Try the ACE classes. It will work on any platform, even embeded ones (at least with the serial port). (the classes you would be interested in are ACE_DEV_IO and ACE_DEV_Connector).
Thanks for the heads-up, but this is way beyond me. I've looked at the header files doxygen documentation, but I still can't see how to integrate it into something like:
Heh... I don't know much about programming, besides what I've read in K&R and the courses I had to take in university. And when I have to code, my style is so much brute force and ignorance that Microsoft keeps on trying to hire me to join the Outlook team.
This might help you get started but the full coffee maker howto is what you want to look for.
http://linuxselfhelp.com/HOWTO/mini/Coffee.html
Thanks; I checked it out, but both the mini and full HOWTO seem to have exactly the same text.
They both tell me how to make the computer control a device.
I want the device to control the computer!
Re:Those Pesky Ungrounded Outlets in Bathrooms
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· Score: 2, Informative
" The wide blade is supposed to be connected to neutral, the narrow blade is supposed to be connected to hot."
then wouldn't you only get 1/2 phase?
Nope.
Neutral is tied to ground, it serves as a reference point. The hot side alternates between +120V and -120V with respect to neutral.
It's like the body in your car - it's "ground", and the +12V from the battery is referenced to it. In the case of a car, it's not for safety reasons, but for convenience - to power a light, all you need to do is run one wire from the positive terminal of the battery to the light, and then connect the light's other terminal to the body.
If you were to reverse the battery in your car (connect the positive terminal to ground), then the -12V would be referenced to ground. Current would still flow quite happily - although it would destroy all electronic devices in your car, exactly the same as accidentally putting the batteries into your Walkman backwards.
On ships, they don't reference 120V AC power to ground, they reference it to the center tap of the distribution transformer. In other words, with respect to ground (ie. connecting your Fluke 77 DMM to the ship's steel), you have +60V and -60V at each blade during one half of the cycle, then -60V and +60V at each blade during the other half of the cycle. Of course, between the blades, the difference is still 120V. This system is used on ships because rather than having a 50% chance of a potentially lethal shock if you accidentally touch a broken wire, you have a 100% chance of a significantly less dangerous shock. In a moist environment, this is a good idea.
Note also for the sake of clarity that I've oversimplified a few things - RMS voltages from wall sockets, charging system voltages in cars tend to be around 13.8V, etc.
Those Pesky Ungrounded Outlets in Bathrooms
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In my first dorm there were 5 outlets, 1 of which was ungrounded (above a mirror). We were allowed hair dryers,
Heh... Note that those ungrounded outlets built into bathroom light fixtures are normally for electric razors only.
What's different about them?
When they say "RAZOR ONLY" beside the outlet, the outlet is usually on a small 1:1 power transformer. It's called an isolation transformer, and in those applications, they're usually only built to handle something under about 50W. Don't plug a hair dryer into it!
What does it do?
Ordinary outlets have a "hot" side and a neutral side. The neutral side is tied directly to ground at the distribution transformer and usually (depends on local electrical codes) at the fuse box. The hot side is connected to a winding on the distribution transformer which is putting out 120V with respect to ground. The power is then referenced to ground - usually to a cold water pipe which comes directly into the building through the earth.
Outlets also have a wide blade and a narrow blade. The wide blade is supposed to be connected to neutral, the narrow blade is supposed to be connected to hot.
Theoretically, you should be able to touch the wide prong and the ground (round prong) at the same time without getting a shock. The whole point of this is to allow you to accidentally touch the large part of a light socket base without getting a shock. Back in the day, lots of radios and TV sets used a "hot chassis" which was tied directly to one side of the power line - this should have been the neutral. (Most of them also predate polarized power cords, so depending on which way you had it plugged in, you had a 50% chance of the chassis being at 120V or neutral with respect to ground. Be careful!)
The isolation transformer removes that reference to ground, the potential difference exists only between the prongs of the outlet. This is good if you accidentally drop your electric razor into a sink full of water, because there will be no ground current through you - the only current would be from one wet point within the razor to another wet point within the razor.
Isolation transformers are a very important safety feature. Personally, I like them better than ground fault interruptors. The biggest problem with isolation transformers is that making one which will handle the current of a hair dryer or other large (power-wise) appliance requires a lot of heavy iron laminates and copper (expensive).
Why bother with conduit when the house you just descibed will last at most 3 years before it is unlivable due to mold? Insulation sounds good, but modern hosues are so tight already that contractors consider themselves luck to have most survive, and there is much more effictive insultaition then the minimal they are putting in that will only make the problem worse.
Mold isn't a problem where I live; the climate is generally cold and fairly dry.
Probably the most important things to help out are proper dryer and bathroom vents. A dryer will suck a surprising amount of household air out the vent. If the air is already humid because your house is well-sealed, the drying time for your clothes will be longer, but it still gets rid of humid air in your house.
In my case, I want the humidity so that the house is comfortable - about 30% relative humidity. So I don't turn on the bathroom fan when I have a shower. The heating system circulates it. My dryer is electric (don't do this with gas!), so in the winter, I move the output to an air intake in the furnace. The furnace fan runs constantly, even when I'm not heating with oil or gas, and it takes the warm humid air from the dryer all through the house. Of course, I have to change the furnace filters a little more often (lint), but I get the nice smell of Bounce sheets all over the house. None of the lint seems to get to the electrostatic filters that a previous resident installed.
My house is small - 30'x40' bungalow with a basement. Everything is well insulated, even the basement walls. Overall, I can heat the house in the dead of winter (0F with wind) using nothing more than my usual electrical loads (computers, TV, lights, internally-vented dryer, etc) and a pair of 1.5kW electric baseboard heaters in the same room as the furnace. Usually, the baseboard heaters have a short duty cycle, and the furnace fan draws their heat throughout the house. You need a sweater sometimes, but there's about half a tank of furnace oil which has been sitting unused for a couple of years now.
I've been mulling over the idea of replacing the baseboard heaters with a stack of computers, simply because the electricity might as well be working on something productive like SETI@Home units on its way to becoming heat.
The real problem that I have is a lack of programming skills - I'm *not* a programmer. I want to be able to start and stop SETI@Home based on the status of a line on the parallel port.
I can easily whip up the electronics to bring high or low the Paper_Out line on a parallel port based on what the thermostat says. If the Paper_Out line is high, I want to start the SETI@Home task, and if it's low, I want to stop the SETI@Home task, leaving the processor idling (halted in a Pentium or better with power management enabled). Of course, the computers will continue to consume power in this state, but not as much. The power consumed in the idle state will simply decrease the duty cycle the processors have to do to keep the house warm.
I can easily write a shell script which will start and stop the SETI task, but I need an executable which will return the status of the port - 1 for Paper_Out high, 0 for Paper_Out low. Would like to be able to have it run on just about any Intel hardware, because I don't know what sorts of junker machines I can score for this project. Don't care if it has to run as root. Few dependencies are good - some of these machines might have very small hard disk drives, requiring small Linux installs. No X, perhaps an older distro, don't know.
Could do it with any conveniently readable line on either the parallel (Paper_Out, device_ready, etc) or 9-pin serial ports (CTS, etc.).
Anyone got any ideas? Am I simply missing something I can do easily with lpd or similar?
While your at it consider running more energy efficient lighting, as well as redoing all your door and window seals so you have less influx of hot or cold air straining your HVAC system.
Yeah, replace all windows that are more than about 20 years old; at the very least, install outside storm windows if you don't have them.
Sit down and carefully compare your heating costs based on the projected efficiency of your furnace and the costs of energy. In my case, it's cheaper to heat electrically than by oil or gas, so energy efficient lighting isn't a concern - every watt wasted by tungsten is serving to heat the house, so it's okay with me. (Besides, I hate fluorescent lighting.)
I am by no means an expert in your field, so this might sound stupid, but if you need to store and change it frequently you could do this in RAM maybe. Memory cheap enough for it to be able to store a 2 hr divx in a 1Gb ram or something like that. If you need to update it frequently I suppose you have some kind of connection where you could download from in case of a power outage. You might need something smart like being able to broadcast the content to all systems simultaniously after a power outage.
Yeah, software drivers for a RAM disk so that applications could access it as if it were in a hardware storage device; use multicasting to get it there. Boot machine from a smaller solid state disk. Last time I really thought about this problem was before RAM was practical in such quantities.:)
I'm just trying to come up with a solid state solution to your problem.
You forgot a microwave, toaster oven, coffee maker -- all essential dorm-room gear; it's easy to draw 2000 watts during breakfast with these three things alone. Also, don't forget that this is/., so it's unlikely that there's just one computer.
Didn't forget that; in school, we weren't allowed any heating appliances in the dorm rooms. Even hair dryers and soldering irons were bad.
The computers - yeah, I know. But it comes down to real estate - where are you gonna park 2+ computers in your dorm room and still have a flat work surface to do your math homework? I did know a couple of people in res who brought more than one computer, but none of them actually still had them set up after the first week. (Maybe a headless Linux machine off in the corner, but I seriously doubt many students would actually do that.)
A properly designed electrical system in the home with the correct surge equipment at the front end (the electrical box) solves all these problems. from surges in the house from flipping on grandma's 40 year old stand mixer to nasty surges from the factory down the street.
Agreed. But there's still more to it than that.
Surge suppressors on the power entry, just after the main switch. *Large* breaker box.
And if you're building the house - or doing extensive work involving the removal of lots of drywall anyway - rewire the whole house. Build it to commercial specs, even if your residential requirements are lighter.
My suggestion is to use conduit for all wiring, and make sure that you put in extra conduit all over the place so that you can fish network and phone cables into any room as required. Put each duplex outlet on a separate 15A circuit (20A circuits are against code in residences in most jurisdictions). GFI outlets aren't just for bathrooms - they're not very expensive, so put them everywhere - they can save your life and your electronics from damage (say your stereo has a ground leak and you connect it to your computer). And make sure that you have an outlet at least every 10 feet in every room.
While you're doing all that, of course, you should be installing a residential sprinkler system. (Why? Sprinklers massively improve the fire safety of a house or commercial building. And it's a lot easier to clean up water damage than fire damage.) The reduction in your insurance rates over a few years might well pay for your entire renovation costs, and talk to your insurance company about the fact that the building is wired to commercial standards for another potential savings.
Other things to consider: While you've got the house apart, insulate the piss out of it, whether you're in a warm or cold climate.
You might also want to install a gray water system for the toilets. It's against code in my jurisdiction, but I don't really care because it's a good idea. The premise is simple: my toilet is almost 50 years old. It's not one of those stupid "water-efficient" toilets that takes 6 flushes to get rid of dark matter. And I don't like urinating in perfectly clean water - there's no point. So I put a 55 gallon drum in the basement. The bathtub U-trap (unscrew the washout nipple and find a piece of pipe of the same thread, make sure you still have a bend in the hose for a three-way U-trap) and washing machine now drain into the barrel. Using bleach in a cotton white cycle not only keeps your shirts blindingly white, but also keeps algae out of the barrel. Near the top of the barrel is an overflow pipe which takes excess stored water to the drain. A burglar alarm magnetic switch on the toilet's float now controls a relay which turns on a small pump. Gray water is pumped through a small hose up into the toilet tank, using a fountain pump with 15 feet of head.
Since I live in a cold climate and like hot showers, not only am I reclaiming the water, but I'm also reclaiming the heat. The water in the barrel cools down slowly, releasing its heat into the house. Saves me over $200 a year in heat and water costs.
A fringe benefit is that warm soapy water in the toilet dissolves stuff better than cold tap water, so the toilet doesn't need to be cleaned as often.
have you considered using a bicycle generator? i.e where you have to pedal for 5 hours a week to charge up a battery which can supply enough power for a TV for an hour or so?
I've thought of that before. You know, it's a great idea for a few reasons:
all those hours of inactivity are turned into exercise
makes watching TV a lot more work than doing the studying you really should be doing, so your marks will improve
saves you from watching The Matrix for the 700th time when you could be doing more productive things like drinking beer with friends
I do have to wonder about how bad this dorm room power crisis really is. Let's consider appliances with realistic maximum power consumptions:
Computer - 350 watts
Monitor - 250 watts
Computer speakers - 50 watts (note that this is less than the output "ratings" from the marketing department - your "350W" computer speakers must be violating the laws of conservation of energy)
Laser printer - 300 watts
Wall-warts for PDA, cellphone, clock-radio, small switched hub or router - 30 watts total
Boom box - 50 watts (see Computer Speakers)
TV set - 250 watts
VCR/DVD player - 50 watts
Beer fridge - 300 watts
Lights over desk, etc - 200 watts
Note that many of these loads are intermittent or mutually exclusive. Most laser printers only pull any amount of power when the printer is actually fusing a page. The boom box probably won't be playing loudly at the same time as the computer speakers. And, unless you like to leave the door open, the beer fridge's compressor should be off most of the time.
And some of these appliances will become duplicates in a shared dorm room, so the realistic likelihood of them being on at once is small.
1830 watts is the total power consumption for the list of appliances above. In my jurisdiction, commercial buildings (including University residences) have one outlet per 1500W circuit. Most circuit breakers are thermal (takes time to heat up a bimetallic strip in the breaker) and therefore act like slow-blow fuses. And unless you're printing a massive pile of course notes while playing the boom box and computer speakers loudly and doing it with the beer fridge door jammed open, the loads are probably going to be too transient to trip the breaker. So you may have a whole load of power bars plugged into that one outlet, but in reality, it's likely to be perfectly fine.
On the other hand, dorm rooms are small. It's in the students' best interests - forget power consumption - to slim things down:
Computer - 350 watts
Monitor - space-saving LCD - 60 watts
Computer speakers - 50 watts
Laser printer - 300 watts
Wall-warts for PDA, cellphone, clock-radio, small switched hub or router - 30 watts total
Boom box - play MP3/Ogg/CDs from computer - 0 watts
TV set - video card with TV features, preferably not ATI because their software sucks - 0 watts
VCR/DVD player - play DVD on computer, and if you absolutely have to rip some video off-air, do it with the computer - 0 watts
Beer fridge - 300 watts
Lights over desk, etc - 200 watts
Noting that this scheme is merely a common-sense approach to giving you more space in your dorm room (and making moving at the end of the year that much less painful), your maximum consumption will only be about 1260 watts. Which means that if you've got a circuit, you're fine.
I'd suggest to universities that they point out in their residence brochures something along the lines of "Moving into and out of residence can be unpleasant. For that reason, we suggest that students attempt to travel as lightly as possible. LCD monitors and video cards with TV inputs will save you space by avoiding having to carry around bulky CRT displays." Maybe offer a small rebate to students who use an LCD monitor and TV-in video card to replace a CRT-based monitor and TV set.
when your stuff gets downloaded. If you're gonna tax everyone, then you can't complain when they take what they paid for.
But there's a further problem here. I don't know too many people who are running around downloading such precious gems as Rita McNeil or the Tragically Hip's lovely Bobcaygeon. Artisits like Rush, Big Sugar, Barenaked Ladies, and Rufus Wainwright are aberrations and represent a very tiny portion of the SOCAN catalog. Yet I can't believe that the tax wouldn't be based on the entire catalog, not just those few songs/artists who can thank their talent rather than CRTC Canadian Content laws for their success.
So, Canadians will be paying a tax to download music which nobody downloads because it's so rank.
Actually, that's not true, either. I downloaded Bobcaygeon because it's like a train wreck; if it happens in front of you, you can't take your eyes off it. Any time an American friend tells me that the grass is greener on my side of the fence, I e-mail Bobcaygeon.
Just use some CompactFlash as disk, 32 Mb or larger will do fine for an embedded linux system (SDL graphics, tinyhttp server if need be).
I have used the SSV systems for this kind of thing.
Yeah... But the trend now is to stream video (hotel, airline, restaurant commercials) over the FIDS. Need to be able to store that and change it frequently.
Wow, I think that is about the third time in this topic you make the assertion that arts subjects is about coloring books and crayons.
My arts elective in University required all students have a *purple* crayon in all classes and gave 15% of your course mark based on attendance. After the TAs passed out the course outlines and I saw that, it was pretty hard to take the course seriously.
Most (if not all) engineering/science/math/economics people can get their heads around the basic requirements and contents of any arts course - literature, composition, history, group dynamics, etc. On the other hand, I frequently looked at my timetable for the next term, looked up the course description, and was immediately lost after the title. Few arts students could even begin to imagine what "Engineering Mechanics 101: An Introduction to Force and Moment Vectors, Couple Moments, Static Equilibrium and Frames and Machines" was going to be all about. When I walked into that class, I knew what a force vector was, but everything else in that course description was Greek to me. (Note: Couple Moments, Frames and Machines aren't what you probably think they are.)
Lots of easy karma points from dittohead Slashdot moderators when you pick on strawmen.
Strawmen? Like from The Wizard of Oz?
You must be a very smart man in comparison, studying these incredibly difficult engineering subjects.
Heh. I like your tone of sarcasm. Very cute.
Engineering is difficult. Not so much the material as the quantity of material - most three-month-long terms involved 5 textbooks, at 500 pages each, on highly technical subjects (3 months = 90 days to cover 2,500 pages before the exams; about 30 pages of Gaussian flux or Adaptive Quadrature Techniques of Numerical Integration every day). Note that 30 pages of technical documentation - where every second or third line is an equation, function or relationship which must be understood if not memorized - takes a lot longer to read than 30 pages of Beowulf (not the computer cluster!) or a history textbook. It's continuously overwhelming.
No one cares if you go to class. No one cares if you write your tests on triple integrals or microwave theory using a purple crayon or (my personal favorite) a 2B 0.5mm mechanical pencil. You can't bullshit your way through an essay that you forgot to study for - you either know the material or you don't, and it's quantifiable and easy to prove in the marking scheme.
Unless it's a multiple choice test, in which case *all* your profs are well-schooled in the rules of probability and set tests where the correct answer is surrounded by seven to eleven other results you would have been likely to find if you forgot to use the product rule while differentiating for a gradient vector or some other equally stupid error. When you have a 1:8 to a 1:12 chance of guessing the correct answer - and often a penalty for an incorrect answer - you will not be able to bullshit your way through.
In short, Engineering - like all sciences, theoretical or applied - requires you to know what you're doing, not just to drag your hung-over ass and a purple crayon to class. Work ethic is the most important thing you can bring to the table.
So forgive me if I have a hard time taking an arts degree seriously. They simply haven't looked into Hell's gaping maw.
You dumbass, you missed a great chance to score. A smart sexy beast like me would have taken here to the side, told here she heard the part about integrating out of context, invited here for cup of coffee to have a "deep" conversation about integration and how multicultural I am. If all things go well, a kiss + a huge + a little butt squeeze would be granted without prejudice.
The only way to have tolerated her would have been to duct tape her mouth shut, and I'm pretty sure that she would have objected. Besides, it would have lessened the promise of the evening.
Your sig is kind of retarded. Circumcision has nothing to do with savagery versus non-savagery, you dolt.
I see.
Most of the world doesn't circumcise.
This is true.
And most of the world doesn't have potable water or electricity either. What's your point?
Would you call the French, Germans, and all of Europe savages?
France and Germany aren't part of Europe? That's news to me, especially since I hold EU citizenship. By birth, in fact.
And, actually, I would call France and Germany savages. They harbor Roman Polanski. They passively protect potentially-dangerous dictators despite all evidence and their own very recent foray into tyranny still being in living memory. And they censor free speech, as unsavory as discussion of their own neo-Nazi groups might be.
Or China? Or Africa? Or Japan?
China and Africa don't count; as a whole, they still haven't figured out things like potable water and washing tables at the local market.
Japan? They build paper houses with stone roofs. In an earthquake zone, no less. Between that, the consumption of raw fish, the Hello Kitty obsession and the oh-so-practical street addressing systems they use in every large Japanese city I've visited, I'm rather loathe to use them as role models of practicality.
If so you have a big problem with our American ego...
I assume you meant "your American ego". I'm not American, actually. I hold EU (British) and Canadian citizenships.
Getting to your apparent problem: I had myself circumcised as an adult. You see, there's a neat thing about foreskin: it's normal and natural. But wearing pants isn't normal or natural, and society seems to prefer it when I don't parade around naked. So, I did a little research (scientific journals only, avoiding all the looney-tunes no-circ wackos who blame their latent homosexuality and male-pattern baldness on their circumcisions) and the only intelligent argument that I could find against circumcision is the possibility of complications. Given that major complications are exceedingly rare (based again on research in scientific journals), I took the risk.
Indeed, I have been more than satisfied with my altered state. My only regret is that I didn't have it done at birth so as to avoid missing out on the first 22 years of benefits.
*YOU* assumed (based solely on her sandals?) that she was an art major.
ArtS major. One of the BA programs. If she were in science, engineering, commerce, economics or architecture, she would have required a high school calculus credit as a prerequisite for admission.
Note that all of those majors have something else in common besides calculus: career prospects which by and large don't include an entry-level job as a "management trainee" at The Gap.
Ergo, logic suggests that calculus is the difference between a degree and birdcage liner.
*YOU* assumed (based solely on her angst?) that she had had a "comfortable middle-class childhood."
Sure! She was at least comfortable financially. I wouldn't remember her if I ran into her on the street or met her in a bar, but my memory is that she was well-dressed (in an name-brand with money but no taste sort of way).
I do remember the wooden sandals for sure. And nailpolish on the toe nails.
*YOU* assumed (based solely on her ignorance of calculus?) that she was an idiot.
No. She butted into a conversation without knowing what it was about, accused me loudly and without merit based on what she's been programmed to do by who knows how many "Campus Racism Awareness" focus groups and "workshops" (how the *hell* can they get away with calling it a "workshop" if there are no power tools?).
Furthermore, based on her apparent lack of a prerequisite high school calculus credit, she had chosen to invest in a degree which was not likely to further her career. What better barometer of idiocy is there than wasting $40,000+ over 4 years to get a degree which might land a top-flight job in either the housekeeping or food service industries? (Thanks, Peter!)
If you had gone through life only having encountered one use of the term "integration," you might have made the same assumption. That's not to say that she didn't overreact, but her reaction simply means that she feels passionately about the issue. Hopefully you will agree that that isn't a bad thing.
Again, see the same point about the lack of a high school calculus credit pointing to the fact that she was probably throwing away four years and $40k. That's mistake number one. Mistake number two was assuming that she knew what a bunch of strangers were talking about. Mistake number three (not covered in your post, and relevant in the climate involved) was wearing sandals in October.
What bugs me is the assumption that she is worthy of ridicule for not knowing calculus terms, whereas it's perfectly okay for YOU not to know much about HER major. She might be ignorant, but you are both ignorant AND arrogant.
The worldwide supply of English Literature and Medieval History majors clearly exceeds the demand. I know enough about both subjects to get by (including how to brew mead!), whilst I doubt she would even know the basics of more relevant (and arguably more important) subjects which form the basis for amenities she enjoys in today's world - Ohm's Law, cellular mitosis, the speedometer in your car takes the derivative of your odometer with respect to time, the joys of calculating that she'd be a millionaire at retirement if she'd put that $40k for her education into savings, how many pounds of force are needed to get those silly 6" long lugnut wrenches that come with new Toyotas to replace a flat tire by the side of the road...
But that's okay. I'm sure you're right. It's more important that I know Shakespeare's sonnets or the major features of Renaissance portraits. Damn it, instead of pursuing a science/engineering/economics/math/useful degree or spending those youthful four years working and banking the money in anticipation of the effects of compounded interest, I should have been spending the money and time to get a B.A. in Film Studies.
Personally I think some elements of an Arts/Social Sciences degree should be compulsory in every technical degree to help ensure that we don't end up like the Borg.
It is! It sure helped my GPA, the full credit arts elective I took. The most stressful part of the class was when the instructor asked us to dig out our purple crayons. (I'm not kidding.) The payoff was that attendance was taken every class, and 15% of your mark was based on attendance. It was a dead easy course.
I'm suspect you, like many engineering/science/maths people, would probably fail a subject about renaissance art or English literature (the type that comes from England) or modern history. At the very least your dismissive and superior attitude would inhibit your ability to actually understand the very real subtleties and complexities of such subjects.
Since the supply of Art History majors clearly exceeds the market demand for Art History majors, I have tremendous resentment for the fact that there's government funding to those (as all) university degrees whilst money could be spent on public support for degrees which actually have a use to the economy.
The glut of people with BAs but no particular need for them (ie. not employed in academia) pushes up recruiting requirements artificially. ("Candidate A has an unrelated and effectively useless degree while Candidate B has ten years of real-world experience in the field. But Candidate A has a degree, so we'll offer the position of sales associate here at The Gap.")
If you want to do it on your own time and money, fine. But I would also caution those who are considering an arts degree right out of high school to consider the marginal increase in earning power most of them enjoy, versus the compounded effects of interest earned on savings so early in their working career. It simply is not an intelligent fiscal plan.
(Never mind that when I'm looking for a secretary or something, the resumes with the arts degrees go into the shredder faster than the Word attachments get deleted. Spending 4 years and $40,000+ to get a degree to apply for a job as a secretary is a clear sign to me that the applicant is not sufficiently intelligent to be trusted with a box of paperclips let alone the big-assed scary Mita collating copier.)
...and we wonder why Engineering students have a bad reputation and can't get laid...
Little secret: in the button-down super-preppy world of University, having a bad reputation gets you laid.
Different is good.
What did I do? Try driving around campus in a 1976 Dodge Ram pickup truck with Pinkard and Bowden's Guns Made America Great playing loudly on the stereo, having long hair and flannel shirts, participating and winning in drinking games while chain smoking unfiltered Camels.
Apparent cavalier disregard for academic success, but still showing up for all classes and doing excellent assignments and lab work: "Well, the way I figure it, I don't have a scholarship or a residence placement riding on my marks. All I need to do is pass all my courses. Anything more violates the law of diminishing returns and cuts into drinking time which I can spend with friends so that I don't burn out before the end of senior year." (Think about it: a good engineer is lazy. It wasn't an active guy who invented the TV remote control, the elevator or the dishwasher. One could even make an argument that it was the motivating factor behind the invention of the bridge.)
And doing this not because you feel a need to be a conformist with someone elses' ideals, but because you simply enjoy these things.
Damn, you sure showed bigotry and intolerance in your description and assumptions about this girl. Maybe she misheard and embarrassed herself, but it turns out you are, in fact, an asshole.
Wow. Well, you know, the shoe would have been on the other foot if I'd overheard her talking about the coloring books their mid-terms are based on and jumped to conclusions about those.
*SHE* assumed that my friends and I were racists.
*SHE* demonstrated her naivete and hypersensitivity.
*SHE* is the one who started screaming at me.
*SHE* learned that I am, in fact, an asshole. And proud of it.
Similar experience in which I said, "The problem is that we just aren't able to discriminate well enough..." The angry glares were from people who thought I meant 'be prejudiced' while I simply meant 'distinguish'.
Crazy, huh? Heh... I could just imagine what the uninitiated and hyper-sensitive would have thought of a discussion of RF tuning circuits.
I'm pretty sure we're hearing the version you *wish* you had said after thinking about it later.
Of course! But I still got to call her ignorant, I still welcomed her to contact the Dean of Engineering, and I still made fun of her wooden sandals and pursuit of an arts degree.
Seeing as how this story is probably made up, I hesitated to give you accolades for the story, but the line about calculus was friggin priceless! Keep up the good B.S.!
Thanks! But it's true. The dialog is paraphrased; as close as I can remember it.
Their job is to make sure the cops get paid and the street lights work. It is NOT to re-invent Think-Speak.
Tell me about it.
How about this, which happened to me in University. Note that I don't care about race, disability, sexual orientation - none of that is relevant to whether or not I like (or will hire) someone. But I *hate* political correctness and I avoid it at all costs.
Picture it. In the hallway, just after I missed a question on a math test, where I had to integrate a function of e * trig. (Otherwise, did okay on the test.) Chatting with classmates.
"Well, I think the problem is that I don't integrate very well."
Stranger in the hallway who overhears:
"Oh! That's *horrible*! You're a terrible person! No one chooses the color of their skin! You could have just as easily been born black, you know! It's people like you who keep society from progressing!"
So, in unison, we (all Engineers) looked at her and laughed. At her.
"You're *all* horrible people! This is university! Campus KKK! I'm reporting you to the dean!"
Suffering idiocy as well as I do, it was I who took up the task of dealing with her.
"I would invite you to report that to my dean, I'm sure he'll laugh at you at least as hard as I laughed at you. Let me guess, you're in an arts program, right? In my arts elective, the instructor started by asking our entire class if we had our purple crayons. Things only went downhill from there."
[Indignant gasps from the chick... who was wearing wooden sandals in late October.]
I continued, "...Now, seeing as how *you're* the ignorant one..."
Screaming now, "How *DARE* you call me ignorant! You're the one who said you didn't like to integrate!" People were stopping to see this woman lose it on me. This hallway connected two science buildings, an engineering building and one arts building, so most of them were starting to laugh at her, too.
"You're *ALL* in on this! What's wrong with you people?" She was getting worked up to tears, all the angst of a comfortable middle-class childhood showing.
A big black guy who had been watching and kind of laughing from the beginning told her that he hated to integrate too, then walked away, leaving her stunned.
Me again: "Now, seeing as how you're the ignorant one, integration is a mathematical process for finding the area under a curve. It's from a branch of mathematics called calculus. Your wooden sandals and amazing ability to jump to unfounded conclusions have only served to reaffirm my belief that calculus is the distinction between a degree and toilet paper. You, honeybunch, are an idiot."
And with that, we left. I think she was having a stress attack when we walked away.
How many tube amp junkies crawl to you begging for a hit?
Constantly... But it's like someone coming up to me and saying, "Hey, you're into cars, you'll love my tricked-out Honda Civic! It's got a big stereo!" (I generally put my cigarette butts into those silly upturned exhaust tips.)
One: Not the same thing.
Two: No. I'm not into guitar amps (while I love classic rock). And I'm not into "audiophile" stuff where they all sit around and talk about "the ambience of my music is a lot better through these $600 speaker cables" while completely ignoring any intelligent mathematical analysis.
In short, someone comes to me looking for tubes, it better be to:
restore early (1940s to 1960s) television sets or equipment
restore an antique radio
restore vintage scientific or military equipment
look for the original vintage tubes for early stereo equipment
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Try the ACE classes. It will work on any platform, even embeded ones (at least with the serial port). (the classes you would be interested in are ACE_DEV_IO and ACE_DEV_Connector).
Thanks for the heads-up, but this is way beyond me. I've looked at the header files doxygen documentation, but I still can't see how to integrate it into something like:
#include "$EVERYTHING_SO_THAT_gcc_SHUTS_UP"
void main() {
if (ttyS0.flags("CTS")){
cout << "1";
} else {
cout << "0";
}
}
Heh... I don't know much about programming, besides what I've read in K&R and the courses I had to take in university. And when I have to code, my style is so much brute force and ignorance that Microsoft keeps on trying to hire me to join the Outlook team.
This might help you get started but the full coffee maker howto is what you want to look for.
http://linuxselfhelp.com/HOWTO/mini/Coffee.html
Thanks; I checked it out, but both the mini and full HOWTO seem to have exactly the same text.
They both tell me how to make the computer control a device.
I want the device to control the computer!
" The wide blade is supposed to be connected to neutral, the narrow blade is supposed to be connected to hot."
then wouldn't you only get 1/2 phase?
Nope.
Neutral is tied to ground, it serves as a reference point. The hot side alternates between +120V and -120V with respect to neutral.
It's like the body in your car - it's "ground", and the +12V from the battery is referenced to it. In the case of a car, it's not for safety reasons, but for convenience - to power a light, all you need to do is run one wire from the positive terminal of the battery to the light, and then connect the light's other terminal to the body.
If you were to reverse the battery in your car (connect the positive terminal to ground), then the -12V would be referenced to ground. Current would still flow quite happily - although it would destroy all electronic devices in your car, exactly the same as accidentally putting the batteries into your Walkman backwards.
On ships, they don't reference 120V AC power to ground, they reference it to the center tap of the distribution transformer. In other words, with respect to ground (ie. connecting your Fluke 77 DMM to the ship's steel), you have +60V and -60V at each blade during one half of the cycle, then -60V and +60V at each blade during the other half of the cycle. Of course, between the blades, the difference is still 120V. This system is used on ships because rather than having a 50% chance of a potentially lethal shock if you accidentally touch a broken wire, you have a 100% chance of a significantly less dangerous shock. In a moist environment, this is a good idea.
Note also for the sake of clarity that I've oversimplified a few things - RMS voltages from wall sockets, charging system voltages in cars tend to be around 13.8V, etc.
In my first dorm there were 5 outlets, 1 of which was ungrounded (above a mirror). We were allowed hair dryers,
Heh... Note that those ungrounded outlets built into bathroom light fixtures are normally for electric razors only.
What's different about them?
When they say "RAZOR ONLY" beside the outlet, the outlet is usually on a small 1:1 power transformer. It's called an isolation transformer, and in those applications, they're usually only built to handle something under about 50W. Don't plug a hair dryer into it!
What does it do?
Ordinary outlets have a "hot" side and a neutral side. The neutral side is tied directly to ground at the distribution transformer and usually (depends on local electrical codes) at the fuse box. The hot side is connected to a winding on the distribution transformer which is putting out 120V with respect to ground. The power is then referenced to ground - usually to a cold water pipe which comes directly into the building through the earth.
Outlets also have a wide blade and a narrow blade. The wide blade is supposed to be connected to neutral, the narrow blade is supposed to be connected to hot.
Theoretically, you should be able to touch the wide prong and the ground (round prong) at the same time without getting a shock. The whole point of this is to allow you to accidentally touch the large part of a light socket base without getting a shock. Back in the day, lots of radios and TV sets used a "hot chassis" which was tied directly to one side of the power line - this should have been the neutral. (Most of them also predate polarized power cords, so depending on which way you had it plugged in, you had a 50% chance of the chassis being at 120V or neutral with respect to ground. Be careful!)
The isolation transformer removes that reference to ground, the potential difference exists only between the prongs of the outlet. This is good if you accidentally drop your electric razor into a sink full of water, because there will be no ground current through you - the only current would be from one wet point within the razor to another wet point within the razor.
Isolation transformers are a very important safety feature. Personally, I like them better than ground fault interruptors. The biggest problem with isolation transformers is that making one which will handle the current of a hair dryer or other large (power-wise) appliance requires a lot of heavy iron laminates and copper (expensive).
Why bother with conduit when the house you just descibed will last at most 3 years before it is unlivable due to mold? Insulation sounds good, but modern hosues are so tight already that contractors consider themselves luck to have most survive, and there is much more effictive insultaition then the minimal they are putting in that will only make the problem worse.
Mold isn't a problem where I live; the climate is generally cold and fairly dry.
Probably the most important things to help out are proper dryer and bathroom vents. A dryer will suck a surprising amount of household air out the vent. If the air is already humid because your house is well-sealed, the drying time for your clothes will be longer, but it still gets rid of humid air in your house.
In my case, I want the humidity so that the house is comfortable - about 30% relative humidity. So I don't turn on the bathroom fan when I have a shower. The heating system circulates it. My dryer is electric (don't do this with gas!), so in the winter, I move the output to an air intake in the furnace. The furnace fan runs constantly, even when I'm not heating with oil or gas, and it takes the warm humid air from the dryer all through the house. Of course, I have to change the furnace filters a little more often (lint), but I get the nice smell of Bounce sheets all over the house. None of the lint seems to get to the electrostatic filters that a previous resident installed.
My house is small - 30'x40' bungalow with a basement. Everything is well insulated, even the basement walls. Overall, I can heat the house in the dead of winter (0F with wind) using nothing more than my usual electrical loads (computers, TV, lights, internally-vented dryer, etc) and a pair of 1.5kW electric baseboard heaters in the same room as the furnace. Usually, the baseboard heaters have a short duty cycle, and the furnace fan draws their heat throughout the house. You need a sweater sometimes, but there's about half a tank of furnace oil which has been sitting unused for a couple of years now.
I've been mulling over the idea of replacing the baseboard heaters with a stack of computers, simply because the electricity might as well be working on something productive like SETI@Home units on its way to becoming heat.
The real problem that I have is a lack of programming skills - I'm *not* a programmer. I want to be able to start and stop SETI@Home based on the status of a line on the parallel port.
I can easily whip up the electronics to bring high or low the Paper_Out line on a parallel port based on what the thermostat says. If the Paper_Out line is high, I want to start the SETI@Home task, and if it's low, I want to stop the SETI@Home task, leaving the processor idling (halted in a Pentium or better with power management enabled). Of course, the computers will continue to consume power in this state, but not as much. The power consumed in the idle state will simply decrease the duty cycle the processors have to do to keep the house warm.
I can easily write a shell script which will start and stop the SETI task, but I need an executable which will return the status of the port - 1 for Paper_Out high, 0 for Paper_Out low. Would like to be able to have it run on just about any Intel hardware, because I don't know what sorts of junker machines I can score for this project. Don't care if it has to run as root. Few dependencies are good - some of these machines might have very small hard disk drives, requiring small Linux installs. No X, perhaps an older distro, don't know.
Could do it with any conveniently readable line on either the parallel (Paper_Out, device_ready, etc) or 9-pin serial ports (CTS, etc.).
Anyone got any ideas? Am I simply missing something I can do easily with lpd or similar?
While your at it consider running more energy efficient lighting, as well as redoing all your door and window seals so you have less influx of hot or cold air straining your HVAC system.
Yeah, replace all windows that are more than about 20 years old; at the very least, install outside storm windows if you don't have them.
Sit down and carefully compare your heating costs based on the projected efficiency of your furnace and the costs of energy. In my case, it's cheaper to heat electrically than by oil or gas, so energy efficient lighting isn't a concern - every watt wasted by tungsten is serving to heat the house, so it's okay with me. (Besides, I hate fluorescent lighting.)
And some one mod this guy up.Thanks!
I am by no means an expert in your field, so this might sound stupid, but if you need to store and change it frequently you could do this in RAM maybe. Memory cheap enough for it to be able to store a 2 hr divx in a 1Gb ram or something like that. If you need to update it frequently I suppose you have some kind of connection where you could download from in case of a power outage. You might need something smart like being able to broadcast the content to all systems simultaniously after a power outage.
Yeah, software drivers for a RAM disk so that applications could access it as if it were in a hardware storage device; use multicasting to get it there. Boot machine from a smaller solid state disk. Last time I really thought about this problem was before RAM was practical in such quantities. :)
I'm just trying to come up with a solid state solution to your problem.Best idea I've heard yet!
You forgot a microwave, toaster oven, coffee maker -- all essential dorm-room gear; it's easy to draw 2000 watts during breakfast with these three things alone. Also, don't forget that this is
Didn't forget that; in school, we weren't allowed any heating appliances in the dorm rooms. Even hair dryers and soldering irons were bad.
The computers - yeah, I know. But it comes down to real estate - where are you gonna park 2+ computers in your dorm room and still have a flat work surface to do your math homework? I did know a couple of people in res who brought more than one computer, but none of them actually still had them set up after the first week. (Maybe a headless Linux machine off in the corner, but I seriously doubt many students would actually do that.)
A properly designed electrical system in the home with the correct surge equipment at the front end (the electrical box) solves all these problems. from surges in the house from flipping on grandma's 40 year old stand mixer to nasty surges from the factory down the street.
Agreed. But there's still more to it than that.
Surge suppressors on the power entry, just after the main switch. *Large* breaker box.
And if you're building the house - or doing extensive work involving the removal of lots of drywall anyway - rewire the whole house. Build it to commercial specs, even if your residential requirements are lighter.
My suggestion is to use conduit for all wiring, and make sure that you put in extra conduit all over the place so that you can fish network and phone cables into any room as required. Put each duplex outlet on a separate 15A circuit (20A circuits are against code in residences in most jurisdictions). GFI outlets aren't just for bathrooms - they're not very expensive, so put them everywhere - they can save your life and your electronics from damage (say your stereo has a ground leak and you connect it to your computer). And make sure that you have an outlet at least every 10 feet in every room.
While you're doing all that, of course, you should be installing a residential sprinkler system. (Why? Sprinklers massively improve the fire safety of a house or commercial building. And it's a lot easier to clean up water damage than fire damage.) The reduction in your insurance rates over a few years might well pay for your entire renovation costs, and talk to your insurance company about the fact that the building is wired to commercial standards for another potential savings.
Other things to consider: While you've got the house apart, insulate the piss out of it, whether you're in a warm or cold climate.
You might also want to install a gray water system for the toilets. It's against code in my jurisdiction, but I don't really care because it's a good idea. The premise is simple: my toilet is almost 50 years old. It's not one of those stupid "water-efficient" toilets that takes 6 flushes to get rid of dark matter. And I don't like urinating in perfectly clean water - there's no point. So I put a 55 gallon drum in the basement. The bathtub U-trap (unscrew the washout nipple and find a piece of pipe of the same thread, make sure you still have a bend in the hose for a three-way U-trap) and washing machine now drain into the barrel. Using bleach in a cotton white cycle not only keeps your shirts blindingly white, but also keeps algae out of the barrel. Near the top of the barrel is an overflow pipe which takes excess stored water to the drain. A burglar alarm magnetic switch on the toilet's float now controls a relay which turns on a small pump. Gray water is pumped through a small hose up into the toilet tank, using a fountain pump with 15 feet of head.
Since I live in a cold climate and like hot showers, not only am I reclaiming the water, but I'm also reclaiming the heat. The water in the barrel cools down slowly, releasing its heat into the house. Saves me over $200 a year in heat and water costs.
A fringe benefit is that warm soapy water in the toilet dissolves stuff better than cold tap water, so the toilet doesn't need to be cleaned as often.
have you considered using a bicycle generator? i.e where you have to pedal for 5 hours a week to charge up a battery which can supply enough power for a TV for an hour or so?
I've thought of that before. You know, it's a great idea for a few reasons:
I do have to wonder about how bad this dorm room power crisis really is. Let's consider appliances with realistic maximum power consumptions:
Note that many of these loads are intermittent or mutually exclusive. Most laser printers only pull any amount of power when the printer is actually fusing a page. The boom box probably won't be playing loudly at the same time as the computer speakers. And, unless you like to leave the door open, the beer fridge's compressor should be off most of the time.
And some of these appliances will become duplicates in a shared dorm room, so the realistic likelihood of them being on at once is small.
1830 watts is the total power consumption for the list of appliances above. In my jurisdiction, commercial buildings (including University residences) have one outlet per 1500W circuit. Most circuit breakers are thermal (takes time to heat up a bimetallic strip in the breaker) and therefore act like slow-blow fuses. And unless you're printing a massive pile of course notes while playing the boom box and computer speakers loudly and doing it with the beer fridge door jammed open, the loads are probably going to be too transient to trip the breaker. So you may have a whole load of power bars plugged into that one outlet, but in reality, it's likely to be perfectly fine.
On the other hand, dorm rooms are small. It's in the students' best interests - forget power consumption - to slim things down:
Noting that this scheme is merely a common-sense approach to giving you more space in your dorm room (and making moving at the end of the year that much less painful), your maximum consumption will only be about 1260 watts. Which means that if you've got a circuit, you're fine.
I'd suggest to universities that they point out in their residence brochures something along the lines of "Moving into and out of residence can be unpleasant. For that reason, we suggest that students attempt to travel as lightly as possible. LCD monitors and video cards with TV inputs will save you space by avoiding having to carry around bulky CRT displays." Maybe offer a small rebate to students who use an LCD monitor and TV-in video card to replace a CRT-based monitor and TV set.
when your stuff gets downloaded. If you're gonna tax everyone, then you can't complain when they take what they paid for.
But there's a further problem here. I don't know too many people who are running around downloading such precious gems as Rita McNeil or the Tragically Hip's lovely Bobcaygeon. Artisits like Rush, Big Sugar, Barenaked Ladies, and Rufus Wainwright are aberrations and represent a very tiny portion of the SOCAN catalog. Yet I can't believe that the tax wouldn't be based on the entire catalog, not just those few songs/artists who can thank their talent rather than CRTC Canadian Content laws for their success.
So, Canadians will be paying a tax to download music which nobody downloads because it's so rank.
Actually, that's not true, either. I downloaded Bobcaygeon because it's like a train wreck; if it happens in front of you, you can't take your eyes off it. Any time an American friend tells me that the grass is greener on my side of the fence, I e-mail Bobcaygeon.
Just use some CompactFlash as disk, 32 Mb or larger will do fine for an embedded linux system (SDL graphics, tinyhttp server if need be). I have used the SSV systems for this kind of thing.
Yeah... But the trend now is to stream video (hotel, airline, restaurant commercials) over the FIDS. Need to be able to store that and change it frequently.
Wow, I think that is about the third time in this topic you make the assertion that arts subjects is about coloring books and crayons.
My arts elective in University required all students have a *purple* crayon in all classes and gave 15% of your course mark based on attendance. After the TAs passed out the course outlines and I saw that, it was pretty hard to take the course seriously.
Most (if not all) engineering/science/math/economics people can get their heads around the basic requirements and contents of any arts course - literature, composition, history, group dynamics, etc. On the other hand, I frequently looked at my timetable for the next term, looked up the course description, and was immediately lost after the title. Few arts students could even begin to imagine what "Engineering Mechanics 101: An Introduction to Force and Moment Vectors, Couple Moments, Static Equilibrium and Frames and Machines" was going to be all about. When I walked into that class, I knew what a force vector was, but everything else in that course description was Greek to me. (Note: Couple Moments, Frames and Machines aren't what you probably think they are.)
Lots of easy karma points from dittohead Slashdot moderators when you pick on strawmen.Strawmen? Like from The Wizard of Oz?
You must be a very smart man in comparison, studying these incredibly difficult engineering subjects.Heh. I like your tone of sarcasm. Very cute.
Engineering is difficult. Not so much the material as the quantity of material - most three-month-long terms involved 5 textbooks, at 500 pages each, on highly technical subjects (3 months = 90 days to cover 2,500 pages before the exams; about 30 pages of Gaussian flux or Adaptive Quadrature Techniques of Numerical Integration every day). Note that 30 pages of technical documentation - where every second or third line is an equation, function or relationship which must be understood if not memorized - takes a lot longer to read than 30 pages of Beowulf (not the computer cluster!) or a history textbook. It's continuously overwhelming.
No one cares if you go to class. No one cares if you write your tests on triple integrals or microwave theory using a purple crayon or (my personal favorite) a 2B 0.5mm mechanical pencil. You can't bullshit your way through an essay that you forgot to study for - you either know the material or you don't, and it's quantifiable and easy to prove in the marking scheme.
Unless it's a multiple choice test, in which case *all* your profs are well-schooled in the rules of probability and set tests where the correct answer is surrounded by seven to eleven other results you would have been likely to find if you forgot to use the product rule while differentiating for a gradient vector or some other equally stupid error. When you have a 1:8 to a 1:12 chance of guessing the correct answer - and often a penalty for an incorrect answer - you will not be able to bullshit your way through.
In short, Engineering - like all sciences, theoretical or applied - requires you to know what you're doing, not just to drag your hung-over ass and a purple crayon to class. Work ethic is the most important thing you can bring to the table.
So forgive me if I have a hard time taking an arts degree seriously. They simply haven't looked into Hell's gaping maw.
You dumbass, you missed a great chance to score. A smart sexy beast like me would have taken here to the side, told here she heard the part about integrating out of context, invited here for cup of coffee to have a "deep" conversation about integration and how multicultural I am. If all things go well, a kiss + a huge + a little butt squeeze would be granted without prejudice.
The only way to have tolerated her would have been to duct tape her mouth shut, and I'm pretty sure that she would have objected. Besides, it would have lessened the promise of the evening.
Your sig is kind of retarded. Circumcision has nothing to do with savagery versus non-savagery, you dolt.
I see.
Most of the world doesn't circumcise.This is true.
And most of the world doesn't have potable water or electricity either. What's your point?
Would you call the French, Germans, and all of Europe savages?France and Germany aren't part of Europe? That's news to me, especially since I hold EU citizenship. By birth, in fact.
And, actually, I would call France and Germany savages. They harbor Roman Polanski. They passively protect potentially-dangerous dictators despite all evidence and their own very recent foray into tyranny still being in living memory. And they censor free speech, as unsavory as discussion of their own neo-Nazi groups might be.
Or China? Or Africa? Or Japan?China and Africa don't count; as a whole, they still haven't figured out things like potable water and washing tables at the local market.
Japan? They build paper houses with stone roofs. In an earthquake zone, no less. Between that, the consumption of raw fish, the Hello Kitty obsession and the oh-so-practical street addressing systems they use in every large Japanese city I've visited, I'm rather loathe to use them as role models of practicality.
If so you have a big problem with our American ego...I assume you meant "your American ego". I'm not American, actually. I hold EU (British) and Canadian citizenships.
Getting to your apparent problem: I had myself circumcised as an adult. You see, there's a neat thing about foreskin: it's normal and natural. But wearing pants isn't normal or natural, and society seems to prefer it when I don't parade around naked. So, I did a little research (scientific journals only, avoiding all the looney-tunes no-circ wackos who blame their latent homosexuality and male-pattern baldness on their circumcisions) and the only intelligent argument that I could find against circumcision is the possibility of complications. Given that major complications are exceedingly rare (based again on research in scientific journals), I took the risk.
Indeed, I have been more than satisfied with my altered state. My only regret is that I didn't have it done at birth so as to avoid missing out on the first 22 years of benefits.
*YOU* assumed (based solely on her sandals?) that she was an art major.
ArtS major. One of the BA programs. If she were in science, engineering, commerce, economics or architecture, she would have required a high school calculus credit as a prerequisite for admission.
Note that all of those majors have something else in common besides calculus: career prospects which by and large don't include an entry-level job as a "management trainee" at The Gap.
Ergo, logic suggests that calculus is the difference between a degree and birdcage liner.
*YOU* assumed (based solely on her angst?) that she had had a "comfortable middle-class childhood."Sure! She was at least comfortable financially. I wouldn't remember her if I ran into her on the street or met her in a bar, but my memory is that she was well-dressed (in an name-brand with money but no taste sort of way).
I do remember the wooden sandals for sure. And nailpolish on the toe nails.
*YOU* assumed (based solely on her ignorance of calculus?) that she was an idiot.No. She butted into a conversation without knowing what it was about, accused me loudly and without merit based on what she's been programmed to do by who knows how many "Campus Racism Awareness" focus groups and "workshops" (how the *hell* can they get away with calling it a "workshop" if there are no power tools?).
Furthermore, based on her apparent lack of a prerequisite high school calculus credit, she had chosen to invest in a degree which was not likely to further her career. What better barometer of idiocy is there than wasting $40,000+ over 4 years to get a degree which might land a top-flight job in either the housekeeping or food service industries? (Thanks, Peter!)
If you had gone through life only having encountered one use of the term "integration," you might have made the same assumption. That's not to say that she didn't overreact, but her reaction simply means that she feels passionately about the issue. Hopefully you will agree that that isn't a bad thing.Again, see the same point about the lack of a high school calculus credit pointing to the fact that she was probably throwing away four years and $40k. That's mistake number one. Mistake number two was assuming that she knew what a bunch of strangers were talking about. Mistake number three (not covered in your post, and relevant in the climate involved) was wearing sandals in October.
What bugs me is the assumption that she is worthy of ridicule for not knowing calculus terms, whereas it's perfectly okay for YOU not to know much about HER major. She might be ignorant, but you are both ignorant AND arrogant.The worldwide supply of English Literature and Medieval History majors clearly exceeds the demand. I know enough about both subjects to get by (including how to brew mead!), whilst I doubt she would even know the basics of more relevant (and arguably more important) subjects which form the basis for amenities she enjoys in today's world - Ohm's Law, cellular mitosis, the speedometer in your car takes the derivative of your odometer with respect to time, the joys of calculating that she'd be a millionaire at retirement if she'd put that $40k for her education into savings, how many pounds of force are needed to get those silly 6" long lugnut wrenches that come with new Toyotas to replace a flat tire by the side of the road...
But that's okay. I'm sure you're right. It's more important that I know Shakespeare's sonnets or the major features of Renaissance portraits. Damn it, instead of pursuing a science/engineering/economics/math/useful degree or spending those youthful four years working and banking the money in anticipation of the effects of compounded interest, I should have been spending the money and time to get a B.A. in Film Studies.
Personally I think some elements of an Arts/Social Sciences degree should be compulsory in every technical degree to help ensure that we don't end up like the Borg.
It is! It sure helped my GPA, the full credit arts elective I took. The most stressful part of the class was when the instructor asked us to dig out our purple crayons. (I'm not kidding.) The payoff was that attendance was taken every class, and 15% of your mark was based on attendance. It was a dead easy course.
I'm suspect you, like many engineering/science/maths people, would probably fail a subject about renaissance art or English literature (the type that comes from England) or modern history. At the very least your dismissive and superior attitude would inhibit your ability to actually understand the very real subtleties and complexities of such subjects.Since the supply of Art History majors clearly exceeds the market demand for Art History majors, I have tremendous resentment for the fact that there's government funding to those (as all) university degrees whilst money could be spent on public support for degrees which actually have a use to the economy.
The glut of people with BAs but no particular need for them (ie. not employed in academia) pushes up recruiting requirements artificially. ("Candidate A has an unrelated and effectively useless degree while Candidate B has ten years of real-world experience in the field. But Candidate A has a degree, so we'll offer the position of sales associate here at The Gap.")
If you want to do it on your own time and money, fine. But I would also caution those who are considering an arts degree right out of high school to consider the marginal increase in earning power most of them enjoy, versus the compounded effects of interest earned on savings so early in their working career. It simply is not an intelligent fiscal plan.
(Never mind that when I'm looking for a secretary or something, the resumes with the arts degrees go into the shredder faster than the Word attachments get deleted. Spending 4 years and $40,000+ to get a degree to apply for a job as a secretary is a clear sign to me that the applicant is not sufficiently intelligent to be trusted with a box of paperclips let alone the big-assed scary Mita collating copier.)
Little secret: in the button-down super-preppy world of University, having a bad reputation gets you laid.
Different is good.
What did I do? Try driving around campus in a 1976 Dodge Ram pickup truck with Pinkard and Bowden's Guns Made America Great playing loudly on the stereo, having long hair and flannel shirts, participating and winning in drinking games while chain smoking unfiltered Camels.
Apparent cavalier disregard for academic success, but still showing up for all classes and doing excellent assignments and lab work: "Well, the way I figure it, I don't have a scholarship or a residence placement riding on my marks. All I need to do is pass all my courses. Anything more violates the law of diminishing returns and cuts into drinking time which I can spend with friends so that I don't burn out before the end of senior year." (Think about it: a good engineer is lazy. It wasn't an active guy who invented the TV remote control, the elevator or the dishwasher. One could even make an argument that it was the motivating factor behind the invention of the bridge.)
And doing this not because you feel a need to be a conformist with someone elses' ideals, but because you simply enjoy these things.
Damn, you sure showed bigotry and intolerance in your description and assumptions about this girl. Maybe she misheard and embarrassed herself, but it turns out you are, in fact, an asshole.
Wow. Well, you know, the shoe would have been on the other foot if I'd overheard her talking about the coloring books their mid-terms are based on and jumped to conclusions about those.
*SHE* assumed that my friends and I were racists.
*SHE* demonstrated her naivete and hypersensitivity.
*SHE* is the one who started screaming at me.
*SHE* learned that I am, in fact, an asshole. And proud of it.
Similar experience in which I said, "The problem is that we just aren't able to discriminate well enough..." The angry glares were from people who thought I meant 'be prejudiced' while I simply meant 'distinguish'.
Crazy, huh? Heh... I could just imagine what the uninitiated and hyper-sensitive would have thought of a discussion of RF tuning circuits.
I'm pretty sure we're hearing the version you *wish* you had said after thinking about it later.
Of course! But I still got to call her ignorant, I still welcomed her to contact the Dean of Engineering, and I still made fun of her wooden sandals and pursuit of an arts degree.
Seeing as how this story is probably made up, I hesitated to give you accolades for the story, but the line about calculus was friggin priceless! Keep up the good B.S.!
Thanks! But it's true. The dialog is paraphrased; as close as I can remember it.
Their job is to make sure the cops get paid and the street lights work. It is NOT to re-invent Think-Speak.
Tell me about it.
How about this, which happened to me in University. Note that I don't care about race, disability, sexual orientation - none of that is relevant to whether or not I like (or will hire) someone. But I *hate* political correctness and I avoid it at all costs.
Picture it. In the hallway, just after I missed a question on a math test, where I had to integrate a function of e * trig. (Otherwise, did okay on the test.) Chatting with classmates.
"Well, I think the problem is that I don't integrate very well."
Stranger in the hallway who overhears:
"Oh! That's *horrible*! You're a terrible person! No one chooses the color of their skin! You could have just as easily been born black, you know! It's people like you who keep society from progressing!"
So, in unison, we (all Engineers) looked at her and laughed. At her.
"You're *all* horrible people! This is university! Campus KKK! I'm reporting you to the dean!"
Suffering idiocy as well as I do, it was I who took up the task of dealing with her.
"I would invite you to report that to my dean, I'm sure he'll laugh at you at least as hard as I laughed at you. Let me guess, you're in an arts program, right? In my arts elective, the instructor started by asking our entire class if we had our purple crayons. Things only went downhill from there."
[Indignant gasps from the chick... who was wearing wooden sandals in late October.]
I continued, "...Now, seeing as how *you're* the ignorant one..."
Screaming now, "How *DARE* you call me ignorant! You're the one who said you didn't like to integrate!" People were stopping to see this woman lose it on me. This hallway connected two science buildings, an engineering building and one arts building, so most of them were starting to laugh at her, too.
"You're *ALL* in on this! What's wrong with you people?" She was getting worked up to tears, all the angst of a comfortable middle-class childhood showing.
A big black guy who had been watching and kind of laughing from the beginning told her that he hated to integrate too, then walked away, leaving her stunned.
Me again: "Now, seeing as how you're the ignorant one, integration is a mathematical process for finding the area under a curve. It's from a branch of mathematics called calculus. Your wooden sandals and amazing ability to jump to unfounded conclusions have only served to reaffirm my belief that calculus is the distinction between a degree and toilet paper. You, honeybunch, are an idiot."
And with that, we left. I think she was having a stress attack when we walked away.
How many tube amp junkies crawl to you begging for a hit?
Constantly... But it's like someone coming up to me and saying, "Hey, you're into cars, you'll love my tricked-out Honda Civic! It's got a big stereo!" (I generally put my cigarette butts into those silly upturned exhaust tips.)
One: Not the same thing.
Two: No. I'm not into guitar amps (while I love classic rock). And I'm not into "audiophile" stuff where they all sit around and talk about "the ambience of my music is a lot better through these $600 speaker cables" while completely ignoring any intelligent mathematical analysis.
In short, someone comes to me looking for tubes, it better be to:
Heh. 12AX7 is a dime a dozen. (Spend $15 each at a music store? Rape!) But how about type 37? How about 17BF11? How about 6G5?
It's not audiophiles who want those! (Well, truth be told, the 17BF11 isn't very popular at all and I've got 12 of them...)