So if I am over the speed limit I am in technical violation of the speed limit and I should not get a ticket
Don't know about where you live, but around here, very few speeders get tickets. You really have to be 15+ MPH over the limit before they get interested, and that doesn't count all the miles of roadway where there's no officer even checking speeds. So yeah, if you're speeding, you're technically in violation of the law, but everyone has accepted that it's just not practical to enforce the letter of that law.
Using "technical violation of the law" to describe these wiretaps is a way to tell us that, even though it's illegal, this is the way the organization operates on a day-to-day basis, because they consider it no more "illegal" than jaywalking. The comparison to speeding is especially apt, except that speeding is a relatively minor moving violation, whereas wiretapping violates one of the most fundamental rights enshrined in our Constitution.
Maybe having it easy and being happy aren't synonymous after all?
If 31% of respondents have "unreasonable optimism" but only 6% are depressed, then I'd say having it easy contributes pretty well to being so happy they qualify it as a mental health issue.
They're technically breaking their local law by running these scams... but they're one of the leading industries so the government can't afford to shut them down.
The scammers are breaking the law in most countries. The moniker "419" refers to a section of the Nigerian fraud code which basically says it's OK to scam a scammer. This allows the scammer to trick the victim into a minor fraud, such as claiming to be a friend or relative of a deposed Nigerian finance minister, or providing bribe money, and thus make the scammer immune to civil or criminal prosecution.
So he will do this much earlier. Or is there some physics that makes an explosion 30 minutes before landing more dangerous then 1 hour and 30 minutes?
It's highly unlikely that his home-made, cooked-in-the-bathroom "explosive" would explode (vs burn), or that, if it did explode, would be enough on its own to bring down the plane. In the event that it could, then a crash during landing is much more likely to end up in a populated area than a crash 60 minutes (300 miles) from the airport.
Given that the device is unlikely, on its own, to bring down the plane, then it is at best a distraction for the pilots. Landing is dangerous, and playing out a terrorist attack during landing might increase the probability of pilot error & crash.
Really, though, the lesson of Richard Reid and the UK liquid plot is that even ridiculous and failed schemes will cause a disproportionate and unpopular reaction from security agencies and media and hence accomplish the terrorists objective of social disruption. They no longer need to kill anyone - just find some kind of chemical that might burn or poison under the right conditions and carry it around an airport. I'm waiting for clothing fabricated from nitrocellulose that will put us all in disposable surgical gowns for the flight.
I've seen only a couple online. I thought it might have been from the Sima Saba collision off Dubai, but the only pics of that Google will show me are fireboats. There's been an incident recently - 2009, maybe 2008 - where a tourist helicopter just happened to be in the vicinity of a collition. Usually, the incidents occur far enough offshore that the news helicopters won't go out.
We have already payed for the vast majority of the research articles indirectly through taxation.
What you haven't paid for is the publisher's bandwidth to provide those articles for download. The compromise, at least for biomedical research, is that NIH provides hosting for all federally funded research results at PubMed Central. It's a requirement of NIH grants that publications be deposited in PMC, where they are freely available within 12 months of publication.
I don't understand why Google searches seem more likely to bring up publisher websites than PMC, or even the PubMed abstract than the PMC full text. I imagine it's a PageRank phenomenon and the general obscurity of PMC.
I'd imagine many people have this vision of the crews being able to see the pirates coming and just gunning them down with a chaingun, but the reality is the pirates often manage to sneak up on vessels either using bad weather, blind spots or the cover of night, so many firefights would involve close quarter combat on the decks of the ship itself.
Most of your post is very good, but this is somewhat misleading. Pirates are generally in small (30') open boats with minimal radar profile and difficult to detect. Target vessels are generally intercontinental cargo ships with deck 100 feet off the water. Pirates don't sneak aboard these boats with grappling hooks, they threaten violence and the target crew lowers a boarding ladder for them.
Interestingly, the most effective pirate deterrent is the ship's fire suppression system. If you've never seen one of these in operation, it's quite impressive, and can literally hide the ship behind a curtain of water. It's completely impossible for a small boat to approach a ship with its firehoses running. The point of the pirates' RPGs is to make the captain turn off the firehoses.
Dogma has been that the brain does two kinds of learning - short term and long term. Short term learning happens within a few (or even a single) depolarization, lasts for a few hours, and is perfect for learning that the path is wet today. Long term learning has been seen as a separate, but related process, where repeated neural activity triggers new protein synthesis, and that synthesis results in new synapse formation. That process is thought to require repetition over minutes to hours, results in learning that lasts for days to weeks, and is well suited for learning that this path goes to grandma's house.
To find synaptic remodeling after a single training trial would require some revamping of that model. It seems reasonable enough, especially in more complex brains. A lot of what we know about the biochemistry of learning comes from invertebrates with fewer than 1e5 neurons. Even a mouse brain has ~1e8 neurons, which means there are a lot more opportunities for reinforcing signals, internal repetition, and god knows what else that might accelerate the long-term learning process we see in invertebrates.
It's common for biological journals to charge by the page ($50-100). Most also have an option for making the content available immediately, online, free to readers, generally for an added "Open Choice" or "Author's Choice" charge ($2000-3000). See, for example, Am J Pathol. If they're funded by NIH/NSF grants, they must be made freely available 12 months after publication, and a lot of journals have adopted the policy of free-after-a-year rather than keep track of which 2% of papers don't have to be.
That said, I've reviewed for PLOS and not been happy with the experience. Where most journals will make the authors revise their manuscript to address reviewer concerns, PLOS printed the unrevised MS, then tacked on the reviewer complaints as discussion/blog. I was left with the impression that PLoS is closer to a press release+blog trying to capitalize on Open Source hype than it is to a serious journal.
Now, I am a university professor, so my situation is different, but if anyone asked me to sign an IP waiver that said that whatever materials I made belonged to the school, I'd laugh and walk. That is my bread and butter.
That surprises me. Most U's - certainly most research U's - do exactly that. They get first refusal on any patents, inventions, etc. They get credit on any publications (at least in the sense that you declare your affiliation, at most in the sense of acknowledging internal funding). IP may be your bread and butter, but most universities want credit for encouraging you and a slice of the pie if you make one.
It's interesting that most times the first/. thread under a 'university/IP' thread will be how anything produced in the course of government contract or employ should be in the public domain, but here is a thread applauding people for making a personal profit from that same material. Maybe it's the difference between poor, overworked teachers and rich, lazy professors. Maybe its the difference between patents and copyrights. It's just an interesting contrast.
Really? An interview that starts with "I have been nervous about this interview with you, because what I feel like saying is, 'Sir, prove to me that you are not working with our enemies.'"
You failed to hear the condescension and sarcasm in his explanation. He's using very careful language to imply that muslisms, by not condemning muslim extremists, are de facto supporting terrorism. Of course, we all know that muslim extremist is code for muslim terrorist. "Christian extremist" is never used. Instead we say "Christian fundamentalist," and talk about the IRA without mentioning Catholicism. Remember that Beck is not speaking to an impartial audience, but to one already primed to believe that all terrorists are muslims, and some who will confuse that with "all muslims are terrorists."
You may also not appreciate that the interview is not just with "a muslim congressman" but with "the only muslim congressman." Try walking up to the only FLDS in the room and asking him loudly to condemn polygamy. If he does, everyone thinks he's just playing to audience. If he doesn't then he must support polygamy.
Actually, bullet points are the correct way to use any sort of slide medium... it's just a reference for what is to be discussed.
Then what are note cards for?
Note cards are for the speaker's secret notes, in case he wants to deliver a surprise ending or otherwise keep his audience in the dark as to exactly where the discussion is headed. Or in case he wants to make it difficult for the audience to catch up from a moment of distraction
I've been running a Myth system for two years, and it's required basically zero care and feeding once I got the system up and running and working the way I wanted (granted, that took a bit of time early on, particularly on the frontend, getting third-party software working right, tweaking the remote configuration, etc).
For me, the "getting the system up and running the way I wanted" took about eight months of tweaking, and that was without trying to use internal volume controls. Muddling around in menu paths like Utilities/Setup --> Setup --> Settings --> General. Convincing it to use the "internal" player in absolutely as few places as possible. I still dislike their transcoding system, so every new video means a remote access session, followed by a video manager session to get the metadata into SQL. Any movie with subtitles has to be manually forced to show the subs. The video manager has no hierarchy, so if you have more than a handful of videos, you have to use an external file manager to organize, and every file move means you have to re-download metadata.
Switching to 0.22 broke the sound (of course: it's linux, so anything you do has a 30% chance of breaking sound). Migrating to storage groups wiped all the metadata - which they warn you of and now provide a command line tool to help fetch metadata (my experience: about 20% automated). It also forces you to use the internal player, which has just about the worst interface of the common software video players.
Since all of that sounds like rant, let me say that I haven't any intention of switching from Myth. It does what I want. It works. I've invested hours in teaching it how to use my hardware. It occasionally crashes when launching into one of the plugins, and the 0.21 TV player periodically barfed (the 0.22 TV player has not done so yet), but not so much as to be a major hassle. I'm really happy the myth devs have worked so hard to make a functional package and give it away for free. I tolerate the UI quirks and occasional user-antagonism (like erasing all of my metadata) because they're part of the OSS deal.
Geez, I can't imagine the pressure of trying to get tenure. Your whole career building up to a single massive review of all of your work.
I'm sure it seems that way when you're just starting out, but one goes for tenure after only 5-6 years as an asst prof (preceded by 1-5 years as a postdoc and 4-6 years as a grad student, but neither of those are "real" jobs). Maybe 10-15 years into the academic career, sometime between age 35-40, with maybe 30 more years to go. An assistant prof really hasn't done very much.
NIH has some really nice data on who, what, and when funding is given. It turns out that the median age at which researchers get their first independent NIH grant is around 55 (a number steadily rising over the past couple decades). Yes, very successful people at high pressure universities & med schools will get that first grant sooner. It may even be a requirement for tenure in those places. Yes, those are the researchers that make the evening news, even the general scientific press, but they're also the exception to the rule. Most universities grant tenure to most of their assistant professors because most assistant professors are perfectly competent to do some teaching, write a couple papers every year, and generally make the slow, methodical progress that characterizes science.
It is hard work. It's not a 9-5 job. No one is attracted to academic science by the money, power, or fame: the motivation is more primal than that. Most of us would^w do find ways to pay the university to let us work.
But we have to start thinking about how much this crap COSTS. $500 million? That's $3-4 taken out of my last paycheck. Just for this project.
$500M is 2.8% of NASA's budget. NASA's budget is 0.5% of the federal budget. The $500M rocket is 0.015% of the federal budget. If you really paid $21,000 in federal taxes on your last paycheck, you should shut the fuck up about the government failing to provide homes for the homeless, and just buy them a shelter yourself.
I agree that in the long term space travel will be deemed very important. However, that does not create the funds to pay for it. You sidestepped my point, which is that we cannot afford it.
Your claim that space travel is important conflicts with your claim that the US can afford to spend $0 on it. Like all real world problems, the NASA budget is a question of priorities. We can "afford" to do everything, if only a little bit at a time. NASA is 0.5% of the non-defense budget - less than half of education, homeland security, HUD, Civil defense; less than a quarter of transportation and VA; one fortieth of HHS; one 50th of Treasury.
You seem to be quite fond of pressing problems, but you have not said what problems are so pressing that we can't afford NASA. "The economy"? It's already getting 50x more support than NASA. "Healthcare"? Already getting 40x. "Bringing Democracy to the backward nations of the world"? Seriously: you can't just say "Space exploration is too expensive. There are more important priorities." without saying what those priorities are. If NASA is too expensive, what is the desperately immediate need that would be completely satisfied by reallocation of NASA's budget?
I'm sure you have one. I'm also sure that someone else will have a similarly pressing problem that's more important than your pet project. I'm likewise certain that, having closed NASA this year, a similarly pressing problem will appear next year to prevent re-opening NASA. And the year after that. Once you decide to focus all of your resources on the Problem of the Week, you give up all of your long term goals. The whole reason the government invests in research is that there is no pressing problem to provide economic, market-driven motivation for solution of the problem, despite that we know it's in our long-term interest.
How is it intimidating to have your public opinions exposed to the public? This is only intimidating if the people opposing gay marriage believe that opposition is wrong and shameful. Or if much of the public believes it is wrong and shameful. Legislators are there representing their constituents, not their own personal opinions. If there is an issue which they can not proudly support, one way or the other, then they should abstain. Making a secret vote, the consequences of which they're not willing to accept, is contrary to the whole theory of representative democracy.
In the US, you can apply for a provisional patent for $110. This is a simplified, essentially abstract patent application you can use to hold your place in the patent line while you go off and find someone to commercialize/help you commercialize your idea.
You've still got a year after publication to make a provisional filing, but you also get a year after the provisional filing before the full application.
There is still a lot to be said for a low-tech approach that is not vulnerable to power blackouts, viruses, malware or spyware.
That's what non-cursive writing (printing) is for. It's much more legible to people other than the writer.
Yes, but every time the pen nub comes in contact with the paper, the change in pressure causes a big drop of ink to transfer. Also, continually lifting a quill off the paper and placing it back down will damage the point. I suppose, if you write with one of those new-fangled ball- or ceramic-point pens that this doesn't matter so much, but discontinuity of surface contact can really make a mess with traditional writing instruments.
What is a '"professional" nick' anyways? In professional (as in, work related) situations, I use my name.
Well, for me, tburkhol is a professional nick. 8 character username, assigned in days I was too lazy to put my real name into email, so electronic contacts know me by that string
Could you please give me a few examples of things someone might be so afraid of talking about yet at the same time so interested in that they need to make up a "secret alias" so to speak?
People have different levels of secret and different levels of comfort mixing their personal and professional opinions. Maybe camera operator for FOX news doesn't want his boss to know he supports gay marriage. Maybe you just want occasionally to vent about the asshole who cut you off in traffic, but prefer that your co-workers thing you're a level headed guy. Some people work very hard on their professional personae, which may be slightly or significantly different than their personal persona - think about stage personae like Marilyn Manson and Alice Cooper, who go home to families and lawn mowing.
It may seem paranoid today, but half the world thrives on gossip, and it's easy to imagine that one of those gossip mongers might end up in a position of power over you, and might go googling for facts and gossip related to you. Associating your professional identity with your personal identity isn't a risk only if you personally hold extreme views, it's also a risk if people over you hold extreme views. Separating the identities is like auto insurance - you don't get it because you think you drive badly, you get it because everyone else drives badly.
Personally, I have no "online aliases". I have my nick, plastbox, but it's not like I consider my nick a different person than myself.
There are usually two reasons for this, Kim. Either you've never been in a position where your personal behavior or opinions might influence your welfare, or you hold no personal opinions. Many people do hold strong political or social opinions and enjoy discussing those issues, but wish not that a potential employer or client with opposing view be biased by non-professional concerns. It's quite handy to have a "professional" nick and a "personal" nick.
Of course, "The RfC [300ng/m3] is an estimate (with uncertainty spanning perhaps an order of magnitude) of a continuous inhalation exposure to the human population (including sensitive subgroups) that is likely to be without appreciable risk of deleterious noncancer effects during a lifetime." From the MAAG. So, you could either pay $3000 to clean up the 4 mg of Hg, or you could open a window and try not to break a bulb every week.
Engineers are not applied scientists, anymore than physicians are applied biologists. Science is about a method, not a knowledge base.
If you don't think engineers and physicians apply scientific methods to solve problems, then I encourage you to evacuate the building before the concrete crumbles or the soil slumps away.
"rotten" is an emotionally loaded term, but fundamentally cheese is a cultured food.
No culturing necessary: milk proteins precipitate at low pH, and that's all you need to make cheese. A little proteolysis with papain, chymosin, etc, will change the character a little, as will pressing and culturing, but all you really need to do is precipitate the proteins. It's easy
When most people, even most space biologists, talk about "the effect of gravity" they really mean the effect of some force that counters gravity in order to reduce acceleration. ie: in "microgravity" you're still being acted on by gravity, accelerating toward the nearest, largest mass, but that mass is perpetually moving out of the way before you hit it. The forces resisting gravitational acceleration are very small and we say you're in "zero G."
So, "gravity in all directions simultaneously" is like "no gravity" because no contact force opposes your acceleration. "Gravity in a single random direction that changes all the time so it averages out to zero" is like "no gravity" in that the body maintains is distance from the nearest, largest body, but it is not like "no gravity" in that there is a physical force (viscosity) acting against the gravitational acceleration.
Slashdot Mirror
So if I am over the speed limit I am in technical violation of the speed limit and I should not get a ticket
Don't know about where you live, but around here, very few speeders get tickets. You really have to be 15+ MPH over the limit before they get interested, and that doesn't count all the miles of roadway where there's no officer even checking speeds. So yeah, if you're speeding, you're technically in violation of the law, but everyone has accepted that it's just not practical to enforce the letter of that law.
Using "technical violation of the law" to describe these wiretaps is a way to tell us that, even though it's illegal, this is the way the organization operates on a day-to-day basis, because they consider it no more "illegal" than jaywalking. The comparison to speeding is especially apt, except that speeding is a relatively minor moving violation, whereas wiretapping violates one of the most fundamental rights enshrined in our Constitution.
Maybe having it easy and being happy aren't synonymous after all?
If 31% of respondents have "unreasonable optimism" but only 6% are depressed, then I'd say having it easy contributes pretty well to being so happy they qualify it as a mental health issue.
They're technically breaking their local law by running these scams... but they're one of the leading industries so the government can't afford to shut them down.
The scammers are breaking the law in most countries. The moniker "419" refers to a section of the Nigerian fraud code which basically says it's OK to scam a scammer. This allows the scammer to trick the victim into a minor fraud, such as claiming to be a friend or relative of a deposed Nigerian finance minister, or providing bribe money, and thus make the scammer immune to civil or criminal prosecution.
Ob-wikilink
So he will do this much earlier. Or is there some physics that makes an explosion 30 minutes before landing more dangerous then 1 hour and 30 minutes?
It's highly unlikely that his home-made, cooked-in-the-bathroom "explosive" would explode (vs burn), or that, if it did explode, would be enough on its own to bring down the plane. In the event that it could, then a crash during landing is much more likely to end up in a populated area than a crash 60 minutes (300 miles) from the airport.
Given that the device is unlikely, on its own, to bring down the plane, then it is at best a distraction for the pilots. Landing is dangerous, and playing out a terrorist attack during landing might increase the probability of pilot error & crash.
Really, though, the lesson of Richard Reid and the UK liquid plot is that even ridiculous and failed schemes will cause a disproportionate and unpopular reaction from security agencies and media and hence accomplish the terrorists objective of social disruption. They no longer need to kill anyone - just find some kind of chemical that might burn or poison under the right conditions and carry it around an airport. I'm waiting for clothing fabricated from nitrocellulose that will put us all in disposable surgical gowns for the flight.
I've seen only a couple online. I thought it might have been from the Sima Saba collision off Dubai, but the only pics of that Google will show me are fireboats. There's been an incident recently - 2009, maybe 2008 - where a tourist helicopter just happened to be in the vicinity of a collition. Usually, the incidents occur far enough offshore that the news helicopters won't go out.
We have already payed for the vast majority of the research articles indirectly through taxation.
What you haven't paid for is the publisher's bandwidth to provide those articles for download. The compromise, at least for biomedical research, is that NIH provides hosting for all federally funded research results at PubMed Central. It's a requirement of NIH grants that publications be deposited in PMC, where they are freely available within 12 months of publication.
I don't understand why Google searches seem more likely to bring up publisher websites than PMC, or even the PubMed abstract than the PMC full text. I imagine it's a PageRank phenomenon and the general obscurity of PMC.
I'd imagine many people have this vision of the crews being able to see the pirates coming and just gunning them down with a chaingun, but the reality is the pirates often manage to sneak up on vessels either using bad weather, blind spots or the cover of night, so many firefights would involve close quarter combat on the decks of the ship itself.
Most of your post is very good, but this is somewhat misleading. Pirates are generally in small (30') open boats with minimal radar profile and difficult to detect. Target vessels are generally intercontinental cargo ships with deck 100 feet off the water. Pirates don't sneak aboard these boats with grappling hooks, they threaten violence and the target crew lowers a boarding ladder for them.
Interestingly, the most effective pirate deterrent is the ship's fire suppression system. If you've never seen one of these in operation, it's quite impressive, and can literally hide the ship behind a curtain of water. It's completely impossible for a small boat to approach a ship with its firehoses running. The point of the pirates' RPGs is to make the captain turn off the firehoses.
Dogma has been that the brain does two kinds of learning - short term and long term. Short term learning happens within a few (or even a single) depolarization, lasts for a few hours, and is perfect for learning that the path is wet today. Long term learning has been seen as a separate, but related process, where repeated neural activity triggers new protein synthesis, and that synthesis results in new synapse formation. That process is thought to require repetition over minutes to hours, results in learning that lasts for days to weeks, and is well suited for learning that this path goes to grandma's house.
To find synaptic remodeling after a single training trial would require some revamping of that model. It seems reasonable enough, especially in more complex brains. A lot of what we know about the biochemistry of learning comes from invertebrates with fewer than 1e5 neurons. Even a mouse brain has ~1e8 neurons, which means there are a lot more opportunities for reinforcing signals, internal repetition, and god knows what else that might accelerate the long-term learning process we see in invertebrates.
It's common for biological journals to charge by the page ($50-100). Most also have an option for making the content available immediately, online, free to readers, generally for an added "Open Choice" or "Author's Choice" charge ($2000-3000). See, for example, Am J Pathol. If they're funded by NIH/NSF grants, they must be made freely available 12 months after publication, and a lot of journals have adopted the policy of free-after-a-year rather than keep track of which 2% of papers don't have to be.
That said, I've reviewed for PLOS and not been happy with the experience. Where most journals will make the authors revise their manuscript to address reviewer concerns, PLOS printed the unrevised MS, then tacked on the reviewer complaints as discussion/blog. I was left with the impression that PLoS is closer to a press release+blog trying to capitalize on Open Source hype than it is to a serious journal.
Now, I am a university professor, so my situation is different, but if anyone asked me to sign an IP waiver that said that whatever materials I made belonged to the school, I'd laugh and walk. That is my bread and butter.
That surprises me. Most U's - certainly most research U's - do exactly that. They get first refusal on any patents, inventions, etc. They get credit on any publications (at least in the sense that you declare your affiliation, at most in the sense of acknowledging internal funding). IP may be your bread and butter, but most universities want credit for encouraging you and a slice of the pie if you make one.
It's interesting that most times the first /. thread under a 'university/IP' thread will be how anything produced in the course of government contract or employ should be in the public domain, but here is a thread applauding people for making a personal profit from that same material. Maybe it's the difference between poor, overworked teachers and rich, lazy professors. Maybe its the difference between patents and copyrights. It's just an interesting contrast.
Really? An interview that starts with "I have been nervous about this interview with you, because what I feel like saying is, 'Sir, prove to me that you are not working with our enemies.'" You failed to hear the condescension and sarcasm in his explanation. He's using very careful language to imply that muslisms, by not condemning muslim extremists, are de facto supporting terrorism. Of course, we all know that muslim extremist is code for muslim terrorist. "Christian extremist" is never used. Instead we say "Christian fundamentalist," and talk about the IRA without mentioning Catholicism. Remember that Beck is not speaking to an impartial audience, but to one already primed to believe that all terrorists are muslims, and some who will confuse that with "all muslims are terrorists." You may also not appreciate that the interview is not just with "a muslim congressman" but with "the only muslim congressman." Try walking up to the only FLDS in the room and asking him loudly to condemn polygamy. If he does, everyone thinks he's just playing to audience. If he doesn't then he must support polygamy.
Actually, bullet points are the correct way to use any sort of slide medium... it's just a reference for what is to be discussed.
Then what are note cards for?
Note cards are for the speaker's secret notes, in case he wants to deliver a surprise ending or otherwise keep his audience in the dark as to exactly where the discussion is headed. Or in case he wants to make it difficult for the audience to catch up from a moment of distraction
I've been running a Myth system for two years, and it's required basically zero care and feeding once I got the system up and running and working the way I wanted (granted, that took a bit of time early on, particularly on the frontend, getting third-party software working right, tweaking the remote configuration, etc).
For me, the "getting the system up and running the way I wanted" took about eight months of tweaking, and that was without trying to use internal volume controls. Muddling around in menu paths like Utilities/Setup --> Setup --> Settings --> General. Convincing it to use the "internal" player in absolutely as few places as possible. I still dislike their transcoding system, so every new video means a remote access session, followed by a video manager session to get the metadata into SQL. Any movie with subtitles has to be manually forced to show the subs. The video manager has no hierarchy, so if you have more than a handful of videos, you have to use an external file manager to organize, and every file move means you have to re-download metadata.
Switching to 0.22 broke the sound (of course: it's linux, so anything you do has a 30% chance of breaking sound). Migrating to storage groups wiped all the metadata - which they warn you of and now provide a command line tool to help fetch metadata (my experience: about 20% automated). It also forces you to use the internal player, which has just about the worst interface of the common software video players.
Since all of that sounds like rant, let me say that I haven't any intention of switching from Myth. It does what I want. It works. I've invested hours in teaching it how to use my hardware. It occasionally crashes when launching into one of the plugins, and the 0.21 TV player periodically barfed (the 0.22 TV player has not done so yet), but not so much as to be a major hassle. I'm really happy the myth devs have worked so hard to make a functional package and give it away for free. I tolerate the UI quirks and occasional user-antagonism (like erasing all of my metadata) because they're part of the OSS deal.
Geez, I can't imagine the pressure of trying to get tenure. Your whole career building up to a single massive review of all of your work.
I'm sure it seems that way when you're just starting out, but one goes for tenure after only 5-6 years as an asst prof (preceded by 1-5 years as a postdoc and 4-6 years as a grad student, but neither of those are "real" jobs). Maybe 10-15 years into the academic career, sometime between age 35-40, with maybe 30 more years to go. An assistant prof really hasn't done very much.
NIH has some really nice data on who, what, and when funding is given. It turns out that the median age at which researchers get their first independent NIH grant is around 55 (a number steadily rising over the past couple decades). Yes, very successful people at high pressure universities & med schools will get that first grant sooner. It may even be a requirement for tenure in those places. Yes, those are the researchers that make the evening news, even the general scientific press, but they're also the exception to the rule. Most universities grant tenure to most of their assistant professors because most assistant professors are perfectly competent to do some teaching, write a couple papers every year, and generally make the slow, methodical progress that characterizes science.
It is hard work. It's not a 9-5 job. No one is attracted to academic science by the money, power, or fame: the motivation is more primal than that. Most of us would^w do find ways to pay the university to let us work.
But we have to start thinking about how much this crap COSTS. $500 million? That's $3-4 taken out of my last paycheck. Just for this project.
$500M is 2.8% of NASA's budget. NASA's budget is 0.5% of the federal budget. The $500M rocket is 0.015% of the federal budget. If you really paid $21,000 in federal taxes on your last paycheck, you should shut the fuck up about the government failing to provide homes for the homeless, and just buy them a shelter yourself.
I agree that in the long term space travel will be deemed very important. However, that does not create the funds to pay for it. You sidestepped my point, which is that we cannot afford it.
Your claim that space travel is important conflicts with your claim that the US can afford to spend $0 on it. Like all real world problems, the NASA budget is a question of priorities. We can "afford" to do everything, if only a little bit at a time. NASA is 0.5% of the non-defense budget - less than half of education, homeland security, HUD, Civil defense; less than a quarter of transportation and VA; one fortieth of HHS; one 50th of Treasury.
You seem to be quite fond of pressing problems, but you have not said what problems are so pressing that we can't afford NASA. "The economy"? It's already getting 50x more support than NASA. "Healthcare"? Already getting 40x. "Bringing Democracy to the backward nations of the world"? Seriously: you can't just say "Space exploration is too expensive. There are more important priorities." without saying what those priorities are. If NASA is too expensive, what is the desperately immediate need that would be completely satisfied by reallocation of NASA's budget?
I'm sure you have one. I'm also sure that someone else will have a similarly pressing problem that's more important than your pet project. I'm likewise certain that, having closed NASA this year, a similarly pressing problem will appear next year to prevent re-opening NASA. And the year after that. Once you decide to focus all of your resources on the Problem of the Week, you give up all of your long term goals. The whole reason the government invests in research is that there is no pressing problem to provide economic, market-driven motivation for solution of the problem, despite that we know it's in our long-term interest.
How is it intimidating to have your public opinions exposed to the public? This is only intimidating if the people opposing gay marriage believe that opposition is wrong and shameful. Or if much of the public believes it is wrong and shameful. Legislators are there representing their constituents, not their own personal opinions. If there is an issue which they can not proudly support, one way or the other, then they should abstain. Making a secret vote, the consequences of which they're not willing to accept, is contrary to the whole theory of representative democracy.
If you patent, it'll be expensive.
In the US, you can apply for a provisional patent for $110. This is a simplified, essentially abstract patent application you can use to hold your place in the patent line while you go off and find someone to commercialize/help you commercialize your idea.
You've still got a year after publication to make a provisional filing, but you also get a year after the provisional filing before the full application.
Yes, but every time the pen nub comes in contact with the paper, the change in pressure causes a big drop of ink to transfer. Also, continually lifting a quill off the paper and placing it back down will damage the point. I suppose, if you write with one of those new-fangled ball- or ceramic-point pens that this doesn't matter so much, but discontinuity of surface contact can really make a mess with traditional writing instruments.
What is a '"professional" nick' anyways? In professional (as in, work related) situations, I use my name.
Well, for me, tburkhol is a professional nick. 8 character username, assigned in days I was too lazy to put my real name into email, so electronic contacts know me by that string
Could you please give me a few examples of things someone might be so afraid of talking about yet at the same time so interested in that they need to make up a "secret alias" so to speak?
People have different levels of secret and different levels of comfort mixing their personal and professional opinions. Maybe camera operator for FOX news doesn't want his boss to know he supports gay marriage. Maybe you just want occasionally to vent about the asshole who cut you off in traffic, but prefer that your co-workers thing you're a level headed guy. Some people work very hard on their professional personae, which may be slightly or significantly different than their personal persona - think about stage personae like Marilyn Manson and Alice Cooper, who go home to families and lawn mowing.
It may seem paranoid today, but half the world thrives on gossip, and it's easy to imagine that one of those gossip mongers might end up in a position of power over you, and might go googling for facts and gossip related to you. Associating your professional identity with your personal identity isn't a risk only if you personally hold extreme views, it's also a risk if people over you hold extreme views. Separating the identities is like auto insurance - you don't get it because you think you drive badly, you get it because everyone else drives badly.
Personally, I have no "online aliases". I have my nick, plastbox, but it's not like I consider my nick a different person than myself.
There are usually two reasons for this, Kim. Either you've never been in a position where your personal behavior or opinions might influence your welfare, or you hold no personal opinions. Many people do hold strong political or social opinions and enjoy discussing those issues, but wish not that a potential employer or client with opposing view be biased by non-professional concerns. It's quite handy to have a "professional" nick and a "personal" nick.
Of course, "The RfC [300ng/m3] is an estimate (with uncertainty spanning perhaps an order of magnitude) of a continuous inhalation exposure to the human population (including sensitive subgroups) that is likely to be without appreciable risk of deleterious noncancer effects during a lifetime." From the MAAG. So, you could either pay $3000 to clean up the 4 mg of Hg, or you could open a window and try not to break a bulb every week.
Engineers are not applied scientists, anymore than physicians are applied biologists. Science is about a method, not a knowledge base.
If you don't think engineers and physicians apply scientific methods to solve problems, then I encourage you to evacuate the building before the concrete crumbles or the soil slumps away.
"rotten" is an emotionally loaded term, but fundamentally cheese is a cultured food.
No culturing necessary: milk proteins precipitate at low pH, and that's all you need to make cheese. A little proteolysis with papain, chymosin, etc, will change the character a little, as will pressing and culturing, but all you really need to do is precipitate the proteins. It's easy
How is gravity in all directions = no gravity ?
When most people, even most space biologists, talk about "the effect of gravity" they really mean the effect of some force that counters gravity in order to reduce acceleration. ie: in "microgravity" you're still being acted on by gravity, accelerating toward the nearest, largest mass, but that mass is perpetually moving out of the way before you hit it. The forces resisting gravitational acceleration are very small and we say you're in "zero G."
So, "gravity in all directions simultaneously" is like "no gravity" because no contact force opposes your acceleration. "Gravity in a single random direction that changes all the time so it averages out to zero" is like "no gravity" in that the body maintains is distance from the nearest, largest body, but it is not like "no gravity" in that there is a physical force (viscosity) acting against the gravitational acceleration.