CBC has a number of interesting shows. I particularly like "Ideas", which you can get on cassette or just record live from the internet. http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/
CBC also has "Quirks and Quarks" which covers interesting topics and has interesting guests, but the commentary is a bit juvenile.
I really like "As it happens" but I'm not sure how good that would be recorded - they phone people who are in the day's news.
If your alternative is to decline the job, it might be a better strategy than negotiating simply to return the contract with anything you don't like stroked out.
I haven't done this with an employment contract, but I have with various other kinds of onerous-but-routine paperwork, and the amendments are rarely challenged. I have no idea if that's because the amendments were accepted or unnoticed, but I don't really care.
But don't do it unless you can afford the chance that your amendments will be rejected and the offer withdrawn.
Not the top 1-2% of artists. The top 1-2% of the population. If you can draw a Spunky (whatever that is) you're doing better than me. Only 97 more "artists" to out-do and you're in!
Mensa and Myths about Nerds
on
MSN Sponsors Mensa
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Contrary to conventional wisdom, intelligent people are more, not less, likely to be socially competent, well groomed, aware of what's going on in the world, etc.
That said, Mensa is a social club with highly self-selected membership. I'm not sure that its members are any weirder than members of Parents without Partners, a Sci-Fi Con, or an athletic club.
There's nothing wrong with a social club that draws together people with a common interest. It is just that in Mensa the common interest is one's own intelligence, with a tacit subtext of "only people who know how smart I am appreciate me, and I appreciate only people who are as smart as me."
I have never been a Mensa member; I have never been tempted to be a Mensa member for the reasons cited. I know some, but remarkably few, Mensa members. They haven't convinced me that Mensa members have enough genuine common interests to form a cohesive social club.
EDS is a consulting firm. They sell "billable hours." If those billable hours result in an accurate study or a system that works it is strictly because the individuals whose hours were billed happen to do a good job.
Paul Graham is famous for (among other things) writing the seminal work on practical Bayesian spam filtering. But his Bayesian filter isn't Bayesian at all and makes no sense from a probability perspective.
I'm not ready to attribute it to PIPEDA, but my spam proportion has levelled off.
For the last year I've consistently received about 81% spam. This is in contrast to the previous 4 years, which saw a continuous increase.
Do you really want to do this?
on
Normalizing Music?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I acknowledge that not everybody (including me) is an audiophile, but the recording engineer went to some effort to make a recording that, when played, would reproduce the original performance as closely as possible.
If you ride the volume control (or use automatic gain control to do it for you) or use dynamic range compression (a different animal from digital compression), you're compromising the music.
I'd no sooner do this than bleach my favourite painting.
I'm a Luddite when it comes to Firefox. I don't really understand why it was created, notwithstanding that I've been told several times that if I had any savvy at all I would find the reasons apparent, as everybody else does.
I see it as brand-name dilution. I was an early Mozilla evangelist. Now all the people I converted from the dark side are terribly confused and groaning "Do I have to change again?" You mean I have to replace Mozilla browser/mail by 2 different programs? "It's almost the same only better - I'll help you convert" doesn't play very well as an answer.
I have no ready solution, now that Firefox has established a beach head (IMO, due to surrendipity and marketing rather than inherent superiority). I suppose I'll have to try my best to convince the disciples that they should change horses yet again.
I have more experience with running than rowing (which for me consume roughly equal energy for the same time/distance).
You would be very optimistic to expect the average untrained person to run 5km in 30 mins. I would recommend to such a person to walk for 30 mins at any pace, and start with 15 mins if 30 is too much.
I'm basically transferring that advice to the rower. Sit on the thing and keep moving for 30 mins at any pace. You'll have a natural urge to increase the pace. That's fine, so long as you're still comfortable. If you make yourself uncomfortable, you're likely to find exercise a chore and quit.
I wasn't trying to yank your chain. You said in your original post: "one will be hard pressed to row for more than 2K (4-5 min, (even six, if a woman)"
Did you mean hard pressed at 4-5 min/500m? That'd be pretty slow, but I'm sure that a number of people would have to start at that pace.
OK - I don't really think you meant that. I think you meant hard-pressed at 4-5 min/km, and I agree. 6-10 min/km is a more realistic start for your average couch potato.
And, yes, the Concept II does indeed report time/500m so 6-10min/km is 3:00 - 6:00 on the display.
Aside: I thought Concept II was by far the world leader in ergos. What are its competitors?
Most of us are shockingly out of shape. That is not to say we shouldn't exercise at the level we are able.
The author of the original article stated that he was feeling weak, which leads me to believe that he should start slow and celebrate his achievement, not compare himself to elite rowers. If he feels that 15 mins is a better duration for a start, that's 15 mins better than nothing. But 30 mins, several times a week, is what I think he should plan for in the long run.
He also said that he didn't have a lot of spare time which is why I believe a piece of home equipment (or office equipment if he has an accommodating employer) is the only way he'll find the time. 15-30 mins of exercise takes an hour, more or less, when you include the overhead of a club.
One of the major reasons that people quit exercising is that they try too hard. As you approach your limit, the perceived effort and desire to quit rise exponentially, but the health benefit rises only slightly. So the trick is to back way off. To the point that you don't feel distress. And, to use a commercial cliche, "Just Do It!"
(BTW, I'm in decent shape, but far from elite: personal bests of 10K Concept II 39:55; 10K run 39:56; Marathon 3:40.)
Sorry, but you're speaking of competitive rowing. I never set any speed targets.
I assume you mean 2km at 4-5 min/km. Or do you mean 2km in 5 min? I don't know about a real shell, but with the Concept II's calibration, that's impossible.
I didn't say you have to go fast. How 'bout 8 min/km? Or plug in the heart monitor and ignore the speed.
My point is that you can sit on the rower and do anything between nothing more than sitting and an olympic performance. It all depends on how hard and how often you yank on the handle.
Rowing is low-impact, aerobic, and you can start as slowly as you like. 30 mins a day while you listen to the radio, watch TV, or just ponder your latest bug.
The unit I mentioned above is suitable for beginners through elite athletes.
Definite nerd appeal with a USB connection and a wireless heart monitor. Lots of builtin stats and uses a plug-in memory card. Regenerative power means a D-cell lasts years.
I'm on my 2nd rowing machine (the first was a competitor but it did last a dozen years and thousands of kms). I'm about to hit 1000 km on this one.
No other $800 piece of exercise equipment will dissipate enough energy (without self-destructing) to give you a decent workout. You'd have to drop more than $3K to get a treadmill anywhere neare as durable. And getting on your feet to walk/run requires a lot more motivation than sitting down on the rower.
The article and the SpamAssassin documentation seem to imply that SpamAssassin is best used as a server-side filter.
In fact I've found it works great as a personal filter, if you configure it somewhat differently from the way the documentation suggests. That is, increase the weight of the Bayes filter, and have it train itself on every message it classifies. Then correct it on any mistakes it makes - which rapidly become few and far between.
Here's a paper showing that SpamAssassin can achieve as good results as others touted for personal use.
Unfortunately SpamAssassin is a bit hard to install and set up. But if you have RedHat or Debian Linux, it is available by rpm/apt and you can install a few scripts to make it work.
I wish I had a better shrink-wrapped version, but I don't. So I'm supplying the raw files for one user in the hopes that (a) somewhat technical people can reproduce the setup and be happy, (b) somebody will make a shrink-wrapped version, perhaps with plugins or extensions or macros for more mail clients.
There's a very interesting video on the legal aspects of this case available at www.spamconference.org
You've Got Jail. Some First Hand Observations from the Jeremy Jaynes Spam Trial Jon Praed, Founding Partner, Internet Law Group
In a nutshell, they convicted Jaynes' accomplice based on the money trail and it wasn't all that convincing. The evidence ruled inadmissable was convincing, but not the evidence used to convict.
Windows GUI and apps make it almost impossible to automate anything. Sure, you can still write a bat file *if* there's a command-line equivalent, but for many things there just isn't. So you have to open windows and open unintuitive tabs like "advanced" or "tools" or "preferences." And do it over and over every time you want to change something.
Here is just one example. I use wireless to connect to the internet. Usually, I have "connection sharing" enabled so that the ethernet serves DHCP to a slave computer. Now and then I don't have access to wireless, so I have to reconfigure the ethernet *and* the wireless.
How? With XP (classic mode):
Start
settings
network-and-dialup-connections
wireless connection
properties
advanced
unclick "allow other network users to
connect through this computer's
internet connection"
OK
Close
(wait a long time)
local area network
internet protocol (TCP/IP)
properties
obtain IP address automatically
obtain DNS server addresses
OK
OK
(wait a long time)
I've done that a hundred times. If only I could
type it into a script.
But I can't. Although somebody probably post
some arcane way to do it in this particular
instance, that won't enable me to write scripts
to walk through the myriad of other gui mazes
that Windows throws at me.
Linux, Unix, OS/X any day. Windows with Cygwin, if I must.
Slashdot Mirror
CBC has a number of interesting shows. I particularly like "Ideas", which you can get on cassette or just record live from the internet. http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/
CBC also has "Quirks and Quarks" which covers interesting topics and has interesting guests, but the commentary is a bit juvenile.
I really like "As it happens" but I'm not sure how good that would be recorded - they phone people who are in the day's news.
If your alternative is to decline the job, it might be a better strategy than negotiating simply to return the contract with anything you don't like stroked out.
I haven't done this with an employment contract, but I have with various other kinds of onerous-but-routine paperwork, and the amendments are rarely challenged. I have no idea if that's because the amendments were accepted or unnoticed, but I don't really care.
But don't do it unless you can afford the chance that your amendments will be rejected and the offer withdrawn.
Sure they're reliable. They just aren't lie detectors. They're interrogation aids, just like bright lights, bamboo shoots, rubber hoses, racks, ...
Not the top 1-2% of artists. The top 1-2% of the population. If you can draw a Spunky (whatever that is) you're doing better than me. Only 97 more "artists" to out-do and you're in!
Contrary to conventional wisdom, intelligent people are more, not less, likely to be socially competent, well groomed, aware of what's going on in the world, etc.
That said, Mensa is a social club with highly self-selected membership. I'm not sure that its members are any weirder than members of Parents without Partners, a Sci-Fi Con, or an athletic club.
There's nothing wrong with a social club that draws together people with a common interest. It is just that in Mensa the common interest is one's own intelligence, with a tacit subtext of "only people who know how smart I am appreciate me, and I appreciate only people who are as smart as me."
I have never been a Mensa member; I have never been tempted to be a Mensa member for the reasons cited. I know some, but remarkably few, Mensa members. They haven't convinced me that Mensa members have enough genuine common interests to form a cohesive social club.
EDS is a consulting firm. They sell "billable hours." If those billable hours result in an accurate study or a system that works it is strictly because the individuals whose hours were billed happen to do a good job.
Paul Graham is famous for (among other things) writing the seminal work on practical Bayesian spam filtering. But his Bayesian filter isn't Bayesian at all and makes no sense from a probability perspective.
It does work pretty well, but was improved quite a bit by the application of some mathematics by Gary Robinson.
Yes, you've captured their attitude precisely.
The gcc team seem to have no respect for legacy code. Incompatible syntax changes and incompatible dynamic libraries make me dread every new release.
I'm not ready to attribute it to PIPEDA, but my spam proportion has levelled off.
For the last year I've consistently received about 81% spam. This is in contrast to the previous 4 years, which saw a continuous increase.
I acknowledge that not everybody (including me) is an audiophile, but the recording engineer went to some effort to make a recording that, when played, would reproduce the original performance as closely as possible.
If you ride the volume control (or use automatic gain control to do it for you) or use dynamic range compression (a different animal from digital compression), you're compromising the music.
I'd no sooner do this than bleach my favourite painting.
I'm a Luddite when it comes to Firefox. I don't really understand why it was created, notwithstanding that I've been told several times that if I had any savvy at all I would find the reasons apparent, as everybody else does.
I see it as brand-name dilution. I was an early Mozilla evangelist. Now all the people I converted from the dark side are terribly confused and groaning "Do I have to change again?" You mean I have to replace Mozilla browser/mail by 2 different programs? "It's almost the same only better - I'll help you convert" doesn't play very well as an answer.
I have no ready solution, now that Firefox has established a beach head (IMO, due to surrendipity and marketing rather than inherent superiority). I suppose I'll have to try my best to convince the disciples that they should change horses yet again.
I have more experience with running than rowing
(which for me consume roughly equal energy for
the same time/distance).
You would be very optimistic to expect the average
untrained person to run 5km in 30 mins. I would
recommend to such a person to walk for 30 mins at
any pace, and start with 15 mins if 30 is too much.
I'm basically transferring that advice to the
rower. Sit on the thing and keep moving for
30 mins at any pace. You'll have a natural
urge to increase the pace. That's fine, so
long as you're still comfortable. If you make
yourself uncomfortable, you're likely to find
exercise a chore and quit.
"so 6-10min/km is 3:00 - 6:00 on the display."
Typo. Should be "6-10min/km is 3:00 - 5:00".
Sorry to add to the confusion.
I wasn't trying to yank your chain. You said in
your original post: "one will be hard pressed to
row for more than 2K (4-5 min, (even six, if a
woman)"
Did you mean hard pressed at 4-5 min/500m? That'd
be pretty slow, but I'm sure that a number of
people would have to start at that pace.
OK - I don't really think you meant that. I
think you meant hard-pressed at 4-5 min/km, and
I agree. 6-10 min/km is a more realistic start
for your average couch potato.
And, yes, the Concept II does indeed report
time/500m so 6-10min/km is 3:00 - 6:00 on the
display.
Aside: I thought Concept II was by far the world
leader in ergos. What are its competitors?
The World record for 2 km on the Concept II is 5:37.0
I am inexpert in on-water rowing. I've been unable
to find any 2000m results in the 4:00 range. Could
you please point me at some?
Most of us are shockingly out of shape. That is
not to say we shouldn't exercise at the level we
are able.
The author of the original article stated that he
was feeling weak, which leads me to believe that
he should start slow and celebrate his achievement,
not compare himself to elite rowers. If he feels
that 15 mins is a better duration for a start,
that's 15 mins better than nothing. But 30
mins, several times a week, is what I think
he should plan for in the long run.
He also said that he didn't have a lot of spare
time which is why I believe a piece of home
equipment (or office equipment if he has
an accommodating employer) is the only way
he'll find the time. 15-30 mins of exercise
takes an hour, more or less, when you include
the overhead of a club.
One of the major reasons that people quit
exercising is that they try too hard. As you
approach your limit, the perceived effort and
desire to quit rise exponentially, but the health
benefit rises only slightly. So the trick is
to back way off. To the point that you don't
feel distress. And, to use a commercial cliche,
"Just Do It!"
(BTW, I'm in decent shape, but far from elite:
personal bests of 10K Concept II 39:55; 10K run
39:56; Marathon 3:40.)
Sorry, but you're speaking of competitive
rowing. I never set any speed targets.
I assume you mean 2km at 4-5 min/km. Or do you
mean 2km in 5 min? I don't know about a real
shell, but with the Concept II's calibration,
that's impossible.
I didn't say you have to go fast. How 'bout 8
min/km? Or plug in the heart monitor and ignore
the speed.
My point is that you can sit on the rower and do
anything between nothing more than sitting and
an olympic performance. It all depends on how hard and how often you yank on the handle.
Mail order for $800.00 from Concept II
Rowing is low-impact, aerobic, and you can start
as slowly as you like. 30 mins a day while you
listen to the radio, watch TV, or just ponder your
latest bug.
The unit I mentioned above is suitable for
beginners through elite athletes.
Definite nerd appeal with a USB connection and
a wireless heart monitor. Lots of builtin
stats and uses a plug-in memory card.
Regenerative power means a D-cell lasts years.
I'm on my 2nd rowing machine (the first was
a competitor but it did last a dozen years
and thousands of kms). I'm about to hit 1000
km on this one.
No other $800 piece of exercise equipment will
dissipate enough energy (without self-destructing)
to give you a decent workout. You'd have to
drop more than $3K to get a treadmill anywhere
neare as durable. And getting on your feet to
walk/run requires a lot more motivation than
sitting down on the rower.
What exactly do you mean by "99.985% spam filtering rate" and how did you measure it?
In fact I've found it works great as a personal filter, if you configure it somewhat differently from the way the documentation suggests. That is, increase the weight of the Bayes filter, and have it train itself on every message it classifies. Then correct it on any mistakes it makes - which rapidly become few and far between.
Here's a paper showing that SpamAssassin can achieve as good results as others touted for personal use.
Unfortunately SpamAssassin is a bit hard to install and set up. But if you have RedHat or Debian Linux, it is available by rpm/apt and you can install a few scripts to make it work.
I wish I had a better shrink-wrapped version, but I don't. So I'm supplying the raw files for one user in the hopes that (a) somewhat technical people can reproduce the setup and be happy, (b) somebody will make a shrink-wrapped version, perhaps with plugins or extensions or macros for more mail clients.
Here is the Linux Personal Spamassassin setup.
The headline is wrong. Only one conviction was
overturned.
Jaynes, the perpetrator, had his appeal denied.
He's the major actor, and the only one that was
sentence to hard time in the first place.
There's a very interesting video on the legal
aspects of this case available at
www.spamconference.org
You've Got Jail. Some First Hand Observations from the Jeremy Jaynes Spam Trial
Jon Praed, Founding Partner, Internet Law Group
In a nutshell, they convicted Jaynes' accomplice
based on the money trail and it wasn't all that
convincing. The evidence ruled inadmissable was
convincing, but not the evidence used to convict.
Here is just one example. I use wireless to connect to the internet. Usually, I have "connection sharing" enabled so that the ethernet serves DHCP to a slave computer. Now and then I don't have access to wireless, so I have to reconfigure the ethernet *and* the wireless.
How? With XP (classic mode):
Start
settings
network-and-dialup-connections
wireless connection
properties
advanced
unclick "allow other network users to connect through this computer's internet connection"
OK
Close
(wait a long time)
local area network
internet protocol (TCP/IP)
properties
obtain IP address automatically
obtain DNS server addresses
OK
OK
(wait a long time) I've done that a hundred times. If only I could type it into a script.
But I can't. Although somebody probably post some arcane way to do it in this particular instance, that won't enable me to write scripts to walk through the myriad of other gui mazes that Windows throws at me.
Linux, Unix, OS/X any day. Windows with Cygwin, if I must.
They can. It is just that Mersenne primes are fairly dense and trivial to test.
Numbers of the form k*2^n+1 are pretty dense and also easy to test, but not the gold mine that Mersennes are.