I wonder why these water vapor trolls get worried about a few drops of transpiration from a plant when there's an entire rolling, splashing ocean out there. I'm pretty sure that's a larger source of atmospheric water vapor, and it's been there longer than humans have, so it's obviously not having much of a detrimental effect.
...Unlike digging up fossil fuels that have been buried since before humans existed and releasing that carbon into the atmosphere - an irreversible process until we develop an efficient way of turning atmospheric carbon back into oils and other storable compounds. E.g. algal biofuels.
Bah, your advances are trivial. I'm creating a cow that excretes a tasty white liquid for human consumption. I've also invented various ways of fermenting the liquid to create Yoghurt (TM) and Cheese (TM), patents pending.
Great article. I've come across several people trying to claim that watering your lawn causes more irreversible damage than driving an SUV. Of course that ignores another key difference... carbon released from fossil fuels isn't going to turn back into coal anytime soon, but evaporated water frequently comes down as rain.
Indeed. The only way (on a non-geological timescale) to keep carbon out of the atmosphere is to convert the plant tissues into a solid or liquid form, e.g. some kind of biofuel, and store it. Alternatively, burn it instead of fossil fuels - that won't keep it out of the atmosphere, but it will prevent some extra carbon from being released.
This kind of article reminds me of "we thought the Amazon rainforest removed CO2 from the atmosphere but scientists say it actually releases it!!!11!" articles. Duh! Is the carbon cycle really so difficult for the average person to understand?:-/
Although there are different degrees of anonymous. Someone can have their online ID completely separate from their real world ID, but if they've spent time establishing an online id and reputation by racking up, say, 1000 posts, that makes them less likely to fling out douchebag remarks than a real anonymous coward.
Although, as AI improves it may well become possible for those with enough computing power to group together online accounts based on writing style. If you have one account attached to your real name, one that isn't, and enough posts in both to reveal your personal writing habits, don't bank on being anonymous forever.
And with China's population being >4 times that of the USA, all else being equal, it will have >4 times as many highly intelligent people.
(Of course historically, all else has not been equal, because the USA has managed to attract highly intelligent people away from numerous other countries, including China..)
They could be organized a bit better though. Personally I wonder whether it would help if researchers were to edit wikipedia in their areas of expertise (citing their own published research). It could act as a hypertext, open access journal. It's ridiculous that at the moment, government funded research is locked away by journal publishes and can only be accessed by those who are either affiliated with universities, or willing to pay exorbitant fees.
I've managed without an external CD/DVD drive through the cunning use of (1) another computer with a CD/DVD drive (2) a 500GB USB harddrive with plenty of space for CD/DVD ISOs (3) Daemontools.
My netbook has 1GB RAM, and with a real keyboard, mouse and external screen, it was very usable. The main bottleneck I noticed was when browsing through digital photographs, it took a while for them to render on the larger screen.
One factor they may have left out - baby humans are wired to learn from adult humans. Perhaps baby apes are wired to learn from adult apes? If they did train an ape to use the rake correctly in this situation, and got it to demonstrate for a baby ape, I wonder what the result would be?
IANAD, but if tinnitus is phantom hearing, then according to that itch article, the way to get rid of it would be to trick the brain into thinking that you can hear that frequency again - and thus can stop hearing it.
E.g. if your tinnitus is only in one ear, you could try playing the same tone through headphones. Hopefully you would at least hear it through your healthy ear, tricking the brain into believing you're hearing it with both ears. Then you could play around with the volume, oscillating it between silence and some level close to your tinnitus, and see if the volume of your tinnitus begins to reduce too. (But be careful never to play the tone loudly enough for long enough to cause further damage.)
If it's in both ears, that would be slightly more difficult. You could however try playing a sliding tone that oscillates in frequency from below to above your tinnitus, in the hope that as it 'moves past' the tinnitus frequency your brain will be tricked into thinking that this frequency is no longer (or at least is less) active.
For this kind of experiment, a tone generator that lets you adjust frequency and volume, e.g. using x and y mouse movement would be useful. There's probably something like that on sourceforge; if not, it wouldn't be difficult to code.
The drive for self preservation is simply a consequence of evolution. We'll only need to worry about it arising if the code is allowed to self replicate and mutate.
The easy solution is to replace gas stations with battery swap stations.
You trade in your current battery for a full battery and maybe get some credit for the 10% energy you had left. They then add your battery to the ranks of charging batteries waiting for the next customer.
But what if one of your kids is smarter than another? And the less smart one puts in more work but still gets slightly lower grades? Would you give them a smaller allowance?
I'm all for encouraging hard work, but anything that looks like you're favouring one kid over another (for reasons they can't change) can have nasty consequences.
Well spluh. We'll need more space for those 3D virtual reality movies where you can view the battle from behind the second soldier on the left's shoulder, while noting that he needs to wash his shirt more often.
Or actually, maybe do forget it. Object Pascal and C++ have virtually identical capabilities with slightly different syntax. But C++ is so widely used that there are always more available libraries, IDEs and sources of support. And I say this as someone who used to program in Pascal myself. If you want to go for an obscure language, at least make it something interesting like Dylan...
Nothing beats Zotero, and AFAIK that doesn't work with Word. (In brief: a Firefox extension that recognizes citations to papers on the web and lets you add them to a list of references which can be exported to BibTeX.)
Slashdot Mirror
C++ come on it didn't even have a string class. Thus pointer math hell.
#include <string>
int main() {
std::string s = "What am I, chopped liver?";
cout << s;
return 0;
}
Obligatory xkcd
Music Created by Learning Computer Getting Better
I wonder why these water vapor trolls get worried about a few drops of transpiration from a plant when there's an entire rolling, splashing ocean out there. I'm pretty sure that's a larger source of atmospheric water vapor, and it's been there longer than humans have, so it's obviously not having much of a detrimental effect.
...Unlike digging up fossil fuels that have been buried since before humans existed and releasing that carbon into the atmosphere - an irreversible process until we develop an efficient way of turning atmospheric carbon back into oils and other storable compounds. E.g. algal biofuels.
Bah, your advances are trivial. I'm creating a cow that excretes a tasty white liquid for human consumption. I've also invented various ways of fermenting the liquid to create Yoghurt (TM) and Cheese (TM), patents pending.
Great article. I've come across several people trying to claim that watering your lawn causes more irreversible damage than driving an SUV. Of course that ignores another key difference ... carbon released from fossil fuels isn't going to turn back into coal anytime soon, but evaporated water frequently comes down as rain.
Indeed. The only way (on a non-geological timescale) to keep carbon out of the atmosphere is to convert the plant tissues into a solid or liquid form, e.g. some kind of biofuel, and store it. Alternatively, burn it instead of fossil fuels - that won't keep it out of the atmosphere, but it will prevent some extra carbon from being released.
This kind of article reminds me of "we thought the Amazon rainforest removed CO2 from the atmosphere but scientists say it actually releases it!!!11!" articles. Duh! Is the carbon cycle really so difficult for the average person to understand? :-/
Although there are different degrees of anonymous. Someone can have their online ID completely separate from their real world ID, but if they've spent time establishing an online id and reputation by racking up, say, 1000 posts, that makes them less likely to fling out douchebag remarks than a real anonymous coward.
Although, as AI improves it may well become possible for those with enough computing power to group together online accounts based on writing style. If you have one account attached to your real name, one that isn't, and enough posts in both to reveal your personal writing habits, don't bank on being anonymous forever.
And with China's population being >4 times that of the USA, all else being equal, it will have >4 times as many highly intelligent people. (Of course historically, all else has not been equal, because the USA has managed to attract highly intelligent people away from numerous other countries, including China..)
http://www.jimmyr.com/blog/1_Top_10_Universities_With_Free_Courses_Online.php
Those already exist:
http://ocw.mit.edu/
http://www.youtube.com/ucberkeley
http://www.google.com/search?q=tensor+calculus (or any other subject)
They could be organized a bit better though. Personally I wonder whether it would help if researchers were to edit wikipedia in their areas of expertise (citing their own published research). It could act as a hypertext, open access journal. It's ridiculous that at the moment, government funded research is locked away by journal publishes and can only be accessed by those who are either affiliated with universities, or willing to pay exorbitant fees.
I've managed without an external CD/DVD drive through the cunning use of (1) another computer with a CD/DVD drive (2) a 500GB USB harddrive with plenty of space for CD/DVD ISOs (3) Daemontools.
My netbook has 1GB RAM, and with a real keyboard, mouse and external screen, it was very usable. The main bottleneck I noticed was when browsing through digital photographs, it took a while for them to render on the larger screen.
One factor they may have left out - baby humans are wired to learn from adult humans. Perhaps baby apes are wired to learn from adult apes? If they did train an ape to use the rake correctly in this situation, and got it to demonstrate for a baby ape, I wonder what the result would be?
IANAD, but if tinnitus is phantom hearing, then according to that itch article, the way to get rid of it would be to trick the brain into thinking that you can hear that frequency again - and thus can stop hearing it.
E.g. if your tinnitus is only in one ear, you could try playing the same tone through headphones. Hopefully you would at least hear it through your healthy ear, tricking the brain into believing you're hearing it with both ears. Then you could play around with the volume, oscillating it between silence and some level close to your tinnitus, and see if the volume of your tinnitus begins to reduce too. (But be careful never to play the tone loudly enough for long enough to cause further damage.)
If it's in both ears, that would be slightly more difficult. You could however try playing a sliding tone that oscillates in frequency from below to above your tinnitus, in the hope that as it 'moves past' the tinnitus frequency your brain will be tricked into thinking that this frequency is no longer (or at least is less) active.
For this kind of experiment, a tone generator that lets you adjust frequency and volume, e.g. using x and y mouse movement would be useful. There's probably something like that on sourceforge; if not, it wouldn't be difficult to code.
The drive for self preservation is simply a consequence of evolution. We'll only need to worry about it arising if the code is allowed to self replicate and mutate.
The easy solution is to replace gas stations with battery swap stations.
You trade in your current battery for a full battery and maybe get some credit for the 10% energy you had left. They then add your battery to the ranks of charging batteries waiting for the next customer.
The 505 has a much smaller screen than the DX though, which while fine for novels makes it less suitable for journal articles.
You might be interested in MobileRead's ebook comparison matrix.
Have you heard of dual citizenship? Both the US and UK allow it, so acquiring an American passport doesn't mean losing the British one.
Firefox (one word: addons).
LaTeX
R
Python
Ogg-Vorbis
But what if one of your kids is smarter than another? And the less smart one puts in more work but still gets slightly lower grades? Would you give them a smaller allowance? I'm all for encouraging hard work, but anything that looks like you're favouring one kid over another (for reasons they can't change) can have nasty consequences.
Well spluh. We'll need more space for those 3D virtual reality movies where you can view the battle from behind the second soldier on the left's shoulder, while noting that he needs to wash his shirt more often.
Don't forget the open source Lazarus
Or actually, maybe do forget it. Object Pascal and C++ have virtually identical capabilities with slightly different syntax. But C++ is so widely used that there are always more available libraries, IDEs and sources of support. And I say this as someone who used to program in Pascal myself. If you want to go for an obscure language, at least make it something interesting like Dylan...
Does Word beat out BibTeX yet?
Nothing beats Zotero, and AFAIK that doesn't work with Word. (In brief: a Firefox extension that recognizes citations to papers on the web and lets you add them to a list of references which can be exported to BibTeX.)
I'm not sure about ligatures, but it has a great equation editor: http://www.openoffice.org/product/math.html