Can you throw out ballpark numbers on the difference in energy expenditure percentage of, say, thirty minutes brisk walking and an hour of running per day? How high can one realistically raise the PA percentage? I hear the rule of thumb "thirty minutes of aerobic activity per day" often, and slightly below this level (running for me) is close to where I begin to feel "in shape". Beyond that basic level, there are a few other levels of "in shape-ness" that come with longer and longer workouts. I suspect the human body is better suited for much higher levels of activity than thirty minutes per day; running research suggests that the body continues to improve aerobically until workouts reach about two and a half hours. But of course the 8-5 office job is not very conducive to such things.
One thing I have noticed is that the better shape I'm in, the better I eat. I need to be running 50-60 minutes per day to really feel it, but even at lower levels fast food starts to sound pretty gross, and a plate of mixed vegetables sounds delicious. Since the first time this happened, I prefer water to soda, and this has carried into the not-in-shape times. My personal hypothesis is that my body craves the vitamins and minerals it needs (I don't take vitamin supplements), but others have suggested that my body prefers healthy foods simply because I was raised on a healthy diet...
Take a long lunch a couple times a week and go for a run. Work out in the
mornings or after work (yes, I know this is tough on an 8 hour + 2 commuting
schedule, but not impossible). Bike, run, or walk to work if cicrumstances are
favorable. You mention the bus; is it possible to bike for say, 20-30 mins
each way and then pick up the bus for the rest of the commute? Or just get out
a few stops early and walk home? Get a friend to motivate you to play
raquetball or tennis on weekends. 30 minutes of running (or presumably any
aerobics) say two times during the week with two hour sessions on the weekends
will do wonders (building up slowly is the key to injury prevention though;
don't do too much too soon if you are just starting out).
I've come to enjoy running over the years and have been grateful that
someone taught me how to do it when I was younger. I know a lot of people say
"running? ugh", but if I stick with it long enough to get "in shape", then it's
amazing. I like it because there is so little equipment (I've even learned to
go without shoes in many places); a gym is not required, but it doesn't matter
what exercise you do as long as you find a way to stick with it. When I get
lazy and stop exercising, I start to feel tired and even more lazy in a
downward spiral. When I finally drag myself back to exercise, I feel better
even if my schedule has less downtime because of it. It's definitely worth it
for me.
Can I bug you for some sources on that? I've skimmed the abstracts of a few
studies on, for example, Finnish ex-Olympic athletes, and didn't see anything
like "elite level running is definitely bad", just "they didn't really have
more knee pain than non-elites, but may have more visible damage". Contact
sports did not fare as well as running. A study I've seen on recreational
level runners suggests that it does not accelerate osteoarthritis compared to
non-runners, but I'm curious to see anything about elite runners. Thanks
I understand GEGL will be the new backend for GIMP, supporting deeper color among other things. A friend closer to GIMP development mentioned to me that it may be ready for GIMP sometime this year, but neither the GEGL website or quick searches turn up anything on that topic. A 2003 thread stated that a move to GEGL would be very gradual so as not to necessitate major rewrites.
(This isn't directed at you, just poor design) Readers may not like to
scroll, but they hate waiting for page loads even more. At least that's what
Edward Tufte implied at a conference. Also see discussion
at Tufte's website. Some interesting points raised. I suspect that the
real issue is the page loading speed, rather than the action required to get
there. Once loaded, scrolling is instantaneous. Paging could be, but would
require different formats (e.g. PDF) or cleverer browsers (I thought I heard
something about a Firefox plugin that could convert "next page" links into a
single large page?).
I never understood the "next page" obsession that various websites have. I
assume it's a way to fit more advertising in a given article, but why not,
instead of splitting articles over multiple pages, simply insert more
advertising on a single page? Are publishers afraid multiple ads will not load
immediately? Surely loading an entire new page is worse than one more flash
box? Do contracts require a given ad to have its own page? I'm curious.
Thanks. Skip the whole life/not life thing and get to the point; I'm more interested in your reasoning than a definition of "alive" that justifies that reasoning.
Also note that "average and Median values take in consideration only working
tests (they exclude âToo longâ(TM) programs as well)", so the averages for Cardinal and Rubinious with many errors are of dubious utility.
A cheap parlor trick: ask someone to give you the results of 100 coin tosses, either genuine or fabricated. It's easy to distinguish the genuine from the fabricated as one hundred truly random coin tosses will produce a run of six heads or tails something like 70-80% of the time, but a fabricated sample will likely lack this because it doesn't "look random enough". The point is that if something is expected to be random, then it's also expected to produce runs that if taken individually would be unlikely. I don't know anything about PEAR's methodology or data; the point is just that true random events are expected to appear nonrandom from time to time. An earlier post suggested that PEAR was extracting these runs and using them as evidence. If true, that sounds like bad science, but i'm not really curious enough to check the data for myself.
This summary got me thinking about how one decides whether or not to trust a
given physical bank. Creating a fake bank building would be quite difficult,
so the physical building, proper signage, staff, and the presense of other bank
customers present are good signs that a given branch is legitimate. These are
all either trivial to duplicate or impossible to see on a website. A website
has two things that are less easily forged: the domain name and the SSL
encryption.
The domain name can be made very confusing as with bankofamerica.com vs.
bankofamerica.com.phising-site.info and other URI obscuring techniques. One
way to reduce confusion would be to display the domain name perhaps on a
separate line, or perhaps with the last two or three components highlighted in
some way... Or completely change the browser interface. Take XKCD's wonderful map of the Internet.
This is the browser start page. Type in "bankofamerica.com". The browser
performs a DNS lookup, and then zooms in to the appropriate area of the map.
As it zooms closer, the bank customer might see some familiar neighboring
websites pass by. The customer learns the virtual but fixed location of the
bank's website, and has a way to find that site again without using a search
engine or typing anything: simply zoom in to the relevant area and the browser
will flag sites you've visited in the past. A phising site is hopefully not
likely to have an IP address near the bank's.
Does this have a chance of working? Many sites have multiple servers, and I
imagine the largest have servers distributed very distantly on any map of the
Internet; a customer might learn a few different locations, but what is he to
think when a new location comes up?. IPv6 would also present a challenge with
its vastly larger address space.
As for SSL, the small lock icon or a yellow address bar never struck me as
being very noticeable. There are two key pieces of information a bank or other
store customer would like to know: are my transactions encrypted (well, I would
like to know this) and is this really my bank? I haven't come up with a good
idea for this one, other than perhaps an animated cable connecting the browser
text back to a small and zoomed out map of the internet to represent the
connection between the browser and the remote computer. An unencrypted
connection might be indicated similar to the address bar with color or a lock
icon, but would be an animated during download or upload progress to make it
more clear what exactly was being sent to the remote computer. As for trusting
that the remote site is actually my bank, I wish browsers (and I think this may
exist for some) had a way to personally trust a certificate, and I wish banks
would include certificate fingerprints on their documents similar to physical
addresses and telephone numbers, but this suffers from the same complexity
problems as PGP.
Well, what say ye? I would love a browser that behaved like a zoomable map
of the Internet, even if only for novelty's sake.
A while back at the grocery store, I was offered the loyalty card. The
cashier handed me a card and an application and said "fill this out at home and
mail it in". Since I already had the card, I didn't bother mailing anything
in, and the card is still working three months later. They can track my
purchases, but only to an anonymous number. Of course, I pay with my credit
card so they already have my name anyway...
I don't know about printing on plastic stock, but I do know some plastic
money (Mexico's I believe) includes transparent windows which, like holograms,
would be difficult to reporduce with only a printer. I'm sure someday when 3D
printers are common plastic money will be easy to copy...
I was told by someone on a committe to design US money that plastic money is disliked by the treasury because it lasts too long (~8 years?) and thus takes too long to change over to new currency (seems a bit silly; I thought banks traded worn out bills for new ones; any reason they couldn't turn in non-worn out bills?). It was also explained that colorful money (particularly the new US ten and twenty dollar bills) is very easy to counterfeit on an inkjet printer. The colorful bills were an attempt to stop photocopied money but were designed when color printing was rare; it turns out that the bright colors, when reporduced accurately by an inkjet, make a cashier less likely to notice a funny texture or other oddities. Single offence counterfeit on home color inkjets is one of the largest sources of counterfeit.
I completely agree about the difficulties for the blind, and the dollar coin. And the penny should go.
Oh the humanity! There was a time, as the summary implies, when one could pay with half-pennies and quarter-pennies (in Britain at least). A loaf of bread cost a dime at some point in the past. Below twenty cents (dime + 100%), there are only twenty possible prices, thus the price of some loaves was probably a little higher than it should have been. Today a loaf is around $2. There are 200 different prices between $3 and $1 ($2 +/- 100%). Do we really need this fine grained pricing? Why didn't we need it in the past? Axeing the penny gives you about 40 different prices in that range. If the penny is more trouble than it's worth, let's ditch it. Keep in mind that prices are already rounded to the nearest cent, so you're already paying tenths of a penny more or a less. Also keep in mind that price is determined by what people are willing to pay. I understand Austrailia has done away with the penny, final price is rounded up or down at checkout, and the economy has not collapsed.
And in order to find out if it's truly safe in the long term, someone is
going to have to take some risk. How many things have been introduced not yet
completely proven safe but are still regarded as safe today? The bad list
includes asbestos, mercury, various radioactive products, etc. and looks pretty
grim. I can't whip off a good list so easily since it doesn't make news, but I
bet it includes some mundane things such as fire, raspberries, and potatoes
(native to Peru and long thought to be poisonous by Europeans) as well as high
tech stuff.
It's tragic when we mess up big, but it's our nature to be curious. Some
will be more curious than others. But given a new substance or process similar
to more well know substances or processes with no known or obvious dangers,
it's considered ethical to proceed with using it. Of course, some classes of
substances demand more caution than others. Drugs are highly regulated in the
United States, the utility of which is debatable, but the regulations are a
reflection of the values of that society.
The trouble with ceramics is always catastrophic failure due to their brittleness. When they do break down, they do so in specatular fashion, sometimes blowing into pieces, and always ceasing to function. That is why auto manufacturers currently use polymer film capacitors in the inverters of hybrid cars. Despite the disadvantage of likely requiring an additional cooling loop (I think the standard auto cooling loop is around 125-150 degC while polymer film caps tend to be rated around 75-85 degC) and having much lower capacitance and thus greater bulk, a short in the capacitor ablates the electrode at the short without destroying the rest of the polymer. Thus one might have power to get to a garage rather than being stranded somewhere. I imagine similar concerns would be raised about ceramic supercapacitor batteries, but could probably be tolerated or worked around if the advantages are so great.
I moved to one of two areas in my medium sized American town with any sort of shopping within walking distance (grocery, a few cafes, various other shops). It isn't looked upon as being the "nicest" neighboorhood, but it's pretty nice, and I love being within walking distance of "stuff". I've actually been made fun of for choosing that neighboorhood and for taking my own grocery bag to the store and carrying my groceries home... Maybe it's a little jealousy, but I don't quite get it.
The rest of town is scattered neighboorhoods in between miles and miles of four to six roads lined with parking lots, strip malls, and chain restaurants like so many other urban areas. Blech.
As I understand, semiconductor conductivity is dominated by the number of
charge carriers, not by their mobility (as in metals), and the number of charge
carriers generally decreases with temperature due to lack of thermal exitation.
Does this becomes unimportant when doping is used to control the number of
charge carriers? And either way, isn't the speed of transmission fairly
constant?
Oops, I meant to add that using ffmpeg's "sameq" option produces a 2.1 Mbit/s MPEG-1 and a 1.6 Mbit/s mpeg4 file. Also, I made a Theora file at a similar bitrate (a bit lower; couldn't get the same value) using the alpha5 encoder and ffmpeg2theora. It looks nicer than the others, not having the extreme pixelated look of the other 720x480 files. I have heard some mentions of VP3/Theora smoothing the video... In this case, the smoothing seems to produce a superior looking video, but in other cases it may have a negative effect compared to MPEG-1 or mpeg4.
Is there a guide to getting the most out of MPEG-1 video? I obviously don't know much about choosing the best encoding options, but in my experience, it has been inferior (in terms of quality vs. bitrate) to both ffmpeg's mpeg4 and Theora.
I just did a very rough test using a 720x480 source file. I encoded four files, all at overall (based on filesize including mpeg-1 or avi container) bitrate of 290 kbits/s. Two were MPEG-1 video, one at 720x480, the other at 352x234. The other two were ffmpeg's mpeg4, again at 720x480 and 352x234. They were, probably stupidly, encoded using the -qscale option alone to control file size, e.g. ffmpeg -i input -vcodec mpeg1video -qscale 5 output.mpg. The qscales for the four above files were respectively 18, 5, 15, and 4. Playback using MPlayer with the nearest-neighbor software scaler at 720x480 resolution shows a very pixelated look in the 720x480 unscaled videos, and a artifact-full but non-pixelated look in the 352x234 files that MPlayer scaled back to 720x480. The 352x234 mpeg4 file appeared the highest quality, having fewer visible artifacts than the 352x234 MPEG-1 file. One big trouble with this test is the scaling algorithm acting as a filter on the low resolution files, possibly smoothing so variations. Text from a credits scene looks unsurprisingly pixelated, but the video itself looks pretty good; I expected the nearest neighbor scaler to look worse.
I was not expecting to see lower resolution win out in both MPEG-1 and mpeg4 files. Of course, ffmpeg has dozens of encoding options, and it's likely that poor options were chosen. That said, the comment about MPEG-1 video is not inconsistent with my experience, as rough and uninformed as it is.
The most recent Windows Video, RealVideo, and Sorenson video (Used by
QuickTime prior to H.264) are what I might call proprietary in that there is no
public standard. They are likely covered by patents as well. MPEG-4's AVC or
H.264 may be publically documented but is covered by patents which put free
software implementations in the same legal mud as any proprietary codec. On
the audio side, MP3 and AAC are in similar situations: publically available but
patented.
For publically available and unpatented codecs, as far as I know we've got
MPEG-1 video and MPEG-1 Layer II audio (MP2), and this only because they are so
old that patents have expired. Vorbis is a modern unpatented audio codec, and
Theora is covered by patents which have been freely licensed to the public
making it effectively patent free.
MPEG-1 suffers because it simply isn't as good in a quality vs. bitrate
sense as the modern video codecs. It's possible that bandwidth and disk size
increases could this help somewhat. MPEG-1 is also only good at
resolutions near or below 352x240, even from higher resolution source
material. However, MPEG-1 remains the most likely to be playable on a given
computer. The one additional advantage it has is that decoding may be less CPU
intensive than, say, H.264.
Ogg Theora with Vorbis audio is nice, and competitive with though inferior
to other modern codecs in terms of quality vs. bitrate. Like all the Xiph
codecs, Theora suffers from obscurity. Version 1 is not officially released,
but there are limited tools for playback but little for encoding Theora.
Xiph's QuickTime Components recently
added Theora playback to the QuickTime system (Mac and Windows). Some Theora filters for DirectShow
(Windows Media) support playback and, for the intrepid, encoding.Due to
differences between the Ogg container format and other established containers,
it has had some trouble properly interfacing with DirectShow for example, but
playback does work fairly well. Real's Helix system (Helix Player for Linux,
RealPlayer 10 on Windows) also has plugins for Theora playback and
encoding.
As an occasional dabbler in filmmaking, I release my videos in Ogg
Theora+Vorbis and MPEG-1 Video+MP2 audio. I have released versions using
MPEG-4 ASP video (DivX, XviD, ffmpeg's mpeg4) and MP3 audio, yet I lack the
necessary patent licenses for that and am somewhat reluctant to do so.
Commercial software such as DivX typically extends its patent license to its
customers for various uses (I believe Microsoft does not allow commercial use
of Windows Media Video by default).
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Can you throw out ballpark numbers on the difference in energy expenditure percentage of, say, thirty minutes brisk walking and an hour of running per day? How high can one realistically raise the PA percentage? I hear the rule of thumb "thirty minutes of aerobic activity per day" often, and slightly below this level (running for me) is close to where I begin to feel "in shape". Beyond that basic level, there are a few other levels of "in shape-ness" that come with longer and longer workouts. I suspect the human body is better suited for much higher levels of activity than thirty minutes per day; running research suggests that the body continues to improve aerobically until workouts reach about two and a half hours. But of course the 8-5 office job is not very conducive to such things.
One thing I have noticed is that the better shape I'm in, the better I eat. I need to be running 50-60 minutes per day to really feel it, but even at lower levels fast food starts to sound pretty gross, and a plate of mixed vegetables sounds delicious. Since the first time this happened, I prefer water to soda, and this has carried into the not-in-shape times. My personal hypothesis is that my body craves the vitamins and minerals it needs (I don't take vitamin supplements), but others have suggested that my body prefers healthy foods simply because I was raised on a healthy diet...
Take a long lunch a couple times a week and go for a run. Work out in the mornings or after work (yes, I know this is tough on an 8 hour + 2 commuting schedule, but not impossible). Bike, run, or walk to work if cicrumstances are favorable. You mention the bus; is it possible to bike for say, 20-30 mins each way and then pick up the bus for the rest of the commute? Or just get out a few stops early and walk home? Get a friend to motivate you to play raquetball or tennis on weekends. 30 minutes of running (or presumably any aerobics) say two times during the week with two hour sessions on the weekends will do wonders (building up slowly is the key to injury prevention though; don't do too much too soon if you are just starting out).
I've come to enjoy running over the years and have been grateful that someone taught me how to do it when I was younger. I know a lot of people say "running? ugh", but if I stick with it long enough to get "in shape", then it's amazing. I like it because there is so little equipment (I've even learned to go without shoes in many places); a gym is not required, but it doesn't matter what exercise you do as long as you find a way to stick with it. When I get lazy and stop exercising, I start to feel tired and even more lazy in a downward spiral. When I finally drag myself back to exercise, I feel better even if my schedule has less downtime because of it. It's definitely worth it for me.
Can I bug you for some sources on that? I've skimmed the abstracts of a few studies on, for example, Finnish ex-Olympic athletes, and didn't see anything like "elite level running is definitely bad", just "they didn't really have more knee pain than non-elites, but may have more visible damage". Contact sports did not fare as well as running. A study I've seen on recreational level runners suggests that it does not accelerate osteoarthritis compared to non-runners, but I'm curious to see anything about elite runners. Thanks
I understand GEGL will be the new backend for GIMP, supporting deeper color among other things. A friend closer to GIMP development mentioned to me that it may be ready for GIMP sometime this year, but neither the GEGL website or quick searches turn up anything on that topic. A 2003 thread stated that a move to GEGL would be very gradual so as not to necessitate major rewrites.
(This isn't directed at you, just poor design) Readers may not like to scroll, but they hate waiting for page loads even more. At least that's what Edward Tufte implied at a conference. Also see discussion at Tufte's website. Some interesting points raised. I suspect that the real issue is the page loading speed, rather than the action required to get there. Once loaded, scrolling is instantaneous. Paging could be, but would require different formats (e.g. PDF) or cleverer browsers (I thought I heard something about a Firefox plugin that could convert "next page" links into a single large page?).
This should be obvious, but if they annoy the readers too much, they won't be making any money.
I never understood the "next page" obsession that various websites have. I assume it's a way to fit more advertising in a given article, but why not, instead of splitting articles over multiple pages, simply insert more advertising on a single page? Are publishers afraid multiple ads will not load immediately? Surely loading an entire new page is worse than one more flash box? Do contracts require a given ad to have its own page? I'm curious.
Thanks. Skip the whole life/not life thing and get to the point; I'm more interested in your reasoning than a definition of "alive" that justifies that reasoning.
Western society is currently mostly comfortable with ending an unborn-enough human. Is that so hard to accept that you must justify it with semantics?
Also note that "average and Median values take in consideration only working tests (they exclude âToo longâ(TM) programs as well)", so the averages for Cardinal and Rubinious with many errors are of dubious utility.
A cheap parlor trick: ask someone to give you the results of 100 coin tosses, either genuine or fabricated. It's easy to distinguish the genuine from the fabricated as one hundred truly random coin tosses will produce a run of six heads or tails something like 70-80% of the time, but a fabricated sample will likely lack this because it doesn't "look random enough". The point is that if something is expected to be random, then it's also expected to produce runs that if taken individually would be unlikely. I don't know anything about PEAR's methodology or data; the point is just that true random events are expected to appear nonrandom from time to time. An earlier post suggested that PEAR was extracting these runs and using them as evidence. If true, that sounds like bad science, but i'm not really curious enough to check the data for myself.
This summary got me thinking about how one decides whether or not to trust a given physical bank. Creating a fake bank building would be quite difficult, so the physical building, proper signage, staff, and the presense of other bank customers present are good signs that a given branch is legitimate. These are all either trivial to duplicate or impossible to see on a website. A website has two things that are less easily forged: the domain name and the SSL encryption.
The domain name can be made very confusing as with bankofamerica.com vs. bankofamerica.com.phising-site.info and other URI obscuring techniques. One way to reduce confusion would be to display the domain name perhaps on a separate line, or perhaps with the last two or three components highlighted in some way... Or completely change the browser interface. Take XKCD's wonderful map of the Internet. This is the browser start page. Type in "bankofamerica.com". The browser performs a DNS lookup, and then zooms in to the appropriate area of the map. As it zooms closer, the bank customer might see some familiar neighboring websites pass by. The customer learns the virtual but fixed location of the bank's website, and has a way to find that site again without using a search engine or typing anything: simply zoom in to the relevant area and the browser will flag sites you've visited in the past. A phising site is hopefully not likely to have an IP address near the bank's.
Does this have a chance of working? Many sites have multiple servers, and I imagine the largest have servers distributed very distantly on any map of the Internet; a customer might learn a few different locations, but what is he to think when a new location comes up?. IPv6 would also present a challenge with its vastly larger address space.
As for SSL, the small lock icon or a yellow address bar never struck me as being very noticeable. There are two key pieces of information a bank or other store customer would like to know: are my transactions encrypted (well, I would like to know this) and is this really my bank? I haven't come up with a good idea for this one, other than perhaps an animated cable connecting the browser text back to a small and zoomed out map of the internet to represent the connection between the browser and the remote computer. An unencrypted connection might be indicated similar to the address bar with color or a lock icon, but would be an animated during download or upload progress to make it more clear what exactly was being sent to the remote computer. As for trusting that the remote site is actually my bank, I wish browsers (and I think this may exist for some) had a way to personally trust a certificate, and I wish banks would include certificate fingerprints on their documents similar to physical addresses and telephone numbers, but this suffers from the same complexity problems as PGP.
Well, what say ye? I would love a browser that behaved like a zoomable map of the Internet, even if only for novelty's sake.
Another: Noise, Noise, Noise by M. Colleen Gino.
A while back at the grocery store, I was offered the loyalty card. The cashier handed me a card and an application and said "fill this out at home and mail it in". Since I already had the card, I didn't bother mailing anything in, and the card is still working three months later. They can track my purchases, but only to an anonymous number. Of course, I pay with my credit card so they already have my name anyway ...
I don't know about printing on plastic stock, but I do know some plastic money (Mexico's I believe) includes transparent windows which, like holograms, would be difficult to reporduce with only a printer. I'm sure someday when 3D printers are common plastic money will be easy to copy...
I was told by someone on a committe to design US money that plastic money is disliked by the treasury because it lasts too long (~8 years?) and thus takes too long to change over to new currency (seems a bit silly; I thought banks traded worn out bills for new ones; any reason they couldn't turn in non-worn out bills?). It was also explained that colorful money (particularly the new US ten and twenty dollar bills) is very easy to counterfeit on an inkjet printer. The colorful bills were an attempt to stop photocopied money but were designed when color printing was rare; it turns out that the bright colors, when reporduced accurately by an inkjet, make a cashier less likely to notice a funny texture or other oddities. Single offence counterfeit on home color inkjets is one of the largest sources of counterfeit.
I completely agree about the difficulties for the blind, and the dollar coin. And the penny should go.
Oh the humanity! There was a time, as the summary implies, when one could pay with half-pennies and quarter-pennies (in Britain at least). A loaf of bread cost a dime at some point in the past. Below twenty cents (dime + 100%), there are only twenty possible prices, thus the price of some loaves was probably a little higher than it should have been. Today a loaf is around $2. There are 200 different prices between $3 and $1 ($2 +/- 100%). Do we really need this fine grained pricing? Why didn't we need it in the past? Axeing the penny gives you about 40 different prices in that range. If the penny is more trouble than it's worth, let's ditch it. Keep in mind that prices are already rounded to the nearest cent, so you're already paying tenths of a penny more or a less. Also keep in mind that price is determined by what people are willing to pay. I understand Austrailia has done away with the penny, final price is rounded up or down at checkout, and the economy has not collapsed.
And in order to find out if it's truly safe in the long term, someone is going to have to take some risk. How many things have been introduced not yet completely proven safe but are still regarded as safe today? The bad list includes asbestos, mercury, various radioactive products, etc. and looks pretty grim. I can't whip off a good list so easily since it doesn't make news, but I bet it includes some mundane things such as fire, raspberries, and potatoes (native to Peru and long thought to be poisonous by Europeans) as well as high tech stuff.
It's tragic when we mess up big, but it's our nature to be curious. Some will be more curious than others. But given a new substance or process similar to more well know substances or processes with no known or obvious dangers, it's considered ethical to proceed with using it. Of course, some classes of substances demand more caution than others. Drugs are highly regulated in the United States, the utility of which is debatable, but the regulations are a reflection of the values of that society.
Can you be sure whether heeled shoes cause schizoprenia or not?
The trouble with ceramics is always catastrophic failure due to their brittleness. When they do break down, they do so in specatular fashion, sometimes blowing into pieces, and always ceasing to function. That is why auto manufacturers currently use polymer film capacitors in the inverters of hybrid cars. Despite the disadvantage of likely requiring an additional cooling loop (I think the standard auto cooling loop is around 125-150 degC while polymer film caps tend to be rated around 75-85 degC) and having much lower capacitance and thus greater bulk, a short in the capacitor ablates the electrode at the short without destroying the rest of the polymer. Thus one might have power to get to a garage rather than being stranded somewhere. I imagine similar concerns would be raised about ceramic supercapacitor batteries, but could probably be tolerated or worked around if the advantages are so great.
I moved to one of two areas in my medium sized American town with any sort of shopping within walking distance (grocery, a few cafes, various other shops). It isn't looked upon as being the "nicest" neighboorhood, but it's pretty nice, and I love being within walking distance of "stuff". I've actually been made fun of for choosing that neighboorhood and for taking my own grocery bag to the store and carrying my groceries home... Maybe it's a little jealousy, but I don't quite get it.
The rest of town is scattered neighboorhoods in between miles and miles of four to six roads lined with parking lots, strip malls, and chain restaurants like so many other urban areas. Blech.
As I understand, semiconductor conductivity is dominated by the number of charge carriers, not by their mobility (as in metals), and the number of charge carriers generally decreases with temperature due to lack of thermal exitation. Does this becomes unimportant when doping is used to control the number of charge carriers? And either way, isn't the speed of transmission fairly constant?
"Here is one of many greasemonkey script to remove piquepaille stories." Apparently it doesn't work very well...?
Oops, I meant to add that using ffmpeg's "sameq" option produces a 2.1 Mbit/s MPEG-1 and a 1.6 Mbit/s mpeg4 file. Also, I made a Theora file at a similar bitrate (a bit lower; couldn't get the same value) using the alpha5 encoder and ffmpeg2theora. It looks nicer than the others, not having the extreme pixelated look of the other 720x480 files. I have heard some mentions of VP3/Theora smoothing the video... In this case, the smoothing seems to produce a superior looking video, but in other cases it may have a negative effect compared to MPEG-1 or mpeg4.
Is there a guide to getting the most out of MPEG-1 video? I obviously don't know much about choosing the best encoding options, but in my experience, it has been inferior (in terms of quality vs. bitrate) to both ffmpeg's mpeg4 and Theora.
I just did a very rough test using a 720x480 source file. I encoded four files, all at overall (based on filesize including mpeg-1 or avi container) bitrate of 290 kbits/s. Two were MPEG-1 video, one at 720x480, the other at 352x234. The other two were ffmpeg's mpeg4, again at 720x480 and 352x234. They were, probably stupidly, encoded using the -qscale option alone to control file size, e.g. ffmpeg -i input -vcodec mpeg1video -qscale 5 output.mpg. The qscales for the four above files were respectively 18, 5, 15, and 4. Playback using MPlayer with the nearest-neighbor software scaler at 720x480 resolution shows a very pixelated look in the 720x480 unscaled videos, and a artifact-full but non-pixelated look in the 352x234 files that MPlayer scaled back to 720x480. The 352x234 mpeg4 file appeared the highest quality, having fewer visible artifacts than the 352x234 MPEG-1 file. One big trouble with this test is the scaling algorithm acting as a filter on the low resolution files, possibly smoothing so variations. Text from a credits scene looks unsurprisingly pixelated, but the video itself looks pretty good; I expected the nearest neighbor scaler to look worse.
I was not expecting to see lower resolution win out in both MPEG-1 and mpeg4 files. Of course, ffmpeg has dozens of encoding options, and it's likely that poor options were chosen. That said, the comment about MPEG-1 video is not inconsistent with my experience, as rough and uninformed as it is.
The most recent Windows Video, RealVideo, and Sorenson video (Used by QuickTime prior to H.264) are what I might call proprietary in that there is no public standard. They are likely covered by patents as well. MPEG-4's AVC or H.264 may be publically documented but is covered by patents which put free software implementations in the same legal mud as any proprietary codec. On the audio side, MP3 and AAC are in similar situations: publically available but patented.
For publically available and unpatented codecs, as far as I know we've got MPEG-1 video and MPEG-1 Layer II audio (MP2), and this only because they are so old that patents have expired. Vorbis is a modern unpatented audio codec, and Theora is covered by patents which have been freely licensed to the public making it effectively patent free.
MPEG-1 suffers because it simply isn't as good in a quality vs. bitrate sense as the modern video codecs. It's possible that bandwidth and disk size increases could this help somewhat. MPEG-1 is also only good at resolutions near or below 352x240, even from higher resolution source material. However, MPEG-1 remains the most likely to be playable on a given computer. The one additional advantage it has is that decoding may be less CPU intensive than, say, H.264.
Ogg Theora with Vorbis audio is nice, and competitive with though inferior to other modern codecs in terms of quality vs. bitrate. Like all the Xiph codecs, Theora suffers from obscurity. Version 1 is not officially released, but there are limited tools for playback but little for encoding Theora. Xiph's QuickTime Components recently added Theora playback to the QuickTime system (Mac and Windows). Some Theora filters for DirectShow (Windows Media) support playback and, for the intrepid, encoding.Due to differences between the Ogg container format and other established containers, it has had some trouble properly interfacing with DirectShow for example, but playback does work fairly well. Real's Helix system (Helix Player for Linux, RealPlayer 10 on Windows) also has plugins for Theora playback and encoding.
As an occasional dabbler in filmmaking, I release my videos in Ogg Theora+Vorbis and MPEG-1 Video+MP2 audio. I have released versions using MPEG-4 ASP video (DivX, XviD, ffmpeg's mpeg4) and MP3 audio, yet I lack the necessary patent licenses for that and am somewhat reluctant to do so. Commercial software such as DivX typically extends its patent license to its customers for various uses (I believe Microsoft does not allow commercial use of Windows Media Video by default).