I wish I had mod points to mod you up (don't know why you got modded down). Interesting research by Andrew Newberg (University of Pennsylvania) used imaging techniques to study the differences between the brains of laypeople and religious clergy-type people (Franciscan nuns and Buddhist monks). He found that certain brain regions were stronger in those who meditate often than in the laypeople. He also studies their brains when meditating (or, in the case of the nuns, chanting), and he found an increase in the brain areas during that time period. Coupled with the idea of neural plasticity, it could be that the actual practice does increase those areas (like your exercise analogy).
Newberg has a book out entitled "Why God Won't Go Away." I haven't read it, but I did have the pleasure of seeing him give a seminar at my school last year. There's also a documentary that's being screened called "What the Bleep Do We Know." It's kind of a "Sophie's World" docu/fiction hybrid, but it has interviews with mystics and neuroscientists and philosophers detailing modern ideas about the mind. Again, I haven't seen it (hasn't shown in South Carolina...go figure) but it sounds really interesting.
I'm working on a PhD in neuroscience (currently studying drug addiction), and it's an incredibly fine line to walk between doing something out of one's own volition and doing something because of a biochemical imperative. And who's to say that the two aren't the same thing. As someone else pointed out, this is currently as much as philosophical argument as it is a scientific one at this point (ah, the good ole days, when there wasn't a difference between the two:) ).
Some food for thought...in journal club last year, we studied an experiment about the concious control of body movement. In the cases of people with a certain type of brain injury, there were not concious of deciding to move their arms until after their arms actually started moving (in other words, the decision was made subconciously, and conciousness of the action was a reaction).
I realize that the idea of conciousness being a layer of interpretation of decisions that have already been made isn't a popular idea, and it's far from a proven idea, but it's one that's worth being explored. And it's not to say that conciousness isn't important at all. There are so many inputs that go into making a decision that concious reflection of past events can help make better decisions in the future. Or perhaps there is a circuit that lets concious decision "override" another decision that's being made (although the strength of that input could even vary in different people).
The point is that we're getting alot of new information on how the brain works, and we need to be careful how we interpret things, but I believe it's just as harmful to be on one end of the volition vs. disease spectrum as it is the nature vs. nurture argument.
Actually, the article blatently stated that this isn't something that depends solely on DNA. Although it may have an initial influence, the author clearly states that life experiences have an incredibly strong role in determining how the brain develops.
I understand that something needs to replace ATAPI. It's done it's job well, but there are better technologies. But why wait for SATA when it seems there are already options available? If BIOS manufacturers would all allow booting from a Firewire device (do any currently) and MBs would all put Firewire onboard, it seems that things would be set. It allows for easy daischaining out of the box, it doesn't have the upper limit of devices that SATA does, and it's really fast. I didn't appreciate just how fast until I downloaded my music collection to my iPod. So what am I missing? Is it a licensing issue? If so, what about USB 2.0? Does that still use the CPU, causing a slowdown, or is all processing done on its own controller?
First of all, the slashdot article title is the same as the original article title on the "Physics News Update" website. It's not just a tabloid tactic. It's standard in anything but bonafide journals (scientific, legal, what-have-you), and sometimes even there. The creator of the title assumes the reader is intelligent enough to realize that something more is going on.
As to the Slashdot article itself, the submitter made sure to use terms like "from the perspective of" and "under these circumstances". He's clearly going from the POV of the colliding particle, which isn't an absurd thing to do. Viewing the molecular formula of water to be H1.5O, under these conditions, may prove important in future applications or the understanding of some other phenomenon. Scientists constantly use different values for the same object to make interpretation and calculation easier and more meaningful (atomic number for determining molecular mass in mass spectometry vs. atomic mass in gram-to-mole conversions).
Your interpretation of the article is absurd (if you even read it). The H1.5O thing was a hook to get you to read it. No one seriously suggested that water only had 1.5 hydrogen atoms.
From the article: "Apparently, the protons in hydrogen were sometimes "invisible" to the neutron probes. While the exact details are still being debated by theorists, the researchers' own theoretical considerations suggest the presence of short-lived (sub-femtosecond) entanglement, in which protons in adjacent hydrogen atoms (and possibly the surrounding electrons) are all interlinked in such a way as to change the nature of the scattering results."
As for the "machine not working" argument--again, read the article. It was demonstrated using two different methods and three research teams.
Better yet, start with a survey of languages class. Everyone's taught procedural languages from the get-go, and even computer programmers I know are stuck in the mold of "everything is procedural." Teach some about traditional procedural programming, teach some about object-oriented, teach some about transformation languages (like XSLT), etc. Teach students to keep an open mind about different ways to accomplish the same task. They need to know how to find the best tool for a job with enough basis to learn how to use that tool. That wasn't even really covered in my college courses (software engineering was the closest).
The newest edition of the T2 DVD will include an HD transfer of the movie that can be run with WMP9. I tried to run a sample HD clip ("Step Into Liquid") on my computer (Athlon XP 1600 w/ 512 MB RAM)--I got a nice slide show of still frames. It ran a little better on my laptop. MS's website recommends 2.4 GHz minimum, and I can see why. T2 will be higher rez than that clip, so I'd expect you'd need something even faster.
HDTV can also benefit, as new tuners like the Fusion HDTV card are inexpensive but have software-only decoding, putting a good strain on the CPU. I want one of these new chips. For the lust factor? Nope. There are applications I'm interested in that will actually benefit from the higher speed.
There was more to the anti-DIVX movement (which thankfully won) than a "phone-line" hook-up. DIVX Central knew which movies you were watching and when.
The phone line on TiVo is only for receiving the guide information. Nothing is passed back to TiVo Central. Any "Season Pass" and "Favorites" processing is done locally, so TiVo doesn't know about your habits.
Besides, TiVo works independently of the programming source. If you use satellite because you can't get local programming (including PBS), sending overscan info over PBS is useless. Phone line transmission is really the only practical way to transfer the information.
Finally, you had to have the phone line to make DIVX useful. If you didn't plan on using the DIVX functionality you would buy a DVD player, saving $100. With TiVo, you don't have to hook it up if you don't want. You lose season-pass and TV Guide, but the rest of the functionality is intact.
The two situations are vastly different, IMHO.
Re:Benefits of DVD on a desktop machine?
on
DVD for Linux
·
· Score: 1
There are a few reasons.
1) Some DVDs ("You've Got Mail", "Lost in Space", and "The Matrix" to name a few) have PC features. Of course they don't run on Macs, and who knows if Wine will work, but those running Win can view that material.
2) As noted, increased resolution is a factor. Although a computer monitor may be smaller than your television, the picture is better.
3) Progressive scan. Because Macrovision is lawsuit happy, the only way I know of to get progressive scan output is through some video cards. If your TV is capable (or better yet, your projector is capable) of progressive input, you get a better picture with no line doubler.
4) If you want a second system (like a lot of people have second VCRs) it may be more practical, especially in a small bedroom, to just use your PC for DVDs instead of taking up room with a PC (with monitor), TV, and DVD player.
First, I don't see the "collecting" argument applying as much to CDs as vinyl. Sure, there are limited editions ("Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me" anyone?), but that's not a huge deal.
I have a few reasons for preferring CDs over MP3. First, I don't have a computer at home. That one's a biggy. But even if I did, I wouldn't eschew my CDs for MP3.
I think of a well-packaged CD as a single entity. You have the album (and I prefer sitting down and listening to an album...a complete work that hopefully is unified by theme or style, a complete, organic entity), the liner notes, and the artwork. Yes, the last two pieces are only supplements, but they can shed new light on the music. At least having lyrics already printed for you is nice, but the other information can be edifying. My "Carole King: The Ode Years" has wonderful biographic information about the creator during her most popular years, and I know a little bit more about the music because of that.
I don't care about the CD medium itself. If I had MP3 cartridges, that's fine. Vinyl's wonderful (tape can hang, though). But I don't want to rob myself of "value-added" supplements by merely downloading the music. (And I'd much rather have a booklet in front of me when listening to music than surfing the Internet for the same info).
These are my reasons for not being a huge MP3 fan. Nothing against the technology, it just doesn't fit into my life as well as CD does.
But I specifically remember the torture of being at school every day, of sacrificing total control of your life for a mandatory 8-10 hours a day to a bunch of incompetent, uncaring, overworked teachers who are getting paid next to nothing. In other words, prison guards, with a PR facelift.
How many people feel this way about their teachers? I really don't. Sure, my teachers (I graduated 5 years ago from a public school) were overworked and underpaid, but they definately weren't incompetent or uncaring.
I can only think of a couple of teachers I had who I would qualify as "bad". All of my English teachers were terrific. They encouraged individual interpretation of literature. An answer wasn't wrong just because they disagreed. They would listen to your viewpoint as long as you could defend your answers. Bless Mrs. Thompson, she never say to a student, "You're wrong".
The same applied to all my other subjects (well, less to math, but they still encouraged critical thinking...there's just a smaller margin of personal interpretation to 2+2). I guess my high school was geek-friendly. We had an excellent computer science department. After all, how many high schools were connected to the Internet pre-web, and how many high school students get to work on a Cray?
Please tell me I'm not in the minority here. Most of my teachers didn't HAVE to teach. Their spouses were high-paid engineers and entrepreneurs. I know for a fact those people were there because they wanted to be. Anyone else?
Bill Gates is a bully, and he's a geek. He's rich because he's a bully.
I'm guessing that alot of RL bullies are geeks, as the geeks are getting top jobs and more power and the ability to get revenge on the rest of the world for being mean to them in high school.
It's not an attitude I agree with, but it's one that I've seen. And from reading some of the posts in this thread, we have alot of future power-weilding geeks who want revenge.
Most of the anti-pager/cell phone posts seem to be from people who think that people have to work for technology, when the reality is the other way around.
Example: I was out of town for a few days and took a cell phone (actually PCS). It was much cheaper to call home using it than the hotel system or calling card.
Pagers have their uses too. And mine has this thing called an on/off button. Some even let you set a time for it to automatically turn off.
And wouldn't it be a shame to have a cell phone on camping trips for an emergency. People, technology is a tool. It only becomes a burden when you make a burden.
Using a "hot topic" as a jumping-off point for a story is not necessarily bad. If done well it's called timely. There are plenty of examples of comics doing a good job at dealing with the "hot issues".
You didn't like Captain Planet? Fine. But what about Animal Man? He was definately an environmentalist. Or the "Hard Choices" storyline in New Warriors that intelligently dealt with environmentalism (and, shock of all shocks, considered everyone's viewpoint).
And computer stuff? There was a nice story by John Francis Moore in Doom 2099 about a technopagan. The story was a fun, well-written read.
My point is that stories about the "hot new thing" can be done well. And without looking to current technologies and societal issues for inspiration we would have characters like the Vision, the All-New, All-Different X-Men, or Barb Wire:)
Slashdot Mirror
I wish I had mod points to mod you up (don't know why you got modded down). Interesting research by Andrew Newberg (University of Pennsylvania) used imaging techniques to study the differences between the brains of laypeople and religious clergy-type people (Franciscan nuns and Buddhist monks). He found that certain brain regions were stronger in those who meditate often than in the laypeople. He also studies their brains when meditating (or, in the case of the nuns, chanting), and he found an increase in the brain areas during that time period. Coupled with the idea of neural plasticity, it could be that the actual practice does increase those areas (like your exercise analogy).
Newberg has a book out entitled "Why God Won't Go Away." I haven't read it, but I did have the pleasure of seeing him give a seminar at my school last year. There's also a documentary that's being screened called "What the Bleep Do We Know." It's kind of a "Sophie's World" docu/fiction hybrid, but it has interviews with mystics and neuroscientists and philosophers detailing modern ideas about the mind. Again, I haven't seen it (hasn't shown in South Carolina...go figure) but it sounds really interesting.
I'm working on a PhD in neuroscience (currently studying drug addiction), and it's an incredibly fine line to walk between doing something out of one's own volition and doing something because of a biochemical imperative. And who's to say that the two aren't the same thing. As someone else pointed out, this is currently as much as philosophical argument as it is a scientific one at this point (ah, the good ole days, when there wasn't a difference between the two :) ).
Some food for thought...in journal club last year, we studied an experiment about the concious control of body movement. In the cases of people with a certain type of brain injury, there were not concious of deciding to move their arms until after their arms actually started moving (in other words, the decision was made subconciously, and conciousness of the action was a reaction).
I realize that the idea of conciousness being a layer of interpretation of decisions that have already been made isn't a popular idea, and it's far from a proven idea, but it's one that's worth being explored. And it's not to say that conciousness isn't important at all. There are so many inputs that go into making a decision that concious reflection of past events can help make better decisions in the future. Or perhaps there is a circuit that lets concious decision "override" another decision that's being made (although the strength of that input could even vary in different people).
The point is that we're getting alot of new information on how the brain works, and we need to be careful how we interpret things, but I believe it's just as harmful to be on one end of the volition vs. disease spectrum as it is the nature vs. nurture argument.
Actually, the article blatently stated that this isn't something that depends solely on DNA. Although it may have an initial influence, the author clearly states that life experiences have an incredibly strong role in determining how the brain develops.
I understand that something needs to replace ATAPI. It's done it's job well, but there are better technologies. But why wait for SATA when it seems there are already options available? If BIOS manufacturers would all allow booting from a Firewire device (do any currently) and MBs would all put Firewire onboard, it seems that things would be set. It allows for easy daischaining out of the box, it doesn't have the upper limit of devices that SATA does, and it's really fast. I didn't appreciate just how fast until I downloaded my music collection to my iPod. So what am I missing? Is it a licensing issue? If so, what about USB 2.0? Does that still use the CPU, causing a slowdown, or is all processing done on its own controller?
First of all, the slashdot article title is the same as the original article title on the "Physics News Update" website. It's not just a tabloid tactic. It's standard in anything but bonafide journals (scientific, legal, what-have-you), and sometimes even there. The creator of the title assumes the reader is intelligent enough to realize that something more is going on.
As to the Slashdot article itself, the submitter made sure to use terms like "from the perspective of" and "under these circumstances". He's clearly going from the POV of the colliding particle, which isn't an absurd thing to do. Viewing the molecular formula of water to be H1.5O, under these conditions, may prove important in future applications or the understanding of some other phenomenon. Scientists constantly use different values for the same object to make interpretation and calculation easier and more meaningful (atomic number for determining molecular mass in mass spectometry vs. atomic mass in gram-to-mole conversions).
Your interpretation of the article is absurd (if you even read it). The H1.5O thing was a hook to get you to read it. No one seriously suggested that water only had 1.5 hydrogen atoms.
From the article: "Apparently, the protons in hydrogen were sometimes "invisible" to the neutron probes. While the exact details are still being debated by theorists, the researchers' own theoretical considerations suggest the presence of short-lived (sub-femtosecond) entanglement, in which protons in adjacent hydrogen atoms (and possibly the surrounding electrons) are all interlinked in such a way as to change the nature of the scattering results."
As for the "machine not working" argument--again, read the article. It was demonstrated using two different methods and three research teams.
Better yet, start with a survey of languages class. Everyone's taught procedural languages from the get-go, and even computer programmers I know are stuck in the mold of "everything is procedural." Teach some about traditional procedural programming, teach some about object-oriented, teach some about transformation languages (like XSLT), etc. Teach students to keep an open mind about different ways to accomplish the same task. They need to know how to find the best tool for a job with enough basis to learn how to use that tool. That wasn't even really covered in my college courses (software engineering was the closest).
The newest edition of the T2 DVD will include an HD transfer of the movie that can be run with WMP9. I tried to run a sample HD clip ("Step Into Liquid") on my computer (Athlon XP 1600 w/ 512 MB RAM)--I got a nice slide show of still frames. It ran a little better on my laptop. MS's website recommends 2.4 GHz minimum, and I can see why. T2 will be higher rez than that clip, so I'd expect you'd need something even faster.
HDTV can also benefit, as new tuners like the Fusion HDTV card are inexpensive but have software-only decoding, putting a good strain on the CPU. I want one of these new chips. For the lust factor? Nope. There are applications I'm interested in that will actually benefit from the higher speed.
There was more to the anti-DIVX movement (which thankfully won) than a "phone-line" hook-up. DIVX Central knew which movies you were watching and when.
The phone line on TiVo is only for receiving the guide information. Nothing is passed back to TiVo Central. Any "Season Pass" and "Favorites" processing is done locally, so TiVo doesn't know about your habits.
Besides, TiVo works independently of the programming source. If you use satellite because you can't get local programming (including PBS), sending overscan info over PBS is useless. Phone line transmission is really the only practical way to transfer the information.
Finally, you had to have the phone line to make DIVX useful. If you didn't plan on using the DIVX functionality you would buy a DVD player, saving $100. With TiVo, you don't have to hook it up if you don't want. You lose season-pass and TV Guide, but the rest of the functionality is intact.
The two situations are vastly different, IMHO.
There are a few reasons.
1) Some DVDs ("You've Got Mail", "Lost in Space", and "The Matrix" to name a few) have PC features. Of course they don't run on Macs, and who knows if Wine will work, but those running Win can view that material.
2) As noted, increased resolution is a factor. Although a computer monitor may be smaller than your television, the picture is better.
3) Progressive scan. Because Macrovision is lawsuit happy, the only way I know of to get progressive scan output is through some video cards. If your TV is capable (or better yet, your projector is capable) of progressive input, you get a better picture with no line doubler.
4) If you want a second system (like a lot of people have second VCRs) it may be more practical, especially in a small bedroom, to just use your PC for DVDs instead of taking up room with a PC (with monitor), TV, and DVD player.
I believe this is a naming scheme with built-in versioning. When the next chip comes out it would be the biathlon, after that the triathlon, etc, etc.
First, I don't see the "collecting" argument applying as much to CDs as vinyl. Sure, there are limited editions ("Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me" anyone?), but that's not a huge deal.
I have a few reasons for preferring CDs over MP3. First, I don't have a computer at home. That one's a biggy. But even if I did, I wouldn't eschew my CDs for MP3.
I think of a well-packaged CD as a single entity. You have the album (and I prefer sitting down and listening to an album...a complete work that hopefully is unified by theme or style, a complete, organic entity), the liner notes, and the artwork. Yes, the last two pieces are only supplements, but they can shed new light on the music. At least having lyrics already printed for you is nice, but the other information can be edifying. My "Carole King: The Ode Years" has wonderful biographic information about the creator during her most popular years, and I know a little bit more about the music because of that.
I don't care about the CD medium itself. If I had MP3 cartridges, that's fine. Vinyl's wonderful (tape can hang, though). But I don't want to rob myself of "value-added" supplements by merely downloading the music. (And I'd much rather have a booklet in front of me when listening to music than surfing the Internet for the same info).
These are my reasons for not being a huge MP3 fan. Nothing against the technology, it just doesn't fit into my life as well as CD does.
But I specifically remember the torture of being at school every day, of sacrificing total control of your life for a mandatory 8-10 hours a day to a bunch of incompetent, uncaring, overworked teachers who are getting paid next to nothing. In other words, prison guards, with a PR facelift.
How many people feel this way about their teachers? I really don't. Sure, my teachers (I graduated 5 years ago from a public school) were overworked and underpaid, but they definately weren't incompetent or uncaring.
I can only think of a couple of teachers I had who I would qualify as "bad". All of my English teachers were terrific. They encouraged individual interpretation of literature. An answer wasn't wrong just because they disagreed. They would listen to your viewpoint as long as you could defend your answers. Bless Mrs. Thompson, she never say to a student, "You're wrong".
The same applied to all my other subjects (well, less to math, but they still encouraged critical thinking...there's just a smaller margin of personal interpretation to 2+2). I guess my high school was geek-friendly. We had an excellent computer science department. After all, how many high schools were connected to the Internet pre-web, and how many high school students get to work on a Cray?
Please tell me I'm not in the minority here. Most of my teachers didn't HAVE to teach. Their spouses were high-paid engineers and entrepreneurs. I know for a fact those people were there because they wanted to be. Anyone else?
Bill Gates is a bully, and he's a geek. He's rich because he's a bully.
I'm guessing that alot of RL bullies are geeks, as the geeks are getting top jobs and more power and the ability to get revenge on the rest of the world for being mean to them in high school.
It's not an attitude I agree with, but it's one that I've seen. And from reading some of the posts in this thread, we have alot of future power-weilding geeks who want revenge.
Most of the anti-pager/cell phone posts seem to be from people who think that people have to work for technology, when the reality is the other way around.
Example: I was out of town for a few days and took a cell phone (actually PCS). It was much cheaper to call home using it than the hotel system or calling card.
Pagers have their uses too. And mine has this thing called an on/off button. Some even let you set a time for it to automatically turn off.
And wouldn't it be a shame to have a cell phone on camping trips for an emergency. People, technology is a tool. It only becomes a burden when you make a burden.
Using a "hot topic" as a jumping-off point for a story is not necessarily bad. If done well it's called timely. There are plenty of examples of comics doing a good job at dealing with the "hot issues".
:)
You didn't like Captain Planet? Fine. But what about Animal Man? He was definately an environmentalist. Or the "Hard Choices" storyline in New Warriors that intelligently dealt with environmentalism (and, shock of all shocks, considered everyone's viewpoint).
And computer stuff? There was a nice story by John Francis Moore in Doom 2099 about a technopagan. The story was a fun, well-written read.
My point is that stories about the "hot new thing" can be done well. And without looking to current technologies and societal issues for inspiration we would have characters like the Vision, the All-New, All-Different X-Men, or Barb Wire