I do the same thing. It means I don't drink any soda, which I'm okay with, but I do my grocery shopping at Super Target. Most of the "Archer Farms" stuff (high-end store brand, not "Market Pantry") doesn't use HFCS (including the breads, which seems unique). You're right, it's a little harder to do, but I'm not starving nor shopping at a co-op. If you have a Super Target near you, I'd suggest you take a look. The food is pretty tasty, too.
No one asked anyone to redefine the old SI prefixes, either. I don't understand why people decided to take a standard (the prefix "kilo") and change it to something that was almost, but not quite, what it originally meant. It seems like a new prefix would have been a better choice, and if that's the case why persist with the wrong choice?
If you want to find new music, you should check out http://www.pandora.com/. It's a website that chooses songs to play for you based on artists and songs that you say you like. I find it works pretty well, although their license makes for unusual restrictions. It's all free (at the moment).
Clearly only available if you're listening from your computer with an internet connection, which you may already have another source for.
It seems like Americans are starting to think about quality more. Target knew it couldn't compete with Wal-Mart on price (Wal-Mart is too huge...ask K-mart about that), so it increased price and quality a little and is doing quite well. Have you ever bought food there? They have two store brands: Market Pantry and Archer Farms. Market Pantry is cheap and low quality, but the Archer Farms stuff is pretty decent (and a little more expensive).
That Target is doing so well gives me hope that the American consumer is starting to appreciate quality a little more. Clearly Target is not top-of-the-line, but it's a step in the right direction.
I usually enjoy meeting one-on-one with my advisor. We bounce back ideas and figure out cool things to do.
What I don't enjoy are group meetings, when the above takes place between the presenter and the advisor. It's helpful for the presenter, but after the initial presentation the meeting gets bogged down in details that are not relevent for anyone else. Ten people sit and listen and two or three discuss issues that don't affect others.
Meetings can be useful. Meetings that go on too long seldom are worthwhile for the majority. Advice to people who call meetings: make sure attendees are relevent to the discussion.
That's part of the problem. People base everything on money. Organic food may be better for the environment. Taking buses may be better for the environment. Driving a hybrid may be better for the environment (and reduce dependence on foreign oil)...but it's all slightly more expensive, so people don't do it.
Not directing this at you, necessarily (I don't know your financial situation), but I wish people would take other things into account (the intangibles that will someday be tangibles).
No one, repeat no one takes images straight from the camera/scan and plops it in a magazine these days.
I don't beleive they did in the old days, either. When I started using Kodachrome, I did some research into it and found that it was made really popular because of National Geographic. Photographers have been producing beautiful pictures with since it was introduced in 1935. I also found out that National Geographic optimizes each color separately when they make a print...and they've been doing it since 1935. It does produce some stunning pictures, but anyone who thinks they're not touched up (unless it explicity says so, and then you should check what definition of "touched up" they use) is fooling themself.
I admit that I practiced "pure" photgraphy for quite some time (had a UV filter to procect my lens, and that was it...never burned, dodged, or cropped). In the end, I realized I was choosing my film, changing my apeture, and adjusting my shutter speed based on what effect I wanted. I finally ran out of excuses as to why that was different than touching things up after the fact.
I don't think I would. We've seen it often enough in movies, pictures, television shows, etc. that I don't think it would be all that interesting. I think an IMAX movie showing it would be more spectacular than sitting in a confined space and looking out a tiny window.
This is just my opinion, though. I'd also rather drive across the country rather than fly, because I get to see more things up close, interact with more people, and generally have more freedom to do what I want. Same reason I prefer to walk across national parks instead of driving through them.
I prefer Monte Carlo techniques with special folding moves, personally, but I don't think either method will be solving this problem anytime soon.
What kind of force field do you want to use? CHARMM or AMBER? Well, it might work. From an unfolded protein, though, some of your atoms will undergo fairly drastic changes in environment. Better use a polarizable model. Oh, crap, there's another order of magnitude in expense, and you still may not get the right answer unless your force field is parameterized in a clever way that may only work properly for one class of proteins. What's the functional form? Lennard-Jones? Exp-6? It better be able to reproduce hydrogen bonding accurately. Do you have the correct bond stretching, bond bending, and torsional potentials? A lot of interactions in those systems, and each set has a very complicated potential energy surface with a lot of minima. It's gonna be tough to find the correct one.
Let's get rid of parameters and use quantum mechanical energy calculations, you say? That cuts down your system size to 64 molecules and maybe 20 ps of trajectory if you use a method like CPMD and density functional theory with no Hartree-Fock exchange...and there is no protein in the system, just water. How long does it take a protein to fold? Nanoseconds? Microseconds? So you can forget about doing a protein like this, and besides, current density functionals give a worse answer for most physical properties of water than cheap empirical models. So create a new functional to reproduce the properties of water? It's being tried, and it could work very nicely. Now you just have to worry about the protein. DFT is nice in that you won't have to worry about assigning charges or intramolecular parameters to the protein, but if it struggles this much with water...well, let's say I don't have much faith in it to nail a protein on the first try. On top of that, I don't think I've even seen a single point calculation done on a full protein with DFT (QM/MM, yes, but not just DFT), much less the thousands that you'd need for a simulation.
Nope, protein folding isn't going to give us any answers for years. Tell you what, though: you can keep working on proteins, and I'll try and get water correct. Water is a difficult enough molecule. Maybe by the time we finally get water right, we'll have the resources we need to do a full protein.
I'm not trying to dissuade you from continuing your research. I'm just trying to be realistic about what we can expect and when we can expect it. Good luck to you.
I gave a presentation earlier this week at a conference. There was a Greek man there who asked me a question. As I fumbled through my response (total brain failure), he kept nodding his head, even though I was giving him the wrong answer and he knew it (it was pointed out to me afterwards by my advisor, who happned to be talking with him).
If he shook his head while I was responding to him, I might have panicked and made things worse, so the nodding was probably a good thing. Happens to everyone now and again.
People depressed enough to commit suicide generally don't have any love or joy in their lives, and no prospect of it. Depression isn't a temporary thing, it lasts for years, decades. When you've been completely miserable for years and years, without a single enjoyable memory or anything to look forward to, no friends, no relationships, no ambitions or expectations, then you can make an intelligent prediction that your life is never going to get better, or if it is going to get better, it would be so far in the future that living out the remaining misery in between isn't worth it.
It seems to be one's perception that nothing good is in their life that frequently drives them to the attempt, rather than there actually being nothing good.
In a sense, this is better, since it's usually easier to change a perception than to change an actual event. I don't know if this is what is going on in your case, but I hope so, and I hope you are able to change it.
Re:Audiophile insanity vs. gamer insanity
on
SLI Primer
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· Score: 1
I think the situation is closer to seeing a $2 bill on the other side of a toll bridge and crossing the bridge to get it...only to learn that crossing the bridge cost you $4. Your net gain is negative and the direct result of wanting to pick up the $2 bill.
I would only consider picking up the $2 bill to be earning money if you were going to cross the bridge anyway. In that case, like you said, the toll money is already gone and you can say you "made" $2.
I've had mine since 1998 as well, and I noticed a week or so ago it went up to 250MB. That was nice, since a week before that I opened a gmail account.
I'm never gonna fill up the quotas on either of those, but they're just spam addresses.
Well, yes. Why stop there, though? Take a look at everything else that is taught as a "fact" in schools. The "solar-system" model of the atom is my personal favorite. Anyone who's had a lesson in quantum mechanics knows this to be untrue, and yet it's still taught. Why is that? Perhaps because it's easier to learn it this way. It's good to know about protons and electrons before you can understand even the basics of QM.
This appears to be true with a lot of science. You learn the basics of what science "knows" when you're young. Once you can grasp that, you start learning what science doesn't know. I think it was during organic chemistry that I first remember a professor telling me "no one knows." You learn about the Big Bang before you hear about the superinflationary period that occured right after it. You learn about Newtonian mechanics before you're introduced to QM or special relativity. And you learn about evolution before you learn about the inconsistencies, because it doesn't mean evolution is wrong; just incomplete.
I agree with your post below "You claim the bible is inconsistent...", and in the end that always seems to be the case: science can't disprove religion (how do you know God didn't write the laws of the universe to give rise to evolution?), and religion can't deny that science works and is very useful. You may want to rework the first paragraph (perhaps including the caveat that science is generally more flexible than religon, and will eventually admit a theory is wrong given enough evidence to the contrary...would a Christian ever admit it if someone showed that Jesus of Nazarath died after getting kicked by a donkey when he was 4?), though, and maybe alter the second (or just delete the i.e. remark).
I know someone who photographed a model using Kodachrome once. She hated all the pictures, and so did he. Kodachrome has a very sharp grain (distinct edges), which makes it great for landscapes (and anything else where attention to detail is a good thing) but not good for portraits. The Fujichrome line works better for people because the grain overlaps, smoothing things out.
People keep saying the Canadians burned the White House to the ground, but the sources I find say otherwise.
For instance, the Canadian Museum of Civilization Corporation says the British did it, in retaliation for the Americans burning down the legislative buildings in Toronto. Hmmm. Perhaps there were Canadians in those units, but I cannot find any sources that mention it.
I think being captain of the math team is far and away a better thing than being the captain of the freakin football team.
I would disagree. I think they are both good things, and why not? Being captain of the football team means leading a group of physically large people with type A personalities. Not an easy task.
On the other hand, being captain of the math team means leading a group of very smart people who are likely to nitpick and not forgive any mistake you make. Not an easy task, either.
Then again, maybe you're a born leader and everyone likes you, so you'll never have a problem either way.
I read an article in Sports Illustrated about those bookies once. I seem to remember one guy betting that his newborn son would score the game winning goal against Germany in the finals of the World Cup 25 years later.
The odds were only 25000:1 against, which struck me as a little low.
In Europe, though, it's practically forbidden to acknowledge that Hitler ever existed.
As many other people have pointed out, this is false. Last week I was talking with several Germans about this very issue. We also had a couple Japanese people with us, and we compared/contrasted how WWII is discussed in the USA (I'm American), Germany, and Japan.
In the US, I was taught that we won the war almost singlehandedly. As others have pointed out, this is not true. A little bit of misguidance on the part of the U.S. public school system.
In Germany, I was told they study WWII for years, covering it in every subject from history to art, literature, and philosophy. The dates and the battles are not the focus of most of the studies, either; it's causes and effects, in particular how the system failed enough to let Hilter come to power (Germany was a republic before him, remember). If anything, I was given the opinion that they spent too much time on it.
Then the Japanese people spoke up. They said they spent 'about a week' on WWII. If you want to slam a country for ignoring the war, focus your attention on the Pacific.
Slashdot Mirror
In which case it's just cruel.
I do the same thing. It means I don't drink any soda, which I'm okay with, but I do my grocery shopping at Super Target. Most of the "Archer Farms" stuff (high-end store brand, not "Market Pantry") doesn't use HFCS (including the breads, which seems unique). You're right, it's a little harder to do, but I'm not starving nor shopping at a co-op. If you have a Super Target near you, I'd suggest you take a look. The food is pretty tasty, too.
No one asked anyone to redefine the old SI prefixes, either. I don't understand why people decided to take a standard (the prefix "kilo") and change it to something that was almost, but not quite, what it originally meant. It seems like a new prefix would have been a better choice, and if that's the case why persist with the wrong choice?
If you want to find new music, you should check out http://www.pandora.com/. It's a website that chooses songs to play for you based on artists and songs that you say you like. I find it works pretty well, although their license makes for unusual restrictions. It's all free (at the moment).
Clearly only available if you're listening from your computer with an internet connection, which you may already have another source for.
With people's love of porn, 'XXX_Cust_Svc' would probably work pretty well too....
It seems like Americans are starting to think about quality more. Target knew it couldn't compete with Wal-Mart on price (Wal-Mart is too huge...ask K-mart about that), so it increased price and quality a little and is doing quite well. Have you ever bought food there? They have two store brands: Market Pantry and Archer Farms. Market Pantry is cheap and low quality, but the Archer Farms stuff is pretty decent (and a little more expensive).
That Target is doing so well gives me hope that the American consumer is starting to appreciate quality a little more. Clearly Target is not top-of-the-line, but it's a step in the right direction.
I would trust something told to me by a reputable source. Are you telling me that you verfiy every piece of information with your own observations?
What I don't enjoy are group meetings, when the above takes place between the presenter and the advisor. It's helpful for the presenter, but after the initial presentation the meeting gets bogged down in details that are not relevent for anyone else. Ten people sit and listen and two or three discuss issues that don't affect others.
Meetings can be useful. Meetings that go on too long seldom are worthwhile for the majority. Advice to people who call meetings: make sure attendees are relevent to the discussion.
Not directing this at you, necessarily (I don't know your financial situation), but I wish people would take other things into account (the intangibles that will someday be tangibles).
I get asked for ID once every fifth time or so... ...and I have "Please See ID" written where the signature should be. :-/
I don't beleive they did in the old days, either. When I started using Kodachrome, I did some research into it and found that it was made really popular because of National Geographic. Photographers have been producing beautiful pictures with since it was introduced in 1935. I also found out that National Geographic optimizes each color separately when they make a print...and they've been doing it since 1935. It does produce some stunning pictures, but anyone who thinks they're not touched up (unless it explicity says so, and then you should check what definition of "touched up" they use) is fooling themself.
I admit that I practiced "pure" photgraphy for quite some time (had a UV filter to procect my lens, and that was it...never burned, dodged, or cropped). In the end, I realized I was choosing my film, changing my apeture, and adjusting my shutter speed based on what effect I wanted. I finally ran out of excuses as to why that was different than touching things up after the fact.
I don't think I would. We've seen it often enough in movies, pictures, television shows, etc. that I don't think it would be all that interesting. I think an IMAX movie showing it would be more spectacular than sitting in a confined space and looking out a tiny window.
This is just my opinion, though. I'd also rather drive across the country rather than fly, because I get to see more things up close, interact with more people, and generally have more freedom to do what I want. Same reason I prefer to walk across national parks instead of driving through them.
I prefer Monte Carlo techniques with special folding moves, personally, but I don't think either method will be solving this problem anytime soon.
What kind of force field do you want to use? CHARMM or AMBER? Well, it might work. From an unfolded protein, though, some of your atoms will undergo fairly drastic changes in environment. Better use a polarizable model. Oh, crap, there's another order of magnitude in expense, and you still may not get the right answer unless your force field is parameterized in a clever way that may only work properly for one class of proteins. What's the functional form? Lennard-Jones? Exp-6? It better be able to reproduce hydrogen bonding accurately. Do you have the correct bond stretching, bond bending, and torsional potentials? A lot of interactions in those systems, and each set has a very complicated potential energy surface with a lot of minima. It's gonna be tough to find the correct one.
Let's get rid of parameters and use quantum mechanical energy calculations, you say? That cuts down your system size to 64 molecules and maybe 20 ps of trajectory if you use a method like CPMD and density functional theory with no Hartree-Fock exchange...and there is no protein in the system, just water. How long does it take a protein to fold? Nanoseconds? Microseconds? So you can forget about doing a protein like this, and besides, current density functionals give a worse answer for most physical properties of water than cheap empirical models. So create a new functional to reproduce the properties of water? It's being tried, and it could work very nicely. Now you just have to worry about the protein. DFT is nice in that you won't have to worry about assigning charges or intramolecular parameters to the protein, but if it struggles this much with water...well, let's say I don't have much faith in it to nail a protein on the first try. On top of that, I don't think I've even seen a single point calculation done on a full protein with DFT (QM/MM, yes, but not just DFT), much less the thousands that you'd need for a simulation.
Nope, protein folding isn't going to give us any answers for years. Tell you what, though: you can keep working on proteins, and I'll try and get water correct. Water is a difficult enough molecule. Maybe by the time we finally get water right, we'll have the resources we need to do a full protein.
I'm not trying to dissuade you from continuing your research. I'm just trying to be realistic about what we can expect and when we can expect it. Good luck to you.
I gave a presentation earlier this week at a conference. There was a Greek man there who asked me a question. As I fumbled through my response (total brain failure), he kept nodding his head, even though I was giving him the wrong answer and he knew it (it was pointed out to me afterwards by my advisor, who happned to be talking with him).
If he shook his head while I was responding to him, I might have panicked and made things worse, so the nodding was probably a good thing. Happens to everyone now and again.
It seems to be one's perception that nothing good is in their life that frequently drives them to the attempt, rather than there actually being nothing good.
In a sense, this is better, since it's usually easier to change a perception than to change an actual event. I don't know if this is what is going on in your case, but I hope so, and I hope you are able to change it.
What about a gold plated toilet?
2700 only has four significant digits if it's written as "2700." or the final zero has a bar over the top of it. Otherwise, it's two.
I would only consider picking up the $2 bill to be earning money if you were going to cross the bridge anyway. In that case, like you said, the toll money is already gone and you can say you "made" $2.
I'm never gonna fill up the quotas on either of those, but they're just spam addresses.
Well, yes. Why stop there, though? Take a look at everything else that is taught as a "fact" in schools. The "solar-system" model of the atom is my personal favorite. Anyone who's had a lesson in quantum mechanics knows this to be untrue, and yet it's still taught. Why is that? Perhaps because it's easier to learn it this way. It's good to know about protons and electrons before you can understand even the basics of QM.
This appears to be true with a lot of science. You learn the basics of what science "knows" when you're young. Once you can grasp that, you start learning what science doesn't know. I think it was during organic chemistry that I first remember a professor telling me "no one knows." You learn about the Big Bang before you hear about the superinflationary period that occured right after it. You learn about Newtonian mechanics before you're introduced to QM or special relativity. And you learn about evolution before you learn about the inconsistencies, because it doesn't mean evolution is wrong; just incomplete.
I agree with your post below "You claim the bible is inconsistent...", and in the end that always seems to be the case: science can't disprove religion (how do you know God didn't write the laws of the universe to give rise to evolution?), and religion can't deny that science works and is very useful. You may want to rework the first paragraph (perhaps including the caveat that science is generally more flexible than religon, and will eventually admit a theory is wrong given enough evidence to the contrary...would a Christian ever admit it if someone showed that Jesus of Nazarath died after getting kicked by a donkey when he was 4?), though, and maybe alter the second (or just delete the i.e. remark).
I know someone who photographed a model using Kodachrome once. She hated all the pictures, and so did he. Kodachrome has a very sharp grain (distinct edges), which makes it great for landscapes (and anything else where attention to detail is a good thing) but not good for portraits. The Fujichrome line works better for people because the grain overlaps, smoothing things out.
For instance, the Canadian Museum of Civilization Corporation says the British did it, in retaliation for the Americans burning down the legislative buildings in Toronto. Hmmm. Perhaps there were Canadians in those units, but I cannot find any sources that mention it.
I would disagree. I think they are both good things, and why not? Being captain of the football team means leading a group of physically large people with type A personalities. Not an easy task.
On the other hand, being captain of the math team means leading a group of very smart people who are likely to nitpick and not forgive any mistake you make. Not an easy task, either.
Then again, maybe you're a born leader and everyone likes you, so you'll never have a problem either way.
I read an article in Sports Illustrated about those bookies once. I seem to remember one guy betting that his newborn son would score the game winning goal against Germany in the finals of the World Cup 25 years later.
The odds were only 25000:1 against, which struck me as a little low.
As many other people have pointed out, this is false. Last week I was talking with several Germans about this very issue. We also had a couple Japanese people with us, and we compared/contrasted how WWII is discussed in the USA (I'm American), Germany, and Japan.
In the US, I was taught that we won the war almost singlehandedly. As others have pointed out, this is not true. A little bit of misguidance on the part of the U.S. public school system.
In Germany, I was told they study WWII for years, covering it in every subject from history to art, literature, and philosophy. The dates and the battles are not the focus of most of the studies, either; it's causes and effects, in particular how the system failed enough to let Hilter come to power (Germany was a republic before him, remember). If anything, I was given the opinion that they spent too much time on it.
Then the Japanese people spoke up. They said they spent 'about a week' on WWII. If you want to slam a country for ignoring the war, focus your attention on the Pacific.