Arial isn't a bit-mapped font, it's TrueType. It's just been carefully designed to 'fit' onto screen resolution so that the edges of the font match nicely with the pixel borders.
Maybe I didn't say it right - I didn't mean to imply it
was a a bit-mapped font, but that its final manifestation on the
screen was a bitmap - and yes, what you say is exactly what I meant.
The key is "carefully designed" to "match nicely with the pixel borders" - sadly, font designers rarely seem to do that anymore. It seems to be a lost art.
It does print OK,
even though the screen display is awful.
The following isn't a criticism of just this font, but of almost every
"modern" font. This just happens to be a particularly notable example.
It seems to be in vogue these days to ignore the hints needed for
limited screen resolution, particularly with antialiasing turned off.
Try this experiment: if you're on Windows, turn off ClearType. Compare
the horrible screen display of this font with the carefully thought out
bit-mapped screen fonts of Arial.
It takes time to do it right, and I
guess in this hurried modern world there just isn't time for
craftsmanship anymore.
Most designers also probably assume that everyone has antialiasing
turned on. I don't, because it makes things look fuzzy, sometimes with
vague rainbows bleeding out of the edges. I know I'm in a minority, but
still I don't think that I'm the only one who prefers the crispness of a
carefully designed bit-mapped font. Off and on I've tried to get used
to antialiasing, but in the end I go back. (ClearType also makes the
period and comma almost indistinguishable in the 8pt Andale Mono I
prefer for text editing.) Since I can usually select old-fashioned fonts
with excellent bitmaps, it rarely is a problem, except that there
doesn't seem to be any font with good bitmaps for Unicode math symbols.
And by an odd coincidence, that['s about when particle physics took a
detour into String Theory from which it has yet to recover.
And by another odd coincidence, other
particle physicists
took a detour into Wall Street, where they applied
their advanced mathematical knowledge to creating exotic derivatives
like Credit Default Swaps,
but arguably without proper financial training or real-world
experience. One is tempted to wonder whether the U.S. might be ahead
by $2 trillion - $12 billion = $1.988 trillion had they just gone
and financed the SSC instead.
You could use -00-00 to refer to an all-year event in some kind of
astronomical calendaring system, for example, or 0000-mm-dd to refer to
something that happened 2008 years ago.
Wow, I am speechless.
This is one of the best attempts to turn a bug into a feature
I've seen in years! You should work for
MySQL's marketing department. Now I'm really excited to
hear about the creative things one can do with Feb. 31st...
He's actually starting to have trouble communicating, as the movements
he used for it back then (blinking I think?) are starting to become
harder.
Perhaps the next step would be to monitor his brain waves.
I don't know what the progress is in passive external electrodes,
but fMRI has achieved some amazing things, like
like
Voice recognition software reads your brain waves
. This article is about decoding what people
are listening to or looking at - maybe because it's easier
to correlate experimentally - rather than
what they want to communicate, but perhaps looking at other regions
of the brain might achieve the latter.
I think I've read something about being able to detect whether
a person is telling the truth (kind of eerie).
There's also the problem of the huge size of the machines,
although there's some work on
handheld fMRI (from 2005, not sure of the current state of the
art).
Quantum ghost imaging is a real effect that is
potentially useful, but there is
skepticism that it's an
"entangled photon" quantum effect and not just
an effect that is due to
the ordinary interference of light waves
(which is also ultimately quantum of course but can
be predicted with classical physics).
Appropriate here may be what he had to say about the
popular story of Georg Cantor going insane trying to understand infinity
(specifically the distinction between the infinity of integers, and the
"larger" infinity of the real line)
Actually, the problem wasn't the distinction between these two infinities
(he successfully and famously proved that with his diagonal argument)
but rather whether there are any infinities in-between the infinity of
the integers (aleph-0) and the infinity of the real line (the continuum,
c). Specifically, he tried unsuccessfully to prove that the next higher
infinity after aleph-0, called aleph-1, was equal to c.
As it turns out,
this problem is unsolvable unless we assume it as an additional axiom of
ZFC (Zermelo-Fraenkel with Choice)
set theory, called the continuum hypothesis (CH), which states
aleph-1=c. Goedel showed that is was OK to add CH to set theory without
causing a contradiction (i.e. CH is consistent with the rest of ZFC
set theory). That CH is
independent, i.e. unprovable from
the other axioms, was finally shown by Paul Cohen in 1963.
He did this with a brilliant new technique he invented
called "forcing", which became a stepping stone
for a whole slew of amazing new discoveries about
the "universe" of mind-bogglingly huge
infinities that we mere mortals
can barely even begin to grasp.
[Viruses are] complex machines that can cause their own replication in their environment.
Regarding the complexity of viruses and related parasitic entities,
the potato spindle tuber viroid
is a circular piece of RNA with only 359 bases
(Subcellular Life Forms) i.e. it can be unambiguously described with 718 bits (at 2 bits
per base). And in the
lab, artificial "lifeforms" have been made with
as few as 54 bases (same web page), i.e. 108 bits. These certainly help blur
the boundary between life and non-life.
If you're going to do something stupid like get an OSS logo tattoo, at least get something more cool than a penguin.
That's why BSD is way cooler than Linux. She-daemon anyone (regular) (nsfw version)
(another nsfw?
And if you're lucky you could hook up with a
realone.
On the contrary, if you accept what the Fermi Paradox implies, it shows how unbelievably special, improbable and unique we are in the entire galaxy, if not the entire Universe. [personally, I suspect intelligent life is so improbable that it takes 2.55e35 cycles of the universe(s) for it to happen, on the average.]
What amazes me is that (independently) self-reproducing lifeforms even
exist at all, given that the simplest known one has over 500K base
pairs. I recently posted
about this. From what I can tell, the appearance of the first
such lifeform seems even more improbable than the development of
intelligent life from it - for the latter, we can at least see
multiple stages of development in the huge diversity of lifeforms on earth
(all with more than 500K base pairs)
and come up with an evolutionary theory. For the former, there is a big gap, a big
blank, between a soup of random organic molecules
and 500K base pairs arranged in just the right
order.
Perhaps the exponent in your "2.55e35 cycles of the universe(s)"
is too low by several orders of magnitude?:)
Incidentally, there is a project by the Venter Institute to develop a
"Mycoplasma laboratorium" organism from the 500K base-pair
one, stripping out pieces one at a time
to find a minimal set of genes that can sustain life. The result of that
should be interesting. (They are patenting the thing, which is being
challenged, but regardless of outcome hopefully they won't
withhold the knowledge.)
There are many, many ways to build a system to manage loss of coolant, nuclear reactor scrambles being obvious extreme versions.
WTH is a "nuclear reactor scramble"? Wikipedia sheds no light,
and not even Google was my friend. In fact, your/. post is the only
Google hit for that exact phrase. (I suppose my post will be added to
that list soon.:) )
There is a long, long way to go before a self-reproducing
organism results from a random
combination of DNA, artificial or not.
It is possible for a very simple "lifeform" with only 54 base pairs to
be self-reproducing, but only if it is parasitic.
Such "lifeforms" exploit the complex and sophisticated
DNA machinery of the host to accomplish reproduction.
I found it amazing that the simplest known lifeform that can
reproduce independently is the Mycoplasma
genitalium bacteria, with 582970 base pairs! This probably isn't the
simplest one that can theoretically exist - it is hard to imagine the
right combination out of 4^582970 appearing at random in the pre-life
organic soup - but whatever simpler thing existed before it is a
mystery, as well as why none of the simpler forms still exist today (if
that is the case).
This has been bugging me for some time, and as far as I can
tell no one has a good answer.
Musicians and content "producers" have the right to get a return of their investment.
Actually, they only have the right to try to get a return on their
investment, just like any other business. If their business model doesn't
work, then their investment should fail, like any other business.
Instead, the *AAs are trying to buy draconian, privacy-intrusive laws to guarantee
their success regardless.
If you look at the whole picture, fat people may actually save the rest
of us money. They may have more problems while alive, but if they die
of a heart attack before or shortly after retirement, there will be a
HUGE savings compared to an individual who lives to 100, the last 35 of
which are nonproductive but can be very expensive due to the ailments of aging.
I argued this years ago about the supposed cost to society
of smokers. In the case of a couple of people close to my family,
the man was a chain smoker who died of pancreatic cancer a few
years after retirement - an expensive, but one-shot, proposition -
whereas his nonsmoking wife became physically frail with dementia a few years later and
required expensive, round-the-clock care in a nursing home for
the next 20 years, living into her late 90's. When antismokers cite the "cost of smoking"
statistics, they conveniently overlook such things.
In the early 2000s I found "Real Alternative", which is a no-nonsense, stripped-down
player and browser plugin (incl. Firefox)
for RealAudio and some video. At the time it seemed like a
miracle, an unbelievable breath
of fresh air after the adware-infested official player that
took over your machine. I've carried version 1.22 (realalt122.exe, 5.8MB,
md5 506f4d76f3a13971cc4c4110050921f7)
from one Windows machine to the next over that time, since I know it's fast,
uses little memory, and
works for.ra and.ram files I find here and there. I see that it seems to be up to version
1.80 now, which is likely more modern, but - especially after watching
WinAmp "evolve" - I haven't yet been motivated to see what features
have been added, since 1.22 just does what I want and nothing else; why fix
what's not broken.:)
I'm probably behind the times, so maybe someone could clear
this up for me.
The LCD display on my several-year-old
Compaq laptop is quite unreliable
in terms of viewing true color, for the simple reason that
the contrast of different colors changes significantly
depending on the vertical viewing angle. I can often make
low-contrast or dark photos more visible by tilting the display
away from me (to make them darker) or toward me (to make
them lighter, but with some light colors fading to white and
ironically white turning to gray).
Different colors seem to behave somewhat differently. At extreme
angles, some colors saturate but background details that are
otherwise nearly invisible may become apparent. The "correct"
angle seems to be a matter of subjective judgment, and sometimes
I'll double check on my CRT display to make sure the colors
of something I'm posting are reasonable.
So is the change with viewing angle not a problem anymore?
Are LCDs good enough to be used for professional graphics
work? Is there an objective spec of the insensitivity
of color fidelity to viewing angle that a professional should
look for?
In addition, since people on Slashdot constantly misuse pairs of homonyms like then/than, effect/affect, their/they're, we should just ignore historical usage differences and use them interchangeably.
Don't forget its/it's and their/there. But my vote would go to lose/loose - allowing the
latter as an alternate spelling of the former would go a long way towards
making Slashdot an exemplary display of the grammatical/spelling skills of geeks.
Whether a machine is considered self-reproducing or not is somewhat
subject to interpretation I suppose. Similar issues arise
with
quines (self-reproducing programs). For example,
consider the classic C quine,
For me, this is not a true quine, because there is no
"#include<stdio.h>". It will not compile on typical C compilers.
(There are longer quines that do have the include.)
Basically, you have to agree on a starting environment and what
"self-reproducing" means. Computer viruses might be argued to be better
quines than a program that simply prints itself and requires a
human (or another program) to take the output and run it again.
Similarly, one might demand that a true self-reproducing machine be
able to reproduce itself in the middle of the desert with only the sand
as raw material and sunlight for energy. But most people would accept
something in between that and the machine described in TA.
Self-reproducing lifeforms have similar issues. It is possible for a
very simple "lifeform" with only
54 base pairs to be self-reproducing, but only if it
parasitic. On the other hand, the simplest known lifeform that can
reproduce independently is the Mycoplasma genitalium bacteria with
582970 base pairs. This probably isn't the simplest one that can theoretically
exist - it is hard to imagine the right combination out of 4^582970
appearing at random in the pre-life organic soup - but whatever
simpler thing existed before it is a mystery.
A neat thing about VLC (for nerds anyway), that may not be
well-known, is that you can
ssh into your Linux box and watch movies as ASCII art on
the terminal window. See
http://www.linuxactionshow.com/forum/comments.php?DiscussionID=1466 .
(I see you can do it in Mplayer too according to that page.)
As shown in the link I posted to Wikipedia in my original post, you'll
see that 2H + 2H --> 4He does not happen with any significance. In
other words, that reaction doesn't happen enough to make it a
significant source of the reaction. Nuclear physics doesn't exactly
work like arithmetic.
This table has to do with the probability of reactions of
high-energy particles randomly smashing into each other.
The physics of cold fusion (if it exists) is unknown.
As a wild speculation, the palladium nanomatrix may be acting like a kind of
catalyst to guide the reaction in a controlled fashion.
And if this is the case, it could be that it happens to be
"tuned" in just the right way so that only the
2H + 2H --> 4He reaction occurs.
Warning (for people who forget to tar -tzf first):
dbtxt.tar.gz consists of top-level files, so tar -xzf dbtxt.tar.gz will
spray files all over your home directory if that's where you downloaded it.
Put it in its own directory first.
I don't know about red ants, but for the big black (carpenter?) ants
invading my kitchen, the Terro liquid, which I think is just a sugar solution
with 5% borax - you could probably make it yourself, but why bother - was a miracle. I had this problem for many years every
spring and summer, and those Raid-type plastic "ant traps" that I put all over the
place seemed to have no effect at all.
I put a large drop of this stuff on a piece of cardboard and left it on in a
corner of the kitchen counter. Within a day, the ants formed a crowded
circle around the drop voraciously drinking it up to the point that
their bellies swelled up, with a long line of ants going to wherever
under the sink they came from. Over several days they went through a
third of a small bottle of the stuff! You could see a few apparently
coming back for seconds, weak and shaky. Then they were suddenly gone,
totally and completely. This was 2 years ago, and they've never come
back.
The Terro bottle says it's for "sweet-eating ants" -
I thought all ants loved sweets, so I don't know what that means.
If the lawyers can bill for their flight time, it's an easy way
to bill extra hours. Years ago I heard the story of a lawyer who billed
25 hours in one day, because his red-eye flight crossed
time zones. (This was from a friend of a lawyer who heard the story from
another lawyer, so I can't really
vouch for its validity or whether the billing was accepted, but my
friend delighted in telling it and thought it was hilarious.)
So why would they bother with PGP and reduce their
income?
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe I didn't say it right - I didn't mean to imply it was a a bit-mapped font, but that its final manifestation on the screen was a bitmap - and yes, what you say is exactly what I meant. The key is "carefully designed" to "match nicely with the pixel borders" - sadly, font designers rarely seem to do that anymore. It seems to be a lost art.
The following isn't a criticism of just this font, but of almost every "modern" font. This just happens to be a particularly notable example.
It seems to be in vogue these days to ignore the hints needed for limited screen resolution, particularly with antialiasing turned off. Try this experiment: if you're on Windows, turn off ClearType. Compare the horrible screen display of this font with the carefully thought out bit-mapped screen fonts of Arial.
It takes time to do it right, and I guess in this hurried modern world there just isn't time for craftsmanship anymore.
Most designers also probably assume that everyone has antialiasing turned on. I don't, because it makes things look fuzzy, sometimes with vague rainbows bleeding out of the edges. I know I'm in a minority, but still I don't think that I'm the only one who prefers the crispness of a carefully designed bit-mapped font. Off and on I've tried to get used to antialiasing, but in the end I go back. (ClearType also makes the period and comma almost indistinguishable in the 8pt Andale Mono I prefer for text editing.) Since I can usually select old-fashioned fonts with excellent bitmaps, it rarely is a problem, except that there doesn't seem to be any font with good bitmaps for Unicode math symbols.
And by another odd coincidence, other particle physicists took a detour into Wall Street, where they applied their advanced mathematical knowledge to creating exotic derivatives like Credit Default Swaps, but arguably without proper financial training or real-world experience. One is tempted to wonder whether the U.S. might be ahead by $2 trillion - $12 billion = $1.988 trillion had they just gone and financed the SSC instead.
Wow, I am speechless. This is one of the best attempts to turn a bug into a feature I've seen in years! You should work for MySQL's marketing department. Now I'm really excited to hear about the creative things one can do with Feb. 31st...
Perhaps the next step would be to monitor his brain waves. I don't know what the progress is in passive external electrodes, but fMRI has achieved some amazing things, like like Voice recognition software reads your brain waves . This article is about decoding what people are listening to or looking at - maybe because it's easier to correlate experimentally - rather than what they want to communicate, but perhaps looking at other regions of the brain might achieve the latter. I think I've read something about being able to detect whether a person is telling the truth (kind of eerie). There's also the problem of the huge size of the machines, although there's some work on handheld fMRI (from 2005, not sure of the current state of the art).
Quantum ghost imaging is a real effect that is potentially useful, but there is skepticism that it's an "entangled photon" quantum effect and not just an effect that is due to the ordinary interference of light waves (which is also ultimately quantum of course but can be predicted with classical physics).
Actually, the problem wasn't the distinction between these two infinities (he successfully and famously proved that with his diagonal argument) but rather whether there are any infinities in-between the infinity of the integers (aleph-0) and the infinity of the real line (the continuum, c). Specifically, he tried unsuccessfully to prove that the next higher infinity after aleph-0, called aleph-1, was equal to c.
As it turns out, this problem is unsolvable unless we assume it as an additional axiom of ZFC (Zermelo-Fraenkel with Choice) set theory, called the continuum hypothesis (CH), which states aleph-1=c. Goedel showed that is was OK to add CH to set theory without causing a contradiction (i.e. CH is consistent with the rest of ZFC set theory). That CH is independent, i.e. unprovable from the other axioms, was finally shown by Paul Cohen in 1963. He did this with a brilliant new technique he invented called "forcing", which became a stepping stone for a whole slew of amazing new discoveries about the "universe" of mind-bogglingly huge infinities that we mere mortals can barely even begin to grasp.
Regarding the complexity of viruses and related parasitic entities, the potato spindle tuber viroid is a circular piece of RNA with only 359 bases (Subcellular Life Forms) i.e. it can be unambiguously described with 718 bits (at 2 bits per base). And in the lab, artificial "lifeforms" have been made with as few as 54 bases (same web page), i.e. 108 bits. These certainly help blur the boundary between life and non-life.
They found an image of Jesus in one of the soil samples.
That's why BSD is way cooler than Linux. She-daemon anyone (regular) (nsfw version) (another nsfw? And if you're lucky you could hook up with a real one.
What amazes me is that (independently) self-reproducing lifeforms even exist at all, given that the simplest known one has over 500K base pairs. I recently posted about this. From what I can tell, the appearance of the first such lifeform seems even more improbable than the development of intelligent life from it - for the latter, we can at least see multiple stages of development in the huge diversity of lifeforms on earth (all with more than 500K base pairs) and come up with an evolutionary theory. For the former, there is a big gap, a big blank, between a soup of random organic molecules and 500K base pairs arranged in just the right order.
Perhaps the exponent in your "2.55e35 cycles of the universe(s)" is too low by several orders of magnitude? :)
Incidentally, there is a project by the Venter Institute to develop a "Mycoplasma laboratorium" organism from the 500K base-pair one, stripping out pieces one at a time to find a minimal set of genes that can sustain life. The result of that should be interesting. (They are patenting the thing, which is being challenged, but regardless of outcome hopefully they won't withhold the knowledge.)
WTH is a "nuclear reactor scramble"? Wikipedia sheds no light, and not even Google was my friend. In fact, your /. post is the only
Google hit for that exact phrase. (I suppose my post will be added to
that list soon.:) )
It is possible for a very simple "lifeform" with only 54 base pairs to be self-reproducing, but only if it is parasitic. Such "lifeforms" exploit the complex and sophisticated DNA machinery of the host to accomplish reproduction.
I found it amazing that the simplest known lifeform that can reproduce independently is the Mycoplasma genitalium bacteria, with 582970 base pairs! This probably isn't the simplest one that can theoretically exist - it is hard to imagine the right combination out of 4^582970 appearing at random in the pre-life organic soup - but whatever simpler thing existed before it is a mystery, as well as why none of the simpler forms still exist today (if that is the case).
This has been bugging me for some time, and as far as I can tell no one has a good answer.
Well, if zinc runs out, HIV will be the least of our worries; none of us can survive without it.
Seriously, the amount of zinc in these "zinc fingers" (which already exist in our bodies) is a trace amount.
Actually, they only have the right to try to get a return on their investment, just like any other business. If their business model doesn't work, then their investment should fail, like any other business. Instead, the *AAs are trying to buy draconian, privacy-intrusive laws to guarantee their success regardless.
I argued this years ago about the supposed cost to society of smokers. In the case of a couple of people close to my family, the man was a chain smoker who died of pancreatic cancer a few years after retirement - an expensive, but one-shot, proposition - whereas his nonsmoking wife became physically frail with dementia a few years later and required expensive, round-the-clock care in a nursing home for the next 20 years, living into her late 90's. When antismokers cite the "cost of smoking" statistics, they conveniently overlook such things.
The LCD display on my several-year-old Compaq laptop is quite unreliable in terms of viewing true color, for the simple reason that the contrast of different colors changes significantly depending on the vertical viewing angle. I can often make low-contrast or dark photos more visible by tilting the display away from me (to make them darker) or toward me (to make them lighter, but with some light colors fading to white and ironically white turning to gray). Different colors seem to behave somewhat differently. At extreme angles, some colors saturate but background details that are otherwise nearly invisible may become apparent. The "correct" angle seems to be a matter of subjective judgment, and sometimes I'll double check on my CRT display to make sure the colors of something I'm posting are reasonable.
So is the change with viewing angle not a problem anymore? Are LCDs good enough to be used for professional graphics work? Is there an objective spec of the insensitivity of color fidelity to viewing angle that a professional should look for?
Basically, you have to agree on a starting environment and what "self-reproducing" means. Computer viruses might be argued to be better quines than a program that simply prints itself and requires a human (or another program) to take the output and run it again.
Similarly, one might demand that a true self-reproducing machine be able to reproduce itself in the middle of the desert with only the sand as raw material and sunlight for energy. But most people would accept something in between that and the machine described in TA.
Self-reproducing lifeforms have similar issues. It is possible for a very simple "lifeform" with only 54 base pairs to be self-reproducing, but only if it parasitic. On the other hand, the simplest known lifeform that can reproduce independently is the Mycoplasma genitalium bacteria with 582970 base pairs. This probably isn't the simplest one that can theoretically exist - it is hard to imagine the right combination out of 4^582970 appearing at random in the pre-life organic soup - but whatever simpler thing existed before it is a mystery.
A neat thing about VLC (for nerds anyway), that may not be well-known, is that you can ssh into your Linux box and watch movies as ASCII art on the terminal window. See http://www.linuxactionshow.com/forum/comments.php?DiscussionID=1466 . (I see you can do it in Mplayer too according to that page.)
This table has to do with the probability of reactions of high-energy particles randomly smashing into each other.
The physics of cold fusion (if it exists) is unknown. As a wild speculation, the palladium nanomatrix may be acting like a kind of catalyst to guide the reaction in a controlled fashion. And if this is the case, it could be that it happens to be "tuned" in just the right way so that only the 2H + 2H --> 4He reaction occurs.
Warning (for people who forget to tar -tzf first): dbtxt.tar.gz consists of top-level files, so tar -xzf dbtxt.tar.gz will spray files all over your home directory if that's where you downloaded it. Put it in its own directory first.
I put a large drop of this stuff on a piece of cardboard and left it on in a corner of the kitchen counter. Within a day, the ants formed a crowded circle around the drop voraciously drinking it up to the point that their bellies swelled up, with a long line of ants going to wherever under the sink they came from. Over several days they went through a third of a small bottle of the stuff! You could see a few apparently coming back for seconds, weak and shaky. Then they were suddenly gone, totally and completely. This was 2 years ago, and they've never come back.
The Terro bottle says it's for "sweet-eating ants" - I thought all ants loved sweets, so I don't know what that means.
If the lawyers can bill for their flight time, it's an easy way to bill extra hours. Years ago I heard the story of a lawyer who billed 25 hours in one day, because his red-eye flight crossed time zones. (This was from a friend of a lawyer who heard the story from another lawyer, so I can't really vouch for its validity or whether the billing was accepted, but my friend delighted in telling it and thought it was hilarious.) So why would they bother with PGP and reduce their income?