Actually, if you read a biography on Richard Feynman ("Surely you must be joking, Mr. Feynman" is a good one) you'll see how he put an ability to quickly calculate cube roots to good use. He'd use it in friendly competitions with other scientists and mathematicians, and was a large part of his bar persona (he hung out in strip clubs and picked up many a girl/woman according to the lore and his own words).
Depth of field is dependent on the aperture, yes, but on the other hand you can actually get very fast lenses on point and shoots. Take the Sony F828 for example, which has the equivalent of a 28-200mm f/2-f/2.8 zoom. You can't buy an equivalent lens for SLR cameras. What is important to note is that this is equivalent focal length, and the real focal length of the Sony zoom is 7.1-50 mm. So in the lens area we have two competing influences: short focal length lenses lead to greater depth of field, but fast lenses lead to less depth of field. As I shall show the shortness of the lens wins out.
Yet another why the parent post is wrong is that depth of field is also dependent on the circle of confusion, which in turn is related to the photosite size on the sensor. Point and shoot cameras generally have sensors that are MUCH smaller than those on dSLRs (compare a 1.6x crop dSLR to the Sony F828 again, with its ~4x crop), so the circle of confusion is smaller and the depth of field greater.
In other words, if you're shooting at 80mm equivalent at f/2 on a Sony F828 and a Canon 20D, the Sony will have vastly greater depth of field for two reasons. The first will be that the actual focal length of the Sony lens at 80mm equivalent would be ~20mm due to the small sensor size of the Sony, while the 1.6x crop Canon would be using a 50mm lens. The second will be that the Sony sensor's smaller photosites will result in a smaller circle of confusion, and thus greater depth of field.
The originally posted article is right, at least in part: it is impossible to get a truly narrow depth of field with a point and shoot camera, and the ability to do so is a big selling point of SLR and dSLR cameras.
Reference: Using this DOF calculator, plugging in 20mm actual lens, 5 ft. subject distance, f/2.0 for the Sony, and the same but with a 50mm lens for the Canon I get the following results:
Canon: 4.89 ft is the near limit of acceptable sharpness, 5.11 ft the far limit. That's 0.22 ft depth of field, in other words. Circle of confusion is 0.019 mm.
Sony: 4.72 ft near limit, 5.32 ft far limit. 0.6 ft depth of field, 0.008 mm circle of confusion.
The moral of the story: 0.6 ft vs. 0.22 ft depth of field at the equivalent focal length and aperture. With this in mind, the reader should decide if the parent poster is full of it when he writes "One of the reasons extolled at length for choosing one type against abother is that a DSLR has a narrow depth of field and a "standard" digital camera has a greater depth. As anyone who knows about photography would know this is total tosh."
The parent poster was being facetious, but according to a presentation on sleep disorders that I saw recently for this class (sorry, no slides posted for the sleep lecture) insomnia is prevalent among professionals* because they are too good at occupying time with their own thoughts. From a system of schooling, and from the high pressure careers that result we become very adept at multitasking, and the brain itself becomes fond of churning out a continuous stream of thoughts. You may have noticed this yourself as your mind races through some current problem as you lie awake at midnight.
[* "professionals" implied physicians in this case, but this is just as relevant for programmers. And sorry for the "they"/"we" shift -- I'm assuming/. readers are multitasking professionals of some sort.]
The speaker is the medical director of the sleep program of a major regional hospital, which in itself is a high pressure position. Despite this he places a priority on getting 8.5 hours of sleep/night. Among the tidbits in his lecture was advice to train ourselves to turn off the chatter of the brain. This would be both to allow for restful and quick sleep and for safer driving, to mention another relevant example where having one's head filled with thoughts may not be ideal.
Given the above, it might not be so ridiculous that some might want to tune out without thinking when riding on the subway to or from work. On the other hand, I do hope that no one turns off their mental chatter while driving only to substitute watching TV on their cell phone...
AvantGo has been around for quite a few years now, and seems to be what you're describing. I didn't find it overly useful on my Nokia 3650, since I could just fire up Opera for Series 60 and head directly to the BBC News's low-graphics HTML site (or the WAP version if I was in a masochistic mood), but it seems to be the ticket for devices without network capability.
This is what happened to me, too, except substitute 6th grade for 8th, and 3 kids for your 5. Add in a summer course of geometry before 8th grade and I was done with Calc BC by 10th grade, at the tender age of 14. During middle and high school I did do the homework, however, although often in the 5 or 10 minutes before class began. This came to bite me in the butt my own freshman year in college, but I perservered, swallowed my pride, and actually began to work for the first time in my life.
Now, a year out of college, I'm in med school. Here I'm surrounded by people who like what they're studying (I do as well), and studying a LOT is the norm. And, at this stage, it actually matters whether I know my stuff, so I put my nose to the grindstone and join in, no matter how much it hurts.
I was quite the academic phenom at a young age (not just in math, I was a SET kid), and this helped me in some ways: I never felt the need to compete in a vicious manner or belittle others' achievements since I'd already had the institutional pat on the back from a young age, so to speak. However, it also made me complacent, and this complacency almost was my failure.
The moral of my rambling, self-congratulatory story? Not everyone who finds the pace and scope of traditional school easy ends up falling by the wayside. We all have to learn how to apply ourselves, and to grasp that being smart is simply not enough on its own. Growing up as a precocious youth one often feels that being gifted means that less effort should be expected of oneself, and that academics is a game in which the goal is to find the least amount of work that will appease the taskmasters. I encourage those who might feel this way to go to a competitive school, and learn from the positive example of their peers that the application of one's talents is as important as their mere existence.
The logic is that if you decrease crime, say through monitoring gunshots, then a neighborhood can attract different residents. These more "respectable" residents, who fled for the suburbs way back when, then contribute to the economy, entice businesses to move back in, and so the process of urban revitalization begins.
Did I mention the talk radio and the ACC/Big 10/Pac-10 games?
And iPod does not? Last I checked iPod has brick, parachute, solitaire, and you can download text games on from the internet.
Um, brick, parachute, and solitaire are games, but they are not of the same variety as ACC/Big 10/Pac-10 games. Hint: the ACC, Big 10, and Pac 10 are college sports conferences, and the poster was referring to sports games such as football and basketball, of which you listen to broadcasts. They aren't games that you play with a clickwheel, unless you are so fabulously powerful and rich that you control the athletes.
Thanks for the reply, but all I could find on Google and in your links was a bunch of hand waving. I want to know what they actually do to remove the pigment, to cause increased rate of growth and egg-laying, to produce these unbalanced (breast-heavy) beasts, the things that lead to the reported short lifetimes. A search on PubMed turned up no relevant literature (even though there is much literature out there on GMO grains and the like). Anyone care to help me out with specifics?
Why should it? A bad situation sucks, regardless of if anyone else has it worse?
This is like saying "Oh, I'm being ass-raped twice a week, but the guy down the street is being ass-raped ten times a week, so I should just shut up and take it."
Stop the race to the bottom. Improve conditions for everyone.
There is a difference: if you're programming, you can quit. You can move elsewhere. (And yes, I have worked in the IT/programming field, both as a programmer and as the nominal IT Director, aka "whipping boy", for a small corporation. Quitting a job never felt so good.)
For medical residents there is no such choice. You have to go through residency in your chosen field in the U.S. to practice here -- you're essentially a captive audience. And, as I noted in the grandparent post, certain specialties explicitly state that they can't abide by the 80 hour/week guideline.
You could then argue that one could choose one's specialty around this, except that the hour distribution follows greater patterns: for instance, all of the surgery programs will be toeing the 80 hour line. This makes switching to a similar field for less residency hours a difficult proposition, to say the least.
As a medical student myself, I am selfishly glad that the ACGME has adopted an 80 hour week recommendation, as there seems to be evidence that shifts of even 12+ hours are detrimental to patient care. (Note that the link is for nursing. Current recommendations for medical residents have a 30-hour-straight limit).
On the other hand, you are entirely correct that certain specialty residency programs have been having trouble meeting the 80 hour guideline. Indeed, residents feel pressured to lie about work hours, since their program losing accredidation would hurt their own prospects as well.
Finally, please note that even 80 hour recommendations have officially been extended to 88 hours for some programs, such as many neurosurgery residencies. Imagine if your boss explicitly told a theoretical programming/IT governing body that 80 hours a week, averaged over 4 weeks, simply wasn't enough time. I hope this gives pause to those who love to complain about long hours spent programming.
As a musician and classical violinist I have to wonder why the B# played in second position on the E string differs from 1) the simpler notation of C for the same note as B# or 2) the same C/B# played in third, fourth, or fifth position.
As others have noted, B# and C may well not be the same note, depending on the key. For example, C as the mediant in the context of A flat major should be about 15 cents below an even tempered "C", while B sharp as the leading tone in the context of C sharp major would be a few cents above an even tempered "C". This distinction, while seemingly trivial, is huge, as it dictates whether resultant tones between notes of the same chord are also notes within the chord, or discordant notes.
And yes, I care about this, and so should you if you take intonation seriously. The difference between a "bright" major third (with an even tempered mediant) and an in-tune one (with the mediant properly lowered ~15 cents) is amazing.
It requires 60 votes to bypass a filibuster, which the Republicans do not have, so the Democrats can and will do that if GWB and co. nominate Ashcroft for the SCOTUS.
if you on the other hand had a parachute which somehow was made up of thousands or maybe millions of small pieces of flat objects which could rotate independently
Again your caveat about not fully understanding the issues involved after reading a single non-technical article applies, but I got the impression that the phenomenon requires rotational and translational motion to be decoupled. Thus rotating independently may well be insufficient to allow for the effect of falling slower than via "parachuting".
Either that or it's just another bullshit press release...
This is my suspicion. Why are we reading about scientific discoveries in the popular press before in peer-reviewed journals anyway?
Re:One question...
on
Flying By Brain
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
The parent post is simplistic and misinformed. Here's why:
Point 1: This isn't a brain we're talking about, it's 25,000 neurons in a dish that has a grid of electrodes on the bottom, so whatever structure has come to being is unlikely to resemble that of a brain except that it's made up of neurons which synapse on other neurons.
Point 2: Pleasure and pain are not localized in the brain. You can feel many different kinds of pain (visceral via sympathetic nervous system vs. somatic, for instance) and can feel each of these kinds of pain at different regions in the body (and thus different groups of neurons in the brain). I imagine the same holds true for pleasure, with different neurotransmitter pathways involved for each.
About the grandparent, that's exactly what I wondered too, and I couldn't find any pertinent info in the two articles either. The two following paragraphs are what I find to be very handwavy and suspect:
"Initially when we hook up this brain to a flight simulator, it doesn't know how to control the aircraft," DeMarse said.
"So you hook it up and the aircraft simply drifts randomly. And as the data comes in, it slowly modifies the (neural) network so over time, the network gradually learns to fly the aircraft."
You're talking about Canada. I'm talking about the US. In Canada I have heard that it is indeed relatively easy to become a family practice/internist doctor. Furthermore, specialties are another matter -- see the other posts wrt foreign-trained specialists who drive cabs rather than do general practice since they can't get into Canadian specialty residency programs (as priority goes to Canadians).
It's quite difficult to become certified in the US if you are trained as a doctor overseas, so your statement that "Places like india and south africa end up supplying plenty doctors to western countries" is disingenuous at best.
First off, they must be approved by the Educational Commission for Foreign Medical Graduates (ECFMG), then pass the United States Medical Licensing Examination(TM) (USMLE(TM)) board exam ("the boards" that you may hear med students grumbling about), and then they must complete a residency (3-7 years depending on specialty) in the US even if they were certified and practicing in their home nation. Source: ECFMG fact sheet.
The music resides in/Volumes/[your iPod's name]/iPod Control/Music -- might be slightly wrong here, going from memory and my iPod is beyond arm's reach/not plugged in. So to move music from the iPod to the computer, simply copy all of the FXX within Music folders to your hard drive (ex: "cp -r/Volumes/[your iPod's name]/iPod Control/Music ~/Music/"). Give the tiny 1.8" hard drive a few minutes to grind away, and your songs should be backed up.
the case of David Crohn and others who lack secondary CCR5 (for macrophages) or CXCR4 (for T-cells) receptors and are thus resistant to HIV infection. NB: CCR5 and CXCR4 are believed to be secondary to the CD4 receptor, found on both cell types, in the HIV binding process.
The only novel thing about this discovery is that it was in Asians, vs. the Caucasian populations in which immunity had previously been reported (and I suppose African as well, even though the Kenyan prostitutes as referenced above turned out to not be immune). The article is pretty worthless, not even listing what the "mutant genes" are, but it's a pretty good guess that CCR5 and/or CXCR4 is involved.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, if you read a biography on Richard Feynman ("Surely you must be joking, Mr. Feynman" is a good one) you'll see how he put an ability to quickly calculate cube roots to good use. He'd use it in friendly competitions with other scientists and mathematicians, and was a large part of his bar persona (he hung out in strip clubs and picked up many a girl/woman according to the lore and his own words).
The parent poster is wrong on several counts.
Depth of field is dependent on the aperture, yes, but on the other hand you can actually get very fast lenses on point and shoots. Take the Sony F828 for example, which has the equivalent of a 28-200mm f/2-f/2.8 zoom. You can't buy an equivalent lens for SLR cameras. What is important to note is that this is equivalent focal length, and the real focal length of the Sony zoom is 7.1-50 mm. So in the lens area we have two competing influences: short focal length lenses lead to greater depth of field, but fast lenses lead to less depth of field. As I shall show the shortness of the lens wins out.
Yet another why the parent post is wrong is that depth of field is also dependent on the circle of confusion, which in turn is related to the photosite size on the sensor. Point and shoot cameras generally have sensors that are MUCH smaller than those on dSLRs (compare a 1.6x crop dSLR to the Sony F828 again, with its ~4x crop), so the circle of confusion is smaller and the depth of field greater.
In other words, if you're shooting at 80mm equivalent at f/2 on a Sony F828 and a Canon 20D, the Sony will have vastly greater depth of field for two reasons. The first will be that the actual focal length of the Sony lens at 80mm equivalent would be ~20mm due to the small sensor size of the Sony, while the 1.6x crop Canon would be using a 50mm lens. The second will be that the Sony sensor's smaller photosites will result in a smaller circle of confusion, and thus greater depth of field.
The originally posted article is right, at least in part: it is impossible to get a truly narrow depth of field with a point and shoot camera, and the ability to do so is a big selling point of SLR and dSLR cameras.
Reference: Using this DOF calculator, plugging in 20mm actual lens, 5 ft. subject distance, f/2.0 for the Sony, and the same but with a 50mm lens for the Canon I get the following results:
Canon: 4.89 ft is the near limit of acceptable sharpness, 5.11 ft the far limit. That's 0.22 ft depth of field, in other words. Circle of confusion is 0.019 mm.
Sony: 4.72 ft near limit, 5.32 ft far limit. 0.6 ft depth of field, 0.008 mm circle of confusion.
The moral of the story: 0.6 ft vs. 0.22 ft depth of field at the equivalent focal length and aperture. With this in mind, the reader should decide if the parent poster is full of it when he writes "One of the reasons extolled at length for choosing one type against abother is that a DSLR has a narrow depth of field and a "standard" digital camera has a greater depth. As anyone who knows about photography would know this is total tosh."
The parent poster was being facetious, but according to a presentation on sleep disorders that I saw recently for this class (sorry, no slides posted for the sleep lecture) insomnia is prevalent among professionals* because they are too good at occupying time with their own thoughts. From a system of schooling, and from the high pressure careers that result we become very adept at multitasking, and the brain itself becomes fond of churning out a continuous stream of thoughts. You may have noticed this yourself as your mind races through some current problem as you lie awake at midnight.
/. readers are multitasking professionals of some sort.]
[* "professionals" implied physicians in this case, but this is just as relevant for programmers. And sorry for the "they"/"we" shift -- I'm assuming
The speaker is the medical director of the sleep program of a major regional hospital, which in itself is a high pressure position. Despite this he places a priority on getting 8.5 hours of sleep/night. Among the tidbits in his lecture was advice to train ourselves to turn off the chatter of the brain. This would be both to allow for restful and quick sleep and for safer driving, to mention another relevant example where having one's head filled with thoughts may not be ideal.
Given the above, it might not be so ridiculous that some might want to tune out without thinking when riding on the subway to or from work. On the other hand, I do hope that no one turns off their mental chatter while driving only to substitute watching TV on their cell phone...
AvantGo has been around for quite a few years now, and seems to be what you're describing. I didn't find it overly useful on my Nokia 3650, since I could just fire up Opera for Series 60 and head directly to the BBC News's low-graphics HTML site (or the WAP version if I was in a masochistic mood), but it seems to be the ticket for devices without network capability.
This is what happened to me, too, except substitute 6th grade for 8th, and 3 kids for your 5. Add in a summer course of geometry before 8th grade and I was done with Calc BC by 10th grade, at the tender age of 14. During middle and high school I did do the homework, however, although often in the 5 or 10 minutes before class began. This came to bite me in the butt my own freshman year in college, but I perservered, swallowed my pride, and actually began to work for the first time in my life.
Now, a year out of college, I'm in med school. Here I'm surrounded by people who like what they're studying (I do as well), and studying a LOT is the norm. And, at this stage, it actually matters whether I know my stuff, so I put my nose to the grindstone and join in, no matter how much it hurts.
I was quite the academic phenom at a young age (not just in math, I was a SET kid), and this helped me in some ways: I never felt the need to compete in a vicious manner or belittle others' achievements since I'd already had the institutional pat on the back from a young age, so to speak. However, it also made me complacent, and this complacency almost was my failure.
The moral of my rambling, self-congratulatory story? Not everyone who finds the pace and scope of traditional school easy ends up falling by the wayside. We all have to learn how to apply ourselves, and to grasp that being smart is simply not enough on its own. Growing up as a precocious youth one often feels that being gifted means that less effort should be expected of oneself, and that academics is a game in which the goal is to find the least amount of work that will appease the taskmasters. I encourage those who might feel this way to go to a competitive school, and learn from the positive example of their peers that the application of one's talents is as important as their mere existence.
The logic is that if you decrease crime, say through monitoring gunshots, then a neighborhood can attract different residents. These more "respectable" residents, who fled for the suburbs way back when, then contribute to the economy, entice businesses to move back in, and so the process of urban revitalization begins.
Um, brick, parachute, and solitaire are games, but they are not of the same variety as ACC/Big 10/Pac-10 games. Hint: the ACC, Big 10, and Pac 10 are college sports conferences, and the poster was referring to sports games such as football and basketball, of which you listen to broadcasts. They aren't games that you play with a clickwheel, unless you are so fabulously powerful and rich that you control the athletes.
Thanks for the reply, but all I could find on Google and in your links was a bunch of hand waving. I want to know what they actually do to remove the pigment, to cause increased rate of growth and egg-laying, to produce these unbalanced (breast-heavy) beasts, the things that lead to the reported short lifetimes. A search on PubMed turned up no relevant literature (even though there is much literature out there on GMO grains and the like). Anyone care to help me out with specifics?
References? What exactly do you mean when you write "their genetic structure has been altered so heavily"?
There is a difference: if you're programming, you can quit. You can move elsewhere. (And yes, I have worked in the IT/programming field, both as a programmer and as the nominal IT Director, aka "whipping boy", for a small corporation. Quitting a job never felt so good.)
For medical residents there is no such choice. You have to go through residency in your chosen field in the U.S. to practice here -- you're essentially a captive audience. And, as I noted in the grandparent post, certain specialties explicitly state that they can't abide by the 80 hour/week guideline.
You could then argue that one could choose one's specialty around this, except that the hour distribution follows greater patterns: for instance, all of the surgery programs will be toeing the 80 hour line. This makes switching to a similar field for less residency hours a difficult proposition, to say the least.
As a medical student myself, I am selfishly glad that the ACGME has adopted an 80 hour week recommendation, as there seems to be evidence that shifts of even 12+ hours are detrimental to patient care. (Note that the link is for nursing. Current recommendations for medical residents have a 30-hour-straight limit).
On the other hand, you are entirely correct that certain specialty residency programs have been having trouble meeting the 80 hour guideline. Indeed, residents feel pressured to lie about work hours, since their program losing accredidation would hurt their own prospects as well.
Finally, please note that even 80 hour recommendations have officially been extended to 88 hours for some programs, such as many neurosurgery residencies. Imagine if your boss explicitly told a theoretical programming/IT governing body that 80 hours a week, averaged over 4 weeks, simply wasn't enough time. I hope this gives pause to those who love to complain about long hours spent programming.
As others have noted, B# and C may well not be the same note, depending on the key. For example, C as the mediant in the context of A flat major should be about 15 cents below an even tempered "C", while B sharp as the leading tone in the context of C sharp major would be a few cents above an even tempered "C". This distinction, while seemingly trivial, is huge, as it dictates whether resultant tones between notes of the same chord are also notes within the chord, or discordant notes.
And yes, I care about this, and so should you if you take intonation seriously. The difference between a "bright" major third (with an even tempered mediant) and an in-tune one (with the mediant properly lowered ~15 cents) is amazing.
It requires 60 votes to bypass a filibuster, which the Republicans do not have, so the Democrats can and will do that if GWB and co. nominate Ashcroft for the SCOTUS.
Interesting. This still doesn't bode well for the (great-?) grandparent's suggestion, however.
No, I don't. I mean decoupled.
Again your caveat about not fully understanding the issues involved after reading a single non-technical article applies, but I got the impression that the phenomenon requires rotational and translational motion to be decoupled. Thus rotating independently may well be insufficient to allow for the effect of falling slower than via "parachuting".
Spelling it rEdiculous is somewhat of a trend among internet forum geeks... similar to the "teh" business.
Your theory sounds fine on paper, but are you sure that individual neurons' behavior can be influenced by what sounds like operant conditioning?
This is my suspicion. Why are we reading about scientific discoveries in the popular press before in peer-reviewed journals anyway?
Point 1: This isn't a brain we're talking about, it's 25,000 neurons in a dish that has a grid of electrodes on the bottom, so whatever structure has come to being is unlikely to resemble that of a brain except that it's made up of neurons which synapse on other neurons.
Point 2: Pleasure and pain are not localized in the brain. You can feel many different kinds of pain (visceral via sympathetic nervous system vs. somatic, for instance) and can feel each of these kinds of pain at different regions in the body (and thus different groups of neurons in the brain). I imagine the same holds true for pleasure, with different neurotransmitter pathways involved for each.
About the grandparent, that's exactly what I wondered too, and I couldn't find any pertinent info in the two articles either. The two following paragraphs are what I find to be very handwavy and suspect:
You're talking about Canada. I'm talking about the US. In Canada I have heard that it is indeed relatively easy to become a family practice/internist doctor. Furthermore, specialties are another matter -- see the other posts wrt foreign-trained specialists who drive cabs rather than do general practice since they can't get into Canadian specialty residency programs (as priority goes to Canadians).
It's quite difficult to become certified in the US if you are trained as a doctor overseas, so your statement that "Places like india and south africa end up supplying plenty doctors to western countries" is disingenuous at best.
First off, they must be approved by the Educational Commission for Foreign Medical Graduates (ECFMG), then pass the United States Medical Licensing Examination(TM) (USMLE(TM)) board exam ("the boards" that you may hear med students grumbling about), and then they must complete a residency (3-7 years depending on specialty) in the US even if they were certified and practicing in their home nation. Source: ECFMG fact sheet.
The music resides in /Volumes/[your iPod's name]/iPod Control/Music -- might be slightly wrong here, going from memory and my iPod is beyond arm's reach/not plugged in. So to move music from the iPod to the computer, simply copy all of the FXX within Music folders to your hard drive (ex: "cp -r /Volumes/[your iPod's name]/iPod Control/Music ~/Music/"). Give the tiny 1.8" hard drive a few minutes to grind away, and your songs should be backed up.
Does your boss buy all of the engineers iPods?
The only novel thing about this discovery is that it was in Asians, vs. the Caucasian populations in which immunity had previously been reported (and I suppose African as well, even though the Kenyan prostitutes as referenced above turned out to not be immune). The article is pretty worthless, not even listing what the "mutant genes" are, but it's a pretty good guess that CCR5 and/or CXCR4 is involved.