I agree. Besides, the major problem is that there was (and still is, in some places) simply no healthy food available in school cafeterias: thus, even if the kids could make all the good choices, they'd get way too much sugar and saturated fat compared to other common nutrients (protein, fiber, unsaturated fat, blabla).
Lettuce guy can get all the calories and more than enough protein from romaine lettuce, but he'd soon get deficient on vitamins, and he'd better pray that his GI tract can process 40 heads of romaine a day, LOL.
The big mac guy could probably moderate what parts of the 'mac he's eating -- one would have to run the numbers to see if it's feasible. Vitamins would become a problem as well, soon enough.
I'd get off the "unnatural toxin" bandwagon. The most potent toxins known (lowest LD50) are all synthesized directly by biological systems, not by men running lab equipment. Just because something is an additive, it doesn't mean it's toxic to humans.
I'd really like to see how people get rid of allergies by changing their diet, other than a few corner cases. Citations please?
Lettuce is healthy because it's just filler with not much of a nutritional value when eaten in usual amounts. You can pretty much delete lettuce from your diet, and it won't make a slightest difference.
One cup of lettuce has 10 calories, and 1 gram or less of anything else of value -- other than water. If you were to get 1500 kcal from, say, romaine lettuce, you'd have to eat ~40 heads (that's ~190 cups). Of course by then you'd get enough protein and fiber, too, but good luck on getting 40 heads of lettuce through your system.
I agree. This expectation of privacy everywhere has been taken a bit far. There is no expectation of privacy in the public spaces. If you speak, anyone on a balcony on the opposite side of the street has the right to get a directional microphone and listen in. I also agree that Google has the right to record their street views, even if that makes burglar's work easier.
If you're at a public cafeteria, anyone, including the kid next to you, can record what you order and then eat. The recording may be mental, pen-and-paper, "spy" digital-camera-in-a-pen in your pocket, an iPod nano, a cellphone, whatever. Who cares. I surely don't. How is this cafeteria number scheme news, I just don't know. Such systems have been around seemingly forever.
Agree. My kid does the same thing. It's just a way to do accounting. She used to go to a small school, and the numbers were 3 digits long -- there were only 300 students or so. Those are account numbers, not PINs! They are there to track your spending, it's really honor-based and if you get caught misusing the system (using someone else's number), you will face consequences -- that's the way it should be. Now she goes to a bigger school, and the numbers are 5 or 6 digits long. But we send lunch with her, so no need for her to learn yet another number.
Wow. My high school simply had a private mom-and-pop (literally) fast food joint in the basement. It's still there AFAIK, 15 years later. Just like then, you can get pizzas, hot dogs, hamburgers, pastries, sweets and pop. Prices are and were reasonable and toned down to clients' abilities. You won't get a filet mignon there for sure, but I remember it fondly as a respite from lessons on floors above it;)
Maybe, just maybe, it'd do to automatically check all addresses for semblance of validity. Then there would be no need to screen them any further: if such-and-such a street name exists in given zip code, and the city/town/village name is within that zip, no further checking is needed. Because, being Microsoft and all, that would be just extremely hard to do. Sigh.
I dig your point, but Shakespeare is not a particularly good example for kids. Guy couldn't spell if his life hung on it, for one. Never mind that -- for us -- an ancient dialect of English is not particularly conducive for conveying thoughts; it presents an unnecessary barrier to entry. Kids who grew up in black neighborhoods and speak nothing but ebonics (African American Vernacular English) are told, that they supposedly should learn standard, "proper" English -- or else! Well, I don't see how you can tell it to those kids while insisting that Shakespeare is a good way of demonstrating whatever it's used to demonstrate. Shakespeare's writings are used as examples, they are teaching tools, and in grade schools they are not usually used to teach ancient English!! They are used to teach poetry, drama, whatelse. I see no reason not to use more modern texts, where at least the social and language context is easier to understand.
At the expense of losing my mods here, I must intervene.
You're a lunatic to think that textbooks need "updating much more frequently than that". Textbooks need to be decently done, and then you can keep using them. Exceptions would be perhaps history/social study textbooks. The problem is that no grade level textbook is ever methodically worked on and improved. This used to be the case in the times long forgotten, but not nowadays, not in the U.S.
Textbooks are mediocre to start with, they get superficial changes made to them to warrant new editions, and then somehow all bridges are burned and we get a newly written textbook. Newer, but just as mediocre, or worse. And so the mediocricity is maintained. Noone wants to seriously edit, expand and improve upon "old" texts.
Feynman did some rather methodical reviewing of certain California textbooks in mid-1960s. I'm an optimist, so I thought that things have improved. So, a couple years ago I borrowed a bunch of mid- and highschool physics/science textbooks used in Ohio, and I read through them. The quality is rather uniform -- that of bovine manure. I still have nightmares about that -- drowning in manure pits and such. All of the authors, every single one of them, had absolutely no effing clue what they were writing about. I have no excerpts handy, but it was disgusting. Superficially, it all "made sense" and was seemingly fine. But as soon as you started reading and paying attention, it was all crap. A text that others depend upon for learning, without prior experience of the subject taught, must adhere to pretty high standards. The way it is, though, is exactly the opposite. Mistakes, falsehoods and demonstable lack of understanding abounds in those books.
There is no way to measure it any other way than it was done for the last 40+ years or so: using an eye tracker. When you do so, in all visual stimuli experiments where your subsequent eye motion is based on what you currently see (visual guidance, it's called), the repetition rate is below 10Hz. More like 5Hz. The methodology used to measure those numbers can't improve them: if it does, then the methodology is flawed, for the limit is in our brain. Hardcoded magic number, if you like.
LOL. 30ms to "glance" at another part of the page? What kind of koolaid are they drinking?
Sure, the saccade may take that long, but the processing of the image will take an extra 150ms+ on top of that, give or take. IOW: there is no basis in physiology for what they are doing.
No, it's just a matter of seeing how large the "large enough" cities are (say 200k+ residents), in terms of combined surface area, and comparing this to the lowball-spherical-approximate surface area of Earth.
I am of course ignoring that asteroids may be coming from a preferred direction w.r.t. to Earth's orbital plane, and that may cause some of them to bounce off the atmosphere. That'd be a small fraction of big-enough objects, I'd think.
I agree. I have no AV in my VMware image, and I have had no problems. I run an offline scan of the image's contents using clamav every once in a while, and there was never a problem. But I'd have a very hard time teaching anyone to follow safe browsing rules. People are very reactionary, and as soon as they see an antivirus warning, they go crazy, even if it's just a website warning. They believe, by default, that throwing money on the problem will fix it.
Well, let's see. ~16 meters in diameter at density of iron 7.9gm/cm^3 gives mass of ~260e3 kg. At 30km/s relative velocity, that's 10^14J of kinetic energy, that's about 24 kilotons worth. So we're looking at the equivalent of the Hiroshima bomb.
Let's check the dissipation, though. The mass difference to go from 20m diameter to 16m diameter is 66e3 kg. To melt (ablate) all that iron off, you need 6.6*10^9 J. So that's tiny compared to 10^14J.
So yes, it would in fact cause a few million people to have a really bad day, had it hit in a big city -- so tgd was right, in a way.
It's very improbable that it would hit anywhere near a city, though.
LOL no. If it'd impact into a mid-sized city, say of a million, smack into the downtown, it'd take a few buildings out 9/11 style, damage many others, but that would be it. Hardly a million people would be affected. Wait no, I take that back. The secondary effects of governmental bureaucracy and overreaction would certainly affect more than a few million, at least in some countries. Unless it'd hit somewhere relaxed like in South America (I'm serious, I love their attitude to living a life).
I have a problem with the phrase "scientific accuracy", though. It's not "scientific" accuracy, it's realism. As in: does it match the reality, or not. Science is just a way of analyzing nature (reality), so "scientific accuracy" is a term that, perhaps, would apply to a movie about scientists and/or scientific process. So, in general, the movies are just that: unrealistic. The don't show our world and the nature in a true way. Perhaps the biggest impediment to that may be that people who know science usually talk in a language that's incompatible with the language spoken by movie producers/crews. It takes a special effort, and a fantastic personality, to be able to clearly speak about nature, in a scientific way, to artsy folk.
Now, going back to realism: I'm pretty sure there are no movies out there that are mostly realistic. I was going to say "no popular movies" and "fully realistic", but I think that really pretty much any movie that's rentable on, say, Netflix, is not realistic in a major way, and Netflix does have some quite niche flicks. So if realism or its lack is something that bugs you, there's no way to enjoy any movie, short of, say an MIT lecture recording -- if that could be called a movie, that is.
I have an offtopic question. Eniac is your contemporary, and it was used to do a bunch of numerical calculations. How did it compare to what Feynman and technologically-apt teenagers under his direction did for Project Manhattan? Does anyone know a rough order of magnitude of multiplies-and-adds that both projects had to go through, and the time it took? IIRC, Feynman's boys have figured out pretty much every basic contemporary CPU/GPU design trick (pipelining, interleaving/scheduling, speculative execution, you name it they've done it), even stuff that is not in production (error correction with pipeline stalling and reexecution that would work for, say SEUs). The boys have done it all on multi-colored punch cards.
THINGAMABOB was meant to have an obfuscated meaning;)
As for defines: first of all, since this is C++ code, an enum or a static const int would be more appropriate. But then -- why bother, it doesn't make code any more readable. It's less readable, since you add a layer of abstraction.
Methinks your line of thinking is a case in point for falling for "goto considered harmful" as an excuse not to think about what one is doing.
The magic number avoidance is a double-edged sword. Some people take it for gospel even if it doesn't make sense.
Case in point: I have some code that talks to a piece of hardware. The code is really a library class. The hardware has a bunch of commands, that are invoked by using their numeric codes. I wrote the code like so:
Status Hardware::do_thingamabob() {
return send_command(0x13); }
This command code is not needed anywhere else. Now comes a magic number demagician and turns it into a header file with a bunch of defines, and the function becomes:
Status Hardware::do_thingamabob() {
return send_command(THINGAMABOB_CMD); }
No magic numbers? Check. Easier to understand? No, the locality has been lost. You need to refer to another file to see what is really sent. BTW, the code in question only cares about command codes within the functions that look like more or less like the above, and they are a perfect place to keep those numbers.
These days, if you want to distribute any sort of a non-mainstay "VM assembly" and wish for it to gain any sort of acceptance, it better be LLVM bitcode. Either that, or stick to CLR or JVM. It takes way too much work to create a half-decent optimizing backend, when starting from scratch.
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I agree. Besides, the major problem is that there was (and still is, in some places) simply no healthy food available in school cafeterias: thus, even if the kids could make all the good choices, they'd get way too much sugar and saturated fat compared to other common nutrients (protein, fiber, unsaturated fat, blabla).
Lettuce guy can get all the calories and more than enough protein from romaine lettuce, but he'd soon get deficient on vitamins, and he'd better pray that his GI tract can process 40 heads of romaine a day, LOL.
The big mac guy could probably moderate what parts of the 'mac he's eating -- one would have to run the numbers to see if it's feasible. Vitamins would become a problem as well, soon enough.
I'd get off the "unnatural toxin" bandwagon. The most potent toxins known (lowest LD50) are all synthesized directly by biological systems, not by men running lab equipment. Just because something is an additive, it doesn't mean it's toxic to humans.
I'd really like to see how people get rid of allergies by changing their diet, other than a few corner cases. Citations please?
Lettuce is healthy because it's just filler with not much of a nutritional value when eaten in usual amounts. You can pretty much delete lettuce from your diet, and it won't make a slightest difference.
One cup of lettuce has 10 calories, and 1 gram or less of anything else of value -- other than water. If you were to get 1500 kcal from, say, romaine lettuce, you'd have to eat ~40 heads (that's ~190 cups). Of course by then you'd get enough protein and fiber, too, but good luck on getting 40 heads of lettuce through your system.
Woosh, stalls, anyone, hello?
How on Earth is it "dehumanization" to enter your fine account number at the "register" in order to deduct lunch funds from your account?! Get real.
I agree. This expectation of privacy everywhere has been taken a bit far. There is no expectation of privacy in the public spaces. If you speak, anyone on a balcony on the opposite side of the street has the right to get a directional microphone and listen in. I also agree that Google has the right to record their street views, even if that makes burglar's work easier.
If you're at a public cafeteria, anyone, including the kid next to you, can record what you order and then eat. The recording may be mental, pen-and-paper, "spy" digital-camera-in-a-pen in your pocket, an iPod nano, a cellphone, whatever. Who cares. I surely don't. How is this cafeteria number scheme news, I just don't know. Such systems have been around seemingly forever.
Agree. My kid does the same thing. It's just a way to do accounting. She used to go to a small school, and the numbers were 3 digits long -- there were only 300 students or so. Those are account numbers, not PINs! They are there to track your spending, it's really honor-based and if you get caught misusing the system (using someone else's number), you will face consequences -- that's the way it should be. Now she goes to a bigger school, and the numbers are 5 or 6 digits long. But we send lunch with her, so no need for her to learn yet another number.
Wow. My high school simply had a private mom-and-pop (literally) fast food joint in the basement. It's still there AFAIK, 15 years later. Just like then, you can get pizzas, hot dogs, hamburgers, pastries, sweets and pop. Prices are and were reasonable and toned down to clients' abilities. You won't get a filet mignon there for sure, but I remember it fondly as a respite from lessons on floors above it ;)
Maybe, just maybe, it'd do to automatically check all addresses for semblance of validity. Then there would be no need to screen them any further: if such-and-such a street name exists in given zip code, and the city/town/village name is within that zip, no further checking is needed. Because, being Microsoft and all, that would be just extremely hard to do. Sigh.
I dig your point, but Shakespeare is not a particularly good example for kids. Guy couldn't spell if his life hung on it, for one. Never mind that -- for us -- an ancient dialect of English is not particularly conducive for conveying thoughts; it presents an unnecessary barrier to entry. Kids who grew up in black neighborhoods and speak nothing but ebonics (African American Vernacular English) are told, that they supposedly should learn standard, "proper" English -- or else! Well, I don't see how you can tell it to those kids while insisting that Shakespeare is a good way of demonstrating whatever it's used to demonstrate. Shakespeare's writings are used as examples, they are teaching tools, and in grade schools they are not usually used to teach ancient English!! They are used to teach poetry, drama, whatelse. I see no reason not to use more modern texts, where at least the social and language context is easier to understand.
At the expense of losing my mods here, I must intervene.
You're a lunatic to think that textbooks need "updating much more frequently than that". Textbooks need to be decently done, and then you can keep using them. Exceptions would be perhaps history/social study textbooks. The problem is that no grade level textbook is ever methodically worked on and improved. This used to be the case in the times long forgotten, but not nowadays, not in the U.S.
Textbooks are mediocre to start with, they get superficial changes made to them to warrant new editions, and then somehow all bridges are burned and we get a newly written textbook. Newer, but just as mediocre, or worse. And so the mediocricity is maintained. Noone wants to seriously edit, expand and improve upon "old" texts.
Feynman did some rather methodical reviewing of certain California textbooks in mid-1960s. I'm an optimist, so I thought that things have improved. So, a couple years ago I borrowed a bunch of mid- and highschool physics/science textbooks used in Ohio, and I read through them. The quality is rather uniform -- that of bovine manure. I still have nightmares about that -- drowning in manure pits and such. All of the authors, every single one of them, had absolutely no effing clue what they were writing about. I have no excerpts handy, but it was disgusting. Superficially, it all "made sense" and was seemingly fine. But as soon as you started reading and paying attention, it was all crap. A text that others depend upon for learning, without prior experience of the subject taught, must adhere to pretty high standards. The way it is, though, is exactly the opposite. Mistakes, falsehoods and demonstable lack of understanding abounds in those books.
There is no way to measure it any other way than it was done for the last 40+ years or so: using an eye tracker. When you do so, in all visual stimuli experiments where your subsequent eye motion is based on what you currently see (visual guidance, it's called), the repetition rate is below 10Hz. More like 5Hz. The methodology used to measure those numbers can't improve them: if it does, then the methodology is flawed, for the limit is in our brain. Hardcoded magic number, if you like.
LOL. 30ms to "glance" at another part of the page? What kind of koolaid are they drinking?
Sure, the saccade may take that long, but the processing of the image will take an extra 150ms+ on top of that, give or take. IOW: there is no basis in physiology for what they are doing.
No, it's just a matter of seeing how large the "large enough" cities are (say 200k+ residents), in terms of combined surface area, and comparing this to the lowball-spherical-approximate surface area of Earth.
I am of course ignoring that asteroids may be coming from a preferred direction w.r.t. to Earth's orbital plane, and that may cause some of them to bounce off the atmosphere. That'd be a small fraction of big-enough objects, I'd think.
I agree. I have no AV in my VMware image, and I have had no problems. I run an offline scan of the image's contents using clamav every once in a while, and there was never a problem. But I'd have a very hard time teaching anyone to follow safe browsing rules. People are very reactionary, and as soon as they see an antivirus warning, they go crazy, even if it's just a website warning. They believe, by default, that throwing money on the problem will fix it.
Why 300km/s? I thought it'd be an order of magnitude less?
Well, let's see. ~16 meters in diameter at density of iron 7.9gm/cm^3 gives mass of ~260e3 kg. At 30km/s relative velocity, that's 10^14J of kinetic energy, that's about 24 kilotons worth. So we're looking at the equivalent of the Hiroshima bomb.
Let's check the dissipation, though. The mass difference to go from 20m diameter to 16m diameter is 66e3 kg. To melt (ablate) all that iron off, you need 6.6*10^9 J. So that's tiny compared to 10^14J.
So yes, it would in fact cause a few million people to have a really bad day, had it hit in a big city -- so tgd was right, in a way.
It's very improbable that it would hit anywhere near a city, though.
OK, obviously I can't get my orders of magnitude right, the above is total BS. See below.
LOL no. If it'd impact into a mid-sized city, say of a million, smack into the downtown, it'd take a few buildings out 9/11 style, damage many others, but that would be it. Hardly a million people would be affected. Wait no, I take that back. The secondary effects of governmental bureaucracy and overreaction would certainly affect more than a few million, at least in some countries. Unless it'd hit somewhere relaxed like in South America (I'm serious, I love their attitude to living a life).
Same here.
I have a problem with the phrase "scientific accuracy", though. It's not "scientific" accuracy, it's realism. As in: does it match the reality, or not. Science is just a way of analyzing nature (reality), so "scientific accuracy" is a term that, perhaps, would apply to a movie about scientists and/or scientific process. So, in general, the movies are just that: unrealistic. The don't show our world and the nature in a true way. Perhaps the biggest impediment to that may be that people who know science usually talk in a language that's incompatible with the language spoken by movie producers/crews. It takes a special effort, and a fantastic personality, to be able to clearly speak about nature, in a scientific way, to artsy folk.
Now, going back to realism: I'm pretty sure there are no movies out there that are mostly realistic. I was going to say "no popular movies" and "fully realistic", but I think that really pretty much any movie that's rentable on, say, Netflix, is not realistic in a major way, and Netflix does have some quite niche flicks. So if realism or its lack is something that bugs you, there's no way to enjoy any movie, short of, say an MIT lecture recording -- if that could be called a movie, that is.
I have an offtopic question. Eniac is your contemporary, and it was used to do a bunch of numerical calculations. How did it compare to what Feynman and technologically-apt teenagers under his direction did for Project Manhattan? Does anyone know a rough order of magnitude of multiplies-and-adds that both projects had to go through, and the time it took? IIRC, Feynman's boys have figured out pretty much every basic contemporary CPU/GPU design trick (pipelining, interleaving/scheduling, speculative execution, you name it they've done it), even stuff that is not in production (error correction with pipeline stalling and reexecution that would work for, say SEUs). The boys have done it all on multi-colored punch cards.
THINGAMABOB was meant to have an obfuscated meaning ;)
As for defines: first of all, since this is C++ code, an enum or a static const int would be more appropriate. But then -- why bother, it doesn't make code any more readable. It's less readable, since you add a layer of abstraction.
Methinks your line of thinking is a case in point for falling for "goto considered harmful" as an excuse not to think about what one is doing.
The magic number avoidance is a double-edged sword. Some people take it for gospel even if it doesn't make sense.
Case in point: I have some code that talks to a piece of hardware. The code is really a library class. The hardware has a bunch of commands, that are invoked by using their numeric codes. I wrote the code like so:
Status Hardware::do_thingamabob() {
return send_command(0x13);
}
This command code is not needed anywhere else. Now comes a magic number demagician and turns it into a header file with a bunch of defines, and the function becomes:
Status Hardware::do_thingamabob() {
return send_command(THINGAMABOB_CMD);
}
No magic numbers? Check. Easier to understand? No, the locality has been lost. You need to refer to another file to see what is really sent. BTW, the code in question only cares about command codes within the functions that look like more or less like the above, and they are a perfect place to keep those numbers.
These days, if you want to distribute any sort of a non-mainstay "VM assembly" and wish for it to gain any sort of acceptance, it better be LLVM bitcode. Either that, or stick to CLR or JVM. It takes way too much work to create a half-decent optimizing backend, when starting from scratch.