My understanding is that the Cavendish is very fragile and ripens rather quickly. However, there is currently a tremendous amount of infrastructure dedicated to "babying" the Cavendish in order to make it viable. For example, lots of refrigerated transport and storage (read: expensive). But the Cavendish keeps working because the process is in place. It's cheaper to keep it working than switch to a different species with different needs.
The success of the Cavendish is not because it's inherently resilient but because a tremendous amount of effort was put into making it work.
I can't speak for DARPA, but NSF grants are getting harder to win. The level of funds isn't decreasing, but it isn't increasing either. Also, more grant proposals are coming in for that same amount of money, so funding rates are dropping. NSF may be "low pressure", and America is still one of the best countries as far as scientific funding, but the trend is away from both of those characteristics.
Indeed. Just because you have some mathematical equations that do a good job of describing what you can observe does not mean you actually know what's happening, or that your equations are even correct under all circimstances.
From my experience, it makes no difference. I used to line up the bar code when sending a disk back, but stopped bothering months ago. I've seen no change in the turn around time.
I think that NetFlix uses that barcode only when printing the address on the envelope. The disk gets stuffed (by hand) into an envelope with no address on it, bar code lined up with the window. Then the envelope is run down the conveyor and the bar code is scanned through the window. Their computer determines who should get that particular disk and prints that address on the envelope.
The returned envelopes are unstuffed by hand and then the barcode is scanned to see who had that disk and credit them with the return.
I saw an article online a few months back that briefly described NetFlix's turn around process. They do all the envelope stuffing and unstuffing by hand.
To be a semantic Nazi, those are all abbreviations; there's not one anagram there. Anagrams are abbreviations that themselves form words, e.g.: LASER, RADAR. If it doesn't form a speakable word, it's just a plain 'ol abbreviation.
Well, using the LD-50 of a substance as a measure of how small amounts affect the body is extrapolating very far. You will often get negative effects (like headaches, as the parent noted) long before you reach the LD-50 of any substance. I'd say that's a good thing since reaching the LD-50 will--by definition--KILL half of us. And just because you can find formaldehyde in "normal" levels in the body does not mean that ingesting aspertame and raising those formaldehyde levels is an Ok thing to do. His dietician wasn't wrong in that aspartame will be broken down into formaldehyde at some point in its digestion. Whether that is what's causing his headaches is hard to tell; many big-time soda drinkers report symptoms like this that are anecdotally attributed to aspartame. No doubt injesting lots of caffeine and high fructose corn syrup also attributed.
I'm not a dietician, but I think you'll find that most dieticians will make a concerted effort simply to get their patients to decrease their soda intake. It's just a good thing to do. Using the aspartame-formaldehyde argument is a good one. It's true that it happens, even if there's no work that I know of that definitively links aspartame to pathological formaldehyde levels.
Well, crustaceans are arthropods--basically bugs. Ticks are bugs, too, though ticks are more closely related to arachnoids: terrestrial and having 8 true legs. So, yeah, they're both bugs.
I view Digg strictly via RSS. That way, it's just a string of headlines with a brief description of where the link is going. Other than as a random string of user submitted links, Digg is utter shit. The comments are worthless, and I've not once used the "social bookmarking" aspect of it (like searching for related sites). All the fancy-pants CSS and AJAX effects are worthless.
I even submitted a bug to them because their RSS feeds don't feature a direct link to each sumbmission's link. Rather, you click-through to the Digg page, then click on the submitted link. It just serves to give them a click-through.
In my opinion, many psychoolgy experiments suffer from sampling problems like this. Many have experimental groups consisting almost entirely of undergraduate students--a group that is hardly demographically similar to the population as a whole. I have no doubt that the group of 25-35 year olds consisted of a bunch of graduate students and post-docs who were acquainted with the experimenters. I think we can all agree that anyone who is a graduate student is probably not representative of the average 25-35 year old, at least in education level.
So, you have one group of Dartmouth undergraduates (non-representative of all 18 year olds) being compared to one group of slightly older Dartmouth graduate students (again, non-representative of their age group). How powerful is that comparison when addressing the overall question of maturity, and especially when comparing to the human population as a whole?
As a Canon user, I think you're right that they are moving towards full-frame sensors. The EF-S lineup is a joke, and I really do wonder why they even bothered. There are too few EF-S lenses and too few cameras with an EF-S mount. The EF lineup is nothing but full-frame lenses, and I haven't seen any indication from Canon that they'll be transitioning all those EF lenses to EF-S. Their pro DSLRs are all EF mounts.
In my opinion, moving towards full-frame is the way to go in the DSLR market. The fact of the matter is that bigger sensors equal better images. Yes, technological advances will mean better pictures from smaller sensors, but I don't see the general fact of "bigger sensor = better picture" ever being NOT true. And I don't see why Canon (or any manufacturer) would transition an ENTIRE lineup of lenses by banking on better technology mitigating that fact. On top of that, the SLR format--and by that I mean the camera size, feel, accessory usage, etc--has changed little in the past 20 years. Yes, small SLR cameras would be nice, but in the end, the lenses are still constrained to be yea big. And a slightly smaller sensor can't change the size of the camera too too much. So, I think Canon might be on the right track here, betting on sensors going full frame for the DSLR market. (Admittedly, I'm a Canon user who wants to see that happen, too.)
Small sensors have their place in the consumer point-and-shoot market, but I personally think that DSLRs are moving full frame, and should be moving in that direction.
You lose resolution, but who needs 8 megapixels anyway?
"You lose resolution" is a bit of an understatement. If you look at the (impressive) prototype that that guy has made, he takes a 16 MP camera and ends up with 300x300 pixel images. The more you want to refocus after the fact, the lower your resolution. The technique has tremendous promise, but you would need VERY high resolution sensors to make it worthwhile in the consumer market. Consumers would want both maximum post-photo refocusing and maximum final image resolution. Right now, that would take medium-format sized sensors which are ungodly expensive.
The technique holds tremendous promise, especially if camera makers keep increasing the sizes of the sensors they use, driving down the cost of large, high-MP sensors. Right now, it's not quite ready for prime time, though. Frankly, right now it's cheaper for camera manufacturers to work on improving autofocusing so post-photo refocusing isn't necessary.
From that webpage's FAQ: Are you taking a 16MP camera and producing roughly 300x300 final images?
Yes, the resolution of the final images is equal to the resolution of the microlens array, which is just under 300x300 in the prototype that we built.
We could have equally chosen to use a 1MP microlens array, and produced 1MP final output images. However, we would not have been able to refocus those 1MP images as much as we can refocus our 300x300 images.
I don't know about Mavis Beacon Teaches Chemistry, but when my mom bought me Lee Carvallo's Putting Challenge instead of BoneStorm, I played the shit out of that golf game. If it weren't for his "I recommend you use the putter," I'd still be using my 3 wood to drive golf balls right off the green.
The last issue of Make magazine had a multi-page article on creating your own headphone amplifier that fits into an Aldoids can. That link doesn't have the full article, but it does have some comments that readers posted.
Urine as it leaves the body is sterile in a normal, healthy person, and it's nothing to be afraid of. But urine is a nice growth medium for bacteria. So, urine that has sprayed (dribbled, whatever) onto a surface can foster growth of bacteria that are already on that surface or that fall onto the urine splatter from the air. While you won't catch any nasty infections from, say, a golden shower, you could pick up bacteria that have been growing off of the urine that was dribbled on the toilet a few hours ago.
Ever used an Internet browser? That sends data to various servers
No kidding! The porn site I just visited had an ad that informed me that my computer is emitting a unique identifier (called an "ID Address" I think) that can identify who I am to anyone on the internet. I think it was telling me the truth because it knew what town I live in! I'm OK, though, 'cause I layed down the $19.95 for their identity protection software.
Well I guess I stand corrected. The article stated that a Radeon 9600 was required, and I didn't realize the newer PBs had such a card available (the "Mobility" version apparently). I see the 12"ers like me are still left in the cold though. Aperture's certainly geared towards the high-end G5s and I like to see it demo'd on a Powerbook. Something tells me it wouldn't be pretty, especially considering the performance concerns that the article raised on their G5 test machine.
With regards to "capacity", you should note that Aperture won't even install on your 1.3 GHz Powerbook. Aperture CAN support huge RAW libraries, but the hardware requirements of Aperture are so high that I wonder if the increased capacity is simply due to the kickass hardware you have to have simply to use the program.
I haven't heard of anyone comparing Aperture's performance with huge libraries vs. iPhoto's performance with those same libraries on Aperture-able hardware. Frankly, I'm curious; I avoid iPhoto in part because of its performance limitations.
Amen. My university uses Blackboard, and often after posting a file to the class's Blackboard site, I have to tell the students, "Go to your Blackboard site, click this link on the left, then that link down at the bottom, now this link, and the file's here." Announcements that you post are not ordered in any meaningful way, menu categories are vague if not confusing. Menus can be customised, but that means the teacher has to put in lots of effort to tweak the page, and that there is no consistency between pages for students in multiple classes. Blackboard gets the job done, but the usability is crap and you're constantly fighting it to make it as non-confusing as possible.
Rather than suspending my drives, I have two 5.25" bays that each hold a HDD encased in a Silent Drive quiet enclosure. They almost completely eliminate HDD noise, and I haven't noticed any deletirious effects due to overheating. Both my HDDs spin at 5400 RPM I think.
It's a hard case with a thick foam lining. The HDD goes inside and you cap it with the power and data transfer cables coming out the cap. The enclosure+HDD then mounts into the 5.25" bay.
Interestingly, if you look at that second like you provided, the water is flowing back INTO the levee from the flooded neighborhood. I had heard that this was happening around Thursday or so. It's cool to see it in pictures.
Slashdot Mirror
My understanding is that the Cavendish is very fragile and ripens rather quickly. However, there is currently a tremendous amount of infrastructure dedicated to "babying" the Cavendish in order to make it viable. For example, lots of refrigerated transport and storage (read: expensive). But the Cavendish keeps working because the process is in place. It's cheaper to keep it working than switch to a different species with different needs.
The success of the Cavendish is not because it's inherently resilient but because a tremendous amount of effort was put into making it work.
You can't express 1/6 as a fraction of integers with a denominator of 1.
Of course you can: (1/6)/1. Nothing but integers.
I can't speak for DARPA, but NSF grants are getting harder to win. The level of funds isn't decreasing, but it isn't increasing either. Also, more grant proposals are coming in for that same amount of money, so funding rates are dropping. NSF may be "low pressure", and America is still one of the best countries as far as scientific funding, but the trend is away from both of those characteristics.
Observational humor often gets modded Insightful to increase the poster's karma because Funny mods don't affect karma.
Indeed. Just because you have some mathematical equations that do a good job of describing what you can observe does not mean you actually know what's happening, or that your equations are even correct under all circimstances.
From my experience, it makes no difference. I used to line up the bar code when sending a disk back, but stopped bothering months ago. I've seen no change in the turn around time.
I think that NetFlix uses that barcode only when printing the address on the envelope. The disk gets stuffed (by hand) into an envelope with no address on it, bar code lined up with the window. Then the envelope is run down the conveyor and the bar code is scanned through the window. Their computer determines who should get that particular disk and prints that address on the envelope.
The returned envelopes are unstuffed by hand and then the barcode is scanned to see who had that disk and credit them with the return.
I saw an article online a few months back that briefly described NetFlix's turn around process. They do all the envelope stuffing and unstuffing by hand.
To be a semantic Nazi, those are all abbreviations; there's not one anagram there. Anagrams are abbreviations that themselves form words, e.g.: LASER, RADAR. If it doesn't form a speakable word, it's just a plain 'ol abbreviation.
Well, using the LD-50 of a substance as a measure of how small amounts affect the body is extrapolating very far. You will often get negative effects (like headaches, as the parent noted) long before you reach the LD-50 of any substance. I'd say that's a good thing since reaching the LD-50 will--by definition--KILL half of us. And just because you can find formaldehyde in "normal" levels in the body does not mean that ingesting aspertame and raising those formaldehyde levels is an Ok thing to do. His dietician wasn't wrong in that aspartame will be broken down into formaldehyde at some point in its digestion. Whether that is what's causing his headaches is hard to tell; many big-time soda drinkers report symptoms like this that are anecdotally attributed to aspartame. No doubt injesting lots of caffeine and high fructose corn syrup also attributed.
I'm not a dietician, but I think you'll find that most dieticians will make a concerted effort simply to get their patients to decrease their soda intake. It's just a good thing to do. Using the aspartame-formaldehyde argument is a good one. It's true that it happens, even if there's no work that I know of that definitively links aspartame to pathological formaldehyde levels.
Well, crustaceans are arthropods--basically bugs. Ticks are bugs, too, though ticks are more closely related to arachnoids: terrestrial and having 8 true legs. So, yeah, they're both bugs.
I view Digg strictly via RSS. That way, it's just a string of headlines with a brief description of where the link is going. Other than as a random string of user submitted links, Digg is utter shit. The comments are worthless, and I've not once used the "social bookmarking" aspect of it (like searching for related sites). All the fancy-pants CSS and AJAX effects are worthless.
I even submitted a bug to them because their RSS feeds don't feature a direct link to each sumbmission's link. Rather, you click-through to the Digg page, then click on the submitted link. It just serves to give them a click-through.
In my opinion, many psychoolgy experiments suffer from sampling problems like this. Many have experimental groups consisting almost entirely of undergraduate students--a group that is hardly demographically similar to the population as a whole. I have no doubt that the group of 25-35 year olds consisted of a bunch of graduate students and post-docs who were acquainted with the experimenters. I think we can all agree that anyone who is a graduate student is probably not representative of the average 25-35 year old, at least in education level.
So, you have one group of Dartmouth undergraduates (non-representative of all 18 year olds) being compared to one group of slightly older Dartmouth graduate students (again, non-representative of their age group). How powerful is that comparison when addressing the overall question of maturity, and especially when comparing to the human population as a whole?
As a Canon user, I think you're right that they are moving towards full-frame sensors. The EF-S lineup is a joke, and I really do wonder why they even bothered. There are too few EF-S lenses and too few cameras with an EF-S mount. The EF lineup is nothing but full-frame lenses, and I haven't seen any indication from Canon that they'll be transitioning all those EF lenses to EF-S. Their pro DSLRs are all EF mounts.
In my opinion, moving towards full-frame is the way to go in the DSLR market. The fact of the matter is that bigger sensors equal better images. Yes, technological advances will mean better pictures from smaller sensors, but I don't see the general fact of "bigger sensor = better picture" ever being NOT true. And I don't see why Canon (or any manufacturer) would transition an ENTIRE lineup of lenses by banking on better technology mitigating that fact. On top of that, the SLR format--and by that I mean the camera size, feel, accessory usage, etc--has changed little in the past 20 years. Yes, small SLR cameras would be nice, but in the end, the lenses are still constrained to be yea big. And a slightly smaller sensor can't change the size of the camera too too much. So, I think Canon might be on the right track here, betting on sensors going full frame for the DSLR market. (Admittedly, I'm a Canon user who wants to see that happen, too.)
Small sensors have their place in the consumer point-and-shoot market, but I personally think that DSLRs are moving full frame, and should be moving in that direction.
You lose resolution, but who needs 8 megapixels anyway?
"You lose resolution" is a bit of an understatement. If you look at the (impressive) prototype that that guy has made, he takes a 16 MP camera and ends up with 300x300 pixel images. The more you want to refocus after the fact, the lower your resolution. The technique has tremendous promise, but you would need VERY high resolution sensors to make it worthwhile in the consumer market. Consumers would want both maximum post-photo refocusing and maximum final image resolution. Right now, that would take medium-format sized sensors which are ungodly expensive.
The technique holds tremendous promise, especially if camera makers keep increasing the sizes of the sensors they use, driving down the cost of large, high-MP sensors. Right now, it's not quite ready for prime time, though. Frankly, right now it's cheaper for camera manufacturers to work on improving autofocusing so post-photo refocusing isn't necessary.
From that webpage's FAQ:
Are you taking a 16MP camera and producing roughly 300x300 final images?
Yes, the resolution of the final images is equal to the resolution of the microlens array, which is just under 300x300 in the prototype that we built.
We could have equally chosen to use a 1MP microlens array, and produced 1MP final output images. However, we would not have been able to refocus those 1MP images as much as we can refocus our 300x300 images.
I don't know about Mavis Beacon Teaches Chemistry, but when my mom bought me Lee Carvallo's Putting Challenge instead of BoneStorm, I played the shit out of that golf game. If it weren't for his "I recommend you use the putter," I'd still be using my 3 wood to drive golf balls right off the green.
And now look at me. I'm Tiger Woods.
The last issue of Make magazine had a multi-page article on creating your own headphone amplifier that fits into an Aldoids can. That link doesn't have the full article, but it does have some comments that readers posted.
Urine as it leaves the body is sterile in a normal, healthy person, and it's nothing to be afraid of. But urine is a nice growth medium for bacteria. So, urine that has sprayed (dribbled, whatever) onto a surface can foster growth of bacteria that are already on that surface or that fall onto the urine splatter from the air. While you won't catch any nasty infections from, say, a golden shower, you could pick up bacteria that have been growing off of the urine that was dribbled on the toilet a few hours ago.
Ever used an Internet browser? That sends data to various servers
No kidding! The porn site I just visited had an ad that informed me that my computer is emitting a unique identifier (called an "ID Address" I think) that can identify who I am to anyone on the internet. I think it was telling me the truth because it knew what town I live in! I'm OK, though, 'cause I layed down the $19.95 for their identity protection software.
*cough* QuickTime *cough*
To be fair, QT on OS X also breaks Apple's own Human Interface Guidelines. It's UI is trash all around.
Well I guess I stand corrected. The article stated that a Radeon 9600 was required, and I didn't realize the newer PBs had such a card available (the "Mobility" version apparently). I see the 12"ers like me are still left in the cold though. Aperture's certainly geared towards the high-end G5s and I like to see it demo'd on a Powerbook. Something tells me it wouldn't be pretty, especially considering the performance concerns that the article raised on their G5 test machine.
With regards to "capacity", you should note that Aperture won't even install on your 1.3 GHz Powerbook. Aperture CAN support huge RAW libraries, but the hardware requirements of Aperture are so high that I wonder if the increased capacity is simply due to the kickass hardware you have to have simply to use the program.
I haven't heard of anyone comparing Aperture's performance with huge libraries vs. iPhoto's performance with those same libraries on Aperture-able hardware. Frankly, I'm curious; I avoid iPhoto in part because of its performance limitations.
Use this newfound knowledge for it's true purpose: making fun of vegans.
Amen. My university uses Blackboard, and often after posting a file to the class's Blackboard site, I have to tell the students, "Go to your Blackboard site, click this link on the left, then that link down at the bottom, now this link, and the file's here." Announcements that you post are not ordered in any meaningful way, menu categories are vague if not confusing. Menus can be customised, but that means the teacher has to put in lots of effort to tweak the page, and that there is no consistency between pages for students in multiple classes. Blackboard gets the job done, but the usability is crap and you're constantly fighting it to make it as non-confusing as possible.
You would'nt make it. According to Death by Caffeine, it would take 269.41 cans of Pepsi or 102.38 shots of espresso to kill a 150 pound person.
I assume this uses the LD50 rating for caffeine, which is 192 Mg / Kg when orally administered to rats.
Rather than suspending my drives, I have two 5.25" bays that each hold a HDD encased in a Silent Drive quiet enclosure. They almost completely eliminate HDD noise, and I haven't noticed any deletirious effects due to overheating. Both my HDDs spin at 5400 RPM I think.
It's a hard case with a thick foam lining. The HDD goes inside and you cap it with the power and data transfer cables coming out the cap. The enclosure+HDD then mounts into the 5.25" bay.
Interestingly, if you look at that second like you provided, the water is flowing back INTO the levee from the flooded neighborhood. I had heard that this was happening around Thursday or so. It's cool to see it in pictures.