...which clearly explains why Chinese civilization plateaued for so many millenia, while in Europe, right around the time they started adding milk to Chinese proto-tea (around the late 1600s), Leibniz was in his prime, and was stimulated to generalize from mathematics to the idea of symbolic formal languages, thus developing the basis for both symbolic logic as well as all computer programming languages. On top of that, he invented an automatic calculating machine with much more promise than the Chinese abacus, and these two inventions paved the way for the computer revolution a mere few hundred years later, without which we would not be able to write messages that are delivered instantly to total strangers living on the other side of the world!
Coincidence? I think not!
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to pour myself a cuppa.
That's not correct. Many dyslexics have problems with individual words, which can include getting letters in the wrong order, as well as using letters that shouldn't be there. Dyslexia covers a broad range of symptoms, ranging from mild to severe, and can affect either or both the auditory and visual pathways. If you're dyslexic or have some dyslexic friends, and are basing your experience of dyslexia on that personal knowledge, you probably have very little idea of the full range of the syndrome.
There's a widely held misconception that any beverage made using the tea plant can be called tea. This is like saying that any drink made from grapes in the province of Champagne in France can be called Champagne. It's just not true.
Technically, the only thing that can be called tea is a beverage that's made by steeping the properly dried leaves (must not be green!) of the tea plant in freshly boiled water, then pouring the result into a cup containing some milk, and adding an appropriate amount of sugar. Until you've followed all those steps, you don't have tea, you merely have one of the ingredients of tea. So next time you're drinking your milk-free beverage, don't think of it as tea. It's just hot, tealeaf-infused water, nothing more.
(Note also that the true tea beverage must not be made using any other additives, herbs, etc., with the possible exception of Oil of Bergamot, which was grandfathered into the accepted definition of tea by Charles II in 1675.)
Oops. You can copy and paste the link into your browser address bar, and it should work. Seems like the site just doesn't like it if the referrer is some other site (like Slashdot).
That cartoon isn't anything special in itself - it's more the feelings behind it that are relevant. There's more on the German Propaganda Archive (link is to WWII era posters, cartoons etc.)
In your case, the restless leg syndrome sounds as though it may have a purpose. But the problem which many people seem to experience is discomfort which (apparently) isn't properly correlated to actual bodily stress. Having restless leg syndrome, afaik, doesn't necessarily mean you'll suffer unusally from leg trouble as you age, although obviously some proportion of people with restless leg syndrome will.
My own non-scientific speculation about this is that there's a mechanism to ensure that we move our legs around enough to avoid DVT etc., which in some people is oversensitive so that they feel the need to move their legs even when the "actual" need is minimal. There are presumably also people who don't feel this discomfort enough, and so are perhaps at greater risk of DVT. And as I mentioned previously, there are people who wiggle for reasons more psychological than physiological. So, leg wiggling doesn't necessarily imply restless leg syndrome, and restless leg syndrome doesn't necessarily imply unhealthy legs.
Repetitive leg motion while sitting doesn't necessarily mean restless leg syndrome. It's much more likely to be an ADD/ADHD symptom - the motion is a way to calm yourself and keep yourself focused. (Try consciously stopping the motion and see what effect it has on your ability to focus on what you're working on.) There are also other conditions that can lead to such motion, which have to do with nervous tension as opposed to restless leg syndrome.
Restless leg syndrome is when people feel an uncomfortable sensation in their legs when sitting still, which goes away as a result of motion. Usually, just wiggling the legs isn't enough - it require real motion, like walking around. I think it's quite likely that restless leg syndrome is part of a mechanism to protect against diseases like DVT, but some people may be overly sensitive to it.
Jokes about blacks, Chinese, Hispanics etc. are a staple of comedians across the board, from Carlos Mencia and Dave Chappelle to SNL, Chris Rock, the South Park team, and many others current and past. The term "nigger" may be avoided by some, but note that the grandparent post didn't use any derogatory terms. The subject matter itself is not necessarily off limits, depending partly on the nature of the joke.
The point is that humor is one way in which humans deal with uncomfortable subjects, particularly ones which they don't want to talk about directly. You can't wave a magic wand and make people's prejudices disappear, but making them laugh about a subject can be the next best thing. It can have the effect of making the subject seem less threatening, or even poking fun at the prejudices themselves, or implicitly questioning how realistic the underlying fears are.
Of course, humor is a double-edged sword, which can be used for harm as well as good, but if you look closely at the current humor related to gays, you'll find that most of it is not actually mean-spirited, as such. It inevitably still reflects the prejudices of the people making the jokes, but it could hardly be any other way. Start worrying when you see cartoons like this one, showing Jewish tentacles around England, Russia, China, and the U.S., which reflects the mentality behind the Nazi atrocities in WWII.
Like it or not, jokes about homosexuality are a staple of current American pop culture. Are you so sure that's due to homophobia, or might it actually be part of a process of moving towards greater understanding and acceptance of sexuality differences?
Just to remind you that taste isn't universal, I've seen a fair amount of Bebop and I find it watchable but basically boring - not something I'd go out of my way to watch. Sometimes I don't find it interesting enough to watch an episode to the end - it's too predictable. I'd much rather watch Trigun. GITS is much better, way better than either Bebop or Evangelion. Miyazaki is great, of course.
Re:Psychopathic science and immune exploits.
on
Spam Gets Personal
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· Score: 1
One of these days, I'm worried that unethical or thoughtless biologist are going to publish exploits for the human immune system, and one of these days technology is going to get cheap enough and ubiquitous enough for the biologist equivalent of a script kiddie to wage genocide. I'm worried that in the next century, we're going to get an object lesson in just how hard it is to "patch and update" our immune system.
Bill Joy's essay Why the future doesn't need us raises similar concerns, although I don't recall whether script kiddie genemods were on his list. Your scenario also reminds me of the novel Beggars Ride (third book in a trilogy), in which someone contracts for a custom designed virus designed to make humanity easier to control. In that case, the existence of an extremely smart, completely unscrupulous genetic scientist, and someone willing to fund him, was all that was needed.
Plenty of people have backed down from an opportunity like that. Lewis Black did the Radio and TV Correspondent's Dinner, and even without the President in attendance, he was quite off his game largely out of not wanting to cross too far over "the line". As he result, he came pretty close to sucking.
Colbert did no such thing: in fact, he pushed the envelope farther than anyone I can recall having seen. If you're tone-deaf to that sort of thing, then it may seem like no big deal to you, but just because you can't perceive it, doesn't mean something extraordinary didn't just happen.
Big media can bring it on. I'd love to be a test case for copyright, the rights of individuals, the legality of the DMCA, and the obligation of copyright owners to make their works available in ways that don't date back to the middle of the last century.
Wow, I guess working on feature films, music videos, spots, pilots, or anything else we do here in Hollyweird (well Santa Monica) all day every day I wouldn't know.
That's right, apparently you don't know. First, the term "Ken Burns effect" wasn't coined by Steve Jobs (see link provided by AC), and second, its generic is name "pan and zoom", not "pan and scan". While there's an obvious connection between the two, the latter refers specifically to a technique for converting between formats, and not to the Ken Burns effect.
You seem to be having a problem with logical inferences, e.g. the fact that you first heard something from Steve Jobs doesn't mean it didn't exist previously (it more likely means that Jobs is aware of a wider world than you are); and the fact that when performing a pan and scan, you do something a lot like a pan and zoom, doesn't mean that the term "pan and scan" can correctly be used instead of "pan and zoom". To test your logical ability, try this ten question test.
Sucker. Haven't you figured out yet that every advance in technology is used either to commercially exploit you, or politically control you? Accept that shiny new implant at your peril! But did I mention, it's shiny?!
I addressed your point about home users in my post. As an aside, note that Walmart sells PCs with Linspire loaded. But back-and-forth is clearly pointless here, because I'd have to give you a huge introduction to the marketing job of a company like Microsoft, how their markets relate to and affect each other, how the software industry has evolved and will continue to evolve, and so on. Instead of that, I'll just summarize like this: it's just as well for Microsoft shareholders that you're not in charge there (although it would be advantageous for everyone else in the world). Microsoft doesn't hold onto its monopoly position by giving up on strategic pieces of the software stack.
Who said anything about an "enterprise environment"? Microsoft's market is everyone who might buy a computer, and there's a significant portion of that market that is not, in fact, particularly dependent on specific applications which only run on Windows, but rather primarily need a browser, an email client, and an assortment of other not particularly demanding utilities. The people that "aren't even vaguely aware that there is a difference" are prime, juicy targets for a non-Windows based desktop that provides what they need - but right now, many banking sites and similar require IE.
As for enterprise environments, I consult in that area, and many enterprise desktops rely quite heavily on browser-based applications these days. That's particularly true for desktops of sales staff and management. One of my clients is currently in the process of converting a major in-house financial services application (which processes billions of dollars worth of transactions per year) to run in Firefox rather than IE, getting rid of IE-specific code that was built in as far back as 1998, to support for some rich-client style functionality.
The "only" other thing stopping the users of this application from being able to work on a Linux desktop are some of the Office tools: Windows, Excel, Outlook. While those aren't easily replaced by any means (due to social & network effects), the point is that the browser is one of the major components that act as a bulwark against customers realizing that they may have viable alternatives. Microsoft can't afford to give up the amount of control and mindshare that having the dominant web browser provides.
Dvorak might have a point here, but for one thing: as long as people see IE as the default web browser, the idea that Windows is the only choice in operating systems is reinforced. Take the browser out of Microsoft's hands, and a lot of questions about how much we really need this Windows thing are raised. Those questions exist anyway, but the dominance of IE makes people less likely to ask them.
what CS problem that I might encounter in an upper-division CS course requires the use of Diff. Eq., Linear Algebra or Physics?
To pick just one example, the Kalman Filter, which is used for everything from radar tracking to helicopter stabilization, relies on linear algebra. And physics gives an excellent background in learning to apply mathematical modeling techniques to real-world phenomena. One of the best (or at least most interesting) distributed version control systems out there, Darcs, was written by a physicist, in the Haskell programming language (the latter of course being based on the lambda calculus, another seemingly esoteric subject which is so fundamental that it really ought to be taught in high school). Darcs is based on a physically-inspired theory of patches.
There's a problem here which was described by Paul Graham as "The Blub Paradox" (in Beating the Averages). Graham writes "But when our hypothetical Blub programmer looks in the other direction, up the power continuum, he doesn't realize he's looking up." It's not easy to correctly assess that which you do not (yet) understand.
The other side of the story is that you're totally right about coding being different from CS. The problem is that most HR/Business types don't know the difference.
I agree, this is a big part of the problem. This comes from the fact that everything about computers, and particularly software, is so relatively new. As alluded to elsewhere in the thread, you don't get HR people trying to hire mathematicians or even economists for accounting positions - they know better than that. They just don't know better than that, yet, when it comes to programming, particularly in "IT". And this confusion affects academic curricula, too - universities want to satisfy the commercial demand with subjects they already teach, and academic computer scientists don't want to turn themselves into a Java instructors any more than they absolutely have to.
It seems the best course of action is to expand software engineering programs to fill the void and make sure those are focused on turning out pratical, level-headed engineers who can solve a variety of problems but do not care to learn any more about math or physics than it takes to get an equation from a mathematician or physicist and implement it.
I think that'd be a start. However, I also think we'll eventually find that the tentacles of software are so diverse that "software engineering" is too broad a subject, and we'll end up with a "software school" analog to "medical school" or "law school", where a wide variety of subjects are taught, including theory, engineering, and other topics. I notice CMU has a "School of Computer Science already, and Northeastern has a College of Computer and Information Science, but most other institutions still treat CS and related disciplines as a "department".
-No one has any interest in forcing the americans to pay up their debts. The consumption drop would ruin half of the world.
That's like saying "no-one has any interest in forcing the homeowners to pay off their mortgages immediately". The U.S. is not defaulting on its debts, so what the hell are you talking about? I can only conclude that you're confused about macroeconomics.
Slashdot Mirror
...which clearly explains why Chinese civilization plateaued for so many millenia, while in Europe, right around the time they started adding milk to Chinese proto-tea (around the late 1600s), Leibniz was in his prime, and was stimulated to generalize from mathematics to the idea of symbolic formal languages, thus developing the basis for both symbolic logic as well as all computer programming languages. On top of that, he invented an automatic calculating machine with much more promise than the Chinese abacus, and these two inventions paved the way for the computer revolution a mere few hundred years later, without which we would not be able to write messages that are delivered instantly to total strangers living on the other side of the world!
Coincidence? I think not!
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to pour myself a cuppa.
The problem is that it's about Chuck Norris, instead of Jack Bauer.
Once, someone tried to tell Jack Bauer a knock knock joke. Jack Bauer found out who was there, who they worked for, and where the goddamned bomb was.
Then again, if Jack Bauer was gay, his name would be Chuck Norris.
That's not correct. Many dyslexics have problems with individual words, which can include getting letters in the wrong order, as well as using letters that shouldn't be there. Dyslexia covers a broad range of symptoms, ranging from mild to severe, and can affect either or both the auditory and visual pathways. If you're dyslexic or have some dyslexic friends, and are basing your experience of dyslexia on that personal knowledge, you probably have very little idea of the full range of the syndrome.
There's a widely held misconception that any beverage made using the tea plant can be called tea. This is like saying that any drink made from grapes in the province of Champagne in France can be called Champagne. It's just not true.
Technically, the only thing that can be called tea is a beverage that's made by steeping the properly dried leaves (must not be green!) of the tea plant in freshly boiled water, then pouring the result into a cup containing some milk, and adding an appropriate amount of sugar. Until you've followed all those steps, you don't have tea, you merely have one of the ingredients of tea. So next time you're drinking your milk-free beverage, don't think of it as tea. It's just hot, tealeaf-infused water, nothing more.
(Note also that the true tea beverage must not be made using any other additives, herbs, etc., with the possible exception of Oil of Bergamot, which was grandfathered into the accepted definition of tea by Charles II in 1675.)
Oops. You can copy and paste the link into your browser address bar, and it should work. Seems like the site just doesn't like it if the referrer is some other site (like Slashdot).
That cartoon isn't anything special in itself - it's more the feelings behind it that are relevant. There's more on the German Propaganda Archive (link is to WWII era posters, cartoons etc.)
In your case, the restless leg syndrome sounds as though it may have a purpose. But the problem which many people seem to experience is discomfort which (apparently) isn't properly correlated to actual bodily stress. Having restless leg syndrome, afaik, doesn't necessarily mean you'll suffer unusally from leg trouble as you age, although obviously some proportion of people with restless leg syndrome will.
My own non-scientific speculation about this is that there's a mechanism to ensure that we move our legs around enough to avoid DVT etc., which in some people is oversensitive so that they feel the need to move their legs even when the "actual" need is minimal. There are presumably also people who don't feel this discomfort enough, and so are perhaps at greater risk of DVT. And as I mentioned previously, there are people who wiggle for reasons more psychological than physiological. So, leg wiggling doesn't necessarily imply restless leg syndrome, and restless leg syndrome doesn't necessarily imply unhealthy legs.
It figures. That's why I use nano.
Repetitive leg motion while sitting doesn't necessarily mean restless leg syndrome. It's much more likely to be an ADD/ADHD symptom - the motion is a way to calm yourself and keep yourself focused. (Try consciously stopping the motion and see what effect it has on your ability to focus on what you're working on.) There are also other conditions that can lead to such motion, which have to do with nervous tension as opposed to restless leg syndrome. Restless leg syndrome is when people feel an uncomfortable sensation in their legs when sitting still, which goes away as a result of motion. Usually, just wiggling the legs isn't enough - it require real motion, like walking around. I think it's quite likely that restless leg syndrome is part of a mechanism to protect against diseases like DVT, but some people may be overly sensitive to it.
Jokes about blacks, Chinese, Hispanics etc. are a staple of comedians across the board, from Carlos Mencia and Dave Chappelle to SNL, Chris Rock, the South Park team, and many others current and past. The term "nigger" may be avoided by some, but note that the grandparent post didn't use any derogatory terms. The subject matter itself is not necessarily off limits, depending partly on the nature of the joke.
The point is that humor is one way in which humans deal with uncomfortable subjects, particularly ones which they don't want to talk about directly. You can't wave a magic wand and make people's prejudices disappear, but making them laugh about a subject can be the next best thing. It can have the effect of making the subject seem less threatening, or even poking fun at the prejudices themselves, or implicitly questioning how realistic the underlying fears are.
Of course, humor is a double-edged sword, which can be used for harm as well as good, but if you look closely at the current humor related to gays, you'll find that most of it is not actually mean-spirited, as such. It inevitably still reflects the prejudices of the people making the jokes, but it could hardly be any other way. Start worrying when you see cartoons like this one, showing Jewish tentacles around England, Russia, China, and the U.S., which reflects the mentality behind the Nazi atrocities in WWII.
Like it or not, jokes about homosexuality are a staple of current American pop culture. Are you so sure that's due to homophobia, or might it actually be part of a process of moving towards greater understanding and acceptance of sexuality differences?
Just to remind you that taste isn't universal, I've seen a fair amount of Bebop and I find it watchable but basically boring - not something I'd go out of my way to watch. Sometimes I don't find it interesting enough to watch an episode to the end - it's too predictable. I'd much rather watch Trigun. GITS is much better, way better than either Bebop or Evangelion. Miyazaki is great, of course.
If you wanna get technical, it should be "flout", not "flouting" in this context, i.e. "1. Flout the laws of physics".
Plenty of people have backed down from an opportunity like that. Lewis Black did the Radio and TV Correspondent's Dinner, and even without the President in attendance, he was quite off his game largely out of not wanting to cross too far over "the line". As he result, he came pretty close to sucking.
Colbert did no such thing: in fact, he pushed the envelope farther than anyone I can recall having seen. If you're tone-deaf to that sort of thing, then it may seem like no big deal to you, but just because you can't perceive it, doesn't mean something extraordinary didn't just happen.
Big media can bring it on. I'd love to be a test case for copyright, the rights of individuals, the legality of the DMCA, and the obligation of copyright owners to make their works available in ways that don't date back to the middle of the last century.
That's right, apparently you don't know. First, the term "Ken Burns effect" wasn't coined by Steve Jobs (see link provided by AC), and second, its generic is name "pan and zoom", not "pan and scan". While there's an obvious connection between the two, the latter refers specifically to a technique for converting between formats, and not to the Ken Burns effect.
You seem to be having a problem with logical inferences, e.g. the fact that you first heard something from Steve Jobs doesn't mean it didn't exist previously (it more likely means that Jobs is aware of a wider world than you are); and the fact that when performing a pan and scan, you do something a lot like a pan and zoom, doesn't mean that the term "pan and scan" can correctly be used instead of "pan and zoom". To test your logical ability, try this ten question test.
Sucker. Haven't you figured out yet that every advance in technology is used either to commercially exploit you, or politically control you? Accept that shiny new implant at your peril! But did I mention, it's shiny?!
I addressed your point about home users in my post. As an aside, note that Walmart sells PCs with Linspire loaded. But back-and-forth is clearly pointless here, because I'd have to give you a huge introduction to the marketing job of a company like Microsoft, how their markets relate to and affect each other, how the software industry has evolved and will continue to evolve, and so on. Instead of that, I'll just summarize like this: it's just as well for Microsoft shareholders that you're not in charge there (although it would be advantageous for everyone else in the world). Microsoft doesn't hold onto its monopoly position by giving up on strategic pieces of the software stack.
Who said anything about an "enterprise environment"? Microsoft's market is everyone who might buy a computer, and there's a significant portion of that market that is not, in fact, particularly dependent on specific applications which only run on Windows, but rather primarily need a browser, an email client, and an assortment of other not particularly demanding utilities. The people that "aren't even vaguely aware that there is a difference" are prime, juicy targets for a non-Windows based desktop that provides what they need - but right now, many banking sites and similar require IE.
As for enterprise environments, I consult in that area, and many enterprise desktops rely quite heavily on browser-based applications these days. That's particularly true for desktops of sales staff and management. One of my clients is currently in the process of converting a major in-house financial services application (which processes billions of dollars worth of transactions per year) to run in Firefox rather than IE, getting rid of IE-specific code that was built in as far back as 1998, to support for some rich-client style functionality.
The "only" other thing stopping the users of this application from being able to work on a Linux desktop are some of the Office tools: Windows, Excel, Outlook. While those aren't easily replaced by any means (due to social & network effects), the point is that the browser is one of the major components that act as a bulwark against customers realizing that they may have viable alternatives. Microsoft can't afford to give up the amount of control and mindshare that having the dominant web browser provides.
Dvorak might have a point here, but for one thing: as long as people see IE as the default web browser, the idea that Windows is the only choice in operating systems is reinforced. Take the browser out of Microsoft's hands, and a lot of questions about how much we really need this Windows thing are raised. Those questions exist anyway, but the dominance of IE makes people less likely to ask them.
To pick just one example, the Kalman Filter, which is used for everything from radar tracking to helicopter stabilization, relies on linear algebra. And physics gives an excellent background in learning to apply mathematical modeling techniques to real-world phenomena. One of the best (or at least most interesting) distributed version control systems out there, Darcs, was written by a physicist, in the Haskell programming language (the latter of course being based on the lambda calculus, another seemingly esoteric subject which is so fundamental that it really ought to be taught in high school). Darcs is based on a physically-inspired theory of patches.
There's a problem here which was described by Paul Graham as "The Blub Paradox" (in Beating the Averages). Graham writes "But when our hypothetical Blub programmer looks in the other direction, up the power continuum, he doesn't realize he's looking up." It's not easy to correctly assess that which you do not (yet) understand.
I agree, this is a big part of the problem. This comes from the fact that everything about computers, and particularly software, is so relatively new. As alluded to elsewhere in the thread, you don't get HR people trying to hire mathematicians or even economists for accounting positions - they know better than that. They just don't know better than that, yet, when it comes to programming, particularly in "IT". And this confusion affects academic curricula, too - universities want to satisfy the commercial demand with subjects they already teach, and academic computer scientists don't want to turn themselves into a Java instructors any more than they absolutely have to.
I think that'd be a start. However, I also think we'll eventually find that the tentacles of software are so diverse that "software engineering" is too broad a subject, and we'll end up with a "software school" analog to "medical school" or "law school", where a wide variety of subjects are taught, including theory, engineering, and other topics. I notice CMU has a "School of Computer Science already, and Northeastern has a College of Computer and Information Science, but most other institutions still treat CS and related disciplines as a "department".