm not a scientist, but Popper is pretty convincing to me. In the humanities, there are other ways of checking ideas and interpretations, and they're less certain (which is why the humanities are so hard); but there too, people are very resistant to the prospect that their bright idea might be wrong (though there is in literary study a category of Interestingly Wrong, which can be a consolation). So you can get non-scientists to respect good science more if you can get people to attend to critical thinking, in its various modes.
Wouldn't want to dis the moose, at all. In Australia, they have kangaroos, which can land on top of your car. Not much to be done about that. BTW, in Australia the sheep are mostly merinos, which must be the dumbest animals ever. When you're driving through a mob of them, they'll wait until the last moment, and then dive under your wheels. The first time I drove through a mob of New Zealand sheep, I couldn't get used to the idea they'd run away from the car. But they're different breeds.
AFAIK the "moose test" is a test of swervability that a ?Swedish motoring magazine did, and only started being called "moose test" after an A-series Mercedes rolled doing it. The crash tests are crash tests. For lots of good reasons, European cars tend to be smaller than US ones. That's pretty certainly one cause of differences in survivability design and testing. If the cars from one continent do badly in the other continent's tests, certainly it shouldn't be called protectionism. Another good reason for driving Japanese.
You also gotta convince the insurance industry. Most policies ordinary folks can buy exclude anything with a nuclear or ionizing radiation aspect, and I think the US nuclear industry is only viable because of the Price-Anderson Act, that limits liability. It's a pity. I believe the arguments that nuclear is safe -- certainly compared with coal. But there is an industry that makes its living out of betting on risk, and they won't touch it. Do they really know something the rest of us don't know, or are they just scaredy-cats. Pretty sure they're not tree huggers, though.
Books regularly used by kids don't last a century. And you've got to allow for accidental loss and destruction, and deliberate theft -- wherever books are used (did you actually buy every book on your shelves? I've got one or two I never returned).
Maybe a laptop is overkill for pure text delivery. But have you priced memory recently? Know how many metres worth of book shelves you can get into a Gig? And a monochrome LCD display is pretty cheap. Replacement of books is a significant financial part of the value of a cheap device.
The guy *is* a jackass -- and it makes him a lot of money, and he seems to have fun. He started out as a mouthy, iconoclastic(ish) motoring journalist, kind of the P.J. O'Rourke of English motoring TV. But then he got to be a parody of himself. Still occasionally funny, though. But in this case he shouldn't have been being a jackass. Until recently, I occasionally made purchases with cheques. If it was at B+M, I'd write my address and phone number on the back. Sometimes the assistant would note my driving licence number on the back of the cheque. Everybody did this, and we didn't *think* we were being jackasses. What it shows is that a lot of stuff just happens, without the checks (not cheques) we all thought were in place. Oh, and the disks he refers to. In the UK there's a BIG scandal about how two CD-ROMs were made of the child benefit database, and sent by regular courier to another Govt. department. When they went missing, they just made another set, and sent them in the internal mail, too. 25 million sets of bank details, names and addresses. Clarkson seems to have been trying to suggest that this wasn't a proper cause for the hysteria that broke out, because the details could have been got in other ways, and weren't especially confidential. Seems he was wrong, but not jackass wrong.
Well, books would cost, probably, an average of USD$20 each. A year's supply would cost $1000 for 50 kids. Depreciation? You'd be lucky to get 3 years from the sort of use you might expect. Then there's the cost of that "near-by" library; if it really is a desperately poor country (which is, of course, as everyone KEEPS ON SAYING, 88**NOT**88 the target for OLPC), that library doesn't exist. So you factor in that, and the cost of money for the books and the library. Then you need to fund the transport, and the administration, which bloats by the laws of educational administration everywhere. I don't know the figures, but you'd be lucky to do minimal text delivery for $20 per year. Just as a replacement for dead trees, a really cheap digital device starts looking pretty cost-effective, when you think of the range of material already available, and that could become available, for essentially no cost. Over the years, the Media Lab has done a lot of gee-whiz grandstanding, but this idea looks pretty good, and if the price can be brought down further, then you go, Mary Lou.