What does "low grade helium" mean? Is it the alphas or the electrons that get worn out?
It seems that chemically separating a gas whose chief property is not reacting with anything from other gases that are either very reactive or have a molecular weight different by an order of magnitude shouldn't be *that* hard...
As someone who is both a pianist and a photographer, this metaphor is way off.
A better comparison is more like
cheap 55-key Casio keyboard - decent upright piano - Bosendorfer concert grand (or Stradivarius violin; Stratovarius is a metal band which most definitely doesn't make violins). cameraphone - consumer digital SLR - Phase One medium format back
Here, the first one will let you do some very limited things, and its output is fine for some purposes but not suitable for many. The second one is a complete tool, letting you do everything (change lenses and control shutter speed and aperture for the camera; use basically the whole range of notes that are musically useful on the piano) and gives good output. (There are shots from $500 consumer DSLR's that are printed six feet tall and hung in the Smithsonian's gallery of wildlife photography, and they hang without shame next to shots done with the best money can buy.)
Ordinary DSLR's don't cost that much, compared to some other things people buy (like violins and pianos). You can get a very decent one for a few hundred bucks. While there are a lot of folks running around with cameras that have lots of expensive features that they have no need for (the "full frame" craze comes to mind), there are also a lot of folks who use every bit of what their consumer DSLR will do.
I'm not at all demeaning SLR's for video -- they do it very, very well, as you say. (Hence my first sentence: if you are prepared to manually focus, it will work, otherwise not.)
The issue is that the people who do manual focus pulling are very very good at what they do. Most DSLR owners, even ones who are excellent stills photographers, are not experienced with video manual focus. It seems that you are; good for you. Lots of folks aren't, and I know of quite a few people who have gotten rude surprises when they find that the video on their new SLR disables autofocus. A hockey game isn't exactly the easiest of targets, if you're new at that sort of thing -- especially if you're using nice fast glass.
Shooting video of your son's hockey games with the Canon SLR will be a disaster unless you are prepared to manually focus all the time; the autofocus systems in SLR's don't work in movie mode. (Some of them don't work at all, and some of them just suck; I don't know which the T3 is.) The one exception is the Canon 70D, which has a fancy split-pixel sensor that lets it AF during movie shooting.
The exceptions are the Sony SLT cameras, which send 2/3 of the light to the sensor and 1/3 to a dedicated AF sensor, and the Olympus and Panasonic Micro Four Thirds cameras, which can use the readout from the main sensor to autofocus. (This is the same thing that the SLR's try to do when autofocusing in movie mode; the Micro 4/3 cameras just manage to not suck at it so badly.)
Depending on what you're doing low-light video is easier than low-light stills; most cameras will show less noise in video mode at any given ISO, plus you can fix the shutter speed to 1/30 or whatever your framerate is rather than using the 1/100 or more you need to avoid blur on moving targets for stills.
For $200? Find a used Olympus E-510 or E-520 and its kit lens. You can do a lot worse. There is a telephoto kit lens too (40-150, 80-300 equiv) that is small, cheap, and surprisingly sharp.
dSLR's "should" be used by whoever the hell wants to use them. That's as absurd as saying that pianos should only be used by professional pianists because anyone else can get a harmonica. Who says?
How is morphine more dangerous than heroin? (Honest question.) I thought that they were both basically interchangeable in a medical setting (with proper dose adjustment, etc., to get an equivalent analgesic effect.)
Because opiate addiction causes a lot of harm, and people have always fallen for the fallacy that the best way to decrease the harm associated with something is to ban it.
You would, though -- it's an opiate, and one strong opiate is pretty close to the same as another.
I remember when Krokodil first became a thing in Eastern Europe; I read an article with an interview with an addict who said "I'd do anything to get some nice clean heroin, but since I can't, it's this stuff..."
It's not left-wing; if anything, it's right-wing. (I'm a centrist.)
Left-wing economics in the US seems predicated on the assumption that there is X amount of stuff to go around, and the 1% are using more than their share of stuff, and ought to give more to everyone else. The left-wing narrative sets the wealthy against the poor.
Right-wing economics (at least the sane, non-theological version of it) says that wealth isn't a zero-sum game, and that wealth is created for both parties (whether rich or poor) whenever there's a voluntary exchange of labor, goods, land, whatever. The right-wing narrative says that we are all in a quest to improve the overall wealth of society, and "a rising tide floats all boats".
Ballmer pits employees against each other; "good business practice" pits them all against the bottom line. If even the worst fellow in the shop creates more value for the company than his salary, he's worth keeping around. That's more like the right-wing narrative.
How does the glorification of sex lead to violence?
There seems to be a real anticorrelation between sex-positivity and violence in the world. What bit of the world seems to be always at each other's throats? The same bit that makes their women wear rugs with (sometimes) eyeholes. Where are some of the most peaceful bits of the world? Western Europe...
As an American, I am way less worried about foreigners hurting me than my government hurting me, either directly, indirectly by restricting people I'd like to do business with, or by simply confiscating part of my income as taxes to do silly things.
The check on a democratically-elected government to stop them from doing silly things is for the people to find out about it and vote the fuckers out. But we can't do this if we're not allowed to know...
I would attribute this to properties not of Australian law but of Australians. If you carved out a few hundred square blocks of inner-city Chicago and dropped them in Adelaide they'd find a way to kill each other. If you took a bunch of Aussies and dropped them in the middle of Arizona (with very permissive gun laws), they'd be just fine (as are, for the most part, the Arizonans). It's not the laws; it's the people.
I'd turn it around and say: a polite citizenry rarely commits murder.
There aren't many murders in New Hampshire or Vermont, despite the high gun ownership rate. There are lots of murders in Baltimore and Southeast DC, despite the near-complete gun ban. In the US, there is actually a stronger (positive) correlation between church attendance and murder than firearm ownership and murder, done state-by-state.
(Do you really want to return to a mandatory draft in the US?)
Yes, actually (as a flaming liberal): perhaps if everyone had to serve in the military then there'd be some resistance to militarism. You notice the Swiss haven't bombed any Middle East sandpits lately?
So, yes, there are LOTS of guns in Switzerland. But very, very different rules.
I think the more salient point is the different culture. A disproportionate number of the murders in the US happen among particular subcultures and sub-geographies which aren't present in Switzerland. The murder rate in places as disparate as New Hampshire and Utah are both quite low; the murders happen in places like Baltimore and Chicago.
The more it is mentioned, the less likely it will happen, because people will be aware.
I would add something different: the more it is mentioned that someone who wants to murder some of us will probably be able to, the more we will get used to the idea that we, no matter how much we invest in airport gropers and See Something Say Something posters, are vulnerable -- and will stop overreacting to threats.
Slashdot Mirror
What does "low grade helium" mean? Is it the alphas or the electrons that get worn out?
It seems that chemically separating a gas whose chief property is not reacting with anything from other gases that are either very reactive or have a molecular weight different by an order of magnitude shouldn't be *that* hard...
As someone who is both a pianist and a photographer, this metaphor is way off.
A better comparison is more like
cheap 55-key Casio keyboard - decent upright piano - Bosendorfer concert grand (or Stradivarius violin; Stratovarius is a metal band which most definitely doesn't make violins).
cameraphone - consumer digital SLR - Phase One medium format back
Here, the first one will let you do some very limited things, and its output is fine for some purposes but not suitable for many. The second one is a complete tool, letting you do everything (change lenses and control shutter speed and aperture for the camera; use basically the whole range of notes that are musically useful on the piano) and gives good output. (There are shots from $500 consumer DSLR's that are printed six feet tall and hung in the Smithsonian's gallery of wildlife photography, and they hang without shame next to shots done with the best money can buy.)
Ordinary DSLR's don't cost that much, compared to some other things people buy (like violins and pianos). You can get a very decent one for a few hundred bucks. While there are a lot of folks running around with cameras that have lots of expensive features that they have no need for (the "full frame" craze comes to mind), there are also a lot of folks who use every bit of what their consumer DSLR will do.
I'm not at all demeaning SLR's for video -- they do it very, very well, as you say. (Hence my first sentence: if you are prepared to manually focus, it will work, otherwise not.)
The issue is that the people who do manual focus pulling are very very good at what they do. Most DSLR owners, even ones who are excellent stills photographers, are not experienced with video manual focus. It seems that you are; good for you. Lots of folks aren't, and I know of quite a few people who have gotten rude surprises when they find that the video on their new SLR disables autofocus. A hockey game isn't exactly the easiest of targets, if you're new at that sort of thing -- especially if you're using nice fast glass.
Shooting video of your son's hockey games with the Canon SLR will be a disaster unless you are prepared to manually focus all the time; the autofocus systems in SLR's don't work in movie mode. (Some of them don't work at all, and some of them just suck; I don't know which the T3 is.) The one exception is the Canon 70D, which has a fancy split-pixel sensor that lets it AF during movie shooting.
The exceptions are the Sony SLT cameras, which send 2/3 of the light to the sensor and 1/3 to a dedicated AF sensor, and the Olympus and Panasonic Micro Four Thirds cameras, which can use the readout from the main sensor to autofocus. (This is the same thing that the SLR's try to do when autofocusing in movie mode; the Micro 4/3 cameras just manage to not suck at it so badly.)
Depending on what you're doing low-light video is easier than low-light stills; most cameras will show less noise in video mode at any given ISO, plus you can fix the shutter speed to 1/30 or whatever your framerate is rather than using the 1/100 or more you need to avoid blur on moving targets for stills.
For $200? Find a used Olympus E-510 or E-520 and its kit lens. You can do a lot worse. There is a telephoto kit lens too (40-150, 80-300 equiv) that is small, cheap, and surprisingly sharp.
Never been a problem for me either. Pop SD card into computer, grab pictures, pull out ones that don't suck, upload to Facebook.
dSLR's "should" be used by whoever the hell wants to use them. That's as absurd as saying that pianos should only be used by professional pianists because anyone else can get a harmonica. Who says?
How is morphine more dangerous than heroin? (Honest question.) I thought that they were both basically interchangeable in a medical setting (with proper dose adjustment, etc., to get an equivalent analgesic effect.)
It depends on where you are: the taxes on tobacco are very high, in particular.
Because opiate addiction causes a lot of harm, and people have always fallen for the fallacy that the best way to decrease the harm associated with something is to ban it.
You would, though -- it's an opiate, and one strong opiate is pretty close to the same as another.
I remember when Krokodil first became a thing in Eastern Europe; I read an article with an interview with an addict who said "I'd do anything to get some nice clean heroin, but since I can't, it's this stuff..."
pentagon.army.mil 0.0.0.0
It's not left-wing; if anything, it's right-wing. (I'm a centrist.)
Left-wing economics in the US seems predicated on the assumption that there is X amount of stuff to go around, and the 1% are using more than their share of stuff, and ought to give more to everyone else. The left-wing narrative sets the wealthy against the poor.
Right-wing economics (at least the sane, non-theological version of it) says that wealth isn't a zero-sum game, and that wealth is created for both parties (whether rich or poor) whenever there's a voluntary exchange of labor, goods, land, whatever. The right-wing narrative says that we are all in a quest to improve the overall wealth of society, and "a rising tide floats all boats".
Ballmer pits employees against each other; "good business practice" pits them all against the bottom line. If even the worst fellow in the shop creates more value for the company than his salary, he's worth keeping around. That's more like the right-wing narrative.
How does the glorification of sex lead to violence?
There seems to be a real anticorrelation between sex-positivity and violence in the world. What bit of the world seems to be always at each other's throats? The same bit that makes their women wear rugs with (sometimes) eyeholes. Where are some of the most peaceful bits of the world? Western Europe...
Then it's person vs. people, which will show up in the statistics. 8 people killed by a guy with a pistol = 8 people killed by knives.
As an American, I am way less worried about foreigners hurting me than my government hurting me, either directly, indirectly by restricting people I'd like to do business with, or by simply confiscating part of my income as taxes to do silly things.
The check on a democratically-elected government to stop them from doing silly things is for the people to find out about it and vote the fuckers out. But we can't do this if we're not allowed to know...
I would attribute this to properties not of Australian law but of Australians. If you carved out a few hundred square blocks of inner-city Chicago and dropped them in Adelaide they'd find a way to kill each other. If you took a bunch of Aussies and dropped them in the middle of Arizona (with very permissive gun laws), they'd be just fine (as are, for the most part, the Arizonans). It's not the laws; it's the people.
There was also a mass shooting in Austria very recently.
I'd turn it around and say: a polite citizenry rarely commits murder.
There aren't many murders in New Hampshire or Vermont, despite the high gun ownership rate. There are lots of murders in Baltimore and Southeast DC, despite the near-complete gun ban. In the US, there is actually a stronger (positive) correlation between church attendance and murder than firearm ownership and murder, done state-by-state.
(Do you really want to return to a mandatory draft in the US?)
Yes, actually (as a flaming liberal): perhaps if everyone had to serve in the military then there'd be some resistance to militarism. You notice the Swiss haven't bombed any Middle East sandpits lately?
So, yes, there are LOTS of guns in Switzerland. But very, very different rules.
I think the more salient point is the different culture. A disproportionate number of the murders in the US happen among particular subcultures and sub-geographies which aren't present in Switzerland. The murder rate in places as disparate as New Hampshire and Utah are both quite low; the murders happen in places like Baltimore and Chicago.
Who cares about "murders with firearms"? Dead is dead. Now it's knife crime in the UK.
I imagine it would work better if he pointed the correct part of his anatomy at the target before pushing the "explosive diarrhea" button?
Yes, it's a cheap shot. But there is no way that a failed butt bomber is not funny.
The more it is mentioned, the less likely it will happen, because people will be aware.
I would add something different: the more it is mentioned that someone who wants to murder some of us will probably be able to, the more we will get used to the idea that we, no matter how much we invest in airport gropers and See Something Say Something posters, are vulnerable -- and will stop overreacting to threats.
I meant in the US -- al-Qaeda doesn't really have that much of a beef with the Russians.