No, it's an attempt to make it non-esoteric. Scientific fields can be esoteric, concerned with things that don't affect normal ppl. But engineering is never esoteric! Engineering is concerned with taking all the rules the scientists and mathematicians have come up with, and using them as tools (or simplifying them where required) to solve a real world problem, like building a bridge, or making a chemical compound - or writing the software which controls the engine in your car.
What's esoteric is art, and treating software as a pure artform rather than bringing in any scientific basis for it is a dead-end. In the past, scientific theories were judged not on whether they worked but whether they "looked" good or neat or felt "right" to ppl. This is the way software is today. What's needed is the software equivalent of Faraday, Darwin, etc - currently software is still at the alchemy stage where you can impress someone with something that looks flashy but is actually not doing anything at all.
We absolutely don't need more programmers. What we need are more good designers. And the idea is to establish that good software design can be taught.
If you're in need of a package to draw electronic circuits and do general schematic capture stuff, check out Pulsonix. These guys have made a fully-featured electronics schematic capture program freely available to anyone who wants to download it. The only downsides are (a) it's 19MB, and (b) it's Windows-only. Highly recommended.
The package also contains a PCB design package and other good stuff; however, you have to pay to unlock these (not excessive amounts by the standards of most design packages, but £1-2K is a lot for someone in a developing country or your typical hobbyist). If you're on a real budget, just use the schematic capture part to produce netlists, and then use an old DOS/Win3.11 PCB layout program such as BoardMaker for the PCB design.
If you're still on a dial-up connection and you're doing a video download, you've already got a Digital Pearl Harbor. As with the film, you spend 90 minutes sitting around with not much happening, waiting for 10 minutes of decent visuals...
Simple - water (what did you think H2O stood for?;-). And the day the world runs out of water, we're going to be worried about more than how to power your laptop...
Count number of Skycars in existence. 1,... er, and that's it. "Cars" plural don't exist yet. Although put me down for a third mortgage when it does happen.:-)
A variable name should explain the data stored in that variable. It absolutely does not explain how that data is calculated, how it is used by the program, where the data goes, what other tasks may be communicating with this one, etc.
The only way to explain any of this is with comments. If anyone gives me a piece of code to review with a complex bit of maths in it, and it doesn't explain why it does it the way it does, any optimisation, scaling factors or what happens in the event of overflow/underflow (if appropriate), then I will send it back to the coder with a review comment saying to add any or all of these as required.
Code doesn't get stale, it gets forgotten. Several years later, you will not remember how it works - that's a fact of professional life. If you've used some really neat hack, the only way you'll remind yourself what you did back then is to add comments, and it's certainly the only way for anyone else to work it out.
The issue is with ppl thinking that code and comments are separate and can be updated individually. It's not an "either-or" - a coder must produce well-designed code with properly-thought-out names andvalid comments. If they don't, they're either bad coders or inexperienced coders, and at review they should be shown how to improve the quality of their code. Stale comments must not be allowed through review - this is just one example of problems in bad code. If your code is not subject to review, you are not working in an professional software environment. If you are working in a professional software environment and your code and design are not reviewed, then you and your company are practising gross negligence and the lawsuit from a customer is just waiting to happen!
I agree that 3:1 is BS - the actual amount of comments required depends on the code you're writing. I've written a matrix library where there's about a 5:1 ratio of comments to code; I've also written analogue input device drivers with simple range-checks and filtering with a ratio of less than 1:1.
Not so much twitching, as blocking the surgeon from cutting where he shouldn't. Brain surgery, maybe?
More useful may be where there's differences of scale - for example, keyhole surgery using those natty little gadgets on the end of a fibre-optic stalk that go up a vein. Or say the surgeon needs to clear out a blood clot from an artery. Then the gadget can be programmed so that it will cut the blood clot, but won't allow anything to touch the artery wall itself.
Another advantage might be that you won't need super-genius surgeons to do some of this stuff. With built-in checks, maybe a normal doctor or a less-skilled surgeon could do the job. And for training ppl up, this would be ideal - no more accidents by junior doctors, for example.
External shocks we can tolerance. But the body doesn't tolerate shocks directly to internal organs. A friend of mine used to work in medical electronics, and he said the limit on power supplies in medical monitoring equipment was something ridiculously low, like 2V.
One issue is that whatever you mine will need to be refined to make it useful. You don't get pure chrome-vanadium steel asteroids. And refining requires some way of getting stuff to separate. Currently the easiest way of doing this is gravity. Centrifuges are used, but only where the quantities are small - a centrifuge large enough to produce industrial quantities of steel would meet some very real physical limitations. And electrolysis can be used, but it's usually significantly more expensive than other methods, since you have to literally melt the ore. So the Moon or Mars may be useful, in that they may have sufficient gravity to allow easy refining using Earth-developed techniques, whilst only having a small gravity well so that getting stuff in and out isn't energy-expensive.
And in fact, the Moon may be the ideal place to have a first go at building a space elevator - IIRC the mass of a space elevator structure decreases as the cube of the gravitational force. So a gravity of 1/6 G would give you a space elevator 1/216 of the size required on Earth. This not only makes it easier to get the stuff to build it, but also means that some of the insanely-difficult engineering problems for Earth's space elevator (the problems of the lower structure supporting that mass) may simply not be necessary.
Look up "space elevator". Arthur C Clarke's idea is that when there's stuff coming back down to Earth, launches back out there will effectively be free.
Not unless you want the line "Shut up Ash" to feature in the script...;-)
Grab.
PS. Gotta get yourself in a horror film, WW. OK, the leeches in Stand By Me were icky, but something where ppl get sliced and diced. Bonus points if you're doing the slicing and dicing.
Re:Organised religion quote
on
God's Debris
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· Score: 2
Depends on your translation of "Volk". When AH said "Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuehrer", a standard English translation is "One people, one empire, one leader", or sometimes "one race". It's "people" as in "a large group of" - "masses" does translate it, but so would "common people" (although the latter has an implicit value-judgement).
Some things that were purely designed for a purpose are beautiful in spite of having been designed purely to a purpose. A racing yacht is never designed for beauty, it's designed for maximum speed - but it just so happens that beauty comes as standard with the ideal shape to maximise that parameter. Try that one on your professor.
And even Fine Art has always produced with the aim of making money. Mozart, Beethoven, Bach - they all wrote music as their job, and were well paid for it. They took commissions to write a piece of music in a particular style, and knocked it out for the money. Homer's stories and the tunes of Turlough o'Carolan were invented as payment for food and lodging. Do you reckon da Vinci did the Mona Lisa or the Sistine Chapel ceiling for free? And in the case of the Sistine Chapel and all other religious artwork of the time (absolutely without exception), the aim of the commissioner (the Church) was to impress ppl with the power of the Church - this then gets more heads through the door, increases the Church's power and gets more revenue. And ppl would donate money to the Church for projects like this, not bcos they wanted to help art be created but bcos they thought it was buying them a place in heaven (ie. admission to heaven has a cash price:-).
Lastly, ask your professor to provide a dictionary definition of "beautiful" where "aesthetically pleasing" is not one meaning of the word (or even the main meaning of the word). If it is aesthetically pleasing, it is beautiful, end of story, regardless of whether it was originally designed for a utilitarian purpose. And if beauty is a requirement for art, then a Ferrari or a racing yacht or a catenary arch bridge will all qualify.
The best definition I've heard so far for art is that it must convey the artist's intention, even if the viewer/listener has to really think about it. So where the artist says "it's whatever you want it to be", the artist has by definition failed. And if the artist just says "I want to shock" then he may as well show a picture of him screwing a sheep for exactly the same effect and exactly the same art content.
Bottom line, money and art are independent. If that were not so, your art professor could not say that he had ever created art, since any art he did create was merely preparing him for his current position which is earning him good money!
But the assets can be art. For example, the Sistine Chapel was created by a company called the Catholic Church. Remember that a company is not a stand-alone entity, but is made up of ppl.
Sounds reasonable. Colleges only have to provide you with resources to do your work, they're not obliged to let you surf for pr0n or download MP3s. It's a privilege, not a right.
Maybe so, but this doesn't turn a monster into a Barbie doll - it's still just as nasty and ugly as it ever was. There's nothing wrong with the tech per se, it's just what it's used for - if the use is for ripping off musicians, count me out.
This is presumably working on the theory that nervous systems are fairly similar in all animals. So if you can work out how to make a cockroach tap-dance under computer control, then you can do the same for Christopher Reeve or other paralysed ppl (but presumably in this case under CR's control - just imagine some h4x0r getting root on CR's control box!:-).
You'd have real problems getting a grant to do these experiments on babies, or even on volunteers. Messing with nervous systems could (a) cause lots of pain, and (b) damage the nerves so that the person is paralysed. But with cockroaches, who cares? If it gets paralysed, squish it and move on to another one. Why roaches? Well, they're large insects, so presumably it's easier to trace the nerves. And I'd guess insects are easier to deal with due to their exoskeleton - if you need to attach something to an insect, you can glue it to the outside and be sure it won't come off. With mammals and reptiles, you've always got the problem of attaching stuff securely to skin. And of course, there's the PETA issue - pictures of cute fluffy mice in labs are good for publicity, but no-one's going to object to experiments on roaches bcos they're not photogenic!
Maybe you need to reconsider how medical research is done. Transplants were _not_ done on humans, they were done on chimps, rats, dogs, etc first.
Dark Tower started well, but it kind of loses it as it goes along. There's moments of brilliance, but some of it drags. And it's a bit of an excuse to rehash existing characters from other King books. Wizard and Glass varies wildly from great to grot...
But most of the sailing community never goes beyond a couple of hundred miles of home, and certainly won't go outside "civilisation" (ie. somewhere with shops, or at least somewhere you could hire a car to get somewhere with shops). Most ppl just sail between marinas, where there's good facilities at each end if you have had problems in between, and where there's a coastguard to rescue you if you do get into a situation you can't handle. So most boats sold today are GRP - the benefits of wood or steel aren't worth the extra cost or maintenance problems.
The key with wood is the phrase "with proper maintenance". "Proper maintenance" on the exterior of a wooden boat involves vast amounts of work on sanding down and revarnishing every year. "Proper maintenance" on the exterior of a GRP boat is basically limited to applying antifouling and filling any bubbles in the gelcoat which do appear. A wooden boat takes an order of magnitude longer to maintain, believe me. It currently takes my parents much less time to sort out the underside of their GRP cruiser (Achilles 27 IIRC) than it ever did for them to rub down and repaint the 16-foot wooden Fireball dinghy they had before, or even the 10-foot Mirror dinghy we had when I was a kid.
For serious cruising use in the boonies, steel is usually recommended - whatever place you limp back to after grounding out, there's bound to be someone with a welding set. And steel only punctures at the place you hit, unlike wood (and GRP) which crack and splinter. But you get all sorts of condensation problems with steel, and the boat tends to get too hot in summer and too cold in winter, so you need lots of insulation.
One would like an acceleration that didn't laminate one to the back wall of one's airplane...;-)
But acceleration is simply how fast you get to that max speed, and that's not really an issue over long distances. You can bet that a bullet will accelerate faster than an SR-71 Blackbird, but the Blackbird's top speed is faster than a bullet. And the jet technology in a missile and in a 747 is basically the same. Over short distances though (like restricting the scramjet missile to the local patch of desert so that it doesn't land on a town 500 miles away!) you'll need high acceleration to get the thing up to speed over a shorter distance. This is also cheaper on fuel, and so allows a smaller, cheaper rocket to be used.
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No, it's an attempt to make it non-esoteric. Scientific fields can be esoteric, concerned with things that don't affect normal ppl. But engineering is never esoteric! Engineering is concerned with taking all the rules the scientists and mathematicians have come up with, and using them as tools (or simplifying them where required) to solve a real world problem, like building a bridge, or making a chemical compound - or writing the software which controls the engine in your car.
What's esoteric is art, and treating software as a pure artform rather than bringing in any scientific basis for it is a dead-end. In the past, scientific theories were judged not on whether they worked but whether they "looked" good or neat or felt "right" to ppl. This is the way software is today. What's needed is the software equivalent of Faraday, Darwin, etc - currently software is still at the alchemy stage where you can impress someone with something that looks flashy but is actually not doing anything at all.
We absolutely don't need more programmers. What we need are more good designers. And the idea is to establish that good software design can be taught.
Grab.
If you're in need of a package to draw electronic circuits and do general schematic capture stuff, check out Pulsonix. These guys have made a fully-featured electronics schematic capture program freely available to anyone who wants to download it. The only downsides are (a) it's 19MB, and (b) it's Windows-only. Highly recommended.
The package also contains a PCB design package and other good stuff; however, you have to pay to unlock these (not excessive amounts by the standards of most design packages, but £1-2K is a lot for someone in a developing country or your typical hobbyist). If you're on a real budget, just use the schematic capture part to produce netlists, and then use an old DOS/Win3.11 PCB layout program such as BoardMaker for the PCB design.
Grab.
If you're still on a dial-up connection and you're doing a video download, you've already got a Digital Pearl Harbor. As with the film, you spend 90 minutes sitting around with not much happening, waiting for 10 minutes of decent visuals...
Grab.
Come off it! Kermit the Frog as a junkie, Miss Piggie starring in porn flicks... Where else would you get that?
Grab.
where do you get more?
;-). And the day the world runs out of water, we're going to be worried about more than how to power your laptop...
Simple - water (what did you think H2O stood for?
Grab.
Count number of Skycars in existence. 1, ... er, and that's it. "Cars" plural don't exist yet. Although put me down for a third mortgage when it does happen. :-)
Grab.
A variable name should explain the data stored in that variable. It absolutely does not explain how that data is calculated, how it is used by the program, where the data goes, what other tasks may be communicating with this one, etc.
The only way to explain any of this is with comments. If anyone gives me a piece of code to review with a complex bit of maths in it, and it doesn't explain why it does it the way it does, any optimisation, scaling factors or what happens in the event of overflow/underflow (if appropriate), then I will send it back to the coder with a review comment saying to add any or all of these as required.
Code doesn't get stale, it gets forgotten. Several years later, you will not remember how it works - that's a fact of professional life. If you've used some really neat hack, the only way you'll remind yourself what you did back then is to add comments, and it's certainly the only way for anyone else to work it out.
The issue is with ppl thinking that code and comments are separate and can be updated individually. It's not an "either-or" - a coder must produce well-designed code with properly-thought-out names andvalid comments. If they don't, they're either bad coders or inexperienced coders, and at review they should be shown how to improve the quality of their code. Stale comments must not be allowed through review - this is just one example of problems in bad code. If your code is not subject to review, you are not working in an professional software environment. If you are working in a professional software environment and your code and design are not reviewed, then you and your company are practising gross negligence and the lawsuit from a customer is just waiting to happen!
I agree that 3:1 is BS - the actual amount of comments required depends on the code you're writing. I've written a matrix library where there's about a 5:1 ratio of comments to code; I've also written analogue input device drivers with simple range-checks and filtering with a ratio of less than 1:1.
Grab.
Not so much twitching, as blocking the surgeon from cutting where he shouldn't. Brain surgery, maybe?
More useful may be where there's differences of scale - for example, keyhole surgery using those natty little gadgets on the end of a fibre-optic stalk that go up a vein. Or say the surgeon needs to clear out a blood clot from an artery. Then the gadget can be programmed so that it will cut the blood clot, but won't allow anything to touch the artery wall itself.
Another advantage might be that you won't need super-genius surgeons to do some of this stuff. With built-in checks, maybe a normal doctor or a less-skilled surgeon could do the job. And for training ppl up, this would be ideal - no more accidents by junior doctors, for example.
Grab.
External shocks we can tolerance. But the body doesn't tolerate shocks directly to internal organs. A friend of mine used to work in medical electronics, and he said the limit on power supplies in medical monitoring equipment was something ridiculously low, like 2V.
Grab.
One issue is that whatever you mine will need to be refined to make it useful. You don't get pure chrome-vanadium steel asteroids. And refining requires some way of getting stuff to separate. Currently the easiest way of doing this is gravity. Centrifuges are used, but only where the quantities are small - a centrifuge large enough to produce industrial quantities of steel would meet some very real physical limitations. And electrolysis can be used, but it's usually significantly more expensive than other methods, since you have to literally melt the ore. So the Moon or Mars may be useful, in that they may have sufficient gravity to allow easy refining using Earth-developed techniques, whilst only having a small gravity well so that getting stuff in and out isn't energy-expensive.
And in fact, the Moon may be the ideal place to have a first go at building a space elevator - IIRC the mass of a space elevator structure decreases as the cube of the gravitational force. So a gravity of 1/6 G would give you a space elevator 1/216 of the size required on Earth. This not only makes it easier to get the stuff to build it, but also means that some of the insanely-difficult engineering problems for Earth's space elevator (the problems of the lower structure supporting that mass) may simply not be necessary.
Grab.
Look up "space elevator". Arthur C Clarke's idea is that when there's stuff coming back down to Earth, launches back out there will effectively be free.
Graham.
Not unless you want the line "Shut up Ash" to feature in the script... ;-)
Grab.
PS. Gotta get yourself in a horror film, WW. OK, the leeches in Stand By Me were icky, but something where ppl get sliced and diced. Bonus points if you're doing the slicing and dicing.
Depends on your translation of "Volk". When AH said "Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuehrer", a standard English translation is "One people, one empire, one leader", or sometimes "one race". It's "people" as in "a large group of" - "masses" does translate it, but so would "common people" (although the latter has an implicit value-judgement).
Grab.
Some things that were purely designed for a purpose are beautiful in spite of having been designed purely to a purpose. A racing yacht is never designed for beauty, it's designed for maximum speed - but it just so happens that beauty comes as standard with the ideal shape to maximise that parameter. Try that one on your professor.
:-).
And even Fine Art has always produced with the aim of making money. Mozart, Beethoven, Bach - they all wrote music as their job, and were well paid for it. They took commissions to write a piece of music in a particular style, and knocked it out for the money. Homer's stories and the tunes of Turlough o'Carolan were invented as payment for food and lodging. Do you reckon da Vinci did the Mona Lisa or the Sistine Chapel ceiling for free? And in the case of the Sistine Chapel and all other religious artwork of the time (absolutely without exception), the aim of the commissioner (the Church) was to impress ppl with the power of the Church - this then gets more heads through the door, increases the Church's power and gets more revenue. And ppl would donate money to the Church for projects like this, not bcos they wanted to help art be created but bcos they thought it was buying them a place in heaven (ie. admission to heaven has a cash price
Lastly, ask your professor to provide a dictionary definition of "beautiful" where "aesthetically pleasing" is not one meaning of the word (or even the main meaning of the word). If it is aesthetically pleasing, it is beautiful, end of story, regardless of whether it was originally designed for a utilitarian purpose. And if beauty is a requirement for art, then a Ferrari or a racing yacht or a catenary arch bridge will all qualify.
The best definition I've heard so far for art is that it must convey the artist's intention, even if the viewer/listener has to really think about it. So where the artist says "it's whatever you want it to be", the artist has by definition failed. And if the artist just says "I want to shock" then he may as well show a picture of him screwing a sheep for exactly the same effect and exactly the same art content.
Bottom line, money and art are independent. If that were not so, your art professor could not say that he had ever created art, since any art he did create was merely preparing him for his current position which is earning him good money!
Grab.
But the assets can be art. For example, the Sistine Chapel was created by a company called the Catholic Church. Remember that a company is not a stand-alone entity, but is made up of ppl.
Grab.
Jesse Ventura rephrased that from Karl Marx, who said that "religion is the opiate of the people".
Grab.
Sounds reasonable. Colleges only have to provide you with resources to do your work, they're not obliged to let you surf for pr0n or download MP3s. It's a privilege, not a right.
Grab.
If you're ignorant on the subject, don't invest in long-shot deals, or you'll lose your money. Why do they call it "common" sense? ;-)
Grab.
Maybe so, but this doesn't turn a monster into a Barbie doll - it's still just as nasty and ugly as it ever was. There's nothing wrong with the tech per se, it's just what it's used for - if the use is for ripping off musicians, count me out.
Grab.
"Universal Persian"? Starring Dolphin-friendly Catfood and De-Clawed van Manx?
Grab.
This is presumably working on the theory that nervous systems are fairly similar in all animals. So if you can work out how to make a cockroach tap-dance under computer control, then you can do the same for Christopher Reeve or other paralysed ppl (but presumably in this case under CR's control - just imagine some h4x0r getting root on CR's control box! :-).
You'd have real problems getting a grant to do these experiments on babies, or even on volunteers. Messing with nervous systems could (a) cause lots of pain, and (b) damage the nerves so that the person is paralysed. But with cockroaches, who cares? If it gets paralysed, squish it and move on to another one. Why roaches? Well, they're large insects, so presumably it's easier to trace the nerves. And I'd guess insects are easier to deal with due to their exoskeleton - if you need to attach something to an insect, you can glue it to the outside and be sure it won't come off. With mammals and reptiles, you've always got the problem of attaching stuff securely to skin. And of course, there's the PETA issue - pictures of cute fluffy mice in labs are good for publicity, but no-one's going to object to experiments on roaches bcos they're not photogenic!
Maybe you need to reconsider how medical research is done. Transplants were _not_ done on humans, they were done on chimps, rats, dogs, etc first.
Grab.
Dark Tower started well, but it kind of loses it as it goes along. There's moments of brilliance, but some of it drags. And it's a bit of an excuse to rehash existing characters from other King books. Wizard and Glass varies wildly from great to grot...
Graham.
But most of the sailing community never goes beyond a couple of hundred miles of home, and certainly won't go outside "civilisation" (ie. somewhere with shops, or at least somewhere you could hire a car to get somewhere with shops). Most ppl just sail between marinas, where there's good facilities at each end if you have had problems in between, and where there's a coastguard to rescue you if you do get into a situation you can't handle. So most boats sold today are GRP - the benefits of wood or steel aren't worth the extra cost or maintenance problems.
The key with wood is the phrase "with proper maintenance". "Proper maintenance" on the exterior of a wooden boat involves vast amounts of work on sanding down and revarnishing every year. "Proper maintenance" on the exterior of a GRP boat is basically limited to applying antifouling and filling any bubbles in the gelcoat which do appear. A wooden boat takes an order of magnitude longer to maintain, believe me. It currently takes my parents much less time to sort out the underside of their GRP cruiser (Achilles 27 IIRC) than it ever did for them to rub down and repaint the 16-foot wooden Fireball dinghy they had before, or even the 10-foot Mirror dinghy we had when I was a kid.
For serious cruising use in the boonies, steel is usually recommended - whatever place you limp back to after grounding out, there's bound to be someone with a welding set. And steel only punctures at the place you hit, unlike wood (and GRP) which crack and splinter. But you get all sorts of condensation problems with steel, and the boat tends to get too hot in summer and too cold in winter, so you need lots of insulation.
Grab.
One would like an acceleration that didn't laminate one to the back wall of one's airplane... ;-)
But acceleration is simply how fast you get to that max speed, and that's not really an issue over long distances. You can bet that a bullet will accelerate faster than an SR-71 Blackbird, but the Blackbird's top speed is faster than a bullet. And the jet technology in a missile and in a 747 is basically the same. Over short distances though (like restricting the scramjet missile to the local patch of desert so that it doesn't land on a town 500 miles away!) you'll need high acceleration to get the thing up to speed over a shorter distance. This is also cheaper on fuel, and so allows a smaller, cheaper rocket to be used.
Grab.
He said in the article that it was a gaming machine, so runs on Win98.
And VA Linux no longer exists (see another thread for details). They're now just called VA, since they've found they can't make money off Linux.
Grab.