I think that phrase was slightly mistyped. I parsed it as a few (tens of billions.) I assume they are using English units, in which a few is about a half a handful, which is somewhere around 10-12. So they are saying about 50-60 billion solar masses.
Uh oh... I've figured it out. lolkiddiez sounds an awful lot like lolkittyz. Which of course means they are just trying to cutesy up what they really are.
And the US Mail can be used to spread Anthrax! That's biological terrorism or copyright violation either way!>
But seriously, it would surprise me if twitter was NOT already being monitored en masse by the NSA. Not only is there the potential for catching actual terrorist communication, but merely analyzing the patterns in which tweets are sent could be a quick alert that some sort of sudden disaster is occuring... whether natural disaster like an earthquake, an accidental explosion in an industrial location, or a terrorist activity. It may be possibly to analyze the data to pinpoint the location of an event by where the tweets are sent from without having to even read the contents. Sure, there would be potential for abuse of such monitoring, but there would be potential for early warning which just may allow for cleanup and relief efforts to arrive that much quicker and better informed. It wouldn't be about the tool, it would be about who has access to it.
A nettie pot can be effective, although you do have to be careful to use clean water otherwise you may be introducing more pathogens. I personally would go with sterile saline irrigation for this. It can be picked up pretty inexpensively from most drugstores. And nasal irrigation is also very compatible with drinking a couple glasses of water and taking a hot shower. People that I know who use nettie pots use them in the bathroom anyways... having a sink or toilet nearby is pretty much necessary.
Adding "take a whiff of horseradish" onto this may not be overkill for someone who is very prone to sinus infections or even regular sinus headaches. Depending on your preferences, this can take the form of suhi with plenty of wasabi. It can also mean opening a jar, breathing deeply, and grabbing a Kleenex. By "fresh" I didn't really mean grabbing a grater and a horseradish root, I meant more "not horseradish sauce." Although in a pinch, stopping at Arby's and getting some horsie sauce to dip your fries in can help clear your sinuses if you aren't afraid of fast food in the first place. Also, eating spicy food of any variety (Mexican, Indian, Thai... whatever your choice) can help, but often I've found that the headache will briefly get worse before it goes away. Even a couple drops of straight hotsauce on your tongue can help your sinuses, in addition to impressing the ladies (Note, you are more likely to impress your male friends with this than ladies you are attracted to.)
The burn I was talking about really shouldn't be all that bad... no more uncomfortable than using plain or cold water for nasal irrigation. And I happen to have some Eastern European blood which makes the mild burn of horseradish almost pleasurable. For most people horseradish is more readily used as a cure than spicy food because horseradish is spicy enough to instigate mucous production and thinning, but the burn goes away right away unlike capsid burn which lingers for a while.
This could be a very bad thing when it comes to antibiotics. Low doses are better at creating antibiotic resistance than high doses as it provides a more gentle slope for evolution to take its course. Of course microdose Pyridoxine should have a low enough deleterious side effect rate, yet sound technical enough that your average person wouldn't know the difference. Of course, this all goes to pot in this day and age where the vast majority of people will google any drug they are prescribed. Especially the people who I suspect would be likely to badger a doctor into unnecessary treatment.
I know you are AC and so probably won't be back to check this, but there are things you can do to reduce the chances of secondary sinus infection after a primary viral one. Stay hydrated, take long hot showers, and take a deep whiff of fresh horseradish. The last one should burn a bit, but the burn goes away really quickly unlike the pain of sinus infection. You can also replace smelling horseradish with eating something spicy. The basic premise of these three is it will help drain the mucous out of your sinuses, hopefully pulling enough bacteria out that your immune system can handle the rest.
On a side note, this method can also help reduce the headache of a hangover from a smokey bar. The dehydration from the alcohol means your sinuses won't produce enough mucous to flush out the tar/etc that you were breathing in all night. The result is a sinus headache, which starts to go away once you manage to fill a couple kleenex with a truly vile looking substance.
It IS possible to be a music producer without being a professional, but that's a side note. Even an amateur who has dumped the money into ProTools capable gear shouldn't blink at the price of an AV subscription (which I don't think the subscription model is as bad as it seems for AV, as by nature it has to be constantly updated and tweaked to account for new and upcoming viruses.)
The big question to me is... why would you hook a production computer to the internet in the first place? The system resource consumption and risk of even an AV protected computer getting infected tells me that having a standalone system dedicated to music production would indicate keeping it standalone. Web browsing etc should be done from a separate computer. If you need to do this from the studio, a quiet cheap laptop would fit the bill. Possibly an Eee PC. Does anybody have any experience with how quiet these things are? Considering that they cost less than some plug in effects for ProTools, it would probably be worth considering the investment to keep your main computer safe.
There may be a few times that you would net access with a music production computer, but those should be considered the exception rather than the rule. You can enable antivirus, turn on the network connection, download what you need, disable the network, check what you downloaded then disable the antivirus. Avoiding the latency that an AV solution introduces into a music production environment is generally going to be worth the hassle.
More importantly, a professional producer should also be doing regular backups on their system so they can restore to a previous state in case something goes wrong. The data you are creating should be backed up in a separate system... I'd really encourage daily incrementals with weekly redundant backup, one for onsite storage and one for offsite. If you are in indie producer, offsite means take it home, to a trusted friend's place or safe deposit box. If you are working for a record label, I imagine IT staff is available to work out a more robust backup strategy but the producer should still at least talk to the IT guys to know exactly what's going on.
A truly amateur producer would of course have to take a slightly different route. I'd at least say disable the AV and internet while recording, and get a couple external hard drives to backup your entire system weekly or each time you finish a major milestone in a project. You can probably risk having to redo a weeks worth of work as you will be much quicker doing it the second time... the first go was a learning process.
Honestly, GP doesn't sound like an atheist to me. This statement fits pretty squarely in the deist camp. The phrasing of his statement presupposes the existence of God, but rejects the idea of a personal god that intercedes with human events.
The usage of the original phrase really bothers me.
While correlation does not prove causation, it sure does imply causation. It's probably about as close to the definition of imply that I can come up with. The only way I can see the phrase making sense is to use the logic definition of suggest as a logically necessary consequence. Then the original usage may have held a meaning of While causation implies correlation, correlation does not imply causation, basically saying if there is causation, then correlation will follow. So finding correlations is extremely useful, but picking out the root cause of the correlation can be quite difficult, especially when there are multiple factors in play all feeding back on each other.
Something related that happened often when I was a kid, but almost never as an adult: a hyperawareness state, where I can feel each individual thread in the sheets, can feel/hear my blood moving, etc. This is NOT accompanied by paralysis, and I'm functionally awake, but I think it's probably a partial sleep state.
I would guess that's the "filter" part of your brain falling asleep first... so all sensory data gets passed through to the main brain processes. Alternatively, it could be false positives on what's important; your senses may only seem hyper-aware as sensory data that you aren't used to getting flagged as important does get pushed into consciousness.
The majority of memorable/fun dreams I have now are set in some variant of DOOM. Since I still think this is the only game worth playing, I have no complaint.:)
...then there's the infamous Tetris dreams. I think video games in general translate very well into dreams. The graphics are more simple than real life, and therefore easier to process. And dreams are well known to replay problems that you are working on during the day, and what are games but a large problem solving excercise?
I'm a very light sleeper... one time I dreamed that a spider was building a web attached to my nose. Woke up and guess what, some idiot spider HAD built a web between the ceiling and my nose. WTF?!!
Simple. Real sensory data gets passed through to your brain, but it interprets it as dream data, so just incorporates it into the dream. The minute tickle of a spider may not be enough to rouse you, but would be enough to tell your brain that "hey, there's a spider on my nose!" and it therefore ends up in the dream.
That's the start of lucid dreaming. If you think it may be interesting, it basically takes a little bit of thought during your waking time to train your mind to look for the cues. Eventually you may get a little better at it... it's not that different from any other type of creative thought.
The real-life time is generally quite quick. Basically, dreams comes out pre-formed, and then your mind translates the mostly random data on the fly to make some sort of story behind them. IIRC, the stage of REM where dreams actually occur is basically seconds long, which can translate into hours of dream time.
Yeah... the light switch thing is from waking life. To make it clear, I don't believe that the whole lucid dreaming thing will open up great insights into reality, just that it's kinda fun. Really, what I get out of it is the same thing as getting immersed into a great story or video game. Basically, entertainment and it costs nothing. Attempting lucid dreaming doesn't even cost time, as the effort is generally spent while falling asleep and maybe those few sweet moments after you hit the snooze button in the morning.
Ahh... hypnopompic (waking up) paralysis. When you are asleep, your mind puts out a chemical that paralyzes your muscles so you don't injure yourself because of your dream movements. The paralysis comes about when you basically wake up in the wrong order. You are kinda dreaming, kinda awake and your muscles are still paralyzed. There's many stories in folklore about a witch sitting on your chest and such that go along with the phenomenon.
Although I don't have a source at hand, I've heard many times that watching television puts one in a trance-like state. This is probably similar enough to dreaming that the brain learns to dream in a similar manner.
Then you might want to try lucid dreaming... it can be quite fun. The hard part is to realize that you are dreaming. The best way that I have found to do this is to make spot checks when you are awake, asking yourself if what is happening is possible. If you get in the habit of doing this when you are awake you should start eventually making reality checks in your dreams, or some out there dream logic will start to make you realize that in the waking world that is impossible. The two triggers that have worked the most often for me are movie style scene changes where you are one place and then suddenly another, or of course flying. Other things that can signify a dream are text scrambling itself (Text generally is not stable in dreams... probably reading skills are too complex to maintain in a dream) or light levels not changing when they should (I.E. turning a light on or off does not affect the brightness. I had a friend that would often flick lights on and off just to check if he was dreaming.)
After learning to recognize whether you are dreaming or not, the next difficulty is in getting yourself to keep dreaming while you are conscious of it. The shock of realizing you are dreaming often causes you to wake up enough to stop dreaming, or to change the dream such that you no longer are lucid. I don't personally know of any tricks to help here... it seems to be just more getting comfortable with lucid dreaming. Once you have this down, you can eventually learn to control almost any aspect of your dream: calling in people you want to interact with, putting yourself in any situation you want to imagine, etc. It takes time to get full control of your dream world, but it can be done bit by bit. And if you are the imaginative type, it can be quite rewarding.
These levels of problem would be considered "almost there" in anyone else's beta program. Google has put themselves in a sticky place by having so many pretty much finished items listed as beta, in that now they will need a new name when a new product comes out which should be classified as beta.
Dude... a couple of decades is about one generation. You'd need a LOT more generations of isolation to become genetically incompatible. IIRC, the amount of gene flow needed to indefinitely stave off speciation is on the order of one or two individuals every five generations. Considering that the length of time Native American populations had been geographically isolated from European populations wasn't enough to cause speciation, this is no something you are going to see in your lifetime. It would take a MASSIVE gap of time with essentially zero gene flow between populations to get anywhere near the point where offspring are non-viable. If there is a set of humans found that is genetically incompatible with normal people, it would most likely be in some newly discovered isolated tribe rather than an Eloi/Morlock type split.
And there is another really big thing to work out about non-compete clauses. Just being legally invalid doesn't mean that the clause is non-effective. Future employers will often not risk hiring someone under ANY non-compete contract, as they don't want to risk spending money on a legal defense for you, even if that defense will win. Unless your talents are extremely rare, and in that case you would have enough muscle to get non-compete clauses struck from any contract.
There are actually multiple ways in which water injection can in theory increase the efficiency of an engine, end they are all basically related to thermal expansion in the cylinder. The cooling effect you mentioned IIRC is actually related to the temperature of the intake air more than the engine itself. Cooler air is more dense, so you can dump more moles of air into the cylinder in the compression phase, which when heated will expand more than less dense air will. Droplets of atomized water will be in the liquid phase during compression, but then the heat of ignition will cause them to essentially boil into steam creating pressure that gives you an extra bit of power for a given amount of fuel. Essentially, remember that the heat of combustion doesn't directly move the piston in the engine; it's the pressure created by thermal expansion of intake gasses, in addition to the increase in volume of the end products of combustion versus the volume of the fuel. IIRC, for optimum efficiency the water injector does have to compensate slightly for humidity changes as too much water will eventually decrease the efficiency and power output of the engine.
Hmm... I'm trying to remember... is the water generally injected into the air intake or into the carburetor?
Slashdot Mirror
I think that phrase was slightly mistyped. I parsed it as a few (tens of billions.) I assume they are using English units, in which a few is about a half a handful, which is somewhere around 10-12. So they are saying about 50-60 billion solar masses.
Uh oh... I've figured it out. lolkiddiez sounds an awful lot like lolkittyz. Which of course means they are just trying to cutesy up what they really are.
i can has cheezburger haxs?
And the US Mail can be used to spread Anthrax! That's biological terrorism or copyright violation either way!>
But seriously, it would surprise me if twitter was NOT already being monitored en masse by the NSA. Not only is there the potential for catching actual terrorist communication, but merely analyzing the patterns in which tweets are sent could be a quick alert that some sort of sudden disaster is occuring... whether natural disaster like an earthquake, an accidental explosion in an industrial location, or a terrorist activity. It may be possibly to analyze the data to pinpoint the location of an event by where the tweets are sent from without having to even read the contents. Sure, there would be potential for abuse of such monitoring, but there would be potential for early warning which just may allow for cleanup and relief efforts to arrive that much quicker and better informed. It wouldn't be about the tool, it would be about who has access to it.
A nettie pot can be effective, although you do have to be careful to use clean water otherwise you may be introducing more pathogens. I personally would go with sterile saline irrigation for this. It can be picked up pretty inexpensively from most drugstores. And nasal irrigation is also very compatible with drinking a couple glasses of water and taking a hot shower. People that I know who use nettie pots use them in the bathroom anyways... having a sink or toilet nearby is pretty much necessary.
Adding "take a whiff of horseradish" onto this may not be overkill for someone who is very prone to sinus infections or even regular sinus headaches. Depending on your preferences, this can take the form of suhi with plenty of wasabi. It can also mean opening a jar, breathing deeply, and grabbing a Kleenex. By "fresh" I didn't really mean grabbing a grater and a horseradish root, I meant more "not horseradish sauce." Although in a pinch, stopping at Arby's and getting some horsie sauce to dip your fries in can help clear your sinuses if you aren't afraid of fast food in the first place. Also, eating spicy food of any variety (Mexican, Indian, Thai... whatever your choice) can help, but often I've found that the headache will briefly get worse before it goes away. Even a couple drops of straight hotsauce on your tongue can help your sinuses, in addition to impressing the ladies (Note, you are more likely to impress your male friends with this than ladies you are attracted to.)
The burn I was talking about really shouldn't be all that bad... no more uncomfortable than using plain or cold water for nasal irrigation. And I happen to have some Eastern European blood which makes the mild burn of horseradish almost pleasurable. For most people horseradish is more readily used as a cure than spicy food because horseradish is spicy enough to instigate mucous production and thinning, but the burn goes away right away unlike capsid burn which lingers for a while.
This could be a very bad thing when it comes to antibiotics. Low doses are better at creating antibiotic resistance than high doses as it provides a more gentle slope for evolution to take its course. Of course microdose Pyridoxine should have a low enough deleterious side effect rate, yet sound technical enough that your average person wouldn't know the difference. Of course, this all goes to pot in this day and age where the vast majority of people will google any drug they are prescribed. Especially the people who I suspect would be likely to badger a doctor into unnecessary treatment.
I know you are AC and so probably won't be back to check this, but there are things you can do to reduce the chances of secondary sinus infection after a primary viral one. Stay hydrated, take long hot showers, and take a deep whiff of fresh horseradish. The last one should burn a bit, but the burn goes away really quickly unlike the pain of sinus infection. You can also replace smelling horseradish with eating something spicy. The basic premise of these three is it will help drain the mucous out of your sinuses, hopefully pulling enough bacteria out that your immune system can handle the rest.
On a side note, this method can also help reduce the headache of a hangover from a smokey bar. The dehydration from the alcohol means your sinuses won't produce enough mucous to flush out the tar/etc that you were breathing in all night. The result is a sinus headache, which starts to go away once you manage to fill a couple kleenex with a truly vile looking substance.
It IS possible to be a music producer without being a professional, but that's a side note. Even an amateur who has dumped the money into ProTools capable gear shouldn't blink at the price of an AV subscription (which I don't think the subscription model is as bad as it seems for AV, as by nature it has to be constantly updated and tweaked to account for new and upcoming viruses.)
The big question to me is... why would you hook a production computer to the internet in the first place? The system resource consumption and risk of even an AV protected computer getting infected tells me that having a standalone system dedicated to music production would indicate keeping it standalone. Web browsing etc should be done from a separate computer. If you need to do this from the studio, a quiet cheap laptop would fit the bill. Possibly an Eee PC. Does anybody have any experience with how quiet these things are? Considering that they cost less than some plug in effects for ProTools, it would probably be worth considering the investment to keep your main computer safe.
There may be a few times that you would net access with a music production computer, but those should be considered the exception rather than the rule. You can enable antivirus, turn on the network connection, download what you need, disable the network, check what you downloaded then disable the antivirus. Avoiding the latency that an AV solution introduces into a music production environment is generally going to be worth the hassle. More importantly, a professional producer should also be doing regular backups on their system so they can restore to a previous state in case something goes wrong. The data you are creating should be backed up in a separate system... I'd really encourage daily incrementals with weekly redundant backup, one for onsite storage and one for offsite. If you are in indie producer, offsite means take it home, to a trusted friend's place or safe deposit box. If you are working for a record label, I imagine IT staff is available to work out a more robust backup strategy but the producer should still at least talk to the IT guys to know exactly what's going on. A truly amateur producer would of course have to take a slightly different route. I'd at least say disable the AV and internet while recording, and get a couple external hard drives to backup your entire system weekly or each time you finish a major milestone in a project. You can probably risk having to redo a weeks worth of work as you will be much quicker doing it the second time... the first go was a learning process.
Now there's a perfect opportunity for some bipartisan cooperation.
Honestly, GP doesn't sound like an atheist to me. This statement fits pretty squarely in the deist camp. The phrasing of his statement presupposes the existence of God, but rejects the idea of a personal god that intercedes with human events.
The usage of the original phrase really bothers me.
While correlation does not prove causation, it sure does imply causation. It's probably about as close to the definition of imply that I can come up with. The only way I can see the phrase making sense is to use the logic definition of suggest as a logically necessary consequence. Then the original usage may have held a meaning of While causation implies correlation, correlation does not imply causation, basically saying if there is causation, then correlation will follow. So finding correlations is extremely useful, but picking out the root cause of the correlation can be quite difficult, especially when there are multiple factors in play all feeding back on each other.
This does have to be applied recursively. Moderation in all things... especially moderation.
Something related that happened often when I was a kid, but almost never as an adult: a hyperawareness state, where I can feel each individual thread in the sheets, can feel/hear my blood moving, etc. This is NOT accompanied by paralysis, and I'm functionally awake, but I think it's probably a partial sleep state.
I would guess that's the "filter" part of your brain falling asleep first... so all sensory data gets passed through to the main brain processes. Alternatively, it could be false positives on what's important; your senses may only seem hyper-aware as sensory data that you aren't used to getting flagged as important does get pushed into consciousness.
The majority of memorable/fun dreams I have now are set in some variant of DOOM. Since I still think this is the only game worth playing, I have no complaint. :)
...then there's the infamous Tetris dreams. I think video games in general translate very well into dreams. The graphics are more simple than real life, and therefore easier to process. And dreams are well known to replay problems that you are working on during the day, and what are games but a large problem solving excercise?
I'm a very light sleeper... one time I dreamed that a spider was building a web attached to my nose. Woke up and guess what, some idiot spider HAD built a web between the ceiling and my nose. WTF?!!
Simple. Real sensory data gets passed through to your brain, but it interprets it as dream data, so just incorporates it into the dream. The minute tickle of a spider may not be enough to rouse you, but would be enough to tell your brain that "hey, there's a spider on my nose!" and it therefore ends up in the dream.
That's the start of lucid dreaming. If you think it may be interesting, it basically takes a little bit of thought during your waking time to train your mind to look for the cues. Eventually you may get a little better at it... it's not that different from any other type of creative thought.
The real-life time is generally quite quick. Basically, dreams comes out pre-formed, and then your mind translates the mostly random data on the fly to make some sort of story behind them. IIRC, the stage of REM where dreams actually occur is basically seconds long, which can translate into hours of dream time.
Yeah... the light switch thing is from waking life. To make it clear, I don't believe that the whole lucid dreaming thing will open up great insights into reality, just that it's kinda fun. Really, what I get out of it is the same thing as getting immersed into a great story or video game. Basically, entertainment and it costs nothing. Attempting lucid dreaming doesn't even cost time, as the effort is generally spent while falling asleep and maybe those few sweet moments after you hit the snooze button in the morning.
Ahh... hypnopompic (waking up) paralysis. When you are asleep, your mind puts out a chemical that paralyzes your muscles so you don't injure yourself because of your dream movements. The paralysis comes about when you basically wake up in the wrong order. You are kinda dreaming, kinda awake and your muscles are still paralyzed. There's many stories in folklore about a witch sitting on your chest and such that go along with the phenomenon.
Although I don't have a source at hand, I've heard many times that watching television puts one in a trance-like state. This is probably similar enough to dreaming that the brain learns to dream in a similar manner.
Then you might want to try lucid dreaming... it can be quite fun. The hard part is to realize that you are dreaming. The best way that I have found to do this is to make spot checks when you are awake, asking yourself if what is happening is possible. If you get in the habit of doing this when you are awake you should start eventually making reality checks in your dreams, or some out there dream logic will start to make you realize that in the waking world that is impossible. The two triggers that have worked the most often for me are movie style scene changes where you are one place and then suddenly another, or of course flying. Other things that can signify a dream are text scrambling itself (Text generally is not stable in dreams... probably reading skills are too complex to maintain in a dream) or light levels not changing when they should (I.E. turning a light on or off does not affect the brightness. I had a friend that would often flick lights on and off just to check if he was dreaming.) After learning to recognize whether you are dreaming or not, the next difficulty is in getting yourself to keep dreaming while you are conscious of it. The shock of realizing you are dreaming often causes you to wake up enough to stop dreaming, or to change the dream such that you no longer are lucid. I don't personally know of any tricks to help here... it seems to be just more getting comfortable with lucid dreaming. Once you have this down, you can eventually learn to control almost any aspect of your dream: calling in people you want to interact with, putting yourself in any situation you want to imagine, etc. It takes time to get full control of your dream world, but it can be done bit by bit. And if you are the imaginative type, it can be quite rewarding.
These levels of problem would be considered "almost there" in anyone else's beta program. Google has put themselves in a sticky place by having so many pretty much finished items listed as beta, in that now they will need a new name when a new product comes out which should be classified as beta.
Dude... a couple of decades is about one generation. You'd need a LOT more generations of isolation to become genetically incompatible. IIRC, the amount of gene flow needed to indefinitely stave off speciation is on the order of one or two individuals every five generations. Considering that the length of time Native American populations had been geographically isolated from European populations wasn't enough to cause speciation, this is no something you are going to see in your lifetime. It would take a MASSIVE gap of time with essentially zero gene flow between populations to get anywhere near the point where offspring are non-viable. If there is a set of humans found that is genetically incompatible with normal people, it would most likely be in some newly discovered isolated tribe rather than an Eloi/Morlock type split.
And then there's Viagra.
I would imagine that the proofreader would have the computerized text and an image of the original text side by side for comparison.
And there is another really big thing to work out about non-compete clauses. Just being legally invalid doesn't mean that the clause is non-effective. Future employers will often not risk hiring someone under ANY non-compete contract, as they don't want to risk spending money on a legal defense for you, even if that defense will win. Unless your talents are extremely rare, and in that case you would have enough muscle to get non-compete clauses struck from any contract.
So all we have to do is stop recycling and start throwing our paper garbage into air tight landfills.
There are actually multiple ways in which water injection can in theory increase the efficiency of an engine, end they are all basically related to thermal expansion in the cylinder. The cooling effect you mentioned IIRC is actually related to the temperature of the intake air more than the engine itself. Cooler air is more dense, so you can dump more moles of air into the cylinder in the compression phase, which when heated will expand more than less dense air will. Droplets of atomized water will be in the liquid phase during compression, but then the heat of ignition will cause them to essentially boil into steam creating pressure that gives you an extra bit of power for a given amount of fuel. Essentially, remember that the heat of combustion doesn't directly move the piston in the engine; it's the pressure created by thermal expansion of intake gasses, in addition to the increase in volume of the end products of combustion versus the volume of the fuel. IIRC, for optimum efficiency the water injector does have to compensate slightly for humidity changes as too much water will eventually decrease the efficiency and power output of the engine.
Hmm... I'm trying to remember... is the water generally injected into the air intake or into the carburetor?