Personally, I love the whole package that anime tends to give a viewer.
Some of the best anime movies and series develop characters, tell a compelling story, provide a fantastic or realistic setting, have terrific artwork, entice so many feelings... Many of the best anime out there provide all of these.
Anime isn't, to me, a "genre," per se. It's almost like a microcosm of the whole film and television industries, but done entirely in semi-traditional animation instead of live-action. There are action anime, fantasy anime, sci-fi anime, drama anime, sitcom anime... you name a film or television genre and there's often an anime that fits into it.
You're right, though... there are quite a few anime fans who are TOO enamored with anything Japanese (often called "otaku"). But there are many of us, myself included, who love it because it's often so well done (at least some of the better ones). It's no different to many of us to liking American movies or TV. It's just another form of the same that's done in a different style.
That's one thing that really should turn your attention to it. There's a stigma in the US that animation is for kids. Anime is not necessarily that way.
Another thing to turn your attention to anime is that there are just so many good stories and characters out there to watch and absorb. The proportion is probably only a little higher than other styles of film/TV (even though anime TV series tend to beat out US TV series in many ways and quite frequently). And because there are so many different sub-genres in anime itself, you can find a few series that'll tickle your fancy. Anime TV series tend to make long story arcs that span an entire season, much like many of the truly acclaimed US TV series.
So, you've already seen Mononoke? What kind of genres of film/TV are you interested in?
Fantasy? Look into "Slayers" for a bit of a humor lift. Or if you like something a little more serious, try something like "Vision of Escaflowne".
Sci-Fi? "Neon Genesis Evangelion" could be interesting for you perhaps. Maybe some of the "Gundam" or "Trigun" series.
Drama? Take a glance at "Perfect Blue".
Comedy? Plenty to chose from here. Many anime have some comedic features in them.
Ask an anime fan for some good series in a genre, if you're interested. Those are just a few of my potential suggestions, should you get curious. Other fans will, like any movie/TV viewer, have their own favorites and suggestions. Just remember that anime isn't much different than other movies/TV... it's just using a different way to tell the stories.
(And, yes, there are some bad anime out there... plenty. Just like there are bad movies/TV. It's no different in that aspect, either.)
Good luck in breaking that prejudice, too. Only some anime fans are that rabid. There are many of us who aren't, though.
IIRC, all big cats are in the genus "Panthera", which is where the term originates. But, there are no such things as panthers. It's always some OTHER species of big cat.
"It is commonly used to transform data from the time domain to the frequency domain."
Technically, it can take data from any well-behaved domain to the frequency domain, not just temporal data. I use FFTs on spatial data more than temporal data. Just had to nitpick that.:)
Shouldn't be replying to any of these, but I'm bait today for a little argument...
Reflectivity issue: Yes, you lose ice. But, in a warmer atmosphere, there tends to be be more clouds... and WOW... clouds also reflect, don't they? And those clouds will tend to be around the tropics, where there is a lot more solar insolation to reflect back over the course of a year. The role of albedo (reflectivity) in the climate system is so highly indeterminate that its futile to attempt to make any argument either way without further evidence one way or another.
Sea level increase rate: Dan's comment here is very appropriate. I forgot where I read it, but some administrator in the Netherlands was asked what they were planning on doing if the sea level should rise. He calmly shrugged and replied, "We'll build our wall taller."
CO2 is NOT all bad: The thing which always gets me is people are constantly tossing up graphs of CO2 from 1700 to now. But, go further back in our planet's history. Like around the Jurassic, maybe? During those periods with all those plants and dinosaurs and all sorts of life, CO2 levels were 10 to 20 times current levels. Yep... life was in ALL sorts of trouble then, now wasn't it? The point is that we don't want to change, so any change is "bad". That's fine and dandy, and a perfectly understandable thing to want. But, the thing which bothers me is this stigma that "we're ruined" because of increased CO2. Look at where humans are living right now. Deserts? No problem. Tropical areas? No problem. Tundra and arctic? No problem. We're one of the most adaptable species this world has ever seen, and we're worried about a changing world ruining us? PUH-LEEZE.
More CO2 implies more plant respiration: It has been conclusively shown that increased CO2 leads to more plant respiration... up to a point. Nitrogen is a BIG limiting factor in those reactions. So, don't assume that the biosphere will be able to counteract all this. And, in fact, the whole carbon-climate system feedback is an area of VERY active research. In fact, it is well known that this is one of the most important areas of climate change, but its magnitude is SO incredibly unknown (depending on the model and parameterizations you use, you can get 2000-2100 temperature increases from anywhere between 1 and 7 degrees Celsius). There are SO many different feedback mechanisms in the atmosphere that trying to even determine what MIGHT happen is fuzzy at best. Another pair of model runs I once saw found a very impressive bifurcation point in their biosphere/atmosphere interaction scheme. By very minutely tweaking a parameter that dealt with plant growth probabilities, they were able to go between a state where the Amazon basin dried up significantly and became grasslands and another state where the Amazon rain forest slowly became wetter and wetter to the point of being a rain forest/swamp. Insomuch one can believe these parameterizations, it's amazing that a little change like that could produce such entirely differing results.
Sun's effect: As for the article, I haven't read it, since that's been hypothesized for a while. But, the problem, from what I remember, is that the error bars on measuring solar power are larger than any of these trends, meaning that there's a possible chance that there is no trend, just errors. However, that could have changed since the last I've heard about it. *shrugs.*
(Disclaimer: Yes, I'm an atmospheric scientist. Yes, I know a lot about this particular subject. No, I'm not studying climate interactions, but we just had two colloquia on climate studies: carbon-climate interactions and cloud/moisture feedbacks.)
(I've visited both this park and Carhenge. Terrific pit stops for travellers and storm chasers.;) They give us storm chasers something to remember if we don't see anything significant during that day's chase.)
Will always hate the floppy. I helped out in my high school's library/computer lab all the time in the early 90's. Floppies were everywhere. For Bob's sake, I still have my floppy case filled with 100 floppies in my closet (collecting dust). I hate them because there was no reliability in floppies. I remember doing an informal study of floppy disks with the library staff. We found that about 20% of the floppies would have at least one serious block failure within 3 months of a newly opened pack, almost no matter what manufacturer we looked at. (Very informal... this was not a scientific study, but still highlights why I hate them.)
I got quite good at using some Mac utilities to dump some people's word processing documents off of corrupted blocks into a new text document so that they didn't have to retype the whole thing. (We had a good sized lab of Macs and ClarisWorks was the word processor of choice.) Of course, a big section in the middle would be gone, but that's still better than nothing. And in a smallish high school of 600-700 students, I was doing this about once a day, every day, so it was common enough that I ended up hating the floppy.
As for the comments currently up, I can see the "problems" with dropping the floppy. But, do we really want to be shackled to this antiquated technology forever? Granted, there aren't many decent alternatives (even though I REALLY like the USB keychain storage ideas), but, for Bob's sake, people, it's not like you can't put a floppy on, if you really need it.
The point is, without some pushing, people will be content on using these old floppy disks, which given current technology, are absolutely terrible forms of media. I applaud Dell for pushing this a bit, since it encourages us to either work with some current, better solutions... or maybe even... *GASP!*... develop a replacement that is better. Maybe, given the void created by the loss of the floppies, those USB storage keychain thingies will drop significantly in price and become the new floppy... or maybe CD-RW technology will become more ubiquitous and transparent...? The point is that someone (a major player, not just Apple, who never had to worry about BIY BIOS issues or whatnot) had to step forward and just push the others into looking at the floppy problem. It's a bold step, and I hope that it really pushes us out of using these stupid floppies.
-Jellisky -floppy-free (and bad block free) since 1998...
Ah, but you point out the crux of my argument. There is no contradiction there.
But, it all comes down to the definition of "average". Is it "average" compared to everyone who is currently in the class? Or "average" compared to everyone who has taken the class? Or "average" compared to anyone who could take the class? Or maybe "average" compared to "average Joe-Blow person in the world"? etc., etc., etc....
The point I want to make is that what sort of grading system and how subjective the grader wants to be should be a subjective decision made by the professor themself. It can depend on the subject material, the professor's test/homework writing style, the professor's tendencies, etc. That means that any "set" grading system will, most undoubtedly, be "unfair". But, whatever system is decided on, should be explained completely to the students as part of the introductory material for that class. As in real life, there are always different expectations for different tasks... why should school grading systems be any different?
> How is the source of the money for your tution related to the grade you earn? --------------------
The source of the money is the grants which your advisor supports you on. In other words, it is expected that you are working to go to school. In our department, it is much more like an apprenticeship than a typical college experience.
In that way, since the graduate school has their regulations and we must follow them, we bend the rules inside the department. Since unlike many other students, the department has put money into each student. So, the philosophy is to make sure that a student will pass unless there are serious doubts about the quality of the student to do the work that is required of them. You see, if the student doesn't do their work, then the grant which pays them and others can be revoked.
In that way, yes, I agree... it's ugly and is "rule bending". But it's really only rule bending in a way that, really, is pointless in our field. GPA in graduate school in atmospheric science is almost always one of the most silly things to look at for a future employer, and I'm sure it's similar in many other fields. Employers know that GPA in this field in grad school is bunk. And I believe that many employers of even undergrad graduates feel the same way. There's nothing standard about it in the first place... and any fool who thinks there is is exactly that... a fool. Curricula change between schools and courses, even between years and faculty at the same school. There are just so many differences, that GPA should never be really thought of as a fair indicator of future potential.
For us, I know that many faculty here would love to give out other grades, but it really doesn't matter to them at this point. Grades are not a decent indicator by this point.
------------------ > As my grandpappy used to say, if you want to send a message, use Western Union. If a student is doing poor work then a professor has many means of conveying their concerns. Grades are not a private means of coded communication between the professor and the student, they're a matter of academic record indended to indicate a student's competence and ability. ------------------
Almost no student who gets a C doesn't know well beforehand that they're getting it. Because of the other issues involved in giving a C, it ends up being exactly what you say: a record intended to indicate their ability or competence in that subject. In other words, a message, not just to the already aware student, but to anyone else who sees that record and knows what that C means (which are a large number of employers familiar with this system).
In my undergraduate institution (Valparaiso University), there were a good number of C's and lower given out, especially in the lower level science classes. Yes, there were often more A's and B's given out, but those were because the distribution tended to be skewed to a majority doing well. (Bimodal distributions were common, so the top group got A's and B's while the other got lower grades.) And yes, in some of the higher level classes, not a single C or lower was given out, even in math classes.
Grading systems SHOULD be subjective in nature. It's an argument of a professor trying to say how good a student is in that particular subject.
I consider all the grades I've gotten to be fair. I've considered the grades that friends of mine have gotten in the same class to be fair. Yes, even in the classes without a single C, those were fair. In those cases, the class often worked together... we were all about the same in our understanding and comprehension of the subject matter. There were some that were a little better and some that were a little worse, but many times it was tough to say that one of us was truly better than the others. So, it only made sense that we all got about the same grades; I think the final distribution was 1 A-, 2 B+, 3 B, 1 B-.
One thing that people forget is that in many majors in many schools, the students tend to be similar in their aptitude. It's due to the admissions tendencies of the school and the interests of the students. By the time you get to the higher-level classes, the only students taking them are the ones who tend to be good at the subject anyway. Is it really fair to give an F to that one B- student who answered most of the questions in class with a good understanding of the material, just a little less than the rest of us, just because the "lowest" student should be given an F?
So, it only makes sense that sometimes (and frequently in higher-level classes) a classroom will be filled with students who all understand the material and show potential. A professor just can't toss out an F or D if people all seemingly understand the material and have obviously learned it. How did they fail?
Then, you get to graduate schools like the one I'm in (Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University). It is understood that a C is almost never given out in a class here. Why?
First, the graduate school has this policy that any graduate student must hold a 3.0 GPA at all times. Since our department pays for the students' tuitions, we represent an investment for them. So, unless there is a reason to give out a C (like an obviously sub-par student), it is foolish to give out those low grades since it ends up being a waste of money for the department. They've put money into each of us, so why should they disqualify us by holding the "average student = C" mantra over us? It makes no sense because of that silly graduate school 3.0 GPA policy.
That doesn't mean that C's aren't given out. But they're all about sending messages to the student... "Are you sure you should be doing this kind of work?" Since the department pays for the students to take classes (and our advisors pay us off their research grants to do research also), they expect us to pass those classes. B's are now the "pass" grade, while A's are the "good" grade. C's (and D's) are the "message" grades. It's just shifting everything up to make sure that any money spent on students isn't wasted.
This whole "story" smells of nothing but a reporter trying to make a story out of a subject that looks simple, but is SO much more complex than it looks. In other words, this reporter needs to do more research into the real reasons WHY grades seem inflated. Frequently, in a case-by-case basis, there are good reasons for every grade that is given out. People need to remember that the "average student = C" idea isn't bad, but that "average" is a subjective idea.
-Jellisky
Give me any of those games any day...
on
Snood, the Simple Game
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I love those simple games... the ones that make me focus and think for about a half hour or less. Tetris, Bust A Move (and other Snood-type variants), Tetris Attack (and other variants), Bejeweled, Nisqually, Glines, any of those Yahoo Games word games... all of those get some significant playing time during a standard week from me.
But that's not to say that the more complex games don't get playing time from me. The Civilization series, the Final Fantasy series, Imperialism, the Diablo series... all of those also get played regularly on my computer/console.
The big point, though, is that each game fills a different type of gaming and entertainment niche for me. Both will have markets in the world of gaming.
But, I contend that making those "simple" games, is, as the author pointed out, probably harder than making the more "complex" games. Kind of an oxymoron at first glance, but if you think about it, it makes perfect sense.
A "simple" game must have few controls and those that it does have should be almost immediately obvious in nature. This severe limitation in design isn't overly restrictive, since a simple game will have simple rules, by definition.
But where a simple game is difficult is in the rules of the game. A simple game's rules must be flexible enough that there is no trivial strategy for putting up good scores or winning. The rules must, however, be simple enough that, in reality, they should be able to fit on a simple splash screen. The gameplay should be fluid and usually ever-changing, allowing for natural planning ahead and strategy building. Lastly, skill, not luck, should dominate the gameplay.
Taking these all into account, I can see why there aren't all that many of these simple games. That's not an easy design paradigm, in the least. But, simple games will never really get too much recognition, since they don't really need to. I think the authors of such games often realize that quite quickly. The market is there, but it remains quiet since it doesn't take much time or money to make such a game. So, the ideas can be coded up by an amateur or a professional or two, tested by a few of their friends, and put out for the world to enjoy. Not much infrastructure or capital or time needed for that, is there?
So, keep giving me both types of games. I'll gladly take both.:)
> Give us a break too. If Apple didn't have enormously fat profit margins on hardware it'd be dead tomorrow.
Now, let's imagine that Apple decides, all of a sudden, that all OS X code is GPL. Doesn't affect their hardware sales one bit, right?
Wrong. All of a sudden, everyone knows exactly what is put into their OS to help restrict the machines it can run on, right? And suddenly, everything that gives them any advantages in selling those machines goes "poof"!
Don't forget that their hardware and software are intimately tied together. Release all the secrets on one side and the whole situation can be compromised. Apple can't exist as a pure hardware company... Apple can't exist as a pure software company... they must exist as a complete computer system company. It's a very unique situation, which will almost always fully prevent them from being "free software" pioneers. They realize that as soon as they do, they die. What kind of company would sign their own suicide notes like that?
Apple will never become a Microsoft since they have to have too much control over the components of the entire computer system. This limits their growth. Imagine if Apple had 90% market share. Apple would have to produce so many computers that they'd probably become the largest manufacturer in the world by far. And that has its own incredibly unique problems. Apple's business model prevents them from being huge and monopolistic in the computer market.
Pure and simple, Apple isn't either a hardware company or a software company. Take either one of these out of the equation, and Apple dies. Apple sells the whole computer system. They don't make a separation between hardware and software, since to them, they are both parts of the whole system. Compromise control of any part of it, and their whole business is put into jeopardy.
Um, not to burst your little bubble, but felines and canines tend NOT to have five major digits on four of those appendages. If you count dewclaws, many will have five on the forelegs, but none have five on the back legs. Felines and canines have only four toes on their back feet.
'Course it/is/ interesting that four and five seem to show up the most. 'Course that's probably just the "Law of Small Numbers" showing up... or something dealing with the innate symmetry that backbones tend to give (bilateral symmetry). It's just all in how you look at the problem, I guess.
... is what FORTRAN is good for: number crunching. F77 is a perfect tool for many scientists who don't care about pointers or object oriented programming or nice graphical output subroutines or any other nice things that other programming languages have. They want something that will do some number crunching for them and won't screw up or cause problems.
FORTRAN is simple. It works like many mathematicians and scientists think it should. It meshes well with what they really want to do in a good number of cases. The level of abstraction is perfect for many of them.
FORTRAN will take a long time to die because of this. Personally, I like more real-time interpretive languages like IDL. But when it comes down to something that is pure number crunching that'll take a few hours, I'll gladly have FORTRAN. That's why so much in the sciences is written in FORTRAN, then the data is output and run through other programs to do the pretty plotting and further interpretation.
FORTRAN just works, has worked for 30+ years, and with the amount of incredibly useful code still around, will still work for decades to come. Granted, I don't necessarily like some of the proposed changes, but as long as everything works like it did before with F77 code, I think no one will (or should) mind.
'Twas a very interesting evolution of the "hole", I must admit. Looks like a good fluid dynamics experiment gone unstable to me.
A quick summary of why the ozone hole exists:
- During polar winters, the solar insolation (amount of light from the sun) goes to zero. Since the photochemical reaction by ozone on UV light is no longer there, the stratosphere begins to cool around the poles. This leads to no ozone being produced or destroyed. (Ozone, in the stratosphere, requires light to be created in the first place.)
- This cooling leads to the formation of a very strong vortex by an atmospheric "law" called thermal wind. This vortex tends to be incredibly strong, usually on the order of 50 m/s (112 mph). This vortex usually covers the entire polar region.
- Given the strength of this vortex, very little mixing occurs between contents inside the vortex and outside the vortex. So, as time progresses, the already present chlorine and flourine compounds in the vortex have time to react with the ozone and deplete it noticably (since the vortex doesn't allow the ozone from the lit-up areas of the globe to mix in and refresh the levels).
- As the sun comes back up in polar spring, the photochemical reactions begin again, further reducing the levels of ozone. However, these reactions warm up the middle of the vortex. This warming tends to break down the vortex quite quickly and allows the ozone from the middle latitudes mix in and refresh the ozone levels.
Now, all this happens in both hemispheres during the appropriate winter months. But the Antarctic hole tends to be stronger than the Arctic one for one very simple reason: land. Topography helps set up large-scale waves in the atmosphere's flow. These waves can influence the polar vortex by essentially perturbing it. These perturbations can then grow (depending on the properties of the vortex) and become unstable, leading to a total vortex breakdown. Those events are commonly seen in the Arctic vortex since there are three large mountain ranges in the Northern Hemisphere to excite planetary-scale waves. But around Antarctica, there aren't any significant mountain ranges to excite these waves, so the vortex tends not to be perturbed significantly.
But, it appears this season, that something is causing a very strong wavenumber-2 perturbation (wavenumber-n perturbations have n crests and troughs around a latitude circle). That's pretty obvious from the elliptical early evolution and, then, the eventual breakdown into two lobes. What actually "caused" this amplification is an excellent question. Perhaps this year's vortex was inherrently unstable to wavenumber-2 perturbations? Perhaps this season's El Nino had some odd effect on it? (Doubt that, but it's an interesting idea.) Either way, this event will be studied quite heavily the next few years, I'm sure. (Perhaps even by myself at some point.)
... but it's not limited to engineers. Many scientists are the same. Story time...
In undergrad, I worked with a physicist and an engineer on some Fourier analysis homework. I was a math major (and a meteorology major also). (No, this is not one of those jokes.)
I distinctly remember once when we reduced a problem to a very simple integral: the integral from 0 to 2*PI of 3 x cubed minus 4 x, dx. What do both of them do to finish this problem? Pull out the calculators and begin to type it in... I just watch in awe... they didn't even want to attempt this basic integral without the "comfort blanket" that the calculator gave them. Never mind that thanks to a typo one of them got the wrong answer.
Even in my field (atmospheric science), the "simulation bug" is prevalent. They're great tools, but it's rather annoying when you ask one of these simulation people to explain something that they're pointing out using basic physics that they frequently can't, even when the basic theory has been there for decades.
Scientists and engineers need that strong mathematics background. I personally think that calculators should be outlawed from classrooms until high school. People are frequently too dependent on those tools currently (had one guy in math help session in undergrad who used a calculator to figure out 3 minus 2... I kid you not). You always should learn the basics and the hard way before being given the tools for the easier ways. Anything else is bass-ackward.
... is the plight of the Webcasters, which was briefly touched on in the article. There are a lot of great webcast stations out there (just got introduced to radioio.com... wow.) that are going to probably have to shut down their doors due to the excessive royalty fees that the silly Librarian of Congress set for them.
That's not to say that such fees shouldn't exist. It's just that they are excessive, given many webcasters' revenues.
The real issue here to me is the idea of paying for services. Many people are perfectly willing to pay for services, as long as the services add value for the users. I loved Napster (when I could get it to work on my campus)... the lure of free music was impressive. I've used Kazaa a bit, so I can say that free stuff is great... but even with Kazaa, there's the problem of not getting what you wanted. I remember downloading a song on Napster that I had been searching for for weeks... only to find out that the song I downloaded was a terrible cover of the original.
As the article points out, consumers will pay for something if it is worth it. I've seriously considered eMusic a few times... it sounds like a pretty good deal. Likewise, if someone started up a webcasted radio station that "required" payment for listening, I would think about it (or in the radioio.com case, I'd pull that credit card right out and pay up, as long as it was reasonable... like $20 or so for a year). I have no trouble paying for entertainment or anything else, even if I can find it free elsewhere... especially if paying will get me something extra.
It's all about value... I can either spend time on Kazaa and take my chances, or I can pay some reasonable bit of money for a guaranteed bit of entertainment. Seriously, this just makes sense.
-Jellisky
(Did anyone else notice the terrible math in the article?
"I get at least 30 albums a month or so at 10 bucks a month. That's 10 cents each."
Ummm... $10.00 / 30 albums != $0.10... = $0.33...
*sighs* Where have the basic arithmetic skills of people gone?)
Maybe it's because the creationists can just play the "God is all-powerful, so anything is possible" card at any time. Hard to poke holes in a Biblical theory which has no limitations, isn't it? You don't know how many times I've gotten the "That's one of the mysteries of God" answers. Sorry, but for some people who don't want to think that answer may be enough, but it's not enough for some of us thinking peoples.
I think I would prefer having a world that changes with new information that I have to think about rather than one where I'm told what to think by a 2000 to 4000-year old book. Maybe I like thinking about life, the universe, and everything more than living a blissful, yet ignorant, life where I can "know everything" by reading a book that hasn't changed in the last 1500 years, at least.
Maybe it's this rigidity of the typical Creationist that many people find unsatisfying. To them, the world is already figured out, why bother studying it? Why can't you just live your life according to what this book says? I consider this a pure stagnation of all thought and progress. Science is based off of experimentation and observation... new ways of observing things give new ideas and new theories. Science is not stagnant, and that is one of its strengths. The conservative minds that Creationists tend to have don't like things changing... a continuum is something that Bible-thumpers and Creationists can't handle. Everything has to be discrete and in nice, easy to understand pieces. Things don't happen gradually; they just happen. This flies in the face of so many things that people experience in the world... coffee doesn't spontaneously change to room temperature, clouds and weather just don't spontaneously appear, new lives aren't just brought into creation in adult sizes. That's why creationism seems like the odd man out. Yeah, you can play the "everything" card in God; that's fine. But that's a weak logical argument. Hard to have an intelligent argument with a person who "knows everything", isn't it?
... weather modeling, for one. Here in the US, NCEP (National Centers for Environmental Prediction) runs all the forecast weather models on an IBM-SP (used to run on a Cray C90, I think). In Europe, the ECMWF model is run on a Fujitsu supercomputer, I think.
Models for plasma dynamics and astrophysics are also run on these heavy-duty machines. I'm sure others have had some experience running other things, but I know that the NCEP IBM-SP gets a workout at least 2 times a day running at least four different weather models that have average runtimes around an hour each.
... think that this was so wrong of Apple. Looking at the screen shot of xtunes on their own webpage, the similarities are very striking, including the top bar (which copies nearly identically the top bar of iTunes... compare xtunes screenshot to iTunes screenshot).
Apple did a nice thing by warning them first, instead of just taking out a full subpeona and outright attacking them. Maybe they could have done the really nice thing and not have lawyers do the contacting... but with lawyers, it's hard to ignore them and you know that they're most probably really from Apple, not some weirdo trying to scare you. That said, the similarities between the two are very striking, almost an pure copy outside some icon changes.
Hopefully the sumi people can just let this pass and make some good changes to their interface. I must say, as an iTunes user, that there are bits of the interface which I wouldn't mind to see improved, including adding some additional buttons which I used quite frequently on my old MP3 player, Macast.
... with FORTRAN, I will echo what others have said, plus add a bit.
Yes, FORTRAN is incredibly nice for what it was designed to do: calculate. It is quite quick at it, and the compilers for the 77 version, as noted by others, are incredibly well optimized for this purpose.
FORTRAN is the code of choice for anything that requires a huge bit of mathematical calculations. When you're working with weather models, and it takes 20 hours just to run the FORTRAN code, you begin to notice when that extra overhead the other copilers put in when it increases run times by hours.
That said, if you've programmed before in other languages, be prepared to be sitting there complaining about how terribly FORTRAN is set up. One of my mantras about FORTRAN which keeps me sane is: "The people who made FORTRAN were obviously screwy in the head." Of course, that is said entirely tongue-in-cheek, since the language was "setup" before I was even born. ('Course, not long before, but still before.)
There's a lot to hate about FORTRAN from modern programming, but if you're willing to bite the bullet and accept it for what it can do, then you probably will find it incredibly useful in the long run. FORTRAN is perfect for long calculations (think hour-long, at least), but it is terrible at many other things.
As for the 90 version, it has some nice features, but, overall, you can do a lot of what 90 has in 77 with only a few extra lines of code. Plus, from what I understand, the only decent 90 compilers are commercial (i.e. not free), so factor that into your decision.
So, yes, FORTRAN is ugly code... yes, FORTRAN is terribly constructed given current languages... but, it does its job admirably well. And if anyone wants to complain with me that the difference in running time between C and FORTRAN is only 10%, let me give you a program that'll run for 30 hours in FORTRAN and I'll gladly have those 3 hours extra I just saved.
... the fact that many terrestrial impacts have only one ring, not many. It's an interesting question as to how the "extra" rings come about.
For an example of the difference here, try dropping a decent-sized rock on a beach. The crater it creates has only the one ridge (if any). So, how do you set up those multiple rings... especially since it appears that they have approximately the same amplitudes.
I could be wrong, but that seems to be the biggest difference... and my semi-uneducated guess is that it is most likely due to how close the impacted material is to a fluid (i.e. compare solid rock and sand), since fluids let deformation waves like these to propogate easier than solids. But, that's just a guess.
(To mod someone down or reply... 'tis better to contribute than mod down, I guess.)
Weather modification is one of those topics that atmospheric scientists tend to avoid.
Why?
Simply put, it's not known if it even really works. Sometimes cloud seeding does work (see Gagin and Neumann, 1981); sometimes it has the opposite effect than desired or none at all (see Tukey et al., 1978; Kerr, 1982). There was a large bit of debate as to what effects cloud seeding really has. Let's not mention that there are also, what they call "windows of opportunity" where it is hypothesized that the seeding can even have any semblence of an effect.
Much of the research in the 60's and 70's on cloud seeding was fairly inconclusive, at best. Certain bits of weather modification make sense (for example, reducing the potential sizes of hailstones), but just the basic tenets of "can we control where storms will rain" and "microclimate change" like the Chinese seem to be talking about, are all in the scope of chaotic behavior.
Cloud mechanisms are incredibly nonlinear, so even a small change in the environment can have totally unforseen circumstances. And whether or not you can actually even GET a measurable response from the cloud is another matter altogether.
I applaud the Chinese for reigniting interest in this field (which has been mostly dead since the early 80's), but I wouldn't bet the farm on it working as planned. For the Olympics, the couple tens to hundreds of millions of dollars needed to run such programs could pay off in the end... but for many other situations, the cost does not justify the risky means. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if this whole endeavor falls flat in the end, though. The available data is very ambiguous about the effects, and I really don't see much else that could justify the amount of "positive vibes" the article transmitted.
Now taking bets on how many events are drowned out by a typhoon that they decided to seed that makes an "unexpected" turn...
It is well-known that near the equator and near the surface, the winds are generally light. But there is what's called the "Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone", an area of convergent winds. You can see that on a satellite picture of the western Pacific (look at the bottom edge, near the equator, obviously...). The latitude of this zone varies by season, moving always toward the summer hemisphere. It is an important component in what is called the "Hadley cell", which is an important circulation since it carries a great deal of heat from the tropics to the mid-latitudes and helps explain the placement of the major deserts. A good discussion of the very general "General Circulation of Earth's Atmosphere" can be found here, however some of the more interesting "facts" in it are currently in debate (for example, the existence of the Ferrel cell... the Hadley cell is definitely there, though).
So, the tropics aren't totally wind-free and are actually quite important to what happens through the rest of the world. I believe that it's been calculated that the average residence time of an air parcel in any one hemisphere is about 2 to 4 years, meaning that most parcels travel between hemispheres decently frequently.
Other factors to include is what's called the "Quasi-Biennial Oscillation" or QBO. This is strictly a lower stratospheric phenomenon (30 hPa is a pressure with sea level around 1000 hPa... 30 hPa is somewhere around 30 km above sea level.)
For some info on the QBO, check out:
http://www.atmos.ucla.edu/~cwhung/qbo.html
http://tao.atmos.washington.edu/data_sets/qbo/
Hope this helps. In short, a balloonist could be able to cross the equator. But you'd want to avoid it since the equator is normally pretty stormy.
They're in the Campus West Shopping Center, just, amazingly, west of main campus, near the corner of Elizabeth and Shields. They're also soon to be moving just a little ways down Elizabeth, in the same building as Panhandler's Pizza. (Great... a pizza joint and anime renting joint right next to each other.)
Definitely a great place for anyone going to Colorado State University. They have a very large selection (as large as a big Blockbusters comedy section, for example) on both VHS and DVD. They also have a good selection of anime knick-knacks and some quite knowledgable personnel.
While I must admit that this discovery is not all that spectacular, I would like to address your point of view.
First of all, what exactly is "science that benefits humanity"? How do you define something as nebulous as that? In my opinion, all science benefits humanity, though not all of it directly. Even this research benefits humanity by giving us insight into how traces of water that float through galaxies might have been formed.
The thing about pure science is all about ideas and unlocking truths. For example, you could look at a huge amount of the pure mathematics out there and deem it totally useless... much of it seems to be so contained within the mathematics field that it could seem totally useless to the normal layperson. But then, a smart scientist sees a connection to this higher level mathematics and his or her problem, and makes the full connection. This scientist now has ALL the available tools that the generations of mathematicians have put into this previously "useless" field. Now, thanks to all those previous mathematicians and people who put everything together, the weather forecaster now has the tools to better improve their forecasts, giving you the time that you might not have had before to run to your basement before that tornado touches down a few hundred yards from your house, demolishing it.
The point is that one cannot know how "useful" or beneficial pure scientific research really can be. Did you know that one of the most interesting results in early hurricane forecasting (Eliassen, 1951) was motivated not by hurricane applications, but by planetary-scale flow ideas?
True, it is nice to focus on research that will directly influence humanity... but one quickly finds that by working on generalizations of their specific problems, they can contribute so much more to humanity since their work will end up being used not only in their own work, but in the works of others. It's this basic research, this pure science, that gives tools to so many people.
Now, let's also not forget that, in science, one observation may lead to a hundred questions, and each question, once answered, can lead to a hundred more. And soon, you realize that different people are all asking the same questions, but from totally different sources... then you start putting resources and manpower together...
So, while this observation may not seem too useful right off hand, allow yourself to ask the questions that might follow... like, "Where did this water come from? Did it come from the fusion within the star? And if so, how did it truly form?" Now, let's assume that the answer is that it did come from fusion within the star. Then, the people working on building fusion reactors ask, "Well, are we going to produce water in our reactors? And if so, what do we have to worry about with this incredibly important molecule floating around now?" This leads to design innovations that might not have been thought up before, which then leads to safer and more efficient fusion reactors. This is all entirely possible... and was first spurred on by this, as you call it, "masturbatory gee-whiz hobbyist garbage".
Granted, yes, it would be nice to throw more money at those direct-application problems. But, we've spent billions of dollars already on heart disease alone, for example, and are we really anywhere closer to "curing" it? No, since we found out rather quickly that it's an environmental problem (i.e., diet, exercise, genetics) that each individual has to worry about for themselves, for the most part. Meanwhile, we throw a few tens of millions at some other sciences and get some amazing things in return, i.e. superconduction (which has yet to come fully to fruition).
So, chill, man. Pure sciences are needed as much as their immediately beneficial counterparts.
-Jellisky
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, I love the whole package that anime tends to give a viewer.
Some of the best anime movies and series develop characters, tell a compelling story, provide a fantastic or realistic setting, have terrific artwork, entice so many feelings... Many of the best anime out there provide all of these.
Anime isn't, to me, a "genre," per se. It's almost like a microcosm of the whole film and television industries, but done entirely in semi-traditional animation instead of live-action. There are action anime, fantasy anime, sci-fi anime, drama anime, sitcom anime... you name a film or television genre and there's often an anime that fits into it.
You're right, though... there are quite a few anime fans who are TOO enamored with anything Japanese (often called "otaku"). But there are many of us, myself included, who love it because it's often so well done (at least some of the better ones). It's no different to many of us to liking American movies or TV. It's just another form of the same that's done in a different style.
That's one thing that really should turn your attention to it. There's a stigma in the US that animation is for kids. Anime is not necessarily that way.
Another thing to turn your attention to anime is that there are just so many good stories and characters out there to watch and absorb. The proportion is probably only a little higher than other styles of film/TV (even though anime TV series tend to beat out US TV series in many ways and quite frequently). And because there are so many different sub-genres in anime itself, you can find a few series that'll tickle your fancy. Anime TV series tend to make long story arcs that span an entire season, much like many of the truly acclaimed US TV series.
So, you've already seen Mononoke? What kind of genres of film/TV are you interested in?
Fantasy? Look into "Slayers" for a bit of a humor lift. Or if you like something a little more serious, try something like "Vision of Escaflowne".
Sci-Fi? "Neon Genesis Evangelion" could be interesting for you perhaps. Maybe some of the "Gundam" or "Trigun" series.
Drama? Take a glance at "Perfect Blue".
Comedy? Plenty to chose from here. Many anime have some comedic features in them.
Ask an anime fan for some good series in a genre, if you're interested. Those are just a few of my potential suggestions, should you get curious. Other fans will, like any movie/TV viewer, have their own favorites and suggestions. Just remember that anime isn't much different than other movies/TV... it's just using a different way to tell the stories.
(And, yes, there are some bad anime out there... plenty. Just like there are bad movies/TV. It's no different in that aspect, either.)
Good luck in breaking that prejudice, too. Only some anime fans are that rabid. There are many of us who aren't, though.
-Jellisky
The term "black panther" is used interchangably between black jaguars and black leopards.
h tm
http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/agarman/bco/fact2.
IIRC, all big cats are in the genus "Panthera", which is where the term originates. But, there are no such things as panthers. It's always some OTHER species of big cat.
-Jellisky
One quick correction:
:)
"It is commonly used to transform data from the time domain to the frequency domain."
Technically, it can take data from any well-behaved domain to the frequency domain, not just temporal data. I use FFTs on spatial data more than temporal data. Just had to nitpick that.
-Jellisky
Shouldn't be replying to any of these, but I'm bait today for a little argument...
Reflectivity issue: Yes, you lose ice. But, in a warmer atmosphere, there tends to be be more clouds... and WOW... clouds also reflect, don't they? And those clouds will tend to be around the tropics, where there is a lot more solar insolation to reflect back over the course of a year. The role of albedo (reflectivity) in the climate system is so highly indeterminate that its futile to attempt to make any argument either way without further evidence one way or another.
Sea level increase rate: Dan's comment here is very appropriate. I forgot where I read it, but some administrator in the Netherlands was asked what they were planning on doing if the sea level should rise. He calmly shrugged and replied, "We'll build our wall taller."
CO2 is NOT all bad: The thing which always gets me is people are constantly tossing up graphs of CO2 from 1700 to now. But, go further back in our planet's history. Like around the Jurassic, maybe? During those periods with all those plants and dinosaurs and all sorts of life, CO2 levels were 10 to 20 times current levels. Yep... life was in ALL sorts of trouble then, now wasn't it?
The point is that we don't want to change, so any change is "bad". That's fine and dandy, and a perfectly understandable thing to want. But, the thing which bothers me is this stigma that "we're ruined" because of increased CO2. Look at where humans are living right now. Deserts? No problem. Tropical areas? No problem. Tundra and arctic? No problem. We're one of the most adaptable species this world has ever seen, and we're worried about a changing world ruining us? PUH-LEEZE.
More CO2 implies more plant respiration: It has been conclusively shown that increased CO2 leads to more plant respiration... up to a point. Nitrogen is a BIG limiting factor in those reactions. So, don't assume that the biosphere will be able to counteract all this. And, in fact, the whole carbon-climate system feedback is an area of VERY active research. In fact, it is well known that this is one of the most important areas of climate change, but its magnitude is SO incredibly unknown (depending on the model and parameterizations you use, you can get 2000-2100 temperature increases from anywhere between 1 and 7 degrees Celsius). There are SO many different feedback mechanisms in the atmosphere that trying to even determine what MIGHT happen is fuzzy at best. Another pair of model runs I once saw found a very impressive bifurcation point in their biosphere/atmosphere interaction scheme. By very minutely tweaking a parameter that dealt with plant growth probabilities, they were able to go between a state where the Amazon basin dried up significantly and became grasslands and another state where the Amazon rain forest slowly became wetter and wetter to the point of being a rain forest/swamp. Insomuch one can believe these parameterizations, it's amazing that a little change like that could produce such entirely differing results.
Sun's effect: As for the article, I haven't read it, since that's been hypothesized for a while. But, the problem, from what I remember, is that the error bars on measuring solar power are larger than any of these trends, meaning that there's a possible chance that there is no trend, just errors. However, that could have changed since the last I've heard about it. *shrugs.*
(Disclaimer: Yes, I'm an atmospheric scientist. Yes, I know a lot about this particular subject. No, I'm not studying climate interactions, but we just had two colloquia on climate studies: carbon-climate interactions and cloud/moisture feedbacks.)
-Jellisky
... remind yourself of our nuclear prowess!
;) They give us storm chasers something to remember if we don't see anything significant during that day's chase.)
http://www.ci.kimball.ne.us/gotte_park.htm
(I've visited both this park and Carhenge. Terrific pit stops for travellers and storm chasers.
-Jellisky
Will always hate the floppy. I helped out in my high school's library/computer lab all the time in the early 90's. Floppies were everywhere. For Bob's sake, I still have my floppy case filled with 100 floppies in my closet (collecting dust). I hate them because there was no reliability in floppies. I remember doing an informal study of floppy disks with the library staff. We found that about 20% of the floppies would have at least one serious block failure within 3 months of a newly opened pack, almost no matter what manufacturer we looked at. (Very informal... this was not a scientific study, but still highlights why I hate them.)
I got quite good at using some Mac utilities to dump some people's word processing documents off of corrupted blocks into a new text document so that they didn't have to retype the whole thing. (We had a good sized lab of Macs and ClarisWorks was the word processor of choice.) Of course, a big section in the middle would be gone, but that's still better than nothing. And in a smallish high school of 600-700 students, I was doing this about once a day, every day, so it was common enough that I ended up hating the floppy.
As for the comments currently up, I can see the "problems" with dropping the floppy. But, do we really want to be shackled to this antiquated technology forever? Granted, there aren't many decent alternatives (even though I REALLY like the USB keychain storage ideas), but, for Bob's sake, people, it's not like you can't put a floppy on, if you really need it.
The point is, without some pushing, people will be content on using these old floppy disks, which given current technology, are absolutely terrible forms of media. I applaud Dell for pushing this a bit, since it encourages us to either work with some current, better solutions... or maybe even... *GASP!*... develop a replacement that is better. Maybe, given the void created by the loss of the floppies, those USB storage keychain thingies will drop significantly in price and become the new floppy... or maybe CD-RW technology will become more ubiquitous and transparent...? The point is that someone (a major player, not just Apple, who never had to worry about BIY BIOS issues or whatnot) had to step forward and just push the others into looking at the floppy problem. It's a bold step, and I hope that it really pushes us out of using these stupid floppies.
-Jellisky
-floppy-free (and bad block free) since 1998...
Ah, but you point out the crux of my argument. There is no contradiction there.
...
But, it all comes down to the definition of "average". Is it "average" compared to everyone who is currently in the class? Or "average" compared to everyone who has taken the class? Or "average" compared to anyone who could take the class? Or maybe "average" compared to "average Joe-Blow person in the world"? etc., etc., etc.
The point I want to make is that what sort of grading system and how subjective the grader wants to be should be a subjective decision made by the professor themself. It can depend on the subject material, the professor's test/homework writing style, the professor's tendencies, etc. That means that any "set" grading system will, most undoubtedly, be "unfair". But, whatever system is decided on, should be explained completely to the students as part of the introductory material for that class. As in real life, there are always different expectations for different tasks... why should school grading systems be any different?
-Jellisky
> How is the source of the money for your tution related to the grade you earn?
--------------------
The source of the money is the grants which your advisor supports you on. In other words, it is expected that you are working to go to school. In our department, it is much more like an apprenticeship than a typical college experience.
In that way, since the graduate school has their regulations and we must follow them, we bend the rules inside the department. Since unlike many other students, the department has put money into each student. So, the philosophy is to make sure that a student will pass unless there are serious doubts about the quality of the student to do the work that is required of them. You see, if the student doesn't do their work, then the grant which pays them and others can be revoked.
In that way, yes, I agree... it's ugly and is "rule bending". But it's really only rule bending in a way that, really, is pointless in our field. GPA in graduate school in atmospheric science is almost always one of the most silly things to look at for a future employer, and I'm sure it's similar in many other fields. Employers know that GPA in this field in grad school is bunk. And I believe that many employers of even undergrad graduates feel the same way. There's nothing standard about it in the first place... and any fool who thinks there is is exactly that... a fool. Curricula change between schools and courses, even between years and faculty at the same school. There are just so many differences, that GPA should never be really thought of as a fair indicator of future potential.
For us, I know that many faculty here would love to give out other grades, but it really doesn't matter to them at this point. Grades are not a decent indicator by this point.
------------------
> As my grandpappy used to say, if you want to send a message, use Western Union. If a student is doing poor work then a professor has many means of conveying their concerns. Grades are not a private means of coded communication between the professor and the student, they're a matter of academic record indended to indicate a student's competence and ability.
------------------
Almost no student who gets a C doesn't know well beforehand that they're getting it. Because of the other issues involved in giving a C, it ends up being exactly what you say: a record intended to indicate their ability or competence in that subject. In other words, a message, not just to the already aware student, but to anyone else who sees that record and knows what that C means (which are a large number of employers familiar with this system).
... sometimes there are bad.
In my undergraduate institution (Valparaiso University), there were a good number of C's and lower given out, especially in the lower level science classes. Yes, there were often more A's and B's given out, but those were because the distribution tended to be skewed to a majority doing well. (Bimodal distributions were common, so the top group got A's and B's while the other got lower grades.) And yes, in some of the higher level classes, not a single C or lower was given out, even in math classes.
Grading systems SHOULD be subjective in nature. It's an argument of a professor trying to say how good a student is in that particular subject.
I consider all the grades I've gotten to be fair. I've considered the grades that friends of mine have gotten in the same class to be fair. Yes, even in the classes without a single C, those were fair. In those cases, the class often worked together... we were all about the same in our understanding and comprehension of the subject matter. There were some that were a little better and some that were a little worse, but many times it was tough to say that one of us was truly better than the others. So, it only made sense that we all got about the same grades; I think the final distribution was 1 A-, 2 B+, 3 B, 1 B-.
One thing that people forget is that in many majors in many schools, the students tend to be similar in their aptitude. It's due to the admissions tendencies of the school and the interests of the students. By the time you get to the higher-level classes, the only students taking them are the ones who tend to be good at the subject anyway. Is it really fair to give an F to that one B- student who answered most of the questions in class with a good understanding of the material, just a little less than the rest of us, just because the "lowest" student should be given an F?
So, it only makes sense that sometimes (and frequently in higher-level classes) a classroom will be filled with students who all understand the material and show potential. A professor just can't toss out an F or D if people all seemingly understand the material and have obviously learned it. How did they fail?
Then, you get to graduate schools like the one I'm in (Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University). It is understood that a C is almost never given out in a class here. Why?
First, the graduate school has this policy that any graduate student must hold a 3.0 GPA at all times. Since our department pays for the students' tuitions, we represent an investment for them. So, unless there is a reason to give out a C (like an obviously sub-par student), it is foolish to give out those low grades since it ends up being a waste of money for the department. They've put money into each of us, so why should they disqualify us by holding the "average student = C" mantra over us? It makes no sense because of that silly graduate school 3.0 GPA policy.
That doesn't mean that C's aren't given out. But they're all about sending messages to the student... "Are you sure you should be doing this kind of work?" Since the department pays for the students to take classes (and our advisors pay us off their research grants to do research also), they expect us to pass those classes. B's are now the "pass" grade, while A's are the "good" grade. C's (and D's) are the "message" grades. It's just shifting everything up to make sure that any money spent on students isn't wasted.
This whole "story" smells of nothing but a reporter trying to make a story out of a subject that looks simple, but is SO much more complex than it looks. In other words, this reporter needs to do more research into the real reasons WHY grades seem inflated. Frequently, in a case-by-case basis, there are good reasons for every grade that is given out. People need to remember that the "average student = C" idea isn't bad, but that "average" is a subjective idea.
-Jellisky
I love those simple games... the ones that make me focus and think for about a half hour or less. Tetris, Bust A Move (and other Snood-type variants), Tetris Attack (and other variants), Bejeweled, Nisqually, Glines, any of those Yahoo Games word games... all of those get some significant playing time during a standard week from me.
:)
But that's not to say that the more complex games don't get playing time from me. The Civilization series, the Final Fantasy series, Imperialism, the Diablo series... all of those also get played regularly on my computer/console.
The big point, though, is that each game fills a different type of gaming and entertainment niche for me. Both will have markets in the world of gaming.
But, I contend that making those "simple" games, is, as the author pointed out, probably harder than making the more "complex" games. Kind of an oxymoron at first glance, but if you think about it, it makes perfect sense.
A "simple" game must have few controls and those that it does have should be almost immediately obvious in nature. This severe limitation in design isn't overly restrictive, since a simple game will have simple rules, by definition.
But where a simple game is difficult is in the rules of the game. A simple game's rules must be flexible enough that there is no trivial strategy for putting up good scores or winning. The rules must, however, be simple enough that, in reality, they should be able to fit on a simple splash screen. The gameplay should be fluid and usually ever-changing, allowing for natural planning ahead and strategy building. Lastly, skill, not luck, should dominate the gameplay.
Taking these all into account, I can see why there aren't all that many of these simple games. That's not an easy design paradigm, in the least. But, simple games will never really get too much recognition, since they don't really need to. I think the authors of such games often realize that quite quickly. The market is there, but it remains quiet since it doesn't take much time or money to make such a game. So, the ideas can be coded up by an amateur or a professional or two, tested by a few of their friends, and put out for the world to enjoy. Not much infrastructure or capital or time needed for that, is there?
So, keep giving me both types of games. I'll gladly take both.
-Jellisky
> Give us a break too. If Apple didn't have enormously fat profit margins on hardware it'd be dead tomorrow.
Now, let's imagine that Apple decides, all of a sudden, that all OS X code is GPL. Doesn't affect their hardware sales one bit, right?
Wrong. All of a sudden, everyone knows exactly what is put into their OS to help restrict the machines it can run on, right? And suddenly, everything that gives them any advantages in selling those machines goes "poof"!
Don't forget that their hardware and software are intimately tied together. Release all the secrets on one side and the whole situation can be compromised. Apple can't exist as a pure hardware company... Apple can't exist as a pure software company... they must exist as a complete computer system company. It's a very unique situation, which will almost always fully prevent them from being "free software" pioneers. They realize that as soon as they do, they die. What kind of company would sign their own suicide notes like that?
Apple will never become a Microsoft since they have to have too much control over the components of the entire computer system. This limits their growth. Imagine if Apple had 90% market share. Apple would have to produce so many computers that they'd probably become the largest manufacturer in the world by far. And that has its own incredibly unique problems. Apple's business model prevents them from being huge and monopolistic in the computer market.
Pure and simple, Apple isn't either a hardware company or a software company. Take either one of these out of the equation, and Apple dies. Apple sells the whole computer system. They don't make a separation between hardware and software, since to them, they are both parts of the whole system. Compromise control of any part of it, and their whole business is put into jeopardy.
-Jellisky
Um, not to burst your little bubble, but felines and canines tend NOT to have five major digits on four of those appendages. If you count dewclaws, many will have five on the forelegs, but none have five on the back legs. Felines and canines have only four toes on their back feet.
/is/ interesting that four and five seem to show up the most. 'Course that's probably just the "Law of Small Numbers" showing up... or something dealing with the innate symmetry that backbones tend to give (bilateral symmetry). It's just all in how you look at the problem, I guess.
'Course it
... is what FORTRAN is good for: number crunching. F77 is a perfect tool for many scientists who don't care about pointers or object oriented programming or nice graphical output subroutines or any other nice things that other programming languages have. They want something that will do some number crunching for them and won't screw up or cause problems.
FORTRAN is simple. It works like many mathematicians and scientists think it should. It meshes well with what they really want to do in a good number of cases. The level of abstraction is perfect for many of them.
FORTRAN will take a long time to die because of this. Personally, I like more real-time interpretive languages like IDL. But when it comes down to something that is pure number crunching that'll take a few hours, I'll gladly have FORTRAN. That's why so much in the sciences is written in FORTRAN, then the data is output and run through other programs to do the pretty plotting and further interpretation.
FORTRAN just works, has worked for 30+ years, and with the amount of incredibly useful code still around, will still work for decades to come. Granted, I don't necessarily like some of the proposed changes, but as long as everything works like it did before with F77 code, I think no one will (or should) mind.
-Jellisky
'Twas a very interesting evolution of the "hole", I must admit. Looks like a good fluid dynamics experiment gone unstable to me.
A quick summary of why the ozone hole exists:
- During polar winters, the solar insolation (amount of light from the sun) goes to zero. Since the photochemical reaction by ozone on UV light is no longer there, the stratosphere begins to cool around the poles. This leads to no ozone being produced or destroyed. (Ozone, in the stratosphere, requires light to be created in the first place.)
- This cooling leads to the formation of a very strong vortex by an atmospheric "law" called thermal wind. This vortex tends to be incredibly strong, usually on the order of 50 m/s (112 mph). This vortex usually covers the entire polar region.
- Given the strength of this vortex, very little mixing occurs between contents inside the vortex and outside the vortex. So, as time progresses, the already present chlorine and flourine compounds in the vortex have time to react with the ozone and deplete it noticably (since the vortex doesn't allow the ozone from the lit-up areas of the globe to mix in and refresh the levels).
- As the sun comes back up in polar spring, the photochemical reactions begin again, further reducing the levels of ozone. However, these reactions warm up the middle of the vortex. This warming tends to break down the vortex quite quickly and allows the ozone from the middle latitudes mix in and refresh the ozone levels.
Now, all this happens in both hemispheres during the appropriate winter months. But the Antarctic hole tends to be stronger than the Arctic one for one very simple reason: land. Topography helps set up large-scale waves in the atmosphere's flow. These waves can influence the polar vortex by essentially perturbing it. These perturbations can then grow (depending on the properties of the vortex) and become unstable, leading to a total vortex breakdown. Those events are commonly seen in the Arctic vortex since there are three large mountain ranges in the Northern Hemisphere to excite planetary-scale waves. But around Antarctica, there aren't any significant mountain ranges to excite these waves, so the vortex tends not to be perturbed significantly.
But, it appears this season, that something is causing a very strong wavenumber-2 perturbation (wavenumber-n perturbations have n crests and troughs around a latitude circle). That's pretty obvious from the elliptical early evolution and, then, the eventual breakdown into two lobes. What actually "caused" this amplification is an excellent question. Perhaps this year's vortex was inherrently unstable to wavenumber-2 perturbations? Perhaps this season's El Nino had some odd effect on it? (Doubt that, but it's an interesting idea.) Either way, this event will be studied quite heavily the next few years, I'm sure. (Perhaps even by myself at some point.)
-Jellisky
... but it's not limited to engineers. Many scientists are the same. Story time...
In undergrad, I worked with a physicist and an engineer on some Fourier analysis homework. I was a math major (and a meteorology major also). (No, this is not one of those jokes.)
I distinctly remember once when we reduced a problem to a very simple integral: the integral from 0 to 2*PI of 3 x cubed minus 4 x, dx. What do both of them do to finish this problem? Pull out the calculators and begin to type it in... I just watch in awe... they didn't even want to attempt this basic integral without the "comfort blanket" that the calculator gave them. Never mind that thanks to a typo one of them got the wrong answer.
Even in my field (atmospheric science), the "simulation bug" is prevalent. They're great tools, but it's rather annoying when you ask one of these simulation people to explain something that they're pointing out using basic physics that they frequently can't, even when the basic theory has been there for decades.
Scientists and engineers need that strong mathematics background. I personally think that calculators should be outlawed from classrooms until high school. People are frequently too dependent on those tools currently (had one guy in math help session in undergrad who used a calculator to figure out 3 minus 2... I kid you not). You always should learn the basics and the hard way before being given the tools for the easier ways. Anything else is bass-ackward.
-Jellisky
... is the plight of the Webcasters, which was briefly touched on in the article. There are a lot of great webcast stations out there (just got introduced to radioio.com... wow.) that are going to probably have to shut down their doors due to the excessive royalty fees that the silly Librarian of Congress set for them.
... = $0.33...
That's not to say that such fees shouldn't exist. It's just that they are excessive, given many webcasters' revenues.
The real issue here to me is the idea of paying for services. Many people are perfectly willing to pay for services, as long as the services add value for the users. I loved Napster (when I could get it to work on my campus)... the lure of free music was impressive. I've used Kazaa a bit, so I can say that free stuff is great... but even with Kazaa, there's the problem of not getting what you wanted. I remember downloading a song on Napster that I had been searching for for weeks... only to find out that the song I downloaded was a terrible cover of the original.
As the article points out, consumers will pay for something if it is worth it. I've seriously considered eMusic a few times... it sounds like a pretty good deal. Likewise, if someone started up a webcasted radio station that "required" payment for listening, I would think about it (or in the radioio.com case, I'd pull that credit card right out and pay up, as long as it was reasonable... like $20 or so for a year). I have no trouble paying for entertainment or anything else, even if I can find it free elsewhere... especially if paying will get me something extra.
It's all about value... I can either spend time on Kazaa and take my chances, or I can pay some reasonable bit of money for a guaranteed bit of entertainment. Seriously, this just makes sense.
-Jellisky
(Did anyone else notice the terrible math in the article?
"I get at least 30 albums a month or so at 10 bucks a month. That's 10 cents each."
Ummm... $10.00 / 30 albums != $0.10
*sighs* Where have the basic arithmetic skills of people gone?)
Maybe it's because the creationists can just play the "God is all-powerful, so anything is possible" card at any time. Hard to poke holes in a Biblical theory which has no limitations, isn't it? You don't know how many times I've gotten the "That's one of the mysteries of God" answers. Sorry, but for some people who don't want to think that answer may be enough, but it's not enough for some of us thinking peoples.
I think I would prefer having a world that changes with new information that I have to think about rather than one where I'm told what to think by a 2000 to 4000-year old book. Maybe I like thinking about life, the universe, and everything more than living a blissful, yet ignorant, life where I can "know everything" by reading a book that hasn't changed in the last 1500 years, at least.
Maybe it's this rigidity of the typical Creationist that many people find unsatisfying. To them, the world is already figured out, why bother studying it? Why can't you just live your life according to what this book says? I consider this a pure stagnation of all thought and progress. Science is based off of experimentation and observation... new ways of observing things give new ideas and new theories. Science is not stagnant, and that is one of its strengths. The conservative minds that Creationists tend to have don't like things changing... a continuum is something that Bible-thumpers and Creationists can't handle. Everything has to be discrete and in nice, easy to understand pieces. Things don't happen gradually; they just happen. This flies in the face of so many things that people experience in the world... coffee doesn't spontaneously change to room temperature, clouds and weather just don't spontaneously appear, new lives aren't just brought into creation in adult sizes. That's why creationism seems like the odd man out. Yeah, you can play the "everything" card in God; that's fine. But that's a weak logical argument. Hard to have an intelligent argument with a person who "knows everything", isn't it?
-Jellisky
... weather modeling, for one. Here in the US, NCEP (National Centers for Environmental Prediction) runs all the forecast weather models on an IBM-SP (used to run on a Cray C90, I think). In Europe, the ECMWF model is run on a Fujitsu supercomputer, I think.
Models for plasma dynamics and astrophysics are also run on these heavy-duty machines. I'm sure others have had some experience running other things, but I know that the NCEP IBM-SP gets a workout at least 2 times a day running at least four different weather models that have average runtimes around an hour each.
-Jellisky
... think that this was so wrong of Apple. Looking at the screen shot of xtunes on their own webpage, the similarities are very striking, including the top bar (which copies nearly identically the top bar of iTunes... compare xtunes screenshot to iTunes screenshot).
Apple did a nice thing by warning them first, instead of just taking out a full subpeona and outright attacking them. Maybe they could have done the really nice thing and not have lawyers do the contacting... but with lawyers, it's hard to ignore them and you know that they're most probably really from Apple, not some weirdo trying to scare you. That said, the similarities between the two are very striking, almost an pure copy outside some icon changes.
Hopefully the sumi people can just let this pass and make some good changes to their interface. I must say, as an iTunes user, that there are bits of the interface which I wouldn't mind to see improved, including adding some additional buttons which I used quite frequently on my old MP3 player, Macast.
-Jellisky
... with FORTRAN, I will echo what others have said, plus add a bit.
Yes, FORTRAN is incredibly nice for what it was designed to do: calculate. It is quite quick at it, and the compilers for the 77 version, as noted by others, are incredibly well optimized for this purpose.
FORTRAN is the code of choice for anything that requires a huge bit of mathematical calculations. When you're working with weather models, and it takes 20 hours just to run the FORTRAN code, you begin to notice when that extra overhead the other copilers put in when it increases run times by hours.
That said, if you've programmed before in other languages, be prepared to be sitting there complaining about how terribly FORTRAN is set up. One of my mantras about FORTRAN which keeps me sane is: "The people who made FORTRAN were obviously screwy in the head." Of course, that is said entirely tongue-in-cheek, since the language was "setup" before I was even born. ('Course, not long before, but still before.)
There's a lot to hate about FORTRAN from modern programming, but if you're willing to bite the bullet and accept it for what it can do, then you probably will find it incredibly useful in the long run. FORTRAN is perfect for long calculations (think hour-long, at least), but it is terrible at many other things.
As for the 90 version, it has some nice features, but, overall, you can do a lot of what 90 has in 77 with only a few extra lines of code. Plus, from what I understand, the only decent 90 compilers are commercial (i.e. not free), so factor that into your decision.
So, yes, FORTRAN is ugly code... yes, FORTRAN is terribly constructed given current languages... but, it does its job admirably well. And if anyone wants to complain with me that the difference in running time between C and FORTRAN is only 10%, let me give you a program that'll run for 30 hours in FORTRAN and I'll gladly have those 3 hours extra I just saved.
-Jellisky
... the fact that many terrestrial impacts have only one ring, not many. It's an interesting question as to how the "extra" rings come about.
For an example of the difference here, try dropping a decent-sized rock on a beach. The crater it creates has only the one ridge (if any). So, how do you set up those multiple rings... especially since it appears that they have approximately the same amplitudes.
I could be wrong, but that seems to be the biggest difference... and my semi-uneducated guess is that it is most likely due to how close the impacted material is to a fluid (i.e. compare solid rock and sand), since fluids let deformation waves like these to propogate easier than solids. But, that's just a guess.
(To mod someone down or reply... 'tis better to contribute than mod down, I guess.)
Weather modification is one of those topics that atmospheric scientists tend to avoid.
Why?
Simply put, it's not known if it even really works. Sometimes cloud seeding does work (see Gagin and Neumann, 1981); sometimes it has the opposite effect than desired or none at all (see Tukey et al., 1978; Kerr, 1982). There was a large bit of debate as to what effects cloud seeding really has. Let's not mention that there are also, what they call "windows of opportunity" where it is hypothesized that the seeding can even have any semblence of an effect.
Much of the research in the 60's and 70's on cloud seeding was fairly inconclusive, at best. Certain bits of weather modification make sense (for example, reducing the potential sizes of hailstones), but just the basic tenets of "can we control where storms will rain" and "microclimate change" like the Chinese seem to be talking about, are all in the scope of chaotic behavior.
Cloud mechanisms are incredibly nonlinear, so even a small change in the environment can have totally unforseen circumstances. And whether or not you can actually even GET a measurable response from the cloud is another matter altogether.
I applaud the Chinese for reigniting interest in this field (which has been mostly dead since the early 80's), but I wouldn't bet the farm on it working as planned. For the Olympics, the couple tens to hundreds of millions of dollars needed to run such programs could pay off in the end... but for many other situations, the cost does not justify the risky means. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if this whole endeavor falls flat in the end, though. The available data is very ambiguous about the effects, and I really don't see much else that could justify the amount of "positive vibes" the article transmitted.
Now taking bets on how many events are drowned out by a typhoon that they decided to seed that makes an "unexpected" turn...
-Jellisky
Well, it depends on what you're talking about...
It is well-known that near the equator and near the surface, the winds are generally light. But there is what's called the "Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone", an area of convergent winds. You can see that on a satellite picture of the western Pacific (look at the bottom edge, near the equator, obviously...). The latitude of this zone varies by season, moving always toward the summer hemisphere. It is an important component in what is called the "Hadley cell", which is an important circulation since it carries a great deal of heat from the tropics to the mid-latitudes and helps explain the placement of the major deserts. A good discussion of the very general "General Circulation of Earth's Atmosphere" can be found here, however some of the more interesting "facts" in it are currently in debate (for example, the existence of the Ferrel cell... the Hadley cell is definitely there, though).
So, the tropics aren't totally wind-free and are actually quite important to what happens through the rest of the world. I believe that it's been calculated that the average residence time of an air parcel in any one hemisphere is about 2 to 4 years, meaning that most parcels travel between hemispheres decently frequently.
Other factors to include is what's called the "Quasi-Biennial Oscillation" or QBO. This is strictly a lower stratospheric phenomenon (30 hPa is a pressure with sea level around 1000 hPa... 30 hPa is somewhere around 30 km above sea level.)
For some info on the QBO, check out:
http://www.atmos.ucla.edu/~cwhung/qbo.html
http://tao.atmos.washington.edu/data_sets/qbo/
Hope this helps. In short, a balloonist could be able to cross the equator. But you'd want to avoid it since the equator is normally pretty stormy.
-Jellisky
They're in the Campus West Shopping Center, just, amazingly, west of main campus, near the corner of Elizabeth and Shields. They're also soon to be moving just a little ways down Elizabeth, in the same building as Panhandler's Pizza. (Great... a pizza joint and anime renting joint right next to each other.)
Definitely a great place for anyone going to Colorado State University. They have a very large selection (as large as a big Blockbusters comedy section, for example) on both VHS and DVD. They also have a good selection of anime knick-knacks and some quite knowledgable personnel.
-Jellisky
While I must admit that this discovery is not all that spectacular, I would like to address your point of view. First of all, what exactly is "science that benefits humanity"? How do you define something as nebulous as that? In my opinion, all science benefits humanity, though not all of it directly. Even this research benefits humanity by giving us insight into how traces of water that float through galaxies might have been formed. The thing about pure science is all about ideas and unlocking truths. For example, you could look at a huge amount of the pure mathematics out there and deem it totally useless... much of it seems to be so contained within the mathematics field that it could seem totally useless to the normal layperson. But then, a smart scientist sees a connection to this higher level mathematics and his or her problem, and makes the full connection. This scientist now has ALL the available tools that the generations of mathematicians have put into this previously "useless" field. Now, thanks to all those previous mathematicians and people who put everything together, the weather forecaster now has the tools to better improve their forecasts, giving you the time that you might not have had before to run to your basement before that tornado touches down a few hundred yards from your house, demolishing it. The point is that one cannot know how "useful" or beneficial pure scientific research really can be. Did you know that one of the most interesting results in early hurricane forecasting (Eliassen, 1951) was motivated not by hurricane applications, but by planetary-scale flow ideas? True, it is nice to focus on research that will directly influence humanity... but one quickly finds that by working on generalizations of their specific problems, they can contribute so much more to humanity since their work will end up being used not only in their own work, but in the works of others. It's this basic research, this pure science, that gives tools to so many people. Now, let's also not forget that, in science, one observation may lead to a hundred questions, and each question, once answered, can lead to a hundred more. And soon, you realize that different people are all asking the same questions, but from totally different sources... then you start putting resources and manpower together... So, while this observation may not seem too useful right off hand, allow yourself to ask the questions that might follow... like, "Where did this water come from? Did it come from the fusion within the star? And if so, how did it truly form?" Now, let's assume that the answer is that it did come from fusion within the star. Then, the people working on building fusion reactors ask, "Well, are we going to produce water in our reactors? And if so, what do we have to worry about with this incredibly important molecule floating around now?" This leads to design innovations that might not have been thought up before, which then leads to safer and more efficient fusion reactors. This is all entirely possible... and was first spurred on by this, as you call it, "masturbatory gee-whiz hobbyist garbage". Granted, yes, it would be nice to throw more money at those direct-application problems. But, we've spent billions of dollars already on heart disease alone, for example, and are we really anywhere closer to "curing" it? No, since we found out rather quickly that it's an environmental problem (i.e., diet, exercise, genetics) that each individual has to worry about for themselves, for the most part. Meanwhile, we throw a few tens of millions at some other sciences and get some amazing things in return, i.e. superconduction (which has yet to come fully to fruition). So, chill, man. Pure sciences are needed as much as their immediately beneficial counterparts. -Jellisky