Good to see they gave you paddle floats (that is what's under the fore bungees, right?) and a pump.
If you're going to be fiddling with things in a kayak, you might want a paddle leash - tie about 6' of plain old camping cord to the bungee just ahead of you and to a velcro strap (west marine etc) around the shaft.
Next time cut some real cellulose kitchen sponges in half and toss one in each of those baggies... Baggies are convenient (hope someday I don't have to explain the pile of them in the glove box at a traffic stop) but they aren't foolproof and the sponge will soak up small leaks and let the bags float if ^H^H when you drop them overboard. Ask my Garmin 12 about that...
That way AFTER you get back on the boat and empty it, you can paddle around and collect the gear.
Else you'll be fishing for the bag$ of goodie$ while the wind has fun with your ride home...
"5.... The flight vehicle must return from both flights substantially intact, as defined by and in the sole judgment of the ANSARI X PRIZE Review Board, such that the vehicle is reusable."
"Uh, son? Seem's like y'all got a taillight t'aint workin'." "Really officer? Which one?" *BLAM!* "That one, son. Y'all gonna hafta get this vee-hickle offa this heah runway. Heh heh heh..."
So is this "Prescott" as in "our only president's alleged nazi-financier grandfather" or "Prescott" as in "if we keep naming chips and OSs after stuff in the southwest then the moldy bunch in rain-soaked Washington will keep writing whatever we tell them to on the lure of actually getting dry socks"?
on the wrong day, just getting out of Chatham could be the worst part of the trip. Weatherwise, that is - and the bars (the ones in the water, that is - though around town there' s a bumper sticker that reads "Chatham - a quaint drinking village with a fishing problem.")
Fog blows up over the barrier beach outside of Stage Harbor so thick and fast you'd swear there's a forest fire raging on the other side of the dune - and crossing Stage Harbor on a busy day with a sea kayak is like crossing I-95 on foot in rush hour.
Space flight right now is about as dangerous as it would be expected to be. In terms of experimental flight, the disaster rate is what experimental pilots are used to. And yes, all astronauts know the risks and have accepted them. I'd go tomorrow.
People die driving race cars each year to what end? Dale Earnhart is practially a saint. We're willing to pour our hearts out and spend billions each year to shove more people into the breach in order to turn left for four hours. So manned space flight is hardly the most risky endeavor we undertake with arguably more return. Where does NASCAR or CART get us? Cars that can do even more speed than is legally allowed? No - they push the envelope of car technology. Ditto all spaceflight. Swap out the Tallageda with RC cars and tell me how many people will show up... Race car drivers are brave and passionate and accept the risks. Ditto astronauts.
It's not about ratings. What the networks think about space missions is moot - there's NASA TV, so the networks are out of the picture. 90% of what NSF and NIH funds is boring and tedious to the general public - but there are people alive today because of it.
As far as robotics is concerned, it's be nice to know what they're aiming for - remember the Solar Max and both Hubble missions? Lots of human decision making involved, improvisation and creativity - if they're talking telerobotics (as in telerobotic surgery) then they've got a prayer. But if anyone has in their mind that they're going to line up autonomous robots to give the Hubble a new lease, then they need to go back to the DARPA challenge and remember that Apollo 11 would have been just another crater on the moon with a robot at the helm instead of human pilots who could avert the near disaster.
Robots are better at some things - humans are better at some things. Use them both appropriately, drop the prejudices and accept the risks of exploration.
DVD is an optical disc storage media format that is used for playback of movies with high video and sound quality and for storing data. "DVD" is an abbreviation for Digital Versatile Disc, but is often incorrectly referred to as a Digital Video Disc. This is mainly due to the confusion with Video Laser Discs or laserdisc, which had similar uses, but died out in the early 1990's. A DVD appears very similar to a compact disc.
Who wants to spout eight-oh-two-dot-eleven-gee when they can say "Wireless G".
Do you say "automobile" or "car"?
"Digital versatile disc" or DVD?
Do you tell people "the nerve signals from the trigone indicate that there is a need to toggle the state of the detrusor muscle and equalize hydraulic pressure so that osmotic filtering can maintain its normal rate" or "I gotta take a leak."
Given the current state of privacy and such, not to mention plain old need and common sense, exactly who did he talk to who's asking for a feature that records every moment of your waking life?
Dick Cheney? John Ashcroft? Donald Rumsfeld? The girl in "50 First Dates"?
Cable broadband customers get yelled at for running servers, downloading big things, too much traffic... A few things have to change - Comcast and their ilk have to change what they allow or else they'll have more traffic than they can dream of. I believe they don't like people actually using the bandwidth they paid for, so that needs rethinking.
I have a well worn dog-eared copy of the one i bought in 1978 - thank goodness this is updated.
I am a geek and a cyclist and can't get enough of either.
Can't wait for this one!
Todd isn't grumpy - but hes a one-note...
on
The Flickering Mind
·
· Score: 1
His articles have been hawking this stuff for years - and he repeatedly points out the failures in the system.
He leaves out large chunks of successes and the instances where there is little data to support change because in many of these areas there was no pre- to do a pre- and post- on.
For instance - ask students how often they were able to read current events - once a week when the weekly reader or the once-a-week newspaper (if their teacher bothered to do an NIE program), then ask them about the current accesss they have with a computer on the net.
For instance - the fluency in expression that the students see - music composition, digital art, etc. In music you have removed the need for a specific athleticism with a specific instrument and freed the students to compose - you'd be amazed how many there are - and this is Pre-Garageband. Compare this to the flutophone bands we all had to endure.
When most of us were young, we had two methods of expression, papers and showbox dioramas. If your vision of the world or your expressiveness didn't fit into one of these two molds, you were doomed.
For every anecdote Todd holds up about teachers and students on the low end of the scale of facility and effectiveness with electronic learning, there are just as many of not more that can show you glowing examples of where it works.
As for Cliff - he's a pretty good astronomer, but that hardly makes him an expert in the rest of his rants. His invented predicament about the dentist trained on CD-ROM instead of hands-on is a red herring. No one is suggesting that, but for a close comparison, look at the gains from virtual imaging made in anatomy - Cliff needs to spend a week in a med school anatomy class and see the quality of the anatomical structures in the cadavers that are usually found - pencil-sized biceps, untracable nerves and blood vessels, muscles so atrophied as to be indistinguishable, and then have a go at the Visible Human project and similar tools.
A lab full of kids surfing and IM'ing until the room sounds like a casino truly sucks and is hardly worth spending money on.
Networked students, properly managed and led by competent, trained educators is worth the effort and money.
Begun in Germany and currently under development in Europe by EADS the Phoenix will be, together with the Ariane 5, the European vehicle for space conquest."
(1) it took NIH money to culture four dirty shower curtains. (2) it took two (2) PhDs to figure this out. (3) these are apparently rather filthy PhDs (RTA - the four shower curtains were all theirs).
You could have found this out for free at the next state science fair. Along with the usual assortment of cultured doorknobs, soap dishes, dishes from the sink, toothbrushes and hairbrushes, TV remotes and telephones.
I think with MS it's more like they'll ship at 70% and creep to 89% by the time it's obsolete, usually measured in years. It ships as a "C" product and maybe someday makes it to barely an "A". And we pay top dollar for it. I would live with it if it were OSS or cheap. But this is verging on ridiculous. Like the excel demo at MacWorld - the amazing ability to get an excel graph to print on a single page. They were practially in tears of joy demoing this thing that sounds like twenty lines of scripting.
I began to gain an appreciation of how Microsoft worked, and to see it for what it was - a machine that was focused on building products that people wanted, as quickly and as well as they could. Note the "quickly" - this was what distinguished MS from Apple in the end - a focus on moving quickly, and beating the competition. Details like great design were not critical to most customers, so that didn't really make it into the products, except where it mattered to the customer.
Sounds like MS would rather have a half-baked product now than a great one later (or maybe ever). Nice. It does totally ring with the sense of their products in my experience, be they Mac or WIn platforms. They have to understand that they see things from the perspective of those who have been working with incremental versions of their stuff for so long - and you get this sense from the minutia in the blog - that they have no sense of an outsider, pulling up to a computer that they just unwrapped, and trying to get some plain old writing done by using Word. It's like being dropped into the cockpit of a plane and being told to drive. It does dozens of non-intuitive things before you even get to the annoying parts, and it's ALL design. They know this. Every so often that ship something that makes good design sense and does breakthru stuff - but mostly their work is fraught with details that get in the way rather than accellerate your work.
Hardly a scam - there's a continuum of how teams arrange things - and spread the work among students, teachers, parents, engineers. Our first year was probably 1/4 each - with the slight hobble that to actually work in the corporate sponsor's machine shop - you had to be 18 for liability reasons. So we came up with a solution - certain fabs got done in the shop, the rest of it at school. Parents brought in tools, jigs, supplies, the kids designed with straws and pins if they had to (ironically, that was the same propotyping that the engineers used when we first visited their plant - independently they came out from the shop with a chassis model of straws and straight pins. The kids were pretty jazzed.
Do some places do it the way you cited? Sure. It's allowed, but hardly encvouraged. The teams with the most pride are high student involvement - it's an end to end solution - engineering, logistics, economics, promotion - in short, all the skills need ed to run a real engineering venture.
Remember, only students can operate the robot, so there has to be very tight integration between design, build, software, and operators.
As first year players, with the spread out approach to the work, we placed 5th in our region, somewhere in the 20s nationally. Not shabby.
Could we have sat back and let the engineers do everything? We could try but the students never would have let them.
In that first year, we got back from the regionals, and someone back at school asked me how it was. I told them it was the first time in 17 years of teaching that I had to sit down and put my head between my knees because I was about to pass out watching my students do something academic.
Very cool. I've got five former students from that first batch that are in engineering schools now - FIRST fanned the fire in them. I saw kids solve problems I never would have though to throwing at them otherwise. Real pressure, real deadlines, real issues, real engineering.
To almost a man/woman - the engineers I've seen go thru this breathlessly exclaim that they now remember why they got into engineering in the first place - new challenges, novel solutions, the thrill of discovery - compared to many engineering jobs where they're doing the next miniscule iteration of the same thing they did the past half decade or more...
As a team coordinator, I did the behind the scenes, logistics, personalities, money, random headaches, travel, herding kids at WDW, airlines, schedules, parents, etc. You know - the fun stuff - and I wouldn't trade it for anything. I'm as proiud of those teams as anything I've seen in education.
Ah, the days of our trusty Decwriters - you could pound on those keyboards all day, almost a perfect desk-sized position for pitched-forward sleeping (power off please) and they weighed enough to prop up behind a door if being chased by pirates...
Slashdot Mirror
apparently the rf fence is all over my local supermarket - all the carts have one wheel freeze up about 20 feet into the store... ingenious!
"It's like, how much more black could this be? and the answer is none. None more black."
Good to see they gave you paddle floats (that is what's under the fore bungees, right?) and a pump.
If you're going to be fiddling with things in a kayak, you might want a paddle leash - tie about 6' of plain old camping cord to the bungee just ahead of you and to a velcro strap (west marine etc) around the shaft.
Next time cut some real cellulose kitchen sponges in half and toss one in each of those baggies... Baggies are convenient (hope someday I don't have to explain the pile of them in the glove box at a traffic stop) but they aren't foolproof and the sponge will soak up small leaks and let the bags float if ^H^H when you drop them overboard. Ask my Garmin 12 about that...
That way AFTER you get back on the boat and empty it, you can paddle around and collect the gear.
Else you'll be fishing for the bag$ of goodie$ while the wind has fun with your ride home...
"5. ... The flight vehicle must return from both flights substantially intact, as defined by and in the sole judgment of the ANSARI X PRIZE Review Board, such that the vehicle is reusable."
"Uh, son? Seem's like y'all got a taillight t'aint workin'."
"Really officer? Which one?"
*BLAM!*
"That one, son. Y'all gonna hafta get this vee-hickle offa this heah runway. Heh heh heh..."
um, it's a joke.
"...for offering the operational system Windows..."
Calling windows "operational" HAS to be a crime somewhere.
...i can see right thru their work,,,
So is this
"Prescott" as in "our only president's alleged nazi-financier grandfather"
or
"Prescott" as in "if we keep naming chips and OSs after stuff in the southwest then the moldy bunch in rain-soaked Washington will keep writing whatever we tell them to on the lure of actually getting dry socks"?
Just wondering.
on the wrong day, just getting out of Chatham could be the worst part of the trip. Weatherwise, that is - and the bars (the ones in the water, that is - though around town there' s a bumper sticker that reads "Chatham - a quaint drinking village with a fishing problem.")
Fog blows up over the barrier beach outside of Stage Harbor so thick and fast you'd swear there's a forest fire raging on the other side of the dune - and crossing Stage Harbor on a busy day with a sea kayak is like crossing I-95 on foot in rush hour.
People die driving race cars each year to what end? Dale Earnhart is practially a saint. We're willing to pour our hearts out and spend billions each year to shove more people into the breach in order to turn left for four hours. So manned space flight is hardly the most risky endeavor we undertake with arguably more return. Where does NASCAR or CART get us? Cars that can do even more speed than is legally allowed? No - they push the envelope of car technology. Ditto all spaceflight. Swap out the Tallageda with RC cars and tell me how many people will show up... Race car drivers are brave and passionate and accept the risks. Ditto astronauts.
It's not about ratings. What the networks think about space missions is moot - there's NASA TV, so the networks are out of the picture. 90% of what NSF and NIH funds is boring and tedious to the general public - but there are people alive today because of it.
As far as robotics is concerned, it's be nice to know what they're aiming for - remember the Solar Max and both Hubble missions? Lots of human decision making involved, improvisation and creativity - if they're talking telerobotics (as in telerobotic surgery) then they've got a prayer. But if anyone has in their mind that they're going to line up autonomous robots to give the Hubble a new lease, then they need to go back to the DARPA challenge and remember that Apollo 11 would have been just another crater on the moon with a robot at the helm instead of human pilots who could avert the near disaster. Robots are better at some things - humans are better at some things. Use them both appropriately, drop the prejudices and accept the risks of exploration.
nope. i mean (from wikipedia):
DVD is an optical disc storage media format that is used for playback of movies with high video and sound quality and for storing data. "DVD" is an abbreviation for Digital Versatile Disc, but is often incorrectly referred to as a Digital Video Disc. This is mainly due to the confusion with Video Laser Discs or laserdisc, which had similar uses, but died out in the early 1990's. A DVD appears very similar to a compact disc.
Not at all.
Who wants to spout eight-oh-two-dot-eleven-gee when they can say "Wireless G".
Do you say "automobile" or "car"?
"Digital versatile disc" or DVD?
Do you tell people "the nerve signals from the trigone indicate that there is a need to toggle the state of the detrusor muscle and equalize hydraulic pressure so that osmotic filtering can maintain its normal rate"
or
"I gotta take a leak."
Given the current state of privacy and such, not to mention plain old need and common sense, exactly who did he talk to who's asking for a feature that records every moment of your waking life?
Dick Cheney?
John Ashcroft?
Donald Rumsfeld?
The girl in "50 First Dates"?
This is basically a 'flying cars' article.
Cable broadband customers get yelled at for running servers, downloading big things, too much traffic...
A few things have to change - Comcast and their ilk have to change what they allow or else they'll have more traffic than they can dream of.
I believe they don't like people actually using the bandwidth they paid for, so that needs rethinking.
Sorry - I just have this image of all the edxecs running around demoing this thing looking like Bill Macy in "The Jerk"...
just remembered we have one of these - 6' diameter - someone thought it would help with solar collectors back in the 80's - gotta dig this out!
I have a well worn dog-eared copy of the one i bought in 1978 - thank goodness this is updated.
I am a geek and a cyclist and can't get enough of either.
Can't wait for this one!
His articles have been hawking this stuff for years - and he repeatedly points out the failures in the system.
He leaves out large chunks of successes and the instances where there is little data to support change because in many of these areas there was no pre- to do a pre- and post- on.
For instance - ask students how often they were able to read current events - once a week when the weekly reader or the once-a-week newspaper (if their teacher bothered to do an NIE program), then ask them about the current accesss they have with a computer on the net.
For instance - the fluency in expression that the students see - music composition, digital art, etc. In music you have removed the need for a specific athleticism with a specific instrument and freed the students to compose - you'd be amazed how many there are - and this is Pre-Garageband. Compare this to the flutophone bands we all had to endure.
When most of us were young, we had two methods of expression, papers and showbox dioramas. If your vision of the world or your expressiveness didn't fit into one of these two molds, you were doomed.
For every anecdote Todd holds up about teachers and students on the low end of the scale of facility and effectiveness with electronic learning, there are just as many of not more that can show you glowing examples of where it works.
As for Cliff - he's a pretty good astronomer, but that hardly makes him an expert in the rest of his rants. His invented predicament about the dentist trained on CD-ROM instead of hands-on is a red herring. No one is suggesting that, but for a close comparison, look at the gains from virtual imaging made in anatomy - Cliff needs to spend a week in a med school anatomy class and see the quality of the anatomical structures in the cadavers that are usually found - pencil-sized biceps, untracable nerves and blood vessels, muscles so atrophied as to be indistinguishable, and then have a go at the Visible Human project and similar tools.
A lab full of kids surfing and IM'ing until the room sounds like a casino truly sucks and is hardly worth spending money on.
Networked students, properly managed and led by competent, trained educators is worth the effort and money.
Begun in Germany and currently under development in Europe by EADS the Phoenix will be, together with the Ariane 5, the European vehicle for space conquest."
Space conquest? Germany?
Erm, hello?
(1) it took NIH money to culture four dirty shower curtains.
(2) it took two (2) PhDs to figure this out.
(3) these are apparently rather filthy PhDs (RTA - the four shower curtains were all theirs).
You could have found this out for free at the next state science fair. Along with the usual assortment of cultured doorknobs, soap dishes, dishes from the sink, toothbrushes and hairbrushes, TV remotes and telephones.
I think with MS it's more like they'll ship at 70% and creep to 89% by the time it's obsolete, usually measured in years. It ships as a "C" product and maybe someday makes it to barely an "A".
And we pay top dollar for it.
I would live with it if it were OSS or cheap. But this is verging on ridiculous. Like the excel demo at MacWorld - the amazing ability to get an excel graph to print on a single page. They were practially in tears of joy demoing this thing that sounds like twenty lines of scripting.
Sounds like MS would rather have a half-baked product now than a great one later (or maybe ever). Nice. It does totally ring with the sense of their products in my experience, be they Mac or WIn platforms. They have to understand that they see things from the perspective of those who have been working with incremental versions of their stuff for so long - and you get this sense from the minutia in the blog - that they have no sense of an outsider, pulling up to a computer that they just unwrapped, and trying to get some plain old writing done by using Word. It's like being dropped into the cockpit of a plane and being told to drive. It does dozens of non-intuitive things before you even get to the annoying parts, and it's ALL design. They know this. Every so often that ship something that makes good design sense and does breakthru stuff - but mostly their work is fraught with details that get in the way rather than accellerate your work.
Hardly a scam - there's a continuum of how teams arrange things - and spread the work among students, teachers, parents, engineers. Our first year was probably 1/4 each - with the slight hobble that to actually work in the corporate sponsor's machine shop - you had to be 18 for liability reasons. So we came up with a solution - certain fabs got done in the shop, the rest of it at school. Parents brought in tools, jigs, supplies, the kids designed with straws and pins if they had to (ironically, that was the same propotyping that the engineers used when we first visited their plant - independently they came out from the shop with a chassis model of straws and straight pins. The kids were pretty jazzed.
Do some places do it the way you cited? Sure. It's allowed, but hardly encvouraged. The teams with the most pride are high student involvement - it's an end to end solution - engineering, logistics, economics, promotion - in short, all the skills need ed to run a real engineering venture.
Remember, only students can operate the robot, so there has to be very tight integration between design, build, software, and operators.
As first year players, with the spread out approach to the work, we placed 5th in our region, somewhere in the 20s nationally. Not shabby.
Could we have sat back and let the engineers do everything? We could try but the students never would have let them.
In that first year, we got back from the regionals, and someone back at school asked me how it was. I told them it was the first time in 17 years of teaching that I had to sit down and put my head between my knees because I was about to pass out watching my students do something academic.
Very cool. I've got five former students from that first batch that are in engineering schools now - FIRST fanned the fire in them. I saw kids solve problems I never would have though to throwing at them otherwise. Real pressure, real deadlines, real issues, real engineering.
To almost a man/woman - the engineers I've seen go thru this breathlessly exclaim that they now remember why they got into engineering in the first place - new challenges, novel solutions, the thrill of discovery - compared to many engineering jobs where they're doing the next miniscule iteration of the same thing they did the past half decade or more...
As a team coordinator, I did the behind the scenes, logistics, personalities, money, random headaches, travel, herding kids at WDW, airlines, schedules, parents, etc. You know - the fun stuff - and I wouldn't trade it for anything. I'm as proiud of those teams as anything I've seen in education.
Your mileage may vary.
Ah, the days of our trusty Decwriters - you could pound on those keyboards all day, almost a perfect desk-sized position for pitched-forward sleeping (power off please) and they weighed enough to prop up behind a door if being chased by pirates...
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