The point here is that fluids don't restrict themselves before the restriction. Traffic actually does move faster when we use all the lanes available to us. All of the traffic. Not just the scofflaws passing on the right. When everyone merges early, it just confuses the lane restriction and moves it farther upstream where there are no clear traffic regulation devices. Merging early is exacerbating the problem.
Sure, its legal not to merge when you know that a lane is closed ahead, and try and get ahead of as many cars as possible, but by doing so you slow up everyone else. If everyone would just merge early, everyone would move faster.
You are so very very wrong. Let me see if I can explain with some physics, and then follow up with personal observations.
Think of congested traffic as though it were a fluid mechanics problem, molecules of liquid passing through a pipe whose diameter (number of lanes) changes. The molecules fill every portion of the pipe. They don't artificially contract into a smaller stream a quarter of a mile before the pipe restriction.
A real life example from Missouri, where we have the most polite and completely incompetent drivers in the world: Travelling down the three lane interstate one evening in the leftmost lane, I saw a orange construction sign indicating that the left lane was closed ahead. I could not yet see the lane closure ahead, so I continued in the left lane. Other drivers slowed almost to a halt to merge into the crowded center lane. Once around them, I passed a full mile of vehicles crawling along in the two rightmost lanes to find that the left lane wasn't restricted at all. The sign was in error, but a traffic jam ensued because drivers were attempting to merge into the rightmost lanes far before they needed to. Merging early was the entire cause of that traffic problem.
In the New York City area, thought by many to be the home of the rudest most aggressive drivers, this problem might not have ever happened. I have been a passenger in a speeding cab that hurtled right up to a stalled and burning vehicle in the left lane on a bridge(!) and merged at the very last moment. Other vehicles did the same thing. What I noticed was that traffic didn't slow down much at all. The NYC drivers used every available bit of asphalt, and it kept the traffic moving. All it takes in Missouri to cause a traffic jam is the mere hint of a lane closure! Big difference!
Finally, an observation on motorcycles and lane-splitting: Throughout Europe and in California, it is legal, in fact even encouraged, for motorcyclists to filter through slow or stopped traffic by travelling between the cars. It's not legal in other states, and even trying it is likely to get a motorcyclist killed by a vengeful automobile driver. If car drivers cared at all about reducing traffic congestion, they would be happy to have the motorcycles filter past rush hour traffic and move to the front of a line at traffic signals. Getting the motorcycles out of the way frees up space for the automobiles. Making the motorcycle use up just as much space as a car only makes the congestion problem worse. (Think Tetris, played badly) But, The majority of automobile driving Americans are infuriated when a motorcycle passes them in rush hour traffic. It goes to show that our culture prizes a sort of equality of suffering over problem resolution.
So applicants showing those traits are a subset of the set of (likely) good programmers.
Wouldn't it be more effective to identify the superset, thus ensuring that you don't overlook good programmers who don't meet your more restrictive criteria?
Identifying the subset exposes you to the following risks:
Your subset includes only the least qualified of the applicants
Your subset doesn't identify any candidates at all
You're mighty quick to attack other people's logic skills, there, partner.
You know what I'm sick of? The RIAA repeatedly states that only a small percentage of music titles are profitable. They go on to insinuate that when piracy reduces the profits of the few profitable albums, that it impacts the record companies' incentive to privide broad catalog.
This is utter hogwash. If the record companies had any idea beforehand which CDs would be profitable, they would only publish the profitable ones. But they don't know ahead of time. That's why they publish a broad catalog, so that they have a better chance of publishing a hit and making a profit. To insinuate that the record companies publish unprofitable albums out of the goodness of their hearts is the height of deception.
Let's look at this from the point of view of a fictional touring music act that we'll call "Zit Remedy". If "Megadisc Records", member of the RIAA decides to publish a CD of Zit Remedy's music, it has only a slim chance of being profitable. If Zit Remedy's CD isn't profitable, then Zit Remedy receives no royalty payments. However, the CD still stands as a tool for publicity, possibly increasing concert revenues and sales of merchandise. Except Zit Remedy's self-titled debut release is priced at $20 a copy, so it reaches a very small audience... unless college students start ripping and file sharing. Then the profit potential for Zit Remedy climbs. More buzz = more concert attendees = more revenues. The only loser here is Megadisc.
It's pretty clear that the record companies represented by the RIAA have a flawed business model. I don't think it's up to taxpayers to subsidize bad business models. If it were, I could start a buggy whip factory and retire wealthy. Let Megadisc figure it out for itself.
Wow, I could say the exact same things about Italian motorcycles. I'm riding a Husqvarna Supermotard. (Husqvarnas have been produced in Italy since 1994 when the Cagiva group purchased the marque.) My new Italian bike has less power than any bike I've owned since I was a teenager, but I am whipping the snot out of open class sportbike riders on the twisty roads of my native Missouri. And the sound of the motor! A booming single with twin port Termi exhaust headers and twin cans tucked under the fender... it sounds like a Sopwith Camel diving in for the kill, guns blazing. I may have to sell my CBR.
Yeah, but even an untalented rider on an unmodified $4000 motorcycle will eat your lunch stoplight to stoplight. By the way, 4x the displacement does not equal 4x the horsepower. If those great big long cranks and goofy pushrods in your motor can't get spun up to high RPMs, then you aren't getting much power for your displacement. If they can't rotate quickly, then they aren't pumping as much air. All things are not equal between your V8 and an inline 4. If you're making an optimistic 400hp from your 6.6L motor, that is 60 Hp/Liter. A.6L motorcycle engine makes 100+ Hp on standard pump gas for a whopping 175 Hp/Liter. There IS a replacement for displacement. It's called high redline. Your truck doesn't have it.
Re:Try to get your PHB to read this
on
Managing Einsteins
·
· Score: 3, Funny
You've hit the nail on the head. My boss, for instance, really believes that he is "solving the problems when others don't understand the question." In reality, he is often the problem that must be solved by his subordinates. He would never believe that he is not part of the "engine of change." He's really more like the "wheel chocks of ignorance."
What dipshit moderator marked this redundant? Redundant to what?
The point was that the product in the article adjusts the pitch of the singer via some fancy algorithms. I thought it would be funny if the device just slowed or sped up the accompaniment music, like a poorly operating record player. The singer would then technically be "in key" but the result would sound like crap.
Note to moderators - Please mod up this AC comment!
To make my feelings clear on the issue of TI consumer products: I loved my TI99/4A. I loved my Avigo. TI just didn't love these products as much as I did.
The T9 keyboard almost prevented me from buying my heavily discounted Avigo. But, the T9 keyboard turned out to be a wickedly fast method of entering text. It was, as you suggested, a great design feature that was never effectively "sold" to the consumer marketplace.
That, I suppose, is why I think of TI's dabbling in PDAs as hobby-like. TI had a great product, but they didn't convince anyone else it was great. They had a head start on their PDA competitors, but they didn't appear to have a support plan, or a vision for how the Avigo would penetrate the market and hook consumers into the "Avigo line" for generations to come.
I will probably continue to buy TI consumer products when I need them: Their quality and innovation is beyond reproach. That quality just barely makes up for my suspiscion that my new purchase will only enjoy support for a short time and will probably never be the standard in the marketplace.
It may be one more step towards releasing a modern-day Avigo, their failed PDA from a few years back.
Texas Instruments is notorious for releasing excellent consumer electronics products and then either crippling them or letting them wither and die. Witness the Avigo and the TI99/4A.
In the case of the Avigo, it was arguably a better PDA than the Palm Pilot that it was competing against. The applications it sported were certainly better and more comprehensive than those Palm was offering. However, TI made the dev kit for the Avigo platform expensive and difficult to obtain, so nobody of consequence wrote any additional software for the Avigo.
You would think Texas Instruments would have learned their lesson after doing exactly the same thing with the TI99 home computer 15 years before. Both platforms were innovative, high quality products that became commercial failures due to poor marketing and dismal support.
I have to wonder why they even bother to develop these products. It's like consumer product development and manufacturing is a hobby for them, but marketing and support are too much of a pain in the ass, so they don't do it.
That's Ok. I'm sure you will use your liberty and safety for the betterment of our nation and mankind. The people safeguarding your liberty would want it that way.
Seriously, I got way more out of the practical Computer Programming Specialist courses at Keesler AFB than I did from Washington University's engineering curriculum. Once I was trained, they shipped me off to an honest-to-god Air Force squadron where I wrote code for embedded systems, designed databases, repaired hardware, and got to run around with a gun.
The money was terrible. The hours were tough. It was the best work experience of my life. And, as an experience I can put on my resume, it was spectacularly effective at keeping me employed after I was discharged.
Since you asked, motorcycling is my sport of choice.
It's not really a game (since I don't race) unlike other activities in the Olympics. Besides, the Olympics won't include anything involving motors... not that I would want motorcycling to be an Olympic event.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that motorcycling, like rock-climbing, hang-gliding, or bull fighting, is a sport because it is an intense physical activity where the consequences of a mistake are deadly, but the participants do it just for fun.
It's kind of an Ernest Hemmingway perspective. I bet the old man wouldn't have called chess a sport.
The "several moments" would be the entire time between the cutoff of thrust (on the way up) and the inflation of the airbag (on the way down).
It's surprising how many people don't realize that. On the final episode of Junkyard Wars, season 4 (on the cable channel TLC) the two teams built rockets to see who could launch an ostrich egg higher. They both used an accelerometer to trigger their parachute deployment, and both teams, aided by model rocketry experts concluded that when the acceleration drops to zero that the charge should go off because that would happen at the apogee of the flight.
Wrong! The parachutes were deployed as soon as the rocket motors burned out, preventing the rockets from attaining their highest potential altitude given their upward momentum.
That demonstrates nicely that (absent significant aerodynamic drag) a rocket is "weightless" from the moment the engines quit until it either hits the ground or is retarded by a parachute.
Yes, the original poster may not be aware that Autogyros go up because of their forward movement. But that doesn't make the Wright quote any less valid.
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The Zire is rechargeable like the old V series.
The M105 uses alkaline batteries.
Personally, I prefer the alkaline batteries. I can buy new batteries anywhere. I can't always plug in a charger and sit around for a couple hours.
The point here is that fluids don't restrict themselves before the restriction. Traffic actually does move faster when we use all the lanes available to us. All of the traffic. Not just the scofflaws passing on the right. When everyone merges early, it just confuses the lane restriction and moves it farther upstream where there are no clear traffic regulation devices. Merging early is exacerbating the problem.
You are so very very wrong. Let me see if I can explain with some physics, and then follow up with personal observations.
Think of congested traffic as though it were a fluid mechanics problem, molecules of liquid passing through a pipe whose diameter (number of lanes) changes. The molecules fill every portion of the pipe. They don't artificially contract into a smaller stream a quarter of a mile before the pipe restriction.
A real life example from Missouri, where we have the most polite and completely incompetent drivers in the world: Travelling down the three lane interstate one evening in the leftmost lane, I saw a orange construction sign indicating that the left lane was closed ahead. I could not yet see the lane closure ahead, so I continued in the left lane. Other drivers slowed almost to a halt to merge into the crowded center lane. Once around them, I passed a full mile of vehicles crawling along in the two rightmost lanes to find that the left lane wasn't restricted at all. The sign was in error, but a traffic jam ensued because drivers were attempting to merge into the rightmost lanes far before they needed to. Merging early was the entire cause of that traffic problem.
In the New York City area, thought by many to be the home of the rudest most aggressive drivers, this problem might not have ever happened. I have been a passenger in a speeding cab that hurtled right up to a stalled and burning vehicle in the left lane on a bridge(!) and merged at the very last moment. Other vehicles did the same thing. What I noticed was that traffic didn't slow down much at all. The NYC drivers used every available bit of asphalt, and it kept the traffic moving. All it takes in Missouri to cause a traffic jam is the mere hint of a lane closure! Big difference!
Finally, an observation on motorcycles and lane-splitting: Throughout Europe and in California, it is legal, in fact even encouraged, for motorcyclists to filter through slow or stopped traffic by travelling between the cars. It's not legal in other states, and even trying it is likely to get a motorcyclist killed by a vengeful automobile driver. If car drivers cared at all about reducing traffic congestion, they would be happy to have the motorcycles filter past rush hour traffic and move to the front of a line at traffic signals. Getting the motorcycles out of the way frees up space for the automobiles. Making the motorcycle use up just as much space as a car only makes the congestion problem worse. (Think Tetris, played badly) But, The majority of automobile driving Americans are infuriated when a motorcycle passes them in rush hour traffic. It goes to show that our culture prizes a sort of equality of suffering over problem resolution.
Wouldn't it be more effective to identify the superset, thus ensuring that you don't overlook good programmers who don't meet your more restrictive criteria?
Identifying the subset exposes you to the following risks:
Your subset includes only the least qualified of the applicants
Your subset doesn't identify any candidates at all
You're mighty quick to attack other people's logic skills, there, partner.
You know, Sam Carr, David Berkowitz's neighbor had a "talking dog"
It didn't do him much good.
This is utter hogwash. If the record companies had any idea beforehand which CDs would be profitable, they would only publish the profitable ones. But they don't know ahead of time. That's why they publish a broad catalog, so that they have a better chance of publishing a hit and making a profit. To insinuate that the record companies publish unprofitable albums out of the goodness of their hearts is the height of deception.
Let's look at this from the point of view of a fictional touring music act that we'll call "Zit Remedy". If "Megadisc Records", member of the RIAA decides to publish a CD of Zit Remedy's music, it has only a slim chance of being profitable. If Zit Remedy's CD isn't profitable, then Zit Remedy receives no royalty payments. However, the CD still stands as a tool for publicity, possibly increasing concert revenues and sales of merchandise. Except Zit Remedy's self-titled debut release is priced at $20 a copy, so it reaches a very small audience... unless college students start ripping and file sharing. Then the profit potential for Zit Remedy climbs. More buzz = more concert attendees = more revenues. The only loser here is Megadisc.
It's pretty clear that the record companies represented by the RIAA have a flawed business model. I don't think it's up to taxpayers to subsidize bad business models. If it were, I could start a buggy whip factory and retire wealthy. Let Megadisc figure it out for itself.
Wow, I could say the exact same things about Italian motorcycles. I'm riding a Husqvarna Supermotard. (Husqvarnas have been produced in Italy since 1994 when the Cagiva group purchased the marque.) My new Italian bike has less power than any bike I've owned since I was a teenager, but I am whipping the snot out of open class sportbike riders on the twisty roads of my native Missouri. And the sound of the motor! A booming single with twin port Termi exhaust headers and twin cans tucked under the fender... it sounds like a Sopwith Camel diving in for the kill, guns blazing. I may have to sell my CBR.
Yeah, but even an untalented rider on an unmodified $4000 motorcycle will eat your lunch stoplight to stoplight. .6L motorcycle engine makes 100+ Hp on standard pump gas for a whopping 175 Hp/Liter. There IS a replacement for displacement. It's called high redline. Your truck doesn't have it.
By the way, 4x the displacement does not equal 4x the horsepower. If those great big long cranks and goofy pushrods in your motor can't get spun up to high RPMs, then you aren't getting much power for your displacement. If they can't rotate quickly, then they aren't pumping as much air. All things are not equal between your V8 and an inline 4. If you're making an optimistic 400hp from your 6.6L motor, that is 60 Hp/Liter. A
You've hit the nail on the head.
My boss, for instance, really believes that he is "solving the problems when others don't understand the question." In reality, he is often the problem that must be solved by his subordinates. He would never believe that he is not part of the "engine of change." He's really more like the "wheel chocks of ignorance."
The difference? One is useful, the other is funny.
The point was that the product in the article adjusts the pitch of the singer via some fancy algorithms. I thought it would be funny if the device just slowed or sped up the accompaniment music, like a poorly operating record player. The singer would then technically be "in key" but the result would sound like crap.
Now that's funny!
My plan was to have the music slow down and speed up to match the pitch of the singer. Much more reliable... if not quite as pleasing to the ear.
Gasp! The horror! It's clear to me that we need govenment oversight for video game reviews.
Thanks for the informative essay.
Note to moderators - Please mod up this AC comment!
To make my feelings clear on the issue of TI consumer products: I loved my TI99/4A. I loved my Avigo. TI just didn't love these products as much as I did.
The T9 keyboard almost prevented me from buying my heavily discounted Avigo. But, the T9 keyboard turned out to be a wickedly fast method of entering text. It was, as you suggested, a great design feature that was never effectively "sold" to the consumer marketplace.
That, I suppose, is why I think of TI's dabbling in PDAs as hobby-like. TI had a great product, but they didn't convince anyone else it was great. They had a head start on their PDA competitors, but they didn't appear to have a support plan, or a vision for how the Avigo would penetrate the market and hook consumers into the "Avigo line" for generations to come.
I will probably continue to buy TI consumer products when I need them: Their quality and innovation is beyond reproach. That quality just barely makes up for my suspiscion that my new purchase will only enjoy support for a short time and will probably never be the standard in the marketplace.
Texas Instruments is notorious for releasing excellent consumer electronics products and then either crippling them or letting them wither and die. Witness the Avigo and the TI99/4A.
In the case of the Avigo, it was arguably a better PDA than the Palm Pilot that it was competing against. The applications it sported were certainly better and more comprehensive than those Palm was offering. However, TI made the dev kit for the Avigo platform expensive and difficult to obtain, so nobody of consequence wrote any additional software for the Avigo.
You would think Texas Instruments would have learned their lesson after doing exactly the same thing with the TI99 home computer 15 years before. Both platforms were innovative, high quality products that became commercial failures due to poor marketing and dismal support.
I have to wonder why they even bother to develop these products. It's like consumer product development and manufacturing is a hobby for them, but marketing and support are too much of a pain in the ass, so they don't do it.
Just try not to spit on them too often.
Seriously, I got way more out of the practical Computer Programming Specialist courses at Keesler AFB than I did from Washington University's engineering curriculum. Once I was trained, they shipped me off to an honest-to-god Air Force squadron where I wrote code for embedded systems, designed databases, repaired hardware, and got to run around with a gun.
The money was terrible. The hours were tough. It was the best work experience of my life. And, as an experience I can put on my resume, it was spectacularly effective at keeping me employed after I was discharged.
Yeah sure, I do that too. But I consider that secondary to motorcycling. Thanks for noticing.
It's not really a game (since I don't race) unlike other activities in the Olympics. Besides, the Olympics won't include anything involving motors... not that I would want motorcycling to be an Olympic event.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that motorcycling, like rock-climbing, hang-gliding, or bull fighting, is a sport because it is an intense physical activity where the consequences of a mistake are deadly, but the participants do it just for fun.
It's kind of an Ernest Hemmingway perspective. I bet the old man wouldn't have called chess a sport.
Perhaps I should define sport more narrowly as a physical activity in which the risk of immediate death during the event is elevated.
Anything else is a "game."
(Go ahead, ask me what I do for sport.)
That was Cale Yarborough.
Oh dear God! The whole Universe is going to come apart! The earth will be flung from the solar system! I hope I can get a good winter coat.
It's surprising how many people don't realize that. On the final episode of Junkyard Wars, season 4 (on the cable channel TLC) the two teams built rockets to see who could launch an ostrich egg higher. They both used an accelerometer to trigger their parachute deployment, and both teams, aided by model rocketry experts concluded that when the acceleration drops to zero that the charge should go off because that would happen at the apogee of the flight.
Wrong! The parachutes were deployed as soon as the rocket motors burned out, preventing the rockets from attaining their highest potential altitude given their upward momentum.
That demonstrates nicely that (absent significant aerodynamic drag) a rocket is "weightless" from the moment the engines quit until it either hits the ground or is retarded by a parachute.
Yes, the original poster may not be aware that Autogyros go up because of their forward movement. But that doesn't make the Wright quote any less valid.