Your mistrake is in thinking that there are people who are not related to you. We are all cousins; some are simply closer cousins than others.
Even my cat is your cousin, as is the grapefruit tree in my back yard.
Indeed, until Craig Venter did his most recent jiujitsu, there hasn’t been a living organism on this planet for billions of years that wasn't your cousin or your aunt or your uncle, if not one of your direct great-great...great-grandparents.
Once you understand that almost all of your genes are identical to those of even the most distantly-related long-forgotten back-bush tribespeople, it shouldn’t be hard to understand why the evolved hard-wired genetic predispositions to helping your relatives includes them, as well.
Let me get this straight — Creationism is silly pagan nonsense, but the notion of an ancient zombie born of a Jewish virgin that a modern shaman can manifest in the flesh by chanting incantations over stale bread...and cannibalizing said zombie will turn you into a similarly-immortal zombie...and that E.T. would be interested in such nonsense for anything other than anthropological reasons....
I’m sorry. I know I was heading towards some sort of point, but teh shtupid must be contagious....
Canon has four tilt / shift lenses in their lineup, from $1200 to $2200, in 90mm, 45mm, 24mm, and 17mm focal lengths. I have the 24, and it’s an amazing lens. Reviewers are describing it as having the best optics of any 24mm lens made for the 135 format. Its movements are nearly unlimited. The 17 is much the same lens. The 45 and 90 are restricted to tilting and shifting on either parallel or perpendicular axes, and you need a screwdriver to switch from the one to the other. They’re also older designs and will likely be replaced sooner rather than later by ones in the style of the newer 24 and 17.
Nikon makes some PC lenses that I’ve never known anybody to get ecstatic about; perhaps that’s what you’re thinking of? But everybody I know of who does serious stuff on Nikon is using medium format lenses with a bellows. Many do the same with Canon. At that point, you really do have a view camera with a 135-sized digital sensor.
Also worth mentioning: the current round of “full frame” cameras generate prints with resolutions that rival those that Ansel Adams made, though of course modern large format cameras and emulsions are significantly superior. So, unless you’re planning on making door-sized prints that people will be sticking their noses into or unless you need an insanely shallow depth of field, there’s no technical reason to use film instead of digital. There are, of course, many aesthetic reasons, but that’s the artist’s choice. Up to 24 × 36, assuming impeccable technique, good glass, and all the rest, you need a loupe to tell the difference between a 5DII and large format. And, at normal viewing distances, it’s hard to tell even at twice the size.
(Never mind, of course, that the courts will shoot this Louisianan idiocy down in a heartbeat.)
On the one hand, we have the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection, a scientific theory backed by a volume of evidence more diverse and massive than that assembled in support of any other theory.
On the other hand...we have a faery tale.
No, really.
Cdesign proponentsists would have us instead accept a “theory” drawn solely on the proposition that the Bible is substantially true.
And the Bible opens with a story — the very one they’d replace science with — about a magic garden with talking animals and an angry giant.
Worse, it continues in exactly that same vein. It prominently features a talking shrubbery (on fire, no less!) that instructs the reluctant hero how to wield his magic wand. It has more talking animals, sea monsters, lots more giants, and an endless string of magic spells. There’s even a dragon in there, and I think there might be a unicorn, too. At the end we have an utterly bizarre zombie fantasy, complete with one of the thralls groping the zombie king’s intestines. And the grand finale? Global zombie apocalypse.
All y’all who dismiss science in favor of fantasy? This is why we laugh at you.
So, this should be equally offensive to Muslims, Christians, and Jews. Those of y’all who consider yourselves believers in a variation of one of those themes, pay attention:
If I were to tell you a story about a talking unicorn who gave a pep talk to the reluctant hero before instructing the hero in how to wield his magic wand, you’d know instantly that I was telling you a make-believe faery tale that has no bearing on reality whatsoever.
If I were to swap out the unicorn with talking shrubbery, you’d still come to the same conclusion, but you’d think it’s a particularly weird story taking even stranger liberties with reality.
But if I were to light the shrubbery on fire, name the hero, “Moses,” and call the wand “The Staff of Aaron,” you’d know that this is the absolute truth, the Word of YHWH, to be accepted uncritically as historical fact. (Exodus chapters 3 and 4, to be specific.) Or, at the very least, it’s some sort of utterly profound morality play from which deep meaning can and should be drawn.
And you’d be a complete and total blithering fucking idiot for doing so.
Saudi Arabia has about 260 billion barrels of oil in proven reserves (which means they likely have more they haven't found yet). They produce about 10 million barrels of oil per day. That means their oil lifespan is about 70 years, just on what we know they have right now.
Ever heard of this rather obscure mathematical property known as exponential growth?
The word, “bribe,” has two very different common meanings.
The first is a payment to somebody to do something illicit. It might or might not be something the person objects to doing, but it is something against the rules. A border agent might or might not think smoking pot is a good idea, but if you pay him to look the other way while you drive your “plant tissue samples” across the border, that’s a bribe.
The second, and the usage implied here, is a payment to somebody to do something they don’t want to do but which isn’t illicit. It’s especially applied to things that most people think the person should want to do without compensation but, for whatever reason, the person isn’t interested. If you offer to pay your spouse to fold the laundry, that’s often considered a bribe.
But, clearly, almost all paid work falls into the second category. While the work I do isn’t objectionable and pays well, there’s simply no way I’d do it unless you paid me (and paid me well). There are other things I’d rather do for money, but they don’t pay as well. And there are still other things I do and would do that either don’t pay or that I have to pay to do.
So, unless you think your boss is bribing you to go to work, or unless you’d happily give up your paycheck but still continue at your job, it is most hypocritical to call what’s described in this article a bribe. You might wish that students would put in maximum effort even if they don’t get a cash reward, but your boss wishes the exact same thing of you.
Whether or not paying students is an effective end economical method of turning them into honorable and effective citizens is a valid topic of discussion, but such payments are most emphatically not bribes.
Interstellar travel is fundamentally an economic paradox — ignoring, of course, such fantasies as Warp drives.
Sending a Shuttle-sized craft to Alpha Centauri in a matter of years would require roughly the current total energy consumption of humanity.
Only when our civilization advances to the point that we harness a significant portion of the Sun’s total energy output would the energy budget for interstellar travel approximate the same proportion of the energy budget we spend today on interplanetary missions.
One can suggest “sleeper ships,” but building mechanical devices that will survive thousands of years is as hard a problem as throwing them across light years of distance. Any gas will leak out of any container in such a timeframe, and no plastic or rubber seal would last a fraction of the time necessary. The next thought is to provide power to the ship during the long journey, but you need as much total energy as for getting there fast — and, if you can comfortably survive for millennia in interstellar space, why even bother with stars in the first place?
Oh — and the Fermi Paradox applies especially well. Assume that it takes even ten thousand years to colonize a remote solar system, and the entire galaxy would have been overrun by now if a colonizing civilization had started in the terrestrial Jurassic period.
Interstellar travel makes for great space opera, but it has no more bearing on reality than unicorns and dragons.
I’m all for advancements and the research necessary to bring them about.
At least TFS, though, describes a vehicle that is physically impossible with modern engine technology.
VTOL takes vast amounts of energy. High-speed and long-range travel takes lots of energy. Roadable vehicles, flyable vehicles, and VTOL vehicles all demand significantly different efficiency compromises.
Demanding a single vehicle that meets all their requirements means coming up with something that will need a powerplant that’s far smaller, lighter, and more powerful than anything even theoretically possible with current engine technologies, and it will have to be powered by a fuel that’s also more dense and energetic than anything currently in use.
The description really is for a flying saucer, and it will — of necessity — need an equally-fantastic motor. Without that motor, nobody’ll even make it out of the parking lot.
In other words, unless somebody has plans for a 100 kg fusion reactor stashed away somewhere, this DARPA project will always be 20 years from completion.
They want a fast roadable vehicle that does VTOL and long-distance all on a single tank of gas?
How much does the grant include for the development of unobtanium-powered engines?
Or have they finally waterboarded the Little Green Men at Area 51 sufficiently to reveal how to distill two-headed Martial Elvis babies into flying saucer fuel, and this is just the setup for the cover story preceding the public unveiling?
A good manager would not put his employees into such a situation in the first place.
Overtime in general, and unplanned overtime in particular, can only be attributed to one (or both) of two causes:
management failed to create a realistic schedule with sufficient “Murphy” factor and / or failed to ensure the work remained on schedule (avoid dead ends or prevent goldbricking); or
insufficient resources (financial, personnel, materiel, or otherwise) were provided for the job at hand.
As you can see, the two are closely related. If one has a reduced budget to work with, the proper answer is either a reduced project scope or an increased timeline.
“Good. Fast. Cheap. Pick two.”
Punishing workers for failures of management is a sure sign of an unhealthy corporate environment.
A middle manager may be squeezed from both sides, but then either it’s a failure of the middle manager to manage those below, or to manage the expectations of those above, or of those above to manage their end of things.
Of course, an exception can be made in the case of true disasters, such as fire, illness, or other catastrophe. But management’s second responsibility — after running interference during the crisis — should be getting things back to normal.
Otherwise, what on Earth is management being paid for?
While I’m sure this is great news for all those Commie pinko atheist libruls out there, the Truth of the matter is that vaccines are the leading cause of Down’s Syndrome, abortions, homosexuality, and alien anal probes, so you can take that needle and shove it where the sun don’t shine.
marketers have defended the practice by insisting it gives Americans what they want: advertisements and other forms of content that are as relevant to their lives as possible,'
Did I just read that right? Americans want advertisement? Yeah, I want advertisements, just like I want another hole in my dick. What sort of a psychotic, delusional dream world must whoever this quote was mined from live in?
It was written by a marketer who was in the act of marketing the profession of marketing. Need I write more?
I’m really a trumpeter...the computer thing is just to pay the bills.
Last night at a rehearsal, for an incredibly stupid reason (I mean, really, how do you walk out the door without grabbing that big yellow Pelican case?) I had to borrow an instrument.
The one I would have been playing on was owned by both Harry Glantz and Bill Vacchiano, perhaps the two greatest trumpeters ever to play with the New York Philharmonic. It’s a magical instrument, and the only C trumpet I ever want to play on again. Not perfect — it has its quirks — but it’s perfect for me.
The instrument I played on last night was barely adequate, and the mouthpiece was the polar opposite of mine.
It only took a measure or two for me to produce a sound that I considered acceptable. By the end of the first piece, only a trained musician who knows my playing very well would have been able to tell that I wasn’t using my own equipment.
Of course, I had to work a lot harder than normal to get to that point, and I still wasn’t achieving the results I consider optimal. But very, very few people reading these words would be able to tell that.
I learned that lesson decades ago at a master class with Charlie Schlueter, the principal trumpeter of the Boston Symphony. He wanted to demonstrate something but had left his horns at the hotel. So, he picked up whatever was closest, played a couple phrases, looked askance at the trumpet, set it down, and continued with the class. Everybody’s jaw dropped; the horn was the worst piece of shit I’ve ever played on — it leaked, sounded awful, and you couldn’t play it in tune to save your life. But Charlie still sounded like Charlie when he played it.
Hydrogen will burn just fine in a conventional internal combustion engine. The modifications to a modern gasoline-powered engine to make it run on hydrogen are essentially the same as those to make it run off compressed natural gas. I’m sure many of you have noticed fleet vehicles with a CNG sticker on them; though not widespread, the conversion isn’t exactly uncommon, either.
There are three main problems with converting to hydrogen. First, though hydrogen has much more energy density per unit of mass than gasoline, it has much less energy density per unit of volume in any of the ways it’s currently practically available. Second, for similar reasons, getting a sufficient density of fuel / air mixture to the pistons is a bit of a challenge and generally requires turbocharging, pressurized fuel lines, etc. (Or, you can live with an underpowered vehicle.) The last problem, of course, is producing hydrogen.
If the claims of TFA are accurate, then we may actually be on the verge of solving all three problems.
If we’ll soon see affordable high-capacity tanks, that solves the first problem. The second can be dealt with by making use of many of the high-performance tricks we’re already familiar with.
The last...well, hydrogen can trivially be made by running a current through water. If you’ve got a photovoltaic array on your roof, you can analyze water and get essentially free hydrogen. While we’ll never see cars powered in “real time” by the sun, it’s quite easy make in a couple days as much hydrogen as you’ll need to power your car for a week of normal driving.
Put all these pieces together, and in a few years or so real solar-powered cars may be as common as home-converted home-brewed biodiesel cars are today.
Right now we only have after the fact observations (which I personally believe to provide strong proof of evolution) but we don't have any observed speciation (to my knowledge) and until we do there really is no way to convince creationists that evolution is a correct theory.
Humans split later than chimps. No offspring of human ended up being chimps.
Humans did not split from chips either. There is no monkey ancestor to humans.
Nowhere did I write that which you attribute to me. Put simply, I merely observed that humans, chimpanzees, squid, butterflies, and all the rest of the biosphere share a common ancestor, one that can be revealed by tracing backwards in time through parental lineages, and then forward again through the proper descendants. The common ancestor is more recent for some organisms than others. For humans and chimpanzees, mere millions of years ago; for the squid and butterfly, hundreds of times that.
If you wish to criticize what I wrote, it would be more appropriate to observe that family trees are rarely, if ever, simple branchings. Cousins and even siblings produce offspring; there is, in fact, not merely one single common ancestor, but rather quite a few of them.
Except there is no (solid) evidence of that ever happening. We have a lot of variations within species, but we still haven't found any evidence of that n'th great grandpa that was father to both human and chimp lines.
It’s quite fascinating, really.
A man who, on Monday, insists that “there is no (solid) evidence” supporting the Theory of Evolution — which is perhaps the scientific theory better supported by evidence than any other — will quite frequently, on Sunday, sing the praises of impossible mythical beings whom nobody’s ever actually encountered outside of “visions,” mystical inner dialogues, and millennia-old textbook examples of superstitious cult fiction. And he will proclaim the lack of evidence for his pantheon the very foundation of his “faith,” and that which makes his position more noble and meritorious than those founded on evidence and logic.
You cannot produce viable offspring with a chimpanzee. Neither could your great-great-great-grandparents produce viable offspring with that chimpanzee’s great-great-great-grandparents. But, go back enough generations, and your nth-great-grandparents gave birth to an individual whose far-distant offspring was that chimpanzee. Pick any other two organisms, and the same holds — it’s just that you have to go a little farther back in time to find the last common ancestor between, say, a squid and a butterfly.
We are all members of a single ring species that encompasses all of life on Earth. It’s just that the ring is separated by time, rather than geography or physiology.
And now you know the nutshell definition of the Theory of Evolution.
How in God's name can you be a god-hating atheist?
You can't hate God if you're an atheist, because if you're an atheist, then you shouldn't believe in God in the first place.
It is not necessary to believe that Darth Vader actually existed in order to hate the man who obliterated entire planets. Nor is it necessary to believe that that the Flood or the Ten Plagues ever happened or that the entity claimed to be responsible for them exists in order to hate it, either.
No, really. An iPhone is much more powerful than the Cray-1, and probably significantly more powerful than a Cray X-MP. The iPhone certainly has much more RAM and storage than they typical early Crays; I can’t be bothered right now to find out what kind of MFLOP performance an iPhone has.
Slashdot Mirror
Your mistrake is in thinking that there are people who are not related to you. We are all cousins; some are simply closer cousins than others.
Even my cat is your cousin, as is the grapefruit tree in my back yard.
Indeed, until Craig Venter did his most recent jiujitsu, there hasn’t been a living organism on this planet for billions of years that wasn't your cousin or your aunt or your uncle, if not one of your direct great-great...great-grandparents.
Once you understand that almost all of your genes are identical to those of even the most distantly-related long-forgotten back-bush tribespeople, it shouldn’t be hard to understand why the evolved hard-wired genetic predispositions to helping your relatives includes them, as well.
Cheers,
b&
Let me get this straight — Creationism is silly pagan nonsense, but the notion of an ancient zombie born of a Jewish virgin that a modern shaman can manifest in the flesh by chanting incantations over stale bread...and cannibalizing said zombie will turn you into a similarly-immortal zombie...and that E.T. would be interested in such nonsense for anything other than anthropological reasons....
I’m sorry. I know I was heading towards some sort of point, but teh shtupid must be contagious....
Cheers,
b&
zill wrote:
To keep from getting caught. Duh.
Cheers,
b&
Does the person to whom you give these two files have a rubber hose? Is he a member of the “extraordinary rendition” team?
The point of steganography is to not get caught in the first place. If you need plausible deniability, you’ve already lost.
Cheers,
b&
Look again.
Canon has four tilt / shift lenses in their lineup, from $1200 to $2200, in 90mm, 45mm, 24mm, and 17mm focal lengths. I have the 24, and it’s an amazing lens. Reviewers are describing it as having the best optics of any 24mm lens made for the 135 format. Its movements are nearly unlimited. The 17 is much the same lens. The 45 and 90 are restricted to tilting and shifting on either parallel or perpendicular axes, and you need a screwdriver to switch from the one to the other. They’re also older designs and will likely be replaced sooner rather than later by ones in the style of the newer 24 and 17.
Nikon makes some PC lenses that I’ve never known anybody to get ecstatic about; perhaps that’s what you’re thinking of? But everybody I know of who does serious stuff on Nikon is using medium format lenses with a bellows. Many do the same with Canon. At that point, you really do have a view camera with a 135-sized digital sensor.
Also worth mentioning: the current round of “full frame” cameras generate prints with resolutions that rival those that Ansel Adams made, though of course modern large format cameras and emulsions are significantly superior. So, unless you’re planning on making door-sized prints that people will be sticking their noses into or unless you need an insanely shallow depth of field, there’s no technical reason to use film instead of digital. There are, of course, many aesthetic reasons, but that’s the artist’s choice. Up to 24 × 36, assuming impeccable technique, good glass, and all the rest, you need a loupe to tell the difference between a 5DII and large format. And, at normal viewing distances, it’s hard to tell even at twice the size.
Cheers,
b&
(Never mind, of course, that the courts will shoot this Louisianan idiocy down in a heartbeat.)
On the one hand, we have the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection, a scientific theory backed by a volume of evidence more diverse and massive than that assembled in support of any other theory.
On the other hand...we have a faery tale.
No, really.
Cdesign proponentsists would have us instead accept a “theory” drawn solely on the proposition that the Bible is substantially true.
And the Bible opens with a story — the very one they’d replace science with — about a magic garden with talking animals and an angry giant.
Worse, it continues in exactly that same vein. It prominently features a talking shrubbery (on fire, no less!) that instructs the reluctant hero how to wield his magic wand. It has more talking animals, sea monsters, lots more giants, and an endless string of magic spells. There’s even a dragon in there, and I think there might be a unicorn, too. At the end we have an utterly bizarre zombie fantasy, complete with one of the thralls groping the zombie king’s intestines. And the grand finale? Global zombie apocalypse.
All y’all who dismiss science in favor of fantasy? This is why we laugh at you.
Cheers,
b&
So, this should be equally offensive to Muslims, Christians, and Jews. Those of y’all who consider yourselves believers in a variation of one of those themes, pay attention:
If I were to tell you a story about a talking unicorn who gave a pep talk to the reluctant hero before instructing the hero in how to wield his magic wand, you’d know instantly that I was telling you a make-believe faery tale that has no bearing on reality whatsoever.
If I were to swap out the unicorn with talking shrubbery, you’d still come to the same conclusion, but you’d think it’s a particularly weird story taking even stranger liberties with reality.
But if I were to light the shrubbery on fire, name the hero, “Moses,” and call the wand “The Staff of Aaron,” you’d know that this is the absolute truth, the Word of YHWH, to be accepted uncritically as historical fact. (Exodus chapters 3 and 4, to be specific.) Or, at the very least, it’s some sort of utterly profound morality play from which deep meaning can and should be drawn.
And you’d be a complete and total blithering fucking idiot for doing so.
Cheers,
b&
oodaloop wrote:
Ever heard of this rather obscure mathematical property known as exponential growth?
Cheers,
b&
The word, “bribe,” has two very different common meanings.
The first is a payment to somebody to do something illicit. It might or might not be something the person objects to doing, but it is something against the rules. A border agent might or might not think smoking pot is a good idea, but if you pay him to look the other way while you drive your “plant tissue samples” across the border, that’s a bribe.
The second, and the usage implied here, is a payment to somebody to do something they don’t want to do but which isn’t illicit. It’s especially applied to things that most people think the person should want to do without compensation but, for whatever reason, the person isn’t interested. If you offer to pay your spouse to fold the laundry, that’s often considered a bribe.
But, clearly, almost all paid work falls into the second category. While the work I do isn’t objectionable and pays well, there’s simply no way I’d do it unless you paid me (and paid me well). There are other things I’d rather do for money, but they don’t pay as well. And there are still other things I do and would do that either don’t pay or that I have to pay to do.
So, unless you think your boss is bribing you to go to work, or unless you’d happily give up your paycheck but still continue at your job, it is most hypocritical to call what’s described in this article a bribe. You might wish that students would put in maximum effort even if they don’t get a cash reward, but your boss wishes the exact same thing of you.
Whether or not paying students is an effective end economical method of turning them into honorable and effective citizens is a valid topic of discussion, but such payments are most emphatically not bribes.
Cheers,
b&
Yoyoctomomma?
Cheers,
b&
Interstellar travel is fundamentally an economic paradox — ignoring, of course, such fantasies as Warp drives.
Sending a Shuttle-sized craft to Alpha Centauri in a matter of years would require roughly the current total energy consumption of humanity.
Only when our civilization advances to the point that we harness a significant portion of the Sun’s total energy output would the energy budget for interstellar travel approximate the same proportion of the energy budget we spend today on interplanetary missions.
One can suggest “sleeper ships,” but building mechanical devices that will survive thousands of years is as hard a problem as throwing them across light years of distance. Any gas will leak out of any container in such a timeframe, and no plastic or rubber seal would last a fraction of the time necessary. The next thought is to provide power to the ship during the long journey, but you need as much total energy as for getting there fast — and, if you can comfortably survive for millennia in interstellar space, why even bother with stars in the first place?
Oh — and the Fermi Paradox applies especially well. Assume that it takes even ten thousand years to colonize a remote solar system, and the entire galaxy would have been overrun by now if a colonizing civilization had started in the terrestrial Jurassic period.
Interstellar travel makes for great space opera, but it has no more bearing on reality than unicorns and dragons.
Cheers,
b&
Please stop verbing nouns.
That corporate whores enjoy fucking with language is no good reason for us to bend over and spread ’em.
Cheers,
b&
You miss my point.
I’m all for advancements and the research necessary to bring them about.
At least TFS, though, describes a vehicle that is physically impossible with modern engine technology.
VTOL takes vast amounts of energy. High-speed and long-range travel takes lots of energy. Roadable vehicles, flyable vehicles, and VTOL vehicles all demand significantly different efficiency compromises.
Demanding a single vehicle that meets all their requirements means coming up with something that will need a powerplant that’s far smaller, lighter, and more powerful than anything even theoretically possible with current engine technologies, and it will have to be powered by a fuel that’s also more dense and energetic than anything currently in use.
The description really is for a flying saucer, and it will — of necessity — need an equally-fantastic motor. Without that motor, nobody’ll even make it out of the parking lot.
In other words, unless somebody has plans for a 100 kg fusion reactor stashed away somewhere, this DARPA project will always be 20 years from completion.
Cheers,
b&
They want a fast roadable vehicle that does VTOL and long-distance all on a single tank of gas?
How much does the grant include for the development of unobtanium-powered engines?
Or have they finally waterboarded the Little Green Men at Area 51 sufficiently to reveal how to distill two-headed Martial Elvis babies into flying saucer fuel, and this is just the setup for the cover story preceding the public unveiling?
Cheers,
b&
A good manager would not put his employees into such a situation in the first place.
Overtime in general, and unplanned overtime in particular, can only be attributed to one (or both) of two causes:
As you can see, the two are closely related. If one has a reduced budget to work with, the proper answer is either a reduced project scope or an increased timeline.
“Good. Fast. Cheap. Pick two.”
Punishing workers for failures of management is a sure sign of an unhealthy corporate environment.
A middle manager may be squeezed from both sides, but then either it’s a failure of the middle manager to manage those below, or to manage the expectations of those above, or of those above to manage their end of things.
Of course, an exception can be made in the case of true disasters, such as fire, illness, or other catastrophe. But management’s second responsibility — after running interference during the crisis — should be getting things back to normal.
Otherwise, what on Earth is management being paid for?
Cheers,
b&
While I’m sure this is great news for all those Commie pinko atheist libruls out there, the Truth of the matter is that vaccines are the leading cause of Down’s Syndrome, abortions, homosexuality, and alien anal probes, so you can take that needle and shove it where the sun don’t shine.
</sarcasm mode="depressingly-semi-serious">
Cheers,
b&
thisnamestoolong wrote:
It was written by a marketer who was in the act of marketing the profession of marketing. Need I write more?
Cheers,
b&
I’m really a trumpeter...the computer thing is just to pay the bills.
Last night at a rehearsal, for an incredibly stupid reason (I mean, really, how do you walk out the door without grabbing that big yellow Pelican case?) I had to borrow an instrument.
The one I would have been playing on was owned by both Harry Glantz and Bill Vacchiano, perhaps the two greatest trumpeters ever to play with the New York Philharmonic. It’s a magical instrument, and the only C trumpet I ever want to play on again. Not perfect — it has its quirks — but it’s perfect for me.
The instrument I played on last night was barely adequate, and the mouthpiece was the polar opposite of mine.
It only took a measure or two for me to produce a sound that I considered acceptable. By the end of the first piece, only a trained musician who knows my playing very well would have been able to tell that I wasn’t using my own equipment.
Of course, I had to work a lot harder than normal to get to that point, and I still wasn’t achieving the results I consider optimal. But very, very few people reading these words would be able to tell that.
I learned that lesson decades ago at a master class with Charlie Schlueter, the principal trumpeter of the Boston Symphony. He wanted to demonstrate something but had left his horns at the hotel. So, he picked up whatever was closest, played a couple phrases, looked askance at the trumpet, set it down, and continued with the class. Everybody’s jaw dropped; the horn was the worst piece of shit I’ve ever played on — it leaked, sounded awful, and you couldn’t play it in tune to save your life. But Charlie still sounded like Charlie when he played it.
Cheers,
b&
Hydrogen will burn just fine in a conventional internal combustion engine. The modifications to a modern gasoline-powered engine to make it run on hydrogen are essentially the same as those to make it run off compressed natural gas. I’m sure many of you have noticed fleet vehicles with a CNG sticker on them; though not widespread, the conversion isn’t exactly uncommon, either.
There are three main problems with converting to hydrogen. First, though hydrogen has much more energy density per unit of mass than gasoline, it has much less energy density per unit of volume in any of the ways it’s currently practically available. Second, for similar reasons, getting a sufficient density of fuel / air mixture to the pistons is a bit of a challenge and generally requires turbocharging, pressurized fuel lines, etc. (Or, you can live with an underpowered vehicle.) The last problem, of course, is producing hydrogen.
If the claims of TFA are accurate, then we may actually be on the verge of solving all three problems.
If we’ll soon see affordable high-capacity tanks, that solves the first problem. The second can be dealt with by making use of many of the high-performance tricks we’re already familiar with.
The last...well, hydrogen can trivially be made by running a current through water. If you’ve got a photovoltaic array on your roof, you can analyze water and get essentially free hydrogen. While we’ll never see cars powered in “real time” by the sun, it’s quite easy make in a couple days as much hydrogen as you’ll need to power your car for a week of normal driving.
Put all these pieces together, and in a few years or so real solar-powered cars may be as common as home-converted home-brewed biodiesel cars are today.
Cheers,
b&
WCguru42 wrote:
The observed instances of speciation are legion.
Cheers,
b&
An AC wrote:
Nowhere did I write that which you attribute to me. Put simply, I merely observed that humans, chimpanzees, squid, butterflies, and all the rest of the biosphere share a common ancestor, one that can be revealed by tracing backwards in time through parental lineages, and then forward again through the proper descendants. The common ancestor is more recent for some organisms than others. For humans and chimpanzees, mere millions of years ago; for the squid and butterfly, hundreds of times that.
If you wish to criticize what I wrote, it would be more appropriate to observe that family trees are rarely, if ever, simple branchings. Cousins and even siblings produce offspring; there is, in fact, not merely one single common ancestor, but rather quite a few of them.
Cheers,
b&
Bigjeff5 wrote:
It’s quite fascinating, really.
A man who, on Monday, insists that “there is no (solid) evidence” supporting the Theory of Evolution — which is perhaps the scientific theory better supported by evidence than any other — will quite frequently, on Sunday, sing the praises of impossible mythical beings whom nobody’s ever actually encountered outside of “visions,” mystical inner dialogues, and millennia-old textbook examples of superstitious cult fiction. And he will proclaim the lack of evidence for his pantheon the very foundation of his “faith,” and that which makes his position more noble and meritorious than those founded on evidence and logic.
Cheers,
b&
It gets even better.
You cannot produce viable offspring with a chimpanzee. Neither could your great-great-great-grandparents produce viable offspring with that chimpanzee’s great-great-great-grandparents. But, go back enough generations, and your nth-great-grandparents gave birth to an individual whose far-distant offspring was that chimpanzee. Pick any other two organisms, and the same holds — it’s just that you have to go a little farther back in time to find the last common ancestor between, say, a squid and a butterfly.
We are all members of a single ring species that encompasses all of life on Earth. It’s just that the ring is separated by time, rather than geography or physiology.
And now you know the nutshell definition of the Theory of Evolution.
Cheers,
b&
Whiteox wrote:
It is not necessary to believe that Darth Vader actually existed in order to hate the man who obliterated entire planets. Nor is it necessary to believe that that the Flood or the Ten Plagues ever happened or that the entity claimed to be responsible for them exists in order to hate it, either.
Cheers,
b&
No, really. An iPhone is much more powerful than the Cray-1, and probably significantly more powerful than a Cray X-MP. The iPhone certainly has much more RAM and storage than they typical early Crays; I can’t be bothered right now to find out what kind of MFLOP performance an iPhone has.
Cheers,
b&