Knol was a Google project that aimed to include user-written articles on a range of topics. The project was led by Udi Manber of Google, announced December 13, 2007, and was opened in beta to the public on July 23, 2008 with a few hundred articles mostly in the health and medical field. Some Knol pages were opinion papers of one or more authors, and others described products for sale. Some articles were how-to articles or explained product use. Other people could post comments below an article, such as to refute opinions or reject product claims.
In November 2011 Google announced that Knol would be phased out. Content could be exported by owners to the WordPress-based Annotum. Knol was closed on April 30, 2012, and all content was deleted by October 1, 2012. Between these dates the content was not viewable, but was downloadable and exportable
Even before the landing Armstrong's first word on the moon were much anticipated and there was a lot of discussion for weeks in the press about what they would be.
Esquire Magazine even ran a story before the moon landing where they asked sixty prominent figures at the time including Marshall McLuhan, Isaac Asimov, Buckminister Fuller, Ayn Rand, Bob Hope, Hubert Humphrey, Tiny Tim, Sal Mineo, Vladamir Nabokov, Mohamad Ali, Truman Capote, and John Kenneth Galbraith for their suggestions on what Armstrong should say upon landing on the moon that would "ring through the ages.".
When Neil H. Armstrong, a blond, blue-eyed, thirty-eight-year-old civilian astronaut from Wapakoneta, Ohio, steps out of the lunar landing module this summer and plants his size eleven space boot on the surface of the moon, the event will eclipse in historic importance the landing of Christopher Columbus in the New World. Commander Armstrong's step will not immediately affect the nature of the quality of life on earth, of course (neither did Columbus'), but it will mark the departure point of a fantastic new adventure in the saga of man. For that step onto the moon will signal a readiness to travel throughout the solar system, even the universe â" in flights that will lead not merely to new worlds, new substances, new conceptions about the nature of matter and of life itself, but, it can scarcely be doubted, to contact with new beings as well. Moreover, Armstrong's will be the first such epic stride to be recorded in detail by the microphone and the television camera. Future generations will be able to relive all that was said and done at that moment as never before in the history of exploration. The stupendous magnitude and unprecedented visibility of what Commander Armstrong is about to do, therefore, combine to pose the question: when the astronaut takes the first step on the moon, what should he say?
I believe it may have been Gore Vidal who made the suggestion that still sticks in my mind after forty-three years: "We come in peace for all mankind. Now come out from behind that rock with your hands up."
Conventional wisdom has it that complex life evolved in the sea and then crawled up onto land but NPR reports that a provocative new study published in Nature suggests that the earliest large life forms may have appeared on land long before the oceans filled with creatures that swam and crawled and burrowed in the mud. Paleontologists have found fossil evidence for a scattering of animals called Ediacarans that predate the Cambrian explosion about 530 million years ago when complex life suddenly burst forth and filled the seas with a panoply of life forms. Many scientists have assumed Ediacarans were predecessors of jellyfish, worms and other invertebrates but palaeontologist Greg Retallack has been building the case that Ediacarans weren't in fact animals, but actually more like fungi or lichens and that Ediacarans weren't even living in the sea, as everyone has assumed. "What I'm saying for the Ediacaran is that the big [life] forms were on land and life was actually quite a bit simpler in the ocean," says Retallack adding that his new theory lends credence to the idea that life actually evolved on land and then moved into the sea. Paul Knauth at Arizona State University has been pondering this same possibility. "I don't have any problem with early evolution being primarily on land," says Knauth. "I think you can make a pretty good argument for that, and that it came into the sea later. It's kind of a radical idea, but the fact is we don't know." Knauth says it could help explain why the Cambrian explosion appears to be so rapid. It's possible these many life forms gradually evolved on the land and then made a quick dash to the sea. "That means that the Earth was not a barren land surface until about 500 million years ago, as a lot of people have speculated."
The NY Times reports that the Kewaunee Power Station will close early next year because the owner is unable to find a buyer and the plant is no longer economically viable driven by slack demand for energy and the low price of natural gas. âoeThis was an extremely difficult decision, especially in light of how well the station is running and the dedication of the employees,â says Dominion CEO Thomas F. Farrell II. âoeThis decision was based purely on economics.â When Dominion bought the plant from local owners in 2005, it signed contracts to sell them the electricity, a common practice, but as those contracts expire, the plant faces selling electricity at the lower rates that now dominate the energy market. Other companies have also reported falling revenues, although they may not be on the verge of closing reactors because they are in regions where the market price of electricity is higher. The closing, which did not catch many in the industry by surprise, highlights the struggle of the U.S. "nuclear renaissance." A decade ago, the nuclear industry talked about a nuclear renaissance due to rising fossil fuel prices and concerns about meeting greenhouse gas emissions, but the nuclear revival did not occur in the United States as the cost of fossil fuels like natural gas fell and the federal government has been slow to put a price on carbon. "A number of nuclear units won't run their 60-year licensed lives if current gas price forecasts prove accurate," says Peter Bradford, a former member of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. "The determining factor is likely to come at the point at which they need to decide on a major capital investment."
John Paczkowski writes that a disagreement over a key feature - voice-guided turn-by-turn driving directions - led Apple to decide it had no choice but to replace Google Maps with its own poorly received home-brewed replacement. Spoken turn-by-turn navigation has been a free service offered through Google's Android mobile OS for a few years now. but it was never part of the deal that brought Google's Maps to iOS. Requiring iPhone users to look directly at handsets for directions and manually move through each step - while Android users enjoyed native voice-guided instructions - put Apple at a clear disadvantage in the mobile space. Apple pushed Google hard to provide the data it needed to bring voice-guided navigation to iOS but according to people familiar with Google's thinking, the search giant, which had invested massive sums in creating that data and views it as a key feature of Android, wasn't willing to simply hand it over to a competing platform. "There were a number of issues inflaming negotiations, but voice navigation was the biggest," says one source familiar with Apple and Google's negotiations. "Ultimately, it was a deal-breaker." Still Apple is not the only company to be bruised by this rough transition. Google suffered a blow when Apple ended the pair's deal and is scrambling to roll out a standalone mapping application for iOS. Google Maps were used by a large portion of iPhone owners, especially in the US and to abruptly lose that user base, particularly one on a rival mobile platform, is a blow. As one geolocation executive observed, "A hundred million devices upgraded is a big body drop" for Google.
DARPA reports that more than $300 billion worth of satellites are in the geosynchronous orbit, many retired due to failure of one component even if 90% of the satellite works just as well as the day it was launched. DARPA's Phoenix program seeks to develop technologies to cooperatively harvest and re-use valuable components such as antennas or solar arrays from retired, nonworking satellites in GEO and demonstrate the ability to create new space systems at greatly reduced cost. "If this program is successful, space debris becomes space resource," says DARPA Director, Regina E. Dugan. However satellites in GEO are not designed to be disassembled or repaired, so it's not a matter of simply removing some nuts and bolts says David Barnhart. "This requires new remote imaging and robotics technology and special tools to grip, cut, and modify complex systems." For a person operating such robotics, the complexity is similar to trying to assemble via remote control multiple Legos at the same time while looking through a telescope. "If you've got a satellite up there already, don't worry, this isn't going to be some illicit grave-robbing mission to create hordes of evil Frankensatellites," reports Dvice. "DARPA says the agency will make sure and get permission before it chops anything up for scrap."
The original term seems to have been bald-faced (bare-faced) and refers to a face without whiskers. Beards were commonly worn by businessmen in the 18th and 19th century as an attempt to mask facial expressions when making business deals. Thus a bald-faced liar was a very good liar indeed, and was able to lie without the guilt showing on his face.
The more correct term is "bald-faced lie" or "bare-faced lie" (bare is more common in Great Britain). It refers to a "shameless" or "brazen" lie. One where the teller does not attempt to hide his face while telling it.
It's just the last 5 yrs or so that "bold" has come into usage. It refers to typeface. It is used metaphorically in speech. In the same way that a typesetter uses bold face type to highlight specific text and set it apart, a bold face lie stands out in such a way as to not be mistaken for the truth.
The phrase can either be used as bold-faced lie, as in someone with a bold enough face to lie (bold meaning daring, or brazen) or someone bold enough to lie to your face; it can also be used as bald-faced lie, where the older meaning of bald (meaning uncovered or unconcealed) - the more correct usage with this term is bare-faced lie. Earlier editions of Merriam Webster define bold-faced as someone being bold or forward, with no relation to lies.
Back in the 1950s, we used "coolers" - huge metal boxes that cooled by evaporative cooling. The walls of the cooler were filled with porous wood shavings and a pump circulated water that dripped through the shavings while a 10 horsepower motor sucked air through the shavings and into the house. My bed was right in front of the blast of air from the cooler and I remember that it seemed to cool quite well - probably lowering the inside temperature 5 to 10 degrees and making it quite comfortable during the night. I found out years later that what we called "coolers" were called "swamp coolers" in other parts of the country and in my travels I saw swamp coolers still in use in desert climates in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California.
One reason that coolers worked so well back then was that during the drought, the humidity in Ponca City was about zero so water evaporated readily. It seems to me that up until about 1976, when Kaw Dam was built east of town, the humidity was a lot lower in Ponca City. My mother says that having Kaw Lake so close changed the weather patterns around Ponca City and that the humidity rose a lot since its construction. If someone tried to use a swamp cooler today, I doubt if it would work at all.
Every summer I would spend a month with my grandparents in Boswell, Oklahoma. Nobody thought anything about the heat - it was just how life was. But everybody looked forward to the cool of the evening, just when the sun got low in the sky and the shadows would lengthen and the fireflies would come out. The whole family would go out on the big front porch, sit in the swing, drink ice cold ice tea, and wait for our neighbors to come around and sit down with us to talk about the events of the day. Simpler days and better perhaps - at least in memory.
With the report into the tragedy of Air France 447 due next month, Airbus's 'brilliant' aircraft design may have contributed to one of the world's worst aviation disasters and the deaths of all 228 onboard.
For a long time, humans were pretty dumb doing little but make "the same very boring stone tools for almost 2 million years," says Philipp Khaitovich of the Partner Institute for Computational Biology in Shanghai. Then, 150,000 years ago, our big brains suddenly got smart. We started innovating. We tried different materials. We started creating art and maybe even religion. To understand what caused the cognitive spurt, researchers examined chemical brain processes known to have changed in the past 200,000 years. Comparing apes and humans, they found the most robust differences were for processes involved in energy metabolism. The finding suggests that increased access to calories spurred our cognitive advances although definitive claims of causation are premature. In most animals, the gut needs a lot of energy to grind out nourishment from food sources. But cooking, by breaking down fibers and making nutrients more readily available, is a way of processing food outside the body. Eating (mostly) cooked meals would have lessened the energy needs of our digestion systems, thereby freeing up calories for our brains. Today, humans have relatively small digestive systems and allocate around 20% of their total energy to the brain, compared to approximately 13% for non-human primates and 2-8% for other vertebrates. While other theories for the brain's cognitive spurt have not been ruled out, the finding sheds light on what made us, as Khaitovich put it, "so strange compared to other animals."
I stuck with Mozilla starting with V1.0 in July 2002 but about a month ago the bloat and crashes from Firefox 11.0 got too much for me and I gave Chrome a try.
Chrome is faster with no crashes.
I don't know where Firefox went wrong but I'm not going back.
The world's smallest game of Tetris took place in 2002 under an electron microscope using 42 glass microspheres at the Department of Physics of Complex Systems in Amsterdam.
A real-life implementation of the evergreen arcade game Tetris was obtained by optically trapping 42 glass microspheres (1 micrometer diameter) in a 25 micrometer x 20 micrometer sized field under a microscope. Their positions were then steered with a computer. The generation of multiple traps, as well as the computer-steering, was accomplished by the use of acousto-optic deflectors: devices that tuned the deflection of a laser beam for a very fast response.
Another interesting fact about Slim Pickens: Pickens was offered the part of Dick Hallorann in Stanley Kubrick's 1980 adaptation of Stephen King's The Shining. He refused, saying that filming with Kubrick on Dr. Strangelove was too strenuous. He later relented, saying that he would appear in the film as long as Kubrick was contractually required to shoot Pickens' scenes in fewer than 100 takes a shot. However, the role went to Scatman Crothers.
Thank you for creating Slashdot - the world's premier web site for discussion of technical issues.
Vernor Vinge dedicates "Rainbow's End" to "To the Internet-based cognitive tools that are changing our lives - Wikipedia, Google, eBay, and the others of their kind, now and in the future." I believe Slashdot should be added to that list as the most important divergent collaborative tool available on the internet.
Slashdot is a brainstorming tool that generates lots of new ideas, then evaluates them, and presents the results to the reader in a number of formats. Slashdot's implicit view of truth corresponds to the scientific method. In its purest form every comment to a story on Slashdot can be thought as either 1) a hypothesis with supporting data or 2) a counterexample which attempts to nullify a hypothesis. One way to look at Slashdot is as an internet implementation of the scientific method in action.
One of the unique aspects of Slashdot that make it the premier news forum for discussing technical issues on the internet and differentiates Slashdot from similar forums like Digg and Reddit is that stories that appear on the front page of Slashdot are editor-selected while the stories that appear on their front pages of other popular tech discussion web sites are user selected which tends to drive the discussion to a lowest common denominator.
Editor selection of stories tends to maintain a good level of quality of the stories that make it to the front page and gives Slashdot a unique editorial voice. There are some types of stories that routinely show up on other tech discussion sites, that slashdot editors simply will not accept. Slashdot's editors stay away from juvenile material and WTF stories and present an editorial voice of serious consideration of the issues raised.
Thanks again for your defining role in creating the best web site in the world for the serious discussion of technical issues. Your role has been crucial and you will always be remembered.
Steve Green writes that in a stunning reversal for Righthaven, the Las Vegas copyright troll won't be collecting any damages from a man it once branded as a copyright infringer but instead must pay the man's legal fees of $34,045. US District Judge Philip Pro awarded the fees in the case of Kentucky message board poster Wayne Hoehn dismissing Righthaven's suit and finding that Righthaven didn't have standing to sue him due to the Review-Journal maintaining control of the column despite Righthaven's claims of ownership and even that if Righthaven did have ownership, Hoehn was protected by the fair use doctrine in posting an entire Las Vegas Review-Journal column on a sports betting website message board. This is the second attorney's fee award against Righthaven. Earlier, Randazza Legal Group was awarded $3,815 for representing defendant Michael Leon. But these are likely just the tip of the iceberg, with prevailing defendant Thomas DiBiase asking for $199,250 while the Democratic Underground will likely seek a fee award of many hundreds of thousands of dollars after Righthaven was dismissed from that suit for lack of standing. The bottom line for Righthaven is that so far it has not won a single lawsuit - of 275 lawsuits filed since 2010 - on the merits."
Bill Gates' father was a prominent Washington State attorney who retired in 1998 from the firm he co-founded and helped grow, then known as Preston Gates & Ellis. During his 48 years of practice, Gates was an active bar leader, having served as president of the Washington State Bar Association and the National Conference of Bar Presidents.
Slashdot Mirror
Sometimes the wire services will keep the same URL but change the text in the story and even the headline as more facts become available.
I had this happen to me a few years ago on a story I submitted about Fedex misplacing some radioactive rods.
http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/11/26/1948245/FedEx-Misplaces-Radioactive-Rods
By the time the story was posted the rods had been found and the linked story was a non-story with a new headline:
"FedEx Finds Radioactive Shipment That Vanished Between N.D. and Tenn."
Some newspapers like the NY Times will post a correction at the bottom of the story whenever something changes in the story.
Many don't.
Knol was a Google project that aimed to include user-written articles on a range of topics. The project was led by Udi Manber of Google, announced December 13, 2007, and was opened in beta to the public on July 23, 2008 with a few hundred articles mostly in the health and medical field. Some Knol pages were opinion papers of one or more authors, and others described products for sale. Some articles were how-to articles or explained product use. Other people could post comments below an article, such as to refute opinions or reject product claims.
In November 2011 Google announced that Knol would be phased out. Content could be exported by owners to the WordPress-based Annotum. Knol was closed on April 30, 2012, and all content was deleted by October 1, 2012. Between these dates the content was not viewable, but was downloadable and exportable
Esquire Magazine even ran a story before the moon landing where they asked sixty prominent figures at the time including Marshall McLuhan, Isaac Asimov, Buckminister Fuller, Ayn Rand, Bob Hope, Hubert Humphrey, Tiny Tim, Sal Mineo, Vladamir Nabokov, Mohamad Ali, Truman Capote, and John Kenneth Galbraith for their suggestions on what Armstrong should say upon landing on the moon that would "ring through the ages.".
When Neil H. Armstrong, a blond, blue-eyed, thirty-eight-year-old civilian astronaut from Wapakoneta, Ohio, steps out of the lunar landing module this summer and plants his size eleven space boot on the surface of the moon, the event will eclipse in historic importance the landing of Christopher Columbus in the New World. Commander Armstrong's step will not immediately affect the nature of the quality of life on earth, of course (neither did Columbus'), but it will mark the departure point of a fantastic new adventure in the saga of man. For that step onto the moon will signal a readiness to travel throughout the solar system, even the universe â" in flights that will lead not merely to new worlds, new substances, new conceptions about the nature of matter and of life itself, but, it can scarcely be doubted, to contact with new beings as well. Moreover, Armstrong's will be the first such epic stride to be recorded in detail by the microphone and the television camera. Future generations will be able to relive all that was said and done at that moment as never before in the history of exploration. The stupendous magnitude and unprecedented visibility of what Commander Armstrong is about to do, therefore, combine to pose the question: when the astronaut takes the first step on the moon, what should he say?
I believe it may have been Gore Vidal who made the suggestion that still sticks in my mind after forty-three years: "We come in peace for all mankind. Now come out from behind that rock with your hands up."
Betteridge Violates His Own Law
Conventional wisdom has it that complex life evolved in the sea and then crawled up onto land but NPR reports that a provocative new study published in Nature suggests that the earliest large life forms may have appeared on land long before the oceans filled with creatures that swam and crawled and burrowed in the mud. Paleontologists have found fossil evidence for a scattering of animals called Ediacarans that predate the Cambrian explosion about 530 million years ago when complex life suddenly burst forth and filled the seas with a panoply of life forms. Many scientists have assumed Ediacarans were predecessors of jellyfish, worms and other invertebrates but palaeontologist Greg Retallack has been building the case that Ediacarans weren't in fact animals, but actually more like fungi or lichens and that Ediacarans weren't even living in the sea, as everyone has assumed. "What I'm saying for the Ediacaran is that the big [life] forms were on land and life was actually quite a bit simpler in the ocean," says Retallack adding that his new theory lends credence to the idea that life actually evolved on land and then moved into the sea. Paul Knauth at Arizona State University has been pondering this same possibility. "I don't have any problem with early evolution being primarily on land," says Knauth. "I think you can make a pretty good argument for that, and that it came into the sea later. It's kind of a radical idea, but the fact is we don't know." Knauth says it could help explain why the Cambrian explosion appears to be so rapid. It's possible these many life forms gradually evolved on the land and then made a quick dash to the sea. "That means that the Earth was not a barren land surface until about 500 million years ago, as a lot of people have speculated."
The NY Times reports that the Kewaunee Power Station will close early next year because the owner is unable to find a buyer and the plant is no longer economically viable driven by slack demand for energy and the low price of natural gas. âoeThis was an extremely difficult decision, especially in light of how well the station is running and the dedication of the employees,â says Dominion CEO Thomas F. Farrell II. âoeThis decision was based purely on economics.â When Dominion bought the plant from local owners in 2005, it signed contracts to sell them the electricity, a common practice, but as those contracts expire, the plant faces selling electricity at the lower rates that now dominate the energy market. Other companies have also reported falling revenues, although they may not be on the verge of closing reactors because they are in regions where the market price of electricity is higher. The closing, which did not catch many in the industry by surprise, highlights the struggle of the U.S. "nuclear renaissance." A decade ago, the nuclear industry talked about a nuclear renaissance due to rising fossil fuel prices and concerns about meeting greenhouse gas emissions, but the nuclear revival did not occur in the United States as the cost of fossil fuels like natural gas fell and the federal government has been slow to put a price on carbon. "A number of nuclear units won't run their 60-year licensed lives if current gas price forecasts prove accurate," says Peter Bradford, a former member of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. "The determining factor is likely to come at the point at which they need to decide on a major capital investment."
John Paczkowski writes that a disagreement over a key feature - voice-guided turn-by-turn driving directions - led Apple to decide it had no choice but to replace Google Maps with its own poorly received home-brewed replacement. Spoken turn-by-turn navigation has been a free service offered through Google's Android mobile OS for a few years now. but it was never part of the deal that brought Google's Maps to iOS. Requiring iPhone users to look directly at handsets for directions and manually move through each step - while Android users enjoyed native voice-guided instructions - put Apple at a clear disadvantage in the mobile space. Apple pushed Google hard to provide the data it needed to bring voice-guided navigation to iOS but according to people familiar with Google's thinking, the search giant, which had invested massive sums in creating that data and views it as a key feature of Android, wasn't willing to simply hand it over to a competing platform. "There were a number of issues inflaming negotiations, but voice navigation was the biggest," says one source familiar with Apple and Google's negotiations. "Ultimately, it was a deal-breaker." Still Apple is not the only company to be bruised by this rough transition. Google suffered a blow when Apple ended the pair's deal and is scrambling to roll out a standalone mapping application for iOS. Google Maps were used by a large portion of iPhone owners, especially in the US and to abruptly lose that user base, particularly one on a rival mobile platform, is a blow. As one geolocation executive observed, "A hundred million devices upgraded is a big body drop" for Google.
Join us in Ponca City at the Marland Mansion on Saturday, October 20 at 11 am
DARPA reports that more than $300 billion worth of satellites are in the geosynchronous orbit, many retired due to failure of one component even if 90% of the satellite works just as well as the day it was launched. DARPA's Phoenix program seeks to develop technologies to cooperatively harvest and re-use valuable components such as antennas or solar arrays from retired, nonworking satellites in GEO and demonstrate the ability to create new space systems at greatly reduced cost. "If this program is successful, space debris becomes space resource," says DARPA Director, Regina E. Dugan. However satellites in GEO are not designed to be disassembled or repaired, so it's not a matter of simply removing some nuts and bolts says David Barnhart. "This requires new remote imaging and robotics technology and special tools to grip, cut, and modify complex systems." For a person operating such robotics, the complexity is similar to trying to assemble via remote control multiple Legos at the same time while looking through a telescope. "If you've got a satellite up there already, don't worry, this isn't going to be some illicit grave-robbing mission to create hordes of evil Frankensatellites," reports Dvice. "DARPA says the agency will make sure and get permission before it chops anything up for scrap."
The original term seems to have been bald-faced (bare-faced) and refers to a face without whiskers. Beards were commonly worn by businessmen in the 18th and 19th century as an attempt to mask facial expressions when making business deals. Thus a bald-faced liar was a very good liar indeed, and was able to lie without the guilt showing on his face.
The more correct term is "bald-faced lie" or "bare-faced lie" (bare is more common in Great Britain). It refers to a "shameless" or "brazen" lie. One where the teller does not attempt to hide his face while telling it.
It's just the last 5 yrs or so that "bold" has come into usage. It refers to typeface. It is used metaphorically in speech. In the same way that a typesetter uses bold face type to highlight specific text and set it apart, a bold face lie stands out in such a way as to not be mistaken for the truth.
The phrase can either be used as bold-faced lie, as in someone with a bold enough face to lie (bold meaning daring, or brazen) or someone bold enough to lie to your face; it can also be used as bald-faced lie, where the older meaning of bald (meaning uncovered or unconcealed) - the more correct usage with this term is bare-faced lie. Earlier editions of Merriam Webster define bold-faced as someone being bold or forward, with no relation to lies.
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Is_the_correct_term_'bold_face_lie'_or_'bald_faced_lie'_or_another_variation
Could you please correct the submitter's link.
It should be:
http://honorponcacity.com/
The link is correct in my original submission.
Best Regards,
Hugh Pickens
Ponca City, Oklahoma
Back in the 1950s, we used "coolers" - huge metal boxes that cooled by evaporative cooling. The walls of the cooler were filled with porous wood shavings and a pump circulated water that dripped through the shavings while a 10 horsepower motor sucked air through the shavings and into the house. My bed was right in front of the blast of air from the cooler and I remember that it seemed to cool quite well - probably lowering the inside temperature 5 to 10 degrees and making it quite comfortable during the night. I found out years later that what we called "coolers" were called "swamp coolers" in other parts of the country and in my travels I saw swamp coolers still in use in desert climates in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California.
One reason that coolers worked so well back then was that during the drought, the humidity in Ponca City was about zero so water evaporated readily. It seems to me that up until about 1976, when Kaw Dam was built east of town, the humidity was a lot lower in Ponca City. My mother says that having Kaw Lake so close changed the weather patterns around Ponca City and that the humidity rose a lot since its construction. If someone tried to use a swamp cooler today, I doubt if it would work at all.
Every summer I would spend a month with my grandparents in Boswell, Oklahoma. Nobody thought anything about the heat - it was just how life was. But everybody looked forward to the cool of the evening, just when the sun got low in the sky and the shadows would lengthen and the fireflies would come out. The whole family would go out on the big front porch, sit in the swing, drink ice cold ice tea, and wait for our neighbors to come around and sit down with us to talk about the events of the day. Simpler days and better perhaps - at least in memory.
For a long time, humans were pretty dumb doing little but make "the same very boring stone tools for almost 2 million years," says Philipp Khaitovich of the Partner Institute for Computational Biology in Shanghai. Then, 150,000 years ago, our big brains suddenly got smart. We started innovating. We tried different materials. We started creating art and maybe even religion. To understand what caused the cognitive spurt, researchers examined chemical brain processes known to have changed in the past 200,000 years. Comparing apes and humans, they found the most robust differences were for processes involved in energy metabolism. The finding suggests that increased access to calories spurred our cognitive advances although definitive claims of causation are premature. In most animals, the gut needs a lot of energy to grind out nourishment from food sources. But cooking, by breaking down fibers and making nutrients more readily available, is a way of processing food outside the body. Eating (mostly) cooked meals would have lessened the energy needs of our digestion systems, thereby freeing up calories for our brains. Today, humans have relatively small digestive systems and allocate around 20% of their total energy to the brain, compared to approximately 13% for non-human primates and 2-8% for other vertebrates. While other theories for the brain's cognitive spurt have not been ruled out, the finding sheds light on what made us, as Khaitovich put it, "so strange compared to other animals."
Slashdot is the one place on the web where you can find unfiltered comments if you choose to read at -1.
We don't need censorship on Slashdot. If you don't like a comment just mod it down.
If it ain't broke don't fix it.
Abuse reporting is going to create a host of new problems.
I stuck with Mozilla starting with V1.0 in July 2002 but about a month ago the bloat and crashes from Firefox 11.0 got too much for me and I gave Chrome a try.
Chrome is faster with no crashes.
I don't know where Firefox went wrong but I'm not going back.
Buy the phone up front.
Pay for your minutes.
You don't have to buy data or text messages unless you want to.
No contract.
You can quit any time.
up to 20 phones per account at $6 per phone per month.
Good selection of Android phones.
Uses the Sprint network.
Check it out.
A real-life implementation of the evergreen arcade game Tetris was obtained by optically trapping 42 glass microspheres (1 micrometer diameter) in a 25 micrometer x 20 micrometer sized field under a microscope. Their positions were then steered with a computer. The generation of multiple traps, as well as the computer-steering, was accomplished by the use of acousto-optic deflectors: devices that tuned the deflection of a laser beam for a very fast response.
I'm not really a gamer myself but I do appreciate the effort that went into this interview and would like to commend you for it.
I especially enjoyed reading your critique of the gamification movement.
Paint it Pink.
Slim Pickens was actually a stage name.
Slim's real name was Louis Burton Lindley, Jr.
Another interesting fact about Slim Pickens: Pickens was offered the part of Dick Hallorann in Stanley Kubrick's 1980 adaptation of Stephen King's The Shining. He refused, saying that filming with Kubrick on Dr. Strangelove was too strenuous. He later relented, saying that he would appear in the film as long as Kubrick was contractually required to shoot Pickens' scenes in fewer than 100 takes a shot. However, the role went to Scatman Crothers.
So no, no relation.
Thanks anyway.
Thank you for creating Slashdot - the world's premier web site for discussion of technical issues.
Vernor Vinge dedicates "Rainbow's End" to "To the Internet-based cognitive tools that are changing our lives - Wikipedia, Google, eBay, and the others of their kind, now and in the future." I believe Slashdot should be added to that list as the most important divergent collaborative tool available on the internet.
Slashdot is a brainstorming tool that generates lots of new ideas, then evaluates them, and presents the results to the reader in a number of formats. Slashdot's implicit view of truth corresponds to the scientific method. In its purest form every comment to a story on Slashdot can be thought as either 1) a hypothesis with supporting data or 2) a counterexample which attempts to nullify a hypothesis. One way to look at Slashdot is as an internet implementation of the scientific method in action.
One of the unique aspects of Slashdot that make it the premier news forum for discussing technical issues on the internet and differentiates Slashdot from similar forums like Digg and Reddit is that stories that appear on the front page of Slashdot are editor-selected while the stories that appear on their front pages of other popular tech discussion web sites are user selected which tends to drive the discussion to a lowest common denominator.
Editor selection of stories tends to maintain a good level of quality of the stories that make it to the front page and gives Slashdot a unique editorial voice. There are some types of stories that routinely show up on other tech discussion sites, that slashdot editors simply will not accept. Slashdot's editors stay away from juvenile material and WTF stories and present an editorial voice of serious consideration of the issues raised.
Thanks again for your defining role in creating the best web site in the world for the serious discussion of technical issues. Your role has been crucial and you will always be remembered.
Why I enjoy writing for Slashdot.
Steve Green writes that in a stunning reversal for Righthaven, the Las Vegas copyright troll won't be collecting any damages from a man it once branded as a copyright infringer but instead must pay the man's legal fees of $34,045. US District Judge Philip Pro awarded the fees in the case of Kentucky message board poster Wayne Hoehn dismissing Righthaven's suit and finding that Righthaven didn't have standing to sue him due to the Review-Journal maintaining control of the column despite Righthaven's claims of ownership and even that if Righthaven did have ownership, Hoehn was protected by the fair use doctrine in posting an entire Las Vegas Review-Journal column on a sports betting website message board. This is the second attorney's fee award against Righthaven. Earlier, Randazza Legal Group was awarded $3,815 for representing defendant Michael Leon. But these are likely just the tip of the iceberg, with prevailing defendant Thomas DiBiase asking for $199,250 while the Democratic Underground will likely seek a fee award of many hundreds of thousands of dollars after Righthaven was dismissed from that suit for lack of standing. The bottom line for Righthaven is that so far it has not won a single lawsuit - of 275 lawsuits filed since 2010 - on the merits."
Bill Gates' mother was on the National Board of Directors of the United Way.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/local-breaking-news/virginia/microsoft-founder-bill-gates-w.html
Bill Gates' father was a prominent Washington State attorney who retired in 1998 from the firm he co-founded and helped grow, then known as Preston Gates & Ellis. During his 48 years of practice, Gates was an active bar leader, having served as president of the Washington State Bar Association and the National Conference of Bar Presidents.
http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/lawyers_lawyer_bill_gates_sr._to_receive_abas_highest_honor/
Supermoon by one of my favorite artists.