I remember a study a long time ago that suggestest that children who were fed breast milk as a child, were on average, slightly smarter than those who were fed other substitutes.
IIRC it's the higher levels of taurine in human milk (compared to other mammals, or to formula) that aid brain development (or so goes conventional wisdom). I think they throw a bit more of that into the formula mix these days.
Although remarkable omnivores, human beings are still, deep down, essentially grain eaters.
Oh, horsepucky. Humans haven't been grain eaters until very recently in their evolutionary history, pretty much coinciding with agriculture, and certainly post-dating our domestication of fire. Every try eating raw, unground grain? Bleah. Our teeth aren't made for it either. Fruit eaters, more likely.
I'll buy the rest of it though. Yeah, humans are pretty adaptable. Oh, one other caveat with animal studies, especially rats -- humans can't manufacture their own vitamin C, many other animals can. Human minimum requirement for that was established as somewhat above the minimum needed to prevent scurvy, the optimum dose (as we're coming to realize) is probably an order of magnitude higher than that. (And being fruit-eaters would explain that -- loss of the gene to make vitamin C is no big deal if the diet is high in it. Grain isn't.)
I imagine that dolphin (and whale and other cetacean) brains devote a rather large amount of processing power to signal processing, converting sonar returns to information equivalent to vision in humans. That sonar information is essentially serialized as it comes in (well, two serial channels), whereas visual information comes in in parallel. The former would take more processing power (or jellyware devoted to the task).
Yes, bats process sonar info too, but they have two advantages over cetaceans: the sound is travelling in air, at about 1/5 the speed it travels in water; and bats can have rather elaborately shaped external ears (which are somewhat moveable) that can acoustically filter and process the sound before it gets to the eardrum. (Human ears do some of this too, on a reduced level) An animal that lives in the water can't afford the drag of external ears (and to have the same acoustic processing effect, they'd have to be 5 times bigger to make up for the speed of sound difference).
Reminds me of a story my father-in-law (a doctor) tells of his medical student days. He was putting in some stitches with the suture needle in his left hand. After a few stitches, it was more convenient do it with his right hand. Supervising physician notices the switch and angrily says something like: "what are you doing? do you think you're ambidextrous?" FIL replies "no, actually, I'm right-handed".
(Then of course there's the fencing scene between Inigo Montoya and "the man in black" in "The Princess Bride".)
"This sort of thing has cropped up before,
on
Can Software Kill?
·
· Score: 1
Great. The list is now 1 million nodes long. You just blew the stack.
Nope. No platform architecture was specified. For the sake of the exercise, assume a Unisys 'A' series (or it's grandpappy, a Burroughs B6700). Stack machine. All of memory can be treated as a (or multiple) stack(s), and the bottom of it can be swapped to disk as needed.
Function call overhead on that architecture is negligible. The iterative solution would actually be worse on such a machine because you'd keep blowing your top-of-stack registers.
The real world does not always equal x86 architecture, or even classic register architecture.
The '{}' thing just slows a fast programmer/typist down. I did that back in my first year of programming (actually with begin/end blocks -- Algol and Pascal) but a good programmer can keep track of that using indenting.
As for the bit about "begin stung often enough" by the '=' vs '==' confusion -- in 20-some years of C/C++ programming I've made that typo maybe twice. Does that make me a bad programmer?
Also agreed about the reversing a list problem. If you've been doing a lot of programming with lists, you rarely need to draw the silly diagrams. I was once asked a similar question in an interview and quickly responded with a few lines of code that did it recursively (nobody said anything about efficient;-). The interviewer sat there drawing diagrams to convince himself that it would work.
Joel's suggestions/observations are fine for picking somebody at the upper range of mediocre programmers, but they stand a good chance of eliminating someone with the mental talents and level of experience that puts them toward the "superprogrammer" class.
I recently inherited a project which took six months to develop in C++. It weighed in at ~4800 lines of C++ code.
Okay, be fair, how much of that six months was analysis and design time vs actual coding? With a bit of effort I can do 4800 lines of C++ in a weekend if I already know my overall design and data structures going in (*)-- and you had that advantage doing the rewrite in Ruby.
That said, I certainly agree with choosing the right tool for the job, and scripting languages do lend themselves to rapid production of working code. (May not be scalable, or many not handle corner cases well, but it depends on the task at hand.)
((*) Extrapolating from a "personal best" of about 3000 lines in one day. And yes, the code worked, after cleaning up a few typos.)
AMD screwed up and set the default integer size on their X86-64 to 32 bits. This causes all sorts of problems with pointer math since most software assumes that an integer is large enough to do pointer math.
I think you meant "most bad software". Any idiot programmer who assumes pointers and ints are the same deserves what he gets. The compilers are smart enough to know what to use, if variables are declared and used appropriately, and have been since the days of 16-bit ints.
It may be possible, but it's unstable. It will sooner or later (probably sooner) succumb to either external or internal forces and become something else. Probably a dictatorship, since that's usually what follows anarchy.
It might work in isolation, for a relatively small group.
On the other hand, if you buy it unassembled, you could assemble it yourself and have it qualified as an experimental aircraft, plus save $8million. You'd still have to follow the rules for experimental aircraft, but that's true of any homebuilt.
What scientific illiterate modded this "insightful"?
The pH scale runs from 0 to 14, with a pH of 7 being neutral. The number is actually an inverse exponent and has to do with the concentration of hydrogen ions (H+) in solution. (You could also use pOH, relating to the concentration of hydronium ions (OH-), the relationship is pOH = 14 - pH).
I'm not quite brave enough yet to go down under ice that's too thick to smash.
Well, no question that you need to be well organized for an ice dive: tenders, safety ropes, standby safety divers (with longer ropes), etc. Rather embarassing (to say the least!) if you can't find your way back to the hole. Although, in all the ice dives I was ever involved in (my club did quite a few -- Canadian winters;-) only one person ever came off his rope, and the standby divers got to him pretty quickly. (Basic rules -- ascend to the ice and stay put. The safety divers go out on ropes 50% longer than yours was and sweep in a circle, sooner or later a rope will come by. And always use rope that floats! (Polypropylene, I think.))
As for the temperature -- well, as long as it isn't ice, water can only get so cold. A drysuit helps, yes, but I've done ice dives in a wetsuit. (Full, farmer John style, with hood, booties and mitts, of course).
The running style is the big givaway, other points are the shape of the head and the length of the tail. That thing is built for speed, for running down its prey in open, flat terrain. Cougars (at least around these parts) live in mountainous, wooded terrain and prefer to attack from hiding.
At least it's colored correctly for a cougar, no spots.
You need the wonderful goop known as Cold Guard (that and a hood that comes down closer to your mask). I don't know if the stuff is still around, it was a bluish cream with a nightmare list of chemical ingredients, but it helped insulate your skin against the water. (Or maybe it was a chemical reaction causing actual heat -- kidding.)
Back when I was an active diver I did quite a few ice dives -- for several years in a row we did a ceremonial ice dive at midnight on New Years, I forget how that started. On those we mostly played on the ice undersurface (stand upside down and watch your bubbles go 'down' -- wierd). I've actually been colder on open water dives, like down around 100' in the Gulf of St. Lawrence (on the Empress of Ireland) with my suit compressed and a current flowing. At least my regulator didn't freeze up.
(And actually, the times I have had it freeze up it's been in freeflow, so no worries about breathing as long as the tank lasted.)
More serious question: since Cougaar is Java-based, howcome you're using Ruby and not a Java wrapper or something like JSO (Jabber Streaming Objects)?
(Speaking of which, for those in the Denver area, Peter Saint-Andre and Matt Miller will be talking about Jabber and JSO at the Denver Java Users Group (www.denverjug.org) tonight.)
Sheesh, what (if anything) are they teaching kids these days?
The existence of the Lunokhods was certainly well-known at the time. Of course after the first couple of Apollo landings, the attention deficit disordered American public had pretty much lost interest even in humans walking on the Moon, so I guess it's no surprize that hardly anyone remembers the Lunokhods.
In that same time frame (between the two rover landings I think, but I could be wrong) the Russians also landed a vehicle that scooped up a sample of Lunar soil and returned it to Earth. A tiny fraction of what Apollo returned, of course, but significant in that it was from an area of the Moon that Apollo never visited.
Slashdot Mirror
I remember a study a long time ago that suggestest that children who were fed breast milk as a child, were on average, slightly smarter than those who were fed other substitutes.
IIRC it's the higher levels of taurine in human milk (compared to other mammals, or to formula) that aid brain development (or so goes conventional wisdom). I think they throw a bit more of that into the formula mix these days.
Although remarkable omnivores, human beings are still, deep down, essentially grain eaters.
Oh, horsepucky. Humans haven't been grain eaters until very recently in their evolutionary history, pretty much coinciding with agriculture, and certainly post-dating our domestication of fire. Every try eating raw, unground grain? Bleah. Our teeth aren't made for it either. Fruit eaters, more likely.
I'll buy the rest of it though. Yeah, humans are pretty adaptable. Oh, one other caveat with animal studies, especially rats -- humans can't manufacture their own vitamin C, many other animals can. Human minimum requirement for that was established as somewhat above the minimum needed to prevent scurvy, the optimum dose (as we're coming to realize) is probably an order of magnitude higher than that. (And being fruit-eaters would explain that -- loss of the gene to make vitamin C is no big deal if the diet is high in it. Grain isn't.)
Nitpick: "Anastasia" was 20th Century Fox, not Disney.
I just happen to know that because my kids watched it umpteen times last weekend, having borrowed the DVD from the library.
I imagine that dolphin (and whale and other cetacean) brains devote a rather large amount of processing power to signal processing, converting sonar returns to information equivalent to vision in humans. That sonar information is essentially serialized as it comes in (well, two serial channels), whereas visual information comes in in parallel. The former would take more processing power (or jellyware devoted to the task).
Yes, bats process sonar info too, but they have two advantages over cetaceans: the sound is travelling in air, at about 1/5 the speed it travels in water; and bats can have rather elaborately shaped external ears (which are somewhat moveable) that can acoustically filter and process the sound before it gets to the eardrum. (Human ears do some of this too, on a reduced level) An animal that lives in the water can't afford the drag of external ears (and to have the same acoustic processing effect, they'd have to be 5 times bigger to make up for the speed of sound difference).
What about those of us who are ambidextrous?
Reminds me of a story my father-in-law (a doctor) tells of his medical student days. He was putting in some stitches with the suture needle in his left hand. After a few stitches, it was more convenient do it with his right hand. Supervising physician notices the switch and angrily says something like: "what are you doing? do you think you're ambidextrous?" FIL replies "no, actually, I'm right-handed".
(Then of course there's the fencing scene between Inigo Montoya and "the man in black" in "The Princess Bride".)
and it has always been due to human error."
-- HAL 9000, in "2001: A Space Odyssey"
Well, he used to write good SF. Has he been reduced to writing sci fi (he pronounces it "skiffy") now?
(Actually I haven't seen much new from him in a long time.)
Great. The list is now 1 million nodes long. You just blew the stack.
Nope. No platform architecture was specified. For the sake of the exercise, assume a Unisys 'A' series (or it's grandpappy, a Burroughs B6700). Stack machine. All of memory can be treated as a (or multiple) stack(s), and the bottom of it can be swapped to disk as needed.
Function call overhead on that architecture is negligible. The iterative solution would actually be worse on such a machine because you'd keep blowing your top-of-stack registers.
The real world does not always equal x86 architecture, or even classic register architecture.
Hear, hear.
/C++ programming I've made that typo maybe twice. Does that make me a bad programmer?
;-). The interviewer sat there drawing diagrams to convince himself that it would work.
You made all the points I was about to.
The '{}' thing just slows a fast programmer/typist down. I did that back in my first year of programming (actually with begin/end blocks -- Algol and Pascal) but a good programmer can keep track of that using indenting.
As for the bit about "begin stung often enough" by the '=' vs '==' confusion -- in 20-some years of C
Also agreed about the reversing a list problem. If you've been doing a lot of programming with lists, you rarely need to draw the silly diagrams. I was once asked a similar question in an interview and quickly responded with a few lines of code that did it recursively (nobody said anything about efficient
Joel's suggestions/observations are fine for picking somebody at the upper range of mediocre programmers, but they stand a good chance of eliminating someone with the mental talents and level of experience that puts them toward the "superprogrammer" class.
We didn't even have screens, we had to use TVs as monitors!
;-).
Monitors? We used to use hardcopy terminals -- or those 4-line LCD Radio Shack Model 100 thingies if we wanted it portable.
And we called them nicknames (CoSy/BIX, circa 1985).
Handles were a CB radio thing (and a "cell phone" was what one made their "you're allowed one phone call" from
I recently inherited a project which took six months to develop in C++. It weighed in at ~4800 lines of C++ code.
Okay, be fair, how much of that six months was analysis and design time vs actual coding? With a bit of effort I can do 4800 lines of C++ in a weekend if I already know my overall design and data structures going in (*)-- and you had that advantage doing the rewrite in Ruby.
That said, I certainly agree with choosing the right tool for the job, and scripting languages do lend themselves to rapid production of working code. (May not be scalable, or many not handle corner cases well, but it depends on the task at hand.)
((*) Extrapolating from a "personal best" of about 3000 lines in one day. And yes, the code worked, after cleaning up a few typos.)
Well, hell, at the hardware/register level the whole x86 line has always been a dog's breakfast. This is just more of same.
If you want elegant architecture, x86 isn't the place to start.
AMD screwed up and set the default integer size on their X86-64 to 32 bits. This causes all sorts of problems with pointer math since most software assumes that an integer is large enough to do pointer math.
I think you meant "most bad software". Any idiot programmer who assumes pointers and ints are the same deserves what he gets. The compilers are smart enough to know what to use, if variables are declared and used appropriately, and have been since the days of 16-bit ints.
An organized peaceful anarchy is possible.
It may be possible, but it's unstable. It will sooner or later (probably sooner) succumb to either external or internal forces and become something else. Probably a dictatorship, since that's usually what follows anarchy.
It might work in isolation, for a relatively small group.
On the other hand, if you buy it unassembled, you could assemble it yourself and have it qualified as an experimental aircraft, plus save $8million. You'd still have to follow the rules for experimental aircraft, but that's true of any homebuilt.
Also, Hydronium ions are hydratized H+, H30+, while OH- are called hydroxide ions.
/.)
Of course, you're right.
(Note to self: finish morning coffee before posting to
What scientific illiterate modded this "insightful"?
The pH scale runs from 0 to 14, with a pH of 7 being neutral. The number is actually an inverse exponent and has to do with the concentration of hydrogen ions (H+) in solution. (You could also use pOH, relating to the concentration of hydronium ions (OH-), the relationship is pOH = 14 - pH).
I'm not quite brave enough yet to go down under ice that's too thick to smash.
;-) only one person ever came off his rope, and the standby divers got to him pretty quickly. (Basic rules -- ascend to the ice and stay put. The safety divers go out on ropes 50% longer than yours was and sweep in a circle, sooner or later a rope will come by. And always use rope that floats! (Polypropylene, I think.))
Well, no question that you need to be well organized for an ice dive: tenders, safety ropes, standby safety divers (with longer ropes), etc. Rather embarassing (to say the least!) if you can't find your way back to the hole. Although, in all the ice dives I was ever involved in (my club did quite a few -- Canadian winters
As for the temperature -- well, as long as it isn't ice, water can only get so cold. A drysuit helps, yes, but I've done ice dives in a wetsuit. (Full, farmer John style, with hood, booties and mitts, of course).
We've put together a distributed testing and control framework in Ruby, and so we used Jabber as middleware between Java and Ruby.
Okay, cool.
I work with Dana Moore and Bill Wright who wrote the Jabber Developer's Handbook.
Ah, I hadn't seen that book. I'll have to check it out.
The running style is the big givaway, other points are the shape of the head and the length of the tail. That thing is built for speed, for running down its prey in open, flat terrain. Cougars (at least around these parts) live in mountainous, wooded terrain and prefer to attack from hiding.
At least it's colored correctly for a cougar, no spots.
You need the wonderful goop known as Cold Guard (that and a hood that comes down closer to your mask). I don't know if the stuff is still around, it was a bluish cream with a nightmare list of chemical ingredients, but it helped insulate your skin against the water. (Or maybe it was a chemical reaction causing actual heat -- kidding.)
Back when I was an active diver I did quite a few ice dives -- for several years in a row we did a ceremonial ice dive at midnight on New Years, I forget how that started. On those we mostly played on the ice undersurface (stand upside down and watch your bubbles go 'down' -- wierd). I've actually been colder on open water dives, like down around 100' in the Gulf of St. Lawrence (on the Empress of Ireland) with my suit compressed and a current flowing. At least my regulator didn't freeze up.
(And actually, the times I have had it freeze up it's been in freeflow, so no worries about breathing as long as the tank lasted.)
More serious question: since Cougaar is Java-based, howcome you're using Ruby and not a Java wrapper or something like JSO (Jabber Streaming Objects)?
(Speaking of which, for those in the Denver area, Peter Saint-Andre and Matt Miller will be talking about Jabber and JSO at the Denver Java Users Group (www.denverjug.org) tonight.)
So, why does the Cougaar website show a logo with a picture of a cheetah?
Totally different species, living on totally different continents.
Sheesh, what (if anything) are they teaching kids these days?
The existence of the Lunokhods was certainly well-known at the time. Of course after the first couple of Apollo landings, the attention deficit disordered American public had pretty much lost interest even in humans walking on the Moon, so I guess it's no surprize that hardly anyone remembers the Lunokhods.
In that same time frame (between the two rover landings I think, but I could be wrong) the Russians also landed a vehicle that scooped up a sample of Lunar soil and returned it to Earth. A tiny fraction of what Apollo returned, of course, but significant in that it was from an area of the Moon that Apollo never visited.
ROFL! I just watched that episode (on DVD) last night.