I've been to quite a number of McDonalds around the world, and they are not exactly the same. Mostly the differences are in the menus - Japan has teriyaki burgers, Rome has pasta dishes, Mexico has burritos, India (I believe) has mutton burgers instead of beef. Even individual items sometimes vary between countries according to local tastes. People always assume that all McDonalds are clones, but they spend quite bit of time and research to appeal to each local palate. It may be the lowest common denominator food, but it's the local lowest common denominator food.
Why I once went to a Chinese restaurant in Mexico and the food there was virtually identical to the Chinese I've had in the US. Shocking! By your logic, it should have been served on a tortilla with salsa on it.
McDonalds have been around in Southern California since the late 50's. Surely long enough to wipe out all local flavor. And yet, the diversity of food available there today is amazingly diverse, and has increased since the 50's. Most cities in the country have a wider variety of cuisines than they did even 20 years ago. Surely, if McDonalds was going to destroy all local variation, it would have done so in the US over the last 40+ years. But it hasn't.
Then there is nothing that says that corporate success can't be measured in other ways than capital gains.
Of course, but investors make monetary investments in companies expecting financial gains. In fact there is an presumption under the law that investors expect to receive profits. If a company fails to issue its profits, this can be considered malfeasance on the part of the officers and can open the company to shareholder lawsuits (paging LeRach...)
Common wisdom states that turning as high a profit as possible is what the shareholders want. But this only stands because not enough shareholders have spoken out.
You're presupposing that shareholders don't want companies to turn as high a profit as possible. This seems extremely unlikely. If it were true, then you would expect that 'socially concious' mutual funds to be the most popular type, but in fact they continue to be only a niche market. On the other hand, funds with the highest returns tend to be the most popular quarter after quarter.
Except that as a group Americans seem to be greedy and selfish and wouldn't believe that a deviation from the current "natural order" of things is a good idea.
Yep, just like most people in modern economies around the world. No surprise there.
They might not even understand the notion that "return on investment" can include something other than financial returns.
Of course they do, otherwise people would never get married, have children, have pets, go to church, or have hobbies.
What if I want french fries and a hamburger and not a steak? To recreate a Big Mac Meal will require having all of the right ingredients that go into a Big Mac plus deep frying facilities to make the french fries. Given the mess and labor involved in preparation and cleanup, shelling out $4 is not a bad deal.
People are very aware there are alternatives to McDonalds. If they weren't, they would eat there for every meal which they clearly aren't. Most people are willing to occasionally trade a little money for adequate food and savings in hassle and cleanup. By the same logic as above, everyone should always fix their own car, wash their own windows, make their own clothing since it's cheaper. This assumes that your time has a fairly low unit value - a bad assumption for many people.
You're right that you'll never see movies about making peace, but not for the reasons you may think. Making peace, while laudable, tends to make a very a boring story. It usually lacks the key elements of drama: conflict, tension buildup and release, and character evolution. Hollywood, on the other hand, is very much into telling interesting stories. And people find conflict (including combat) very interesting - and always have. Think of the Illiad, Aneaid, Beowulf, King Arthur, Romeo and Juliet, Last of the Mohicans, Red Badge of Courage, every Western ever written or made, every war movie ever made, every Tom Clancy novel, and vitually every Spielberg movie. Even in ST:TOS in the episodes which promoted peace-making, they still had at least one fight or explosion ( not to mention an over-emoted speeches by Kirk at the end). And almost always these were the weakest episodes of the series. You may think it's sick and that it's wrong, but people are what they are, and they respond to what they respond to, whether we approve of it or not.
Forgiving people who killed your friends may or may not be an admirable thing, but I disagree that it is simply the right thing to do. Certainly, from a psychological perspective, it may be healthier to forgive, and from a day-to-day functioning perspective, it may be more pragmatic to forgive, but I don't necessarily agree that forgiving is always morally superior to not forgiving.
Consider Simon Wiesenthal and Lester Tenney (POW, survivor of the Bataan Death March, author of "My Hitch in Hell). Both men are still pursuing their tomenters decades after the war, and neither has 'forgiven' their enemies. After reading their accounts, I wouldn't blame them nor would I judge them. Certainly, if anyone has earned the right to unrepentedly hate someone else, they have. If either of these men should ever forgive those who torured them, I would support it. But only because I thought that it helped the men come to terms with their experiences for themselves, not because I think it makes a moral whit of difference.
After reading the article the first thought I had was that this will probably not last very long as planned mainly due to the hassle factor. Can you imagine as a bus driver having to scan every kid every day and then having to deal with the inevitable bugs, exceptions, and screwups that occur? What if a kid has to take a different bus home to study with a friend? There's bound to be problems with the software/hardware/database that the teachers and principals are going to get tired of dealing with. I bet within a year the checks will be reduced to just during homeroom, and maybe after lunch. The irony is that only the schools in the nicest areas (and with the least problems with truancy and violence) are going to be the ones to get these systems, while schools in rough areas where it might actually be beneficial will never get them.
As for installing webcams throughout schools, just wait until the first 40 year old stalker gets caught using them to monitor his favorite school girl.
The students that care will end up doing all the goal-oriented work while the others will fill in the gaps, even to the point of doing practically nothing. The students that care, work on the project all the time. The students that don't care want to schedule meetings to make lists (read the Dilbert Principle some day).
In all my classes I always liked having a partner (whether official or not). With two of us working together, we usually had more complete notes, handouts, and understanding than either one of us could have done individually. Even if you're a good student, there's always going to be some topic or subtlety that you didn't get but your partner did.
Another gross misconception; an academic cliche if you will. Every time I hear that my brain translates it into proper English: "Your professor is lazy."
It may seem like a cliche to you, but if you ever teach, you'll find that it is so *very* true. As a student, even if my class partner was below me in understanding, the act of explaining the material to them helped to reinforce my understanding better than I could have done alone. Later, when I taught calculus for the first time, it was amazing how much it deepened my understanding of the subject. Being able to solve every example, explain every detail and nuance, and do it spontaneously in front of a live audience is much more demanding than just having to solve problems during an hour exam.
In fact I would say as a general rule, that if you can't explain a topic verbally to someone in a coherent and understandable way, you probably don't understand it as well as you think.
That's because we know what you want. We ask hard questions because it will get us a good grade, because it pleases you. It's classic conditioning and one of the traits of highly successful people to boot.
Actually it wasn't until I was in graduate school that learned how important it was to ask questions in class as they occurred to you, even at the risk of slight embarassment. After all you're paying for the class, and it's your responsibility ultimately to know the material. As an instructor, I always preferred to have interaction from the students(even as not fully thought out questions) than have a dead class.
I'm with you on everything except for one point - that it's easier to lose weight by changing your diet than by exercising. Everything I've read (and my own experience) says it's exactly the opposite - in the long run exercise will almost always result in more weight loss than just changing the diet. (this assumes that you're not already eating some kind of crazy-ass high calorie diet). With exercise, when you burn say 350 calories you also have an elevated metabolism for several hours that burns additional calories. In addition you will tend to gain more muscle mass, which raises your basal metabolism. So the benefits of exercising can be up to several times the actual number of calories burned during a workout.
On the other hand, just reducing your calorie intake (without exercise) will cause your body to go into 'starvation mode' where the metabolism drops to try and maintain body fat. Sure you can eat little enough that you lose weight in spite of this, but you're fighting your body here. Also there will be a tendency to rebound in weight if you ever slack off from your diet.
Now that I'm in my early thirties, I can definitely tell a difference in my metabolism. Unfortunately for me, I suspect that my genetic setpoint is on the heavier side, so it'll probably require constant effort to maintain my weight where I'd like it. Having watched myself and others battle with their weight, here are a few suggestions:
Don't count on diets
Diets (as in diet systems) only really work in the short term. I've seen plenty of people lose weight on no-carbohydrate, all-carbohydrate, all-fruit, etc. diets. But fast-forward a year and they're right back where they were. The only real solution is to modify your normal diet in ways that you can live with in the long term. For me, this means restricting fastfood to just weekends and maybe once during the week. I've upped my pasta intake and I usually try to avoid really fatty foods. Do I splurge occasionally? Sure, and I'd go nuts if I didn't. Mostly it's a matter of moderating my existing diet, rather than replacing it with a whole new one.
Get some exercise
This is really the key to maintaining your weight without undue suffering. You don't have to be running marathons or biking hundreds of miles to get most of the benefits, just do something consistently. Find something that you enjoy and that you can do fairly often - say around 2-3 times a week. Anything less than this (even if it's intense) and you're probably not getting your full fitness benefit and it's too easy to slack off and get out of the habit. I'm a big fan of walking, since you can do it almost anywhere and it doesn't require any equipment or facilities. Don't get over-ambitious in your workout, aim for something that you can maintain in the long-haul.
Get some rest
Another big overlooked factor in general healthiness is getting enough rest. In particular, try to get enough sleep. For me that means about 8 hours a night. There's a difference between the amount of sleep you need for functioning and the optimal amount of sleep for your body. When I'm getting the sleep that my body really needs, it's amazing how much more energetic and how much better I feel. I also do a bit of weightlifting, and I've always found a very string correlation between my periods of best progress and the amount of good quality sleep I was getting. While this may not affect your weight directly, it will affect your appetite and energy levels. This will tend to improve your diet and keep up your interest in exercising. Plus you'll feel better too.
Anyway none of these suggestions are fancy, exciting, or even new, but they do seem to work in the long run. While you don't have to do all of them at once, a little of all three is better than a lot of one and none of the others.
Coffee is unlikely to dehydrate you unless you haven't had caffiene for a while. If you're having a daily cup or two, your kidneys and urinary tract will adapt to it fairly quickly and your body will maintain its water equilibrium. I don't know what kind of coffee you're drinking, but mine wakes me up a bit rather than gives a euphoria.
If I had to pick a mathematical formula to wear for the rest of my life I would probably pick Euler's Formula (e^iPi + 1 = 0) or Maxwell's equations. A distant third would be the formula for the Mandelbrot set (Zn = (Zn-1)^2 + C) with an illustration of course.:-)
Actually most digital cameras can detect IR light at least to some degree. Using the LCD display on my cheapie digital camera, I can clearly see the IR LEDs on my remote control light up even though they're invisible to my eyes. To detect a system in a grocery store, all you'd have to do is use your camera's display to scan for unusual light sources.
Before WWI the American springfield rifle was so similar to the German mauser rifles that the U.S. government was forced to pay royalties to the German company, Mauserwerke. Naturally during the war the U.S. stopped paying royalties and after the war, any remaining royalties were done away with as part of reparations.
Actually Waco is good example of how armed resistance by average citizens can affect government behavior. Now the Branch Davidians were a bunch of nutjobs probably up to illegal activities, and I believe David Koresh and his henchmen are responsible for all the deaths that occured during the standoff. However, the whole incident brought to light malfeasance on the part of the ATF and the DOJ, and certainly they've been abusive in the past. Since Waco, the ATF has been treading much more carefully trying to avoid situations like the one that happened. They're also under greater congressional and media scrutiny nowadays. Just the fact that they *could* face another Waco is enough to restrain their current behavior.
The choices professors made for which textbooks they used always seemed at odds with what I would have chosen to learn from. This especially true for introductory classes, where the textbooks tended to be of the dense, encyclopedical type. I suppose the lectures and notes were supposed to be enough to learn from and the textbooks were just for reference. In practice, this never seemed to work out, and I usually found that a readable textbook was better than any lecture notes.
As for textbooks, Rudin is *okay* for an introductory analysis course (assuming you have a very strong background). Alfors seems to be the gold standard for complex analysis, but I always found it dense and hard to read - Conway is much better and even has a bit of sly wit in it.
I agree that a lot of the math teaching (even at the graduate level) is pretty poor. Some of the most miserable hours of my education were spent in a classroom transcribing by hand a relentless series of definitions, lemmas, theorems, and proofs with almost no commentary. It would have been so much more useful if the professor had passed out his printed up notes at the beginning of class and then walked us through the proofs with a chance for discussion. I've always found it hard to accurately copy a proof and think about it at the same time, and I doubt I'm alone in this.
I always love it when you're reading a proof and it says something like "...after a bit of algebra, we obtain the following form...". This always seem to require a page or two of intense algreba computations plus a few non-intuitive manuipulations for good measure. Nothing like good old mathematical understatement.
This reminds me of the old math joke:
A math professor is working on a problem at the blackboard for a while and isn't getting anywhere. Another math professor comes by, stares at the problem for a few minutes, and announces that the solution is trivial.
The first professor says, "I don't see it - show me," and so the second professor proceeds to explain the solution over the next 40 minutes. "yeah, it's trivial," finally agrees the first professor.
Actually many constitutional scholars agree that the 2nd Amendment does indeed extend to the individual the right own firearms. Cecil at the Straight Dope has a good discussion on the differing interpretations of the 2nd Amendment here. Personally I believe the 'individual rights' interpretation is more in line with what the founding fathers had in mind, with the first clause (...'regulated militia'...) justifying why they were extending 'the right to bear arms' to indiviuals in the second clause.
And we're supposed to believe you because.... you say so? Sorry you're going to have to do better than that. First off, your theory fails the Large Population Conspiracy test, which is that there were thousands of people intimately involved in the space program and yet no one has come forward to expose this conspiracy. Certainly years later, there should have been at least one disgruntled astronaut, engineer, or administrator who would break the silence.
Even if we assume what you say is correct, it's not clear what benefit there would have been to having a 'secret astronaut' program. Throughout the period, the US and USSR were in a race to be the first in every space accomplishment. Sending up a 'secret' astronaut on a mission that you could never mention and might allow the Soviets to jump ahead of you in public achievements just does not make any sense. By the Gemini program (after 1963), the rockets were much more reliable and there would have been little reason to have secret missions when the odds of success were already so high.
Uhmm... I hate to break it you, but most people *are* shallow and childish, at least some of the time. To be this surprised about human behavior, you must not have been in a bar or dance club anytime in the last few decades!
And let's see - someone voluntarily posts their picture on a website for evaluation, someone else voluntarily goes to that website, votes on the picture, and this is supposed to be some kind of oppression. It may be stupid and childish in your opinion, but remember, this is a free country and the most basic freedom is the freedom to be as foolish as you like. If you really think that noticing someone's appearance leads to child murders, then you ought to be attacking fashion magazines, most tv channels, and anything celebrity related.
This is probably a troll, but I just couldn't resist. If it is, then all I can say is...well done.
Actually the fact that man can eat meat and digest it, is proof that mankind's digestive tract *has* evolved to eat meat. A human's digestive tract is intermediate in length between pure carnivore and pure vegetarian animals of similar size, showing that we are in fact omnivores.
Also how fast meat decays is a red herring. All food has a certain amount of bacteria in it, and is 'decaying' at various rates. Once food has been chewed and is in the stomach, the acidic environment is inhospitable to most bacteria and they either die or are passed out harmlessly in waste. (it's the toxic byproducts of certain bacteria before they die that give us food poisoning, not the bacteria themselves) If the idea of food 'decaying' inside you bothers you, think about the last time you had gas after eating beans. The gas is caused by the 'decay' (aka digestion by bactria) of the beans. Maybe we should lay off the vegetables as well.
All this being said, it's probably healthier to eat more vegetables and be moderate in our meat intake, but let's not distort the facts to justify it.
This already exists. Check out the Proxomitron at http://www.computerstuff.net/prox/. Its default filters eliminate almost all ads and java annoyances. Furthermore you can write your own filters to handle any site. Best of all it's free (or at least Shonenware). I've been using it for almost a year now, and it's made the web a much more pleasant place. Currently it's for Windows only, but maybe the author could be persuaded to port it to Linux.
The SAT seems to be the new scapegoat for a lot education problems now a days. It is certainly not a perfect test for predicting a person's undergraduate performance, but is not worthless either. Whether there's a meaningful difference between a score of 1200 and 1000 is debatable, but a person scoring 700 will almost certainly have a harder time in college than someone scoring 1300. So it is measuring *something*, and this something can be a useful predictor of how difficult university-level studies will be for someone.
Like many things in life, predicting someone's success in college (as measured thru grades and graduation rates) is difficult and depends on many factors. SAT scores and GPAs are the easiest to measure and compare, and in fact do a decent job of predicting undergraduate performance during the first year (after this, other factors come in to play such as social relationships, peer pressure, family circumstances, etc. that cannot easily be predicted during the admissions process). In truth many other factors such as personal drive, time management skills, the ability to learn new material quickly, as well as cultural expectations can be just as important in determining how well a student will do in college. But, alas, these are not really measurable. Essays and extracurricular activities may indicate some of these qualities, but that's about all they can reliably do.
Dropping the SAT without replacing it with some other kind of objective test, is in my opinion a mistake. Even if it's 'arbitrary' test (as some critics claim), it's a nationwide 'arbitrary' test that allows students' scores from different high schools (and decades!) to be compared. This is an advantage to students from rural or non-standard high schools as it gives them a chance to compete head-to-head with students from well-know prep schools.
Another reason for not dropping the SAT, is that without an independently administered objective test, it's just too easily to fool yourself as to where your skill levels really are. You may think you're the greatest wrestler or trumpet player in the entire country. Your parents and coach may even agree, but until you play a match or a recital, that's no way to really know. Likewise in academics, if every high school student is a B+ or better student every year, there's no way to know how schools are doing and which ones are in trouble. In general problems that can't be measured, can't be fixed and you certainly won't know it when you have.
I was debating whether to get a PDA earlier this year and finally decided to get a Rex-3 since they were so cheap (~$35). The Rex isn't bad especially if you want a pda that'll fit in your front pocket. But ultimately I got frustrated with not being able to add info on the fly, and bought a Visor. So far it's been great, and the larger size hasn't been a problem. So far I haven't felt limited by the 2MB memory, but I could see how this would be annoying if I were downloading huge files. For ordinary tasks, it's sufficient. I mainly picked the Visor because it has the springboard and it's a lot cheaper than the Palms. Plus it takes AAA batteries (these last abot 4 weeks) which frees you from the charger.
In the long run I think you'll be happier with a Palm-based PDA. There's more software available, and it's upgradable.
I've had ATT@home here in Santa Clara for almost 6 months. Even though I have my system set up for DHCP, I've been using the same IP address the entire time. I even ordered an additional address for a second system.
The only complaint I have is that they didn't offer any advice whatsoever on securing the system when they installed it. You'd think it wouldn't be that hard to warn new users or install some kind of firewall software. I'm sure they could work out a deal with ZoneAlert or some other provider, but nooo! Luckily we use BlackIce at work, so I knew how many probes a cable system can get in just one day. So on my windows system I use BlackIce, and on my linux system I have all but a few ports closed. It's amazing the amount of intrusion attempts I get. Usually if it's just a few probes, I'll just block the intruder. If attempts continue, I'll email the offender's isp. Probes also seemed to surge whenever I use gnutella - I guess host lists are perfect fodder for the script kiddies.
I was pleasantly surprised that the results basically mirrored the candidate ordering from the 'Slashdot slate' that appeared on Thursday. I wonder what percentage of the at-large members are slashdot readers. A fairly good amount from the looks of it.
The total number of votes cast was also surprisingly low - anyone know how many at-large members there are?
Slashdot Mirror
I've been to quite a number of McDonalds around the world, and they are not exactly the same. Mostly the differences are in the menus - Japan has teriyaki burgers, Rome has pasta dishes, Mexico has burritos, India (I believe) has mutton burgers instead of beef. Even individual items sometimes vary between countries according to local tastes. People always assume that all McDonalds are clones, but they spend quite bit of time and research to appeal to each local palate. It may be the lowest common denominator food, but it's the local lowest common denominator food.
Why I once went to a Chinese restaurant in Mexico and the food there was virtually identical to the Chinese I've had in the US. Shocking! By your logic, it should have been served on a tortilla with salsa on it.
McDonalds have been around in Southern California since the late 50's. Surely long enough to wipe out all local flavor. And yet, the diversity of food available there today is amazingly diverse, and has increased since the 50's. Most cities in the country have a wider variety of cuisines than they did even 20 years ago. Surely, if McDonalds was going to destroy all local variation, it would have done so in the US over the last 40+ years. But it hasn't.
Then there is nothing that says that corporate success can't be measured in other ways than capital gains.
Of course, but investors make monetary investments in companies expecting financial gains. In fact there is an presumption under the law that investors expect to receive profits. If a company fails to issue its profits, this can be considered malfeasance on the part of the officers and can open the company to shareholder lawsuits (paging LeRach...)
Common wisdom states that turning as high a profit as possible is what the shareholders want. But this only stands because not enough shareholders have spoken out.
You're presupposing that shareholders don't want companies to turn as high a profit as possible. This seems extremely unlikely. If it were true, then you would expect that 'socially concious' mutual funds to be the most popular type, but in fact they continue to be only a niche market. On the other hand, funds with the highest returns tend to be the most popular quarter after quarter.
Except that as a group Americans seem to be greedy and selfish and wouldn't believe that a deviation from the current "natural order" of things is a good idea.
Yep, just like most people in modern economies around the world. No surprise there.
They might not even understand the notion that "return on investment" can include something other than financial returns.
Of course they do, otherwise people would never get married, have children, have pets, go to church, or have hobbies.
What if I want french fries and a hamburger and not a steak? To recreate a Big Mac Meal will require having all of the right ingredients that go into a Big Mac plus deep frying facilities to make the french fries. Given the mess and labor involved in preparation and cleanup, shelling out $4 is not a bad deal.
People are very aware there are alternatives to McDonalds. If they weren't, they would eat there for every meal which they clearly aren't. Most people are willing to occasionally trade a little money for adequate food and savings in hassle and cleanup. By the same logic as above, everyone should always fix their own car, wash their own windows, make their own clothing since it's cheaper. This assumes that your time has a fairly low unit value - a bad assumption for many people.
Forgiving people who killed your friends may or may not be an admirable thing, but I disagree that it is simply the right thing to do. Certainly, from a psychological perspective, it may be healthier to forgive, and from a day-to-day functioning perspective, it may be more pragmatic to forgive, but I don't necessarily agree that forgiving is always morally superior to not forgiving.
Consider Simon Wiesenthal and Lester Tenney (POW, survivor of the Bataan Death March, author of "My Hitch in Hell). Both men are still pursuing their tomenters decades after the war, and neither has 'forgiven' their enemies. After reading their accounts, I wouldn't blame them nor would I judge them. Certainly, if anyone has earned the right to unrepentedly hate someone else, they have. If either of these men should ever forgive those who torured them, I would support it. But only because I thought that it helped the men come to terms with their experiences for themselves, not because I think it makes a moral whit of difference.
After reading the article the first thought I had was that this will probably not last very long as planned mainly due to the hassle factor. Can you imagine as a bus driver having to scan every kid every day and then having to deal with the inevitable bugs, exceptions, and screwups that occur? What if a kid has to take a different bus home to study with a friend? There's bound to be problems with the software/hardware/database that the teachers and principals are going to get tired of dealing with. I bet within a year the checks will be reduced to just during homeroom, and maybe after lunch. The irony is that only the schools in the nicest areas (and with the least problems with truancy and violence) are going to be the ones to get these systems, while schools in rough areas where it might actually be beneficial will never get them.
As for installing webcams throughout schools, just wait until the first 40 year old stalker gets caught using them to monitor his favorite school girl.
Using the gravity polarizer, no doubt.
The students that care will end up doing all the goal-oriented work while the others will fill in the gaps, even to the point of doing practically nothing. The students that care, work on the project all the time. The students that don't care want to schedule meetings to make lists (read the Dilbert Principle some day).
In all my classes I always liked having a partner (whether official or not). With two of us working together, we usually had more complete notes, handouts, and understanding than either one of us could have done individually. Even if you're a good student, there's always going to be some topic or subtlety that you didn't get but your partner did.
Another gross misconception; an academic cliche if you will. Every time I hear that my brain translates it into proper English: "Your professor is lazy."
It may seem like a cliche to you, but if you ever teach, you'll find that it is so *very* true. As a student, even if my class partner was below me in understanding, the act of explaining the material to them helped to reinforce my understanding better than I could have done alone. Later, when I taught calculus for the first time, it was amazing how much it deepened my understanding of the subject. Being able to solve every example, explain every detail and nuance, and do it spontaneously in front of a live audience is much more demanding than just having to solve problems during an hour exam. In fact I would say as a general rule, that if you can't explain a topic verbally to someone in a coherent and understandable way, you probably don't understand it as well as you think.
That's because we know what you want. We ask hard questions because it will get us a good grade, because it pleases you. It's classic conditioning and one of the traits of highly successful people to boot.
Actually it wasn't until I was in graduate school that learned how important it was to ask questions in class as they occurred to you, even at the risk of slight embarassment. After all you're paying for the class, and it's your responsibility ultimately to know the material. As an instructor, I always preferred to have interaction from the students(even as not fully thought out questions) than have a dead class.
I'm with you on everything except for one point - that it's easier to lose weight by changing your diet than by exercising. Everything I've read (and my own experience) says it's exactly the opposite - in the long run exercise will almost always result in more weight loss than just changing the diet. (this assumes that you're not already eating some kind of crazy-ass high calorie diet). With exercise, when you burn say 350 calories you also have an elevated metabolism for several hours that burns additional calories. In addition you will tend to gain more muscle mass, which raises your basal metabolism. So the benefits of exercising can be up to several times the actual number of calories burned during a workout.
On the other hand, just reducing your calorie intake (without exercise) will cause your body to go into 'starvation mode' where the metabolism drops to try and maintain body fat. Sure you can eat little enough that you lose weight in spite of this, but you're fighting your body here. Also there will be a tendency to rebound in weight if you ever slack off from your diet.
Now that I'm in my early thirties, I can definitely tell a difference in my metabolism. Unfortunately for me, I suspect that my genetic setpoint is on the heavier side, so it'll probably require constant effort to maintain my weight where I'd like it. Having watched myself and others battle with their weight, here are a few suggestions:
Don't count on diets
Diets (as in diet systems) only really work in the short term. I've seen plenty of people lose weight on no-carbohydrate, all-carbohydrate, all-fruit, etc. diets. But fast-forward a year and they're right back where they were. The only real solution is to modify your normal diet in ways that you can live with in the long term. For me, this means restricting fastfood to just weekends and maybe once during the week. I've upped my pasta intake and I usually try to avoid really fatty foods. Do I splurge occasionally? Sure, and I'd go nuts if I didn't. Mostly it's a matter of moderating my existing diet, rather than replacing it with a whole new one.
Get some exercise
This is really the key to maintaining your weight without undue suffering. You don't have to be running marathons or biking hundreds of miles to get most of the benefits, just do something consistently. Find something that you enjoy and that you can do fairly often - say around 2-3 times a week. Anything less than this (even if it's intense) and you're probably not getting your full fitness benefit and it's too easy to slack off and get out of the habit. I'm a big fan of walking, since you can do it almost anywhere and it doesn't require any equipment or facilities. Don't get over-ambitious in your workout, aim for something that you can maintain in the long-haul.
Get some rest
Another big overlooked factor in general healthiness is getting enough rest. In particular, try to get enough sleep. For me that means about 8 hours a night. There's a difference between the amount of sleep you need for functioning and the optimal amount of sleep for your body. When I'm getting the sleep that my body really needs, it's amazing how much more energetic and how much better I feel. I also do a bit of weightlifting, and I've always found a very string correlation between my periods of best progress and the amount of good quality sleep I was getting. While this may not affect your weight directly, it will affect your appetite and energy levels. This will tend to improve your diet and keep up your interest in exercising. Plus you'll feel better too.
Anyway none of these suggestions are fancy, exciting, or even new, but they do seem to work in the long run. While you don't have to do all of them at once, a little of all three is better than a lot of one and none of the others.
Coffee is unlikely to dehydrate you unless you haven't had caffiene for a while. If you're having a daily cup or two, your kidneys and urinary tract will adapt to it fairly quickly and your body will maintain its water equilibrium. I don't know what kind of coffee you're drinking, but mine wakes me up a bit rather than gives a euphoria.
If I had to pick a mathematical formula to wear for the rest of my life I would probably pick Euler's Formula (e^iPi + 1 = 0) or Maxwell's equations. A distant third would be the formula for the Mandelbrot set (Zn = (Zn-1)^2 + C) with an illustration of course. :-)
Actually most digital cameras can detect IR light at least to some degree. Using the LCD display on my cheapie digital camera, I can clearly see the IR LEDs on my remote control light up even though they're invisible to my eyes. To detect a system in a grocery store, all you'd have to do is use your camera's display to scan for unusual light sources.
Before WWI the American springfield rifle was so similar to the German mauser rifles that the U.S. government was forced to pay royalties to the German company, Mauserwerke. Naturally during the war the U.S. stopped paying royalties and after the war, any remaining royalties were done away with as part of reparations.
Actually Waco is good example of how armed resistance by average citizens can affect government behavior. Now the Branch Davidians were a bunch of nutjobs probably up to illegal activities, and I believe David Koresh and his henchmen are responsible for all the deaths that occured during the standoff. However, the whole incident brought to light malfeasance on the part of the ATF and the DOJ, and certainly they've been abusive in the past. Since Waco, the ATF has been treading much more carefully trying to avoid situations like the one that happened. They're also under greater congressional and media scrutiny nowadays. Just the fact that they *could* face another Waco is enough to restrain their current behavior.
The choices professors made for which textbooks they used always seemed at odds with what I would have chosen to learn from. This especially true for introductory classes, where the textbooks tended to be of the dense, encyclopedical type. I suppose the lectures and notes were supposed to be enough to learn from and the textbooks were just for reference. In practice, this never seemed to work out, and I usually found that a readable textbook was better than any lecture notes. As for textbooks, Rudin is *okay* for an introductory analysis course (assuming you have a very strong background). Alfors seems to be the gold standard for complex analysis, but I always found it dense and hard to read - Conway is much better and even has a bit of sly wit in it.
I agree that a lot of the math teaching (even at the graduate level) is pretty poor. Some of the most miserable hours of my education were spent in a classroom transcribing by hand a relentless series of definitions, lemmas, theorems, and proofs with almost no commentary. It would have been so much more useful if the professor had passed out his printed up notes at the beginning of class and then walked us through the proofs with a chance for discussion. I've always found it hard to accurately copy a proof and think about it at the same time, and I doubt I'm alone in this.
This reminds me of the old math joke:
A math professor is working on a problem at the blackboard for a while and isn't getting anywhere. Another math professor comes by, stares at the problem for a few minutes, and announces that the solution is trivial.
The first professor says, "I don't see it - show me," and so the second professor proceeds to explain the solution over the next 40 minutes. "yeah, it's trivial," finally agrees the first professor.
Actually many constitutional scholars agree that the 2nd Amendment does indeed extend to the individual the right own firearms. Cecil at the Straight Dope has a good discussion on the differing interpretations of the 2nd Amendment here. Personally I believe the 'individual rights' interpretation is more in line with what the founding fathers had in mind, with the first clause (...'regulated militia'...) justifying why they were extending 'the right to bear arms' to indiviuals in the second clause.
And we're supposed to believe you because .... you say so? Sorry you're going to have to do better than that. First off, your theory fails the Large Population Conspiracy test, which is that there were thousands of people intimately involved in the space program and yet no one has come forward to expose this conspiracy. Certainly years later, there should have been at least one disgruntled astronaut, engineer, or administrator who would break the silence.
Even if we assume what you say is correct, it's not clear what benefit there would have been to having a 'secret astronaut' program. Throughout the period, the US and USSR were in a race to be the first in every space accomplishment. Sending up a 'secret' astronaut on a mission that you could never mention and might allow the Soviets to jump ahead of you in public achievements just does not make any sense. By the Gemini program (after 1963), the rockets were much more reliable and there would have been little reason to have secret missions when the odds of success were already so high.
Uhmm ... I hate to break it you, but most people *are* shallow and childish, at least some of the time. To be this surprised about human behavior, you must not have been in a bar or dance club anytime in the last few decades!
And let's see - someone voluntarily posts their picture on a website for evaluation, someone else voluntarily goes to that website, votes on the picture, and this is supposed to be some kind of oppression. It may be stupid and childish in your opinion, but remember, this is a free country and the most basic freedom is the freedom to be as foolish as you like. If you really think that noticing someone's appearance leads to child murders, then you ought to be attacking fashion magazines, most tv channels, and anything celebrity related.
This is probably a troll, but I just couldn't resist. If it is, then all I can say is...well done.
Actually the fact that man can eat meat and digest it, is proof that mankind's digestive tract *has* evolved to eat meat. A human's digestive tract is intermediate in length between pure carnivore and pure vegetarian animals of similar size, showing that we are in fact omnivores. Also how fast meat decays is a red herring. All food has a certain amount of bacteria in it, and is 'decaying' at various rates. Once food has been chewed and is in the stomach, the acidic environment is inhospitable to most bacteria and they either die or are passed out harmlessly in waste. (it's the toxic byproducts of certain bacteria before they die that give us food poisoning, not the bacteria themselves) If the idea of food 'decaying' inside you bothers you, think about the last time you had gas after eating beans. The gas is caused by the 'decay' (aka digestion by bactria) of the beans. Maybe we should lay off the vegetables as well. All this being said, it's probably healthier to eat more vegetables and be moderate in our meat intake, but let's not distort the facts to justify it.
This already exists. Check out the Proxomitron at http://www.computerstuff.net/prox/. Its default filters eliminate almost all ads and java annoyances. Furthermore you can write your own filters to handle any site. Best of all it's free (or at least Shonenware). I've been using it for almost a year now, and it's made the web a much more pleasant place. Currently it's for Windows only, but maybe the author could be persuaded to port it to Linux.
The SAT seems to be the new scapegoat for a lot education problems now a days. It is certainly not a perfect test for predicting a person's undergraduate performance, but is not worthless either. Whether there's a meaningful difference between a score of 1200 and 1000 is debatable, but a person scoring 700 will almost certainly have a harder time in college than someone scoring 1300. So it is measuring *something*, and this something can be a useful predictor of how difficult university-level studies will be for someone. Like many things in life, predicting someone's success in college (as measured thru grades and graduation rates) is difficult and depends on many factors. SAT scores and GPAs are the easiest to measure and compare, and in fact do a decent job of predicting undergraduate performance during the first year (after this, other factors come in to play such as social relationships, peer pressure, family circumstances, etc. that cannot easily be predicted during the admissions process). In truth many other factors such as personal drive, time management skills, the ability to learn new material quickly, as well as cultural expectations can be just as important in determining how well a student will do in college. But, alas, these are not really measurable. Essays and extracurricular activities may indicate some of these qualities, but that's about all they can reliably do. Dropping the SAT without replacing it with some other kind of objective test, is in my opinion a mistake. Even if it's 'arbitrary' test (as some critics claim), it's a nationwide 'arbitrary' test that allows students' scores from different high schools (and decades!) to be compared. This is an advantage to students from rural or non-standard high schools as it gives them a chance to compete head-to-head with students from well-know prep schools. Another reason for not dropping the SAT, is that without an independently administered objective test, it's just too easily to fool yourself as to where your skill levels really are. You may think you're the greatest wrestler or trumpet player in the entire country. Your parents and coach may even agree, but until you play a match or a recital, that's no way to really know. Likewise in academics, if every high school student is a B+ or better student every year, there's no way to know how schools are doing and which ones are in trouble. In general problems that can't be measured, can't be fixed and you certainly won't know it when you have.
I was debating whether to get a PDA earlier this year and finally decided to get a Rex-3 since they were so cheap (~$35). The Rex isn't bad especially if you want a pda that'll fit in your front pocket. But ultimately I got frustrated with not being able to add info on the fly, and bought a Visor. So far it's been great, and the larger size hasn't been a problem. So far I haven't felt limited by the 2MB memory, but I could see how this would be annoying if I were downloading huge files. For ordinary tasks, it's sufficient. I mainly picked the Visor because it has the springboard and it's a lot cheaper than the Palms. Plus it takes AAA batteries (these last abot 4 weeks) which frees you from the charger. In the long run I think you'll be happier with a Palm-based PDA. There's more software available, and it's upgradable.
I've had ATT@home here in Santa Clara for almost 6 months. Even though I have my system set up for DHCP, I've been using the same IP address the entire time. I even ordered an additional address for a second system. The only complaint I have is that they didn't offer any advice whatsoever on securing the system when they installed it. You'd think it wouldn't be that hard to warn new users or install some kind of firewall software. I'm sure they could work out a deal with ZoneAlert or some other provider, but nooo! Luckily we use BlackIce at work, so I knew how many probes a cable system can get in just one day. So on my windows system I use BlackIce, and on my linux system I have all but a few ports closed. It's amazing the amount of intrusion attempts I get. Usually if it's just a few probes, I'll just block the intruder. If attempts continue, I'll email the offender's isp. Probes also seemed to surge whenever I use gnutella - I guess host lists are perfect fodder for the script kiddies.
I was pleasantly surprised that the results basically mirrored the candidate ordering from the 'Slashdot slate' that appeared on Thursday. I wonder what percentage of the at-large members are slashdot readers. A fairly good amount from the looks of it. The total number of votes cast was also surprisingly low - anyone know how many at-large members there are?