I agreed with your last post. What is this in reference to?
it not only doesn't have any utility, but it was kind of stupid, too.
By calling the project "stupid", what do you mean? If you mean pointless, that is utility, which has been covered. If you mean uninteresting, well, not everything is interesting to everyone. Do you mean something else?
Can you please give an example of the signs of magical thinking that you see?
Setting something to a purpose for which it was not intended is a great way to see if you really understand how it operates. This leads to de-mystification; if it doesn't work, you have the opportunity to figure out why and then fix it. The process of getting a project like this to work is the opposite of magical thinking. The person may still have a misunderstanding about some part of the system, but how ever do you expect to cure that without making an attempt to learn about it?
The person knows the amount of power that he can get from one USB port. He knows how much power he needs. He came up with 30 USB ports to get the right power. So he did it. And it does what he intended it to do. Unlike the megaphone analogy, this actually works. This is not a display of magical thinking.
Here on slashdot, we applaud people hacking stuff to scratch an itch, no matter how stupid the itch itself is.
I'm not seeing any such applause or admiration on this thread. Most of the posts seem to either completely miss the point of hacking -- and rather than asking, they immediately begin bashing -- or pretend not to know so they can heap on some derision anyway. Even *I* have zero interest in the USB cook thing -- I simply have no problem in understanding how someone else would find this interesting. It is a different sort of culture. If I didn't know, I hope I would ask; in the same way that I am asking about parts of your post in case I have missed something.
I just can't see the itch behind this project.
I don't see where you are going with this. The person who did it obviously had an itch to scratch for this type of project. I explained the general idea in my first post. Obviously, you and others do not see or share the itch. That's fine.
Yeah, but it would've been a lot cooler to make a USB controlled hotplate.
I agree -- maybe this will inspire someone to do it. That would be neat. (Probably been done somewhere, but it's the sharing of ideas that is important.) Taking that and adding some scripting to cook/flip a burger at the right time would be very neat to see!
You're not going to ever get cookingly useful power from a USB port
Yep. But 'utility' wasn't the reason this was done. Ditto for Stallman trying to eat with six chopsticks.
I took your first post to be sincere. You are now simultaneously asking 'why' and complaining that someone has given you an explanation. That is certainly inventive.
Good question. Here is the answer. People in any sort of hacking culture (hardware in this case) do things like this for fun. It's a completely ludicrous idea to take 30 USB ports and try to cook dinner with it -- but it would be amusing to do, and he might learn something in the process. It may not have practical value for other people -- that isn't the point.
Refer to Stallman's article on hacking:
"I went to lunch with some GNU fans, and was sitting down to eat some tteokpaekki (*), when a waitress set down six chopsticks right in front of me. It occurred to me that perhaps these were meant for three people, but it was more amusing to imagine that I was supposed to use all six. I did not know any way to do that, so I realized that if I could come up with a way, it would be a hack. I started thinking. After a few seconds I had an idea..."
You get some idea of the thought process behind this. Although the subject of these two hacks are very different, I'm sure something similar was going through the mind of the USB cook.
"...It is hard to write a simple definition of something as varied as hacking, but I think what these activities have in common is playfulness, cleverness, and exploration. Thus, hacking means exploring the limits of what is possible, in a spirit of playful cleverness. Activities that display playful cleverness have "hack value"."
If you're making a decision for your business, you should be doing a feasibility study for both products, not asking slashdot how to convince your management one way or the other.
So the best way is this: do a feasibility study (i.e., operational, technical, economic, schedule research -- google it), present *your findings* (not what you feel about, then go from there.
"It's not on the charts... what's going on?" "Our position is correct, except... no Goldilocks..." "What do you mean? Where is it?" "That's what I'm trying to tell you, kid. It ain't there."
"New technologies and the progress they bring can make it impossible to distinguish truth from illusion and can lead to confusion between reality and virtual reality," the pope said.
The article does not say whether the Pope is for or against new technology.
"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men." -John Acton (Baron Acton)
This was all figured out 200+ years ago (I'm sure there are far older references to the same idea), but Hollywood came along to give us "hope" in the form of Superman, etc... that is, it came along to confuse us.
Vim users often re-map the "caps lock" key to be "escape", so you end up never moving your hands off of home row. Not moving from the home row: that's where the speed comes in. If the commands come naturally and you never have to move from the home row, the difference is very noticeable.
Plus, you're not always in insert mode. Arguably, you'll use save more often while you're revising something -- move a word or line in command mode, save, and continue without moving your hands. It's very natural.
I would say don't consult the vim guy for Word hotkeys, but here's a better one for you: CTRL+Right arrow to skip a word, versus vim's 'w'. Yeah, just 'w'. Or 'W' to skip to the next whitespace -- something Word won't do afaik. Take both hands off home row, or just press 'w'? I'm sure you can find worse if you are really interested, but I don't think it's much of a contest; efficient editing is specifically what vim was made for.
The popular vi clones (like vim) allow users to perform advanced editing (not just tapping arrow keys to move around), and it does it with the keyboard alone -- and mostly keys that are easy to press (like:w to save, instead of Alt+F, S). This means you do not waste time moving one hand back and forth from the mouse -- it *removes* this overhead. If you try to use something like Word with the keyboard only, you'll be using some very awkward key combinations. Not so with vim.
That covers the "advanced" GUI editors. Now: ed, MS edit, Notepad, etc., don't even try to implement the vast number of features you get with vim that let you quickly edit through the command line. As Bram Moolenaar likes to say, once the commands are "in your fingers" -- so that it's second nature -- your editing speed improves immensely. Particularly for writing code, but it is true for any other use as well.
If you are not interested in quick, efficient editing, then there is no reason to use vim. Ed or Notepad or Word will yield the same result as vim, it will just take you longer to do it (assuming you know how to use both editors efficiently). Most users get hung up because vim is a modal editor, so they ditch it and go back to gedit. For the rest of us who put the time in to learn how to use it effectively, it pays off in a big way.
"When I log into my Xenix system with my 110 baud teletype, both vi and Emacs are just too damn slow. They print useless messages like, ‘C-h for help’ and ‘“foo” File is read only’. So I use the editor that doesn't waste my VALUABLE time.
The "Nicer To Open Source" (NT OS) initiative certainly played its part in attracting users to GNU/Linux and other open source software! Who would have known its been going on for so long?
Excellent points, mr_mischief. The reason I suggest Sagan, Attenborough, and others like them is that they mend the perceived gap between the science and philosophy which I believe students have ground into them by dislike/improper teaching of the hard sciences from k-12.
The books I am talking about were devoted to inspiring wonder, admiration, and curiosity -- not just dictating the cold hard facts of what we see -- that's why I recommended reading Sagan for this class rather than Newton, Einstein, Heisenberg, etc. Within the first chapter of *any* of Sagan's books, this difference is immediately apparent. And the knowledge within it is surely a "different perspective" than what you fill find in other important philosophical texts, which was a stated goal of the class.
The science classes most students will take in college will make most non-science majors have a dislike of science, and allow the science majors to fall into their little discipline. I find this to be a shame.
As Brian Greene says, teaching the "big ideas" of science would help science take its rightful place *beside* the humanities (not *in place* of them), and encourage the notion that an understanding of science is instrumental as *one aspect* of understanding humanity. Reading and thinking about the ideas of the classical philosophers is instrumental to modern day philosophy -- no question about it. However, the newer understanding that human life is the end product of four billion years of gradual change, after ten billion years of stars exploding alone in a lifeless void, adds quite a new dimension to what philosophers historically understood life to be about. Exposing students to this using the most engaging and thought-provoking teachers of science *along side* other vitally important philosophical works is critical for students see the full picture.
By the way, I posted something similar to this on Mr. Abbott's blog. I was happy to see his response that such philosophical science reading is part of the class, though I'm not familiar with the books he listed, and he admits to not finding them very convincing. I'll have to read them to see how they stack up to Sagan.
If this class is meant to "[engage] students with fundamental questions of humanity" and completely skips over the realm of science, that is a huge blunder. You can't have a full picture of what it is to be human without the insight that science brings.
This would have been a great class to introduce students into an appreciation of science, particularly since most students will never get that out of "normal" science studies. Should have had them read Sagan's Pale Blue Dot, then check out Symphony of Science. Shame.
The study says that, after 6 years, they found people who sat around watching TV for 4 hours a day had greater risk than those who sat around watching TV for 2 hours a day. And this "proves" that sitting increases your chances of death by X%.
Did they try having the two groups switch their behavior after 3 years, to see if NOT sitting actually changed things? Or is this effect natural and irreversible? Did EVERYONE in the study exhibit the same results, or were some people affected less or more than others?
They addressed issues such as smoking, but what about other lifestyle differences? How many of the people who watched TV for 4 hours a day also sat at a computer at work for 8 hours a day -- skewing their reported results? Or how many had higher stress jobs that might cause the same effect for different reasons?
Just things I wonder about when reading something like this.
Look at the section, "What does it mean when a Challenge Number is factored?"
It is interesting to note that this section of the FAQ makes an example of RSA-768 being cracked in 2010 -- turns out they were very close, whether they tried to be or not (the article states that the number was actually factored in Dec 2009).
What a ridiculously phrased article. We have "run out of ideas when it comes to inspiring tomorrows products?" D`oh, there are no more ideas. Us cattle better be happy with what we have.
The science fiction writers of the 50s, 60s, and 70s projecting and inventing new technology are the programmers of today. The same creativity is necessary for both good writers and good programmers.
However, this article does dance around a good point. When you consider Moore's Law, as time moves on, it should actually be more and more difficult to predict something that is an "extremely new idea". New technology is closer and closer. The radical ideas of 80 years ago took decades to come around, but the radical ideas of today are relatively right around the corner.
It will be difficult to balance the free, creative mindset of F/SF with the structure of a class and the tangible results demanded by school systems and committees. Hopefully the students AND the teacher will go into the class recognising that there will ultimately be far more to take away from a book than what the social situation was during some period of time. Students will get lots of that in their history classes, and a book that stands out with them will make them review and appreciate those factors in their own time.
Some background on the authors and their stories should be interesting and beneficial, but some of the novels being mentioned are worth more to be "enjoyed" than "studied". And worthwhile they are.
I think there have been a lot of good suggestions... here are some I have not seen that I would include if I had to teach a course on F/SF:
The Dying Earth - Jack Vance. The first Fantasy novel published by Jack Vance, a classic American F/SF author. It is a collection of related stories, each of which are 20-30 pages long, making them easy to sprinkle into a class. Being published in 1950, as a whole it provides quite an insight into the foundations of modern F/SF. For the Dungeons and Dragons-esque fans in the class, as I would have been, in this book Vance coins "The Excellent Prismatic Spray" -- which has been present in the D&D universe and among its many variations and spinoffs since the beginning of their existence. Despite being such an amazing contribution to the Fantasy genre, this remains a little known work today.
Three Hearts and Three Lions - Poul Anderson. I struggle to call it "required reading", but it is a great work of Fantasy, and definitely should be mentioned to interested students. Anderson plucks a soldier out of WWII and places him in the world of King Arthur's Court. Somewhat similar to Twain's "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" in that way, but far more readable and shorter (180 pages).
The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension - Earl Mac Rauch. I have never watched the movie. This book is phenomenal; I very much hope your students will get the chance to be exposed to it. The character of Buckaroo Banzai conveys a very unconventional, original, and amazingly sensible philosophy on life. Strong themes also include leadership and reactions to adversity. On the same level as HHGTTG in my opinion.
Both Jack Vance and Poul Anderson have been one of the twenty-some recipients of the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award given by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America organization -- on the list with names such as Heinlein, Clarke, Asimov, and LeGuin. Other names on the list may help you find more material -- though I'm sure you will have plenty.:)
Slashdot Mirror
I dunno
I agreed with your last post. What is this in reference to?
it not only doesn't have any utility, but it was kind of stupid, too.
By calling the project "stupid", what do you mean? If you mean pointless, that is utility, which has been covered. If you mean uninteresting, well, not everything is interesting to everyone. Do you mean something else?
Can you please give an example of the signs of magical thinking that you see?
Setting something to a purpose for which it was not intended is a great way to see if you really understand how it operates. This leads to de-mystification; if it doesn't work, you have the opportunity to figure out why and then fix it. The process of getting a project like this to work is the opposite of magical thinking. The person may still have a misunderstanding about some part of the system, but how ever do you expect to cure that without making an attempt to learn about it?
The person knows the amount of power that he can get from one USB port. He knows how much power he needs. He came up with 30 USB ports to get the right power. So he did it. And it does what he intended it to do. Unlike the megaphone analogy, this actually works. This is not a display of magical thinking.
Here on slashdot, we applaud people hacking stuff to scratch an itch, no matter how stupid the itch itself is.
I'm not seeing any such applause or admiration on this thread. Most of the posts seem to either completely miss the point of hacking -- and rather than asking, they immediately begin bashing -- or pretend not to know so they can heap on some derision anyway. Even *I* have zero interest in the USB cook thing -- I simply have no problem in understanding how someone else would find this interesting. It is a different sort of culture. If I didn't know, I hope I would ask; in the same way that I am asking about parts of your post in case I have missed something.
I just can't see the itch behind this project.
I don't see where you are going with this. The person who did it obviously had an itch to scratch for this type of project. I explained the general idea in my first post. Obviously, you and others do not see or share the itch. That's fine.
Yeah, but it would've been a lot cooler to make a USB controlled hotplate.
I agree -- maybe this will inspire someone to do it. That would be neat. (Probably been done somewhere, but it's the sharing of ideas that is important.) Taking that and adding some scripting to cook/flip a burger at the right time would be very neat to see!
You're not going to ever get cookingly useful power from a USB port
Yep. But 'utility' wasn't the reason this was done. Ditto for Stallman trying to eat with six chopsticks.
I took your first post to be sincere. You are now simultaneously asking 'why' and complaining that someone has given you an explanation. That is certainly inventive.
Good question. Here is the answer. People in any sort of hacking culture (hardware in this case) do things like this for fun. It's a completely ludicrous idea to take 30 USB ports and try to cook dinner with it -- but it would be amusing to do, and he might learn something in the process. It may not have practical value for other people -- that isn't the point.
Refer to Stallman's article on hacking:
"I went to lunch with some GNU fans, and was sitting down to eat some tteokpaekki (*), when a waitress set down six chopsticks right in front of me. It occurred to me that perhaps these were meant for three people, but it was more amusing to imagine that I was supposed to use all six. I did not know any way to do that, so I realized that if I could come up with a way, it would be a hack. I started thinking. After a few seconds I had an idea..."
You get some idea of the thought process behind this. Although the subject of these two hacks are very different, I'm sure something similar was going through the mind of the USB cook.
"...It is hard to write a simple definition of something as varied as hacking, but I think what these activities have in common is playfulness, cleverness, and exploration. Thus, hacking means exploring the limits of what is possible, in a spirit of playful cleverness. Activities that display playful cleverness have "hack value"."
http://stallman.org/articles/on-hacking.html
HTH
If you're making a decision for your business, you should be doing a feasibility study for both products, not asking slashdot how to convince your management one way or the other.
So the best way is this: do a feasibility study (i.e., operational, technical, economic, schedule research -- google it), present *your findings* (not what you feel about, then go from there.
"It's not on the charts... what's going on?"
"Our position is correct, except... no Goldilocks..."
"What do you mean? Where is it?"
"That's what I'm trying to tell you, kid. It ain't there."
"New technologies and the progress they bring can make it impossible to distinguish truth from illusion and can lead to confusion between reality and virtual reality," the pope said.
The article does not say whether the Pope is for or against new technology.
"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men." -John Acton (Baron Acton) This was all figured out 200+ years ago (I'm sure there are far older references to the same idea), but Hollywood came along to give us "hope" in the form of Superman, etc... that is, it came along to confuse us.
See reply above.
Vim users often re-map the "caps lock" key to be "escape", so you end up never moving your hands off of home row. Not moving from the home row: that's where the speed comes in. If the commands come naturally and you never have to move from the home row, the difference is very noticeable.
Plus, you're not always in insert mode. Arguably, you'll use save more often while you're revising something -- move a word or line in command mode, save, and continue without moving your hands. It's very natural.
I would say don't consult the vim guy for Word hotkeys, but here's a better one for you: CTRL+Right arrow to skip a word, versus vim's 'w'. Yeah, just 'w'. Or 'W' to skip to the next whitespace -- something Word won't do afaik. Take both hands off home row, or just press 'w'? I'm sure you can find worse if you are really interested, but I don't think it's much of a contest; efficient editing is specifically what vim was made for.
Why people use vim, in 2 minutes:
The popular vi clones (like vim) allow users to perform advanced editing (not just tapping arrow keys to move around), and it does it with the keyboard alone -- and mostly keys that are easy to press (like :w to save, instead of Alt+F, S). This means you do not waste time moving one hand back and forth from the mouse -- it *removes* this overhead. If you try to use something like Word with the keyboard only, you'll be using some very awkward key combinations. Not so with vim.
That covers the "advanced" GUI editors. Now: ed, MS edit, Notepad, etc., don't even try to implement the vast number of features you get with vim that let you quickly edit through the command line. As Bram Moolenaar likes to say, once the commands are "in your fingers" -- so that it's second nature -- your editing speed improves immensely. Particularly for writing code, but it is true for any other use as well.
If you are not interested in quick, efficient editing, then there is no reason to use vim. Ed or Notepad or Word will yield the same result as vim, it will just take you longer to do it (assuming you know how to use both editors efficiently). Most users get hung up because vim is a modal editor, so they ditch it and go back to gedit. For the rest of us who put the time in to learn how to use it effectively, it pays off in a big way.
See also:
Bram's Seven habits of effective text editing: http://www.moolenaar.net/habits.html (this is in presentation form somewhere on youtube, too)
Vim's about page: http://www.vim.org/about.php
"When I log into my Xenix system with my 110 baud teletype, both vi and Emacs are just too damn slow. They print useless messages like, ‘C-h for help’ and ‘“foo” File is read only’. So I use the editor that doesn't waste my VALUABLE time.
Ed, man! !man ed"
http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed.msg.html :-)
The "Nicer To Open Source" (NT OS) initiative certainly played its part in attracting users to GNU/Linux and other open source software! Who would have known its been going on for so long?
Isn't there a point at which it's spooky to be celebrating the birthday of dead things? Like, when it dies?
This is too Norman Batesy for me.
Wow -- I was introduced to astronomy through Jack's show. He will be missed.
Excellent points, mr_mischief. The reason I suggest Sagan, Attenborough, and others like them is that they mend the perceived gap between the science and philosophy which I believe students have ground into them by dislike/improper teaching of the hard sciences from k-12.
The books I am talking about were devoted to inspiring wonder, admiration, and curiosity -- not just dictating the cold hard facts of what we see -- that's why I recommended reading Sagan for this class rather than Newton, Einstein, Heisenberg, etc. Within the first chapter of *any* of Sagan's books, this difference is immediately apparent. And the knowledge within it is surely a "different perspective" than what you fill find in other important philosophical texts, which was a stated goal of the class.
The science classes most students will take in college will make most non-science majors have a dislike of science, and allow the science majors to fall into their little discipline. I find this to be a shame.
As Brian Greene says, teaching the "big ideas" of science would help science take its rightful place *beside* the humanities (not *in place* of them), and encourage the notion that an understanding of science is instrumental as *one aspect* of understanding humanity. Reading and thinking about the ideas of the classical philosophers is instrumental to modern day philosophy -- no question about it. However, the newer understanding that human life is the end product of four billion years of gradual change, after ten billion years of stars exploding alone in a lifeless void, adds quite a new dimension to what philosophers historically understood life to be about. Exposing students to this using the most engaging and thought-provoking teachers of science *along side* other vitally important philosophical works is critical for students see the full picture.
By the way, I posted something similar to this on Mr. Abbott's blog. I was happy to see his response that such philosophical science reading is part of the class, though I'm not familiar with the books he listed, and he admits to not finding them very convincing. I'll have to read them to see how they stack up to Sagan.
If this class is meant to "[engage] students with fundamental questions of humanity" and completely skips over the realm of science, that is a huge blunder. You can't have a full picture of what it is to be human without the insight that science brings.
This would have been a great class to introduce students into an appreciation of science, particularly since most students will never get that out of "normal" science studies. Should have had them read Sagan's Pale Blue Dot, then check out Symphony of Science. Shame.
The study says that, after 6 years, they found people who sat around watching TV for 4 hours a day had greater risk than those who sat around watching TV for 2 hours a day. And this "proves" that sitting increases your chances of death by X%.
Did they try having the two groups switch their behavior after 3 years, to see if NOT sitting actually changed things? Or is this effect natural and irreversible? Did EVERYONE in the study exhibit the same results, or were some people affected less or more than others?
They addressed issues such as smoking, but what about other lifestyle differences? How many of the people who watched TV for 4 hours a day also sat at a computer at work for 8 hours a day -- skewing their reported results? Or how many had higher stress jobs that might cause the same effect for different reasons?
Just things I wonder about when reading something like this.
RSA Labs explains the meaning of factorization in the old Challenge FAQ:
http://www.rsa.com/rsalabs/node.asp?id=2094
Look at the section, "What does it mean when a Challenge Number is factored?"
It is interesting to note that this section of the FAQ makes an example of RSA-768 being cracked in 2010 -- turns out they were very close, whether they tried to be or not (the article states that the number was actually factored in Dec 2009).
What a ridiculously phrased article. We have "run out of ideas when it comes to inspiring tomorrows products?" D`oh, there are no more ideas. Us cattle better be happy with what we have.
The science fiction writers of the 50s, 60s, and 70s projecting and inventing new technology are the programmers of today. The same creativity is necessary for both good writers and good programmers.
However, this article does dance around a good point. When you consider Moore's Law, as time moves on, it should actually be more and more difficult to predict something that is an "extremely new idea". New technology is closer and closer. The radical ideas of 80 years ago took decades to come around, but the radical ideas of today are relatively right around the corner.
It will be difficult to balance the free, creative mindset of F/SF with the structure of a class and the tangible results demanded by school systems and committees. Hopefully the students AND the teacher will go into the class recognising that there will ultimately be far more to take away from a book than what the social situation was during some period of time. Students will get lots of that in their history classes, and a book that stands out with them will make them review and appreciate those factors in their own time.
Some background on the authors and their stories should be interesting and beneficial, but some of the novels being mentioned are worth more to be "enjoyed" than "studied". And worthwhile they are.
I think there have been a lot of good suggestions... here are some I have not seen that I would include if I had to teach a course on F/SF:
The Dying Earth - Jack Vance. The first Fantasy novel published by Jack Vance, a classic American F/SF author. It is a collection of related stories, each of which are 20-30 pages long, making them easy to sprinkle into a class. Being published in 1950, as a whole it provides quite an insight into the foundations of modern F/SF. For the Dungeons and Dragons-esque fans in the class, as I would have been, in this book Vance coins "The Excellent Prismatic Spray" -- which has been present in the D&D universe and among its many variations and spinoffs since the beginning of their existence. Despite being such an amazing contribution to the Fantasy genre, this remains a little known work today.
Three Hearts and Three Lions - Poul Anderson. I struggle to call it "required reading", but it is a great work of Fantasy, and definitely should be mentioned to interested students. Anderson plucks a soldier out of WWII and places him in the world of King Arthur's Court. Somewhat similar to Twain's "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" in that way, but far more readable and shorter (180 pages).
The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension - Earl Mac Rauch. I have never watched the movie. This book is phenomenal; I very much hope your students will get the chance to be exposed to it. The character of Buckaroo Banzai conveys a very unconventional, original, and amazingly sensible philosophy on life. Strong themes also include leadership and reactions to adversity. On the same level as HHGTTG in my opinion.
Both Jack Vance and Poul Anderson have been one of the twenty-some recipients of the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award given by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America organization -- on the list with names such as Heinlein, Clarke, Asimov, and LeGuin. Other names on the list may help you find more material -- though I'm sure you will have plenty. :)
Best of luck with the class.