I don't think you understand something about bell curves and similarly guassian distributions...
Yah, there's gonna be the big pile of average in the middle... but we can also ensure that the average distribution is centered on a higher value than the present system allows!
By increasing education, you raise the low, middle *and* high. We can't change the shape of the distribution, but we can certainly recenter it!
As an example from my history (bad argument, to extrapolate from a single case to a trend, but it's an illustration and not a generalization)
Took physics: Relativistic, Quantum, Statistical, Mechanical, Electrical. Sucked at most of them
Took math: Multivariate calculus, statistics, differential equations, etc. Sucked at most of them.
Took liberal arts: Philosophy of Science (reductionist thought, atomic thought, etc), Art History, Japanese, Creative writing, Ethics in Science, American History of the firs Settlers, Survey of Chinese Culture, Chinese Literature and Culture, etc.
Given how long people live, how much leisure time there is, how much the world is expected to change within someone's lifetime, now, why *shouldn't* we expect people to be brought up well rounded in everything? Why not give non-science majors backgrounds in mechanical, electrical, and statistical physics? Yeah, it's hard... but pretty soon that should become commonplace and then we can all reserve quantum, string, and unified physics for the physics majors...
I'm have a good 50, 60 years ahead of me. Why should I be ignorant of culture and literature and philosophy?
My neighbor, similarly, should have a grounding the in the science, computing, and maths that will shape his life too.
You plug one end of the FireWire cable into your Mac
You plug one end of the FireWire cable into your digital camcorder (sorry, you need a FireWire capable digital camcorder for this to work!)
Make sure the camcorder has been rewound (silly, but important)
Open iMovie, Premiere, Final Cut Pro, whatever.
Using the appropriate dialog box... hit import. Stop when all the film has been captured.
A few minutes later, and perhaps 20gb later, you've just transferred all the video at 720x480 at 29.xx fps onto your Mac.
Using the appropriate software, edit movie. Then, if you have PowerBook or iBook, show it to people on a TV, or tape it to VCR, or burn it to a CD, or something.
Worst case, you can dump it back to your digital camcorder via FireWire, and bring that around to show people.
FireWire is a transmission protocol... sorta like ethernet and TCP/IP, sorta like SCSI, sorta like IDE and ATAPI, sorta like USB. It just happens to be simple, like USB, cheap, like IDE, smart, like SCSI, and flexible, like TCP/IP.
The only other PC solution, but the way, even similar to Apple's machines, is Sony, I think.
I guess you have been misinformed, at least a little bit.
Macs do all of the above, now, what with iMovie and iMovie2, straight out of the box, without dealing with buying a video card and software, etc.
Grab a digital video camera, an iBook, and you have yourself a portable digital video workstation. Not terribly powerful, mind you, but very convenient.
Working over USB? How the heck do you capture film, then? From a video source to a box to be compressed before sending it over the meager USB line? Last I checked, the video quality over most USB video boxes was 320x240 motion jpeg at a fairly low framerate... as opposed to the DV standard of 720x480 DV compression at 29.xx fps...
Similarly via the ATI AiW card, though they probably get better framerates and resolutions... on the other hand, that's entirely dependent upon the CPU speed and the ability of the AGP bus/drivers to stream the data to the CPU to compress on the fly.
The whole point of the award and the contribution Apple made, with FireWire and their Macs, is that *any* two bit (well, I guess most television studios would prefer a more impressive title) hack director can make movies and films for a measly $2k investment. Television studios can now use FireWire CDRWs, DVD-Rs, HDs, camcorders, Macs, and software to keep the entire production chain digital and seemless.
So that's why Apple gets the award for FireWire =)
You've got several good replies, but in bits and pieces...
Apple did...
They created FireWire
They gave it a snazzy name
They got it IEEE ratifed as IEEE-1394
They created workstations and laptops with Firewire integration
They created software (iMovie, iMovie2, and FinalCutPro) to integrate said workstations with FireWire camcorders
Gigabit ethernet, for streaming of large digital files to and fro
What Apple didn't do...
Create digital camcorders
Create FireWire camcorders
Create FireWire hard drives
Create FireWire CDRWs
Those are key components of this award, however =)
The system as described isn't impossible, I don't think. We're not talking about complete reuse of byproducts; there is waste heat and waste fuel (Nitrates and Carbon stuff), with the heat being vented into the ocean and the waste stuffs being captured for later.
Only oxygen is recycled, or whatever combustion accelerant is used.
Volvo advertises it as the Prem-aire system, but I think they developed it in conjunction with Dow or some other chemical/manufacturing giant.
It is a big catalytic converter+radiator, using the waste heat piped into the radiator plus some really expensive and fancy metal catalyst/complexes to break down some emission gasses, NO2, NO3, O3, whatever, into cleaner and safer compounds. It probably is similar to what the Japanese sub does too, actually, but directly on the output of it's own emissions. I would think that the sub is able to store/trap the emissions because of a second cycle that takes advantage of the ocean as a big cold resevoir, otherwise volume/pressure/gas storage becomes a big deal under the ocean =)
The Volvo just lets the emissions free, but because they are technically cleaner and safer, it's okay, or something.
It's probably not a 'closed system' in the scientific sense, but is perhaps a closed system in the 'catalyst, fuel, waste' sense.
It must generate waste heat, for example, and I'm pretty sure that this waste heat is lost into the effectively infinite depths of the ocean, using it as a huuuge cold resevoir. On the other hand, there's no technical reason that the waste heat, in tandem with a complex metal catalyst, and a secondary cooling cycle, plus another process to trap 'waste' fuel byproducts, couldn't scrub the exhaust in such a way that it can be reused in the combustion cycle.
More bluntly:
water cooled air + disel => work, waste heat, emissions
work is work
waste heat + catalyst + emissions => hot air, hot gases, hot waste byproducts
hot air + heatsink + ocean => water cooled air
hot gases + hot waste byproducts + catalyst => contained wastes
Then N months later, when the fuel is completely spent, the submersible is collected, the solid waste cartridge is cleaned, and a new supply of fuel is fed into the system.
I'm guessing at this cycle, of course, but it's conceivable. =)
You've just described science and knowledge, my friend.
Everything is a crutch until we get a better description, ad infintum. From Aristotle to Galileo, to Kepler, Newton, Maxwell, Einstein, to Feynman, Hawking, and Thorne. Each generation of scientists and mathematicians uses the truths of the previous generation, breaks it, and refashions it according to modern experiences.
Anyway, rather than running comparisons of emulated vs native code, why not something like Python, Java, or Perl benchmarks, on the assumption that none of those languages are native, all of them are widely available, and most of them are very utilitarian/useful?
Therein lies the dilemna
on
Mac Rants
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
The rant lays out a good question, then. What do you use to gauge value if not Photoshop benchmarks and CPU MHz?
My first intuitive guess would have to be dollars, but then people have the unfortunate habit of trying to get the absolute damn cheapest product out there, which does nothing for quality and performance.
We would need a value per dollar metric to compare systems, then. What value?
Features? That gets hard to compare, as different people value different options, and some people don't even know what features they value until they grow into the system.
Then there is the hard to even see metric, quality . Fit, finish, durability, ease of use, etc. Short of using a system for a couple of days, most laptops/PCs are superficially the same, until you need to open the box, swap video cards, add a new hard drive, etc.
Performance? At least you can use time as a measure, but what would you be measuring with time? Photoshop? Office? It would be twisted, but how about comparing a Windows benchmark running under Virtual PC vs a Windows benchmark on a Windows machine? Given that the virtualization would take a performance hit, you could apply some scalar or multiplier to try to normalize the scores.
I dunno. I know I bought a Mac because it looked good and felt good, and that has no bearing on MHz or performance.
I guess. Does that mean I've interpreted it at least somewhat correctly? It was puzzling why so many of my friends seemed to think it would be impossible to understand, or rather, impossible to absorb, in just one sitting...
I don't get what the big deal is. I had a friend or two mention I'd be confused as heck while watching the Akira movie on the silver screen, and I thought it made sense!
Of course, I'm not a newbie. Still, why would people say it shouldn't make sense?
Tell me if I got the story wrong:
Inferred: Akira the psychic monster is found/created, and later destroyed, yet his power and influence is so great that there is still a cult surrounding him and that he is still talked about and planned for by the government/military/psychic research institutes.
Implied by the end: Akira, and now Tetsuo, have the power to create universes, or something like that.
Story:
Tetsuo, average biker punk, has a run in with psychic escapee who's name escapes me at the moment. Government takes both.
Kaneda, trying to be smooth, has a run in with an anti-Akira/psychic group and joins them and tries to rescue/avenge/punish/find Tetsuo
Tetsuo is found to be a very powerful psychic, with the proper activation drugs.
The other psychics think he's too powerful and try to 'contain' him, but he's powerful enough to beat back all three of the kids. Confused and angry over the pain and treatment he's getting, he decides to confront Akira, who everyone compares him to.
He finds Akira; Kaneda finds him. Akira's history is explained to him by the general. Kaneda and the general both want to end Tetsuo, as he is a threat. Enter SOL, sub-orbital laser.
Tetsuo, in a drug and pain induced frenzy, loses control of his body and powers.
Akira re-appears, his psychic powers more than enough to overcome death and a lack of body. He takes Tetsuo with him, until everyone is ready for the next page in history, whatever that is. This triggers something like the birth of a universe, as implied by a stupid scientist who allowed Tetsuo to become too powerful.
Kaneda loses his best friend and rival.
That's what I saw in the theatre, and it seemed to make sense to me!
It's not just the userbase, you understand, but the graphics and print culture that has to exist in Linux.
If Adobe were to port Photoshop, Illustrator, etc, to Linux, it almost requires that Linux have it's own printshop culture to sustain the growth and development efforts.
It's like asking the Japanese to import dolphin meat into the US just because we like Anime and eat sushi; there isn't the cultural support for the eating of dolphins for that to be feasible...
Art is art regardless of how it was generated; ink, oils, canvas, paper, computer, etc.
On the other hand, because it's computer generated and it's visual doesn't mean it's art, either. The definition of art is vague and left as an exercise to the reader:)
If I were to claim computer generated art as, well, art, I'd be using it to do things impossible in any other medium. Truly push the computer generated portion. Animated 3d stereograms rendered on the fly from a filtered video sequence picked up from a USB cam. Or using multiple speakers and 3d sound generated from IP traffic modifying sounds picked up from the room itself, creating a shifting, moving, living soundspace.
My own take on art is that it's an expression of your soul.
Unless you're going to tell me that binary machine language is just a blueprint?
Executables in the right platform are instructions.
It's just that DNA become a set of instructions executed by the human machine inside the womb.
Your high school education is insufficient. It is a blueprint, yes. The DNA forms the blueprint for protiens, which then go off and do stuff. However that just means they are about as close to blueprints as a stream of Java byte codes are blueprints for a program ^^;
As per the recessiveness... if you work out your logic, then a recessive gene exists in 25% of the population, inactive. Because it never expresses itself, it doesn't get weeded out or promoted. In true random fashion, it never, ever, goes away.
Only dominant genes that have negative survival value get removed from the pool. Dominant genes *always* express themselves, and if they always reduce the chance for survival, then they will statistically over time get removed.
I wouldn't cout Akira, Ghost in the Shell, or Ninja Scroll as 'popular' anime.
Popular anime: Ranma one half, Rouroni Kenshin, Evangelion are popular anime.
So you've fallen for the classic trap of anime is just a 'friggin cartoon'. It's basic storytelling (no different than TV, movie, CG, or any other live acting) but expressed in paints and cels.
So if you want good anime, you need to know what you like. Do you want drama and adventure? Soul searching?
Here are a smattering of good anime:
Evangelion: Story of a boy pilot and 100 feet tall robots. The crux of the story is the humanity and fraility of the boy and his peers.
Why to watch Evangelion: Very strong portrayals of human emotion without actually jerking you around on a rollercoaster.
Escaflowne: The story of a girl transported to an alternative world with 40 feet tall robots. She's mystical and can see the future. The story is really about fate, conviction, and strength of will.
Why to watch Escaflowne: Exciting and touching
Mononoke Hime: Evidently you didn't like this one. The story of Iron Town, the Great Forest, and immortality. A prince is cursed by a dying Boar God/Demon and travels to the Great Forest and Iron Town to try to lift the curse. Focus is on the conflict between human nature, human expansion, and the health of the world we live in and depend on.
Why to watch Mononoke: Very mystic, spiritual, and exciting.
Macross Plus: Story of a fighter pilot Isamu Dyson who gets to fly a state of the art airplane as part of a military design competition. Things get complicated when a complex AI system starts taking over everything. This story is mainly about the complex love triangle between the two X-plane pilots and their best friend/singer.
Why to watch Macross Plus: It's a love story and the story about best friends.
Trigun: A western sci-fi set on a desert planet. Vash is a wandering gunman with a bounty on his head. You follow his adventures as you figure out who this mysterious gunman is and why someone hates him so much. In the end it's a morality tale about the value of life and living.
Why to watch Trigun: It's funny, it's exciting, it's emotional. Very cool.
Jubei-Chan: A great samurai dies leaving the legacy of a legendary eyepatch bestowed with is soul and spirit. Jiyo Nanohana is his spiritual reincarnation when she wears this eyepatch. The story is about her struggles against who she is, what she is, what she's capable of, and why she's doing it, especially when her friends and loved ones cannot escape her destiny.
Why to watch Jubei-Chan: It's cute, it's funny, it's sad. Did I mention it's funny?
You have *perfectly* described science, my anonymous friend.
The big problem then is that if you choose to ignore science and it's many approximations, you lose out on the wonderful things we get out of it...
Like cars, watches, computers, TVs, radios, plastic bottles, aluminum alloy wheels, titanium golf clubs, etc.
With each refinement of science we get ever more unexpected observations, and with each new observation we get new opportunities in which to create new and unexpected devices.
As we refine the neutrino and the elementary particles we can eventually devise gadgets that rely on the characteristics that these neutrinos have.
Seriously, what would you have us do? Decide "Physics, chemistry, and science is done. No more research, everything is finished."
Science is the process by which we try to deduce the pattern, the weave, the weft, of creation, and to satisfy your set of beliefs, the underlying structure as given to us by God. Without science we would have no understanding. Science is constrained to be an approximation, to use heretical thoughts, because the Universe and God is unknowable; we can get infinitely close without ever reaching our destination.
The neat thing about radar is that a stealth aircraft also has the ability and opportunity to broadcast signals as well as absorb and redirect signals.
So this bistatic radar, these cellular networks, are working off of reflected signals off multi band and distributed receivers, without taking into account that a squad of stealthy aircraft can broadcast, in a manner, misinformation about location and direction and velocity.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think you understand something about bell curves and similarly guassian distributions...
Yah, there's gonna be the big pile of average in the middle... but we can also ensure that the average distribution is centered on a higher value than the present system allows!
By increasing education, you raise the low, middle *and* high. We can't change the shape of the distribution, but we can certainly recenter it!
Of course, I should have suspected from the way the article is written... this guy taught my Mechanical Physics course!
Not only that, he's famous for his Mechanical Universe text/videos =)
I dunno why you hold that view...
As an example from my history (bad argument, to extrapolate from a single case to a trend, but it's an illustration and not a generalization)
Took physics: Relativistic, Quantum, Statistical, Mechanical, Electrical. Sucked at most of them
Took math: Multivariate calculus, statistics, differential equations, etc. Sucked at most of them.
Took liberal arts: Philosophy of Science (reductionist thought, atomic thought, etc), Art History, Japanese, Creative writing, Ethics in Science, American History of the firs Settlers, Survey of Chinese Culture, Chinese Literature and Culture, etc.
Given how long people live, how much leisure time there is, how much the world is expected to change within someone's lifetime, now, why *shouldn't* we expect people to be brought up well rounded in everything? Why not give non-science majors backgrounds in mechanical, electrical, and statistical physics? Yeah, it's hard... but pretty soon that should become commonplace and then we can all reserve quantum, string, and unified physics for the physics majors...
I'm have a good 50, 60 years ahead of me. Why should I be ignorant of culture and literature and philosophy?
My neighbor, similarly, should have a grounding the in the science, computing, and maths that will shape his life too.
Uhuh... How does FireWire work?
You plug one end of the FireWire cable into your Mac
You plug one end of the FireWire cable into your digital camcorder (sorry, you need a FireWire capable digital camcorder for this to work!)
Make sure the camcorder has been rewound (silly, but important)
Open iMovie, Premiere, Final Cut Pro, whatever.
Using the appropriate dialog box... hit import. Stop when all the film has been captured.
A few minutes later, and perhaps 20gb later, you've just transferred all the video at 720x480 at 29.xx fps onto your Mac.
Using the appropriate software, edit movie. Then, if you have PowerBook or iBook, show it to people on a TV, or tape it to VCR, or burn it to a CD, or something.
Worst case, you can dump it back to your digital camcorder via FireWire, and bring that around to show people.
FireWire is a transmission protocol... sorta like ethernet and TCP/IP, sorta like SCSI, sorta like IDE and ATAPI, sorta like USB. It just happens to be simple, like USB, cheap, like IDE, smart, like SCSI, and flexible, like TCP/IP.
The only other PC solution, but the way, even similar to Apple's machines, is Sony, I think.
Is it really that bad?
Anyway, it seems to me that paying per quality of broadcast is reasonable.
On the other hand, being told what I can or can't do with something I've paid for doesn't seem reasonable at all!
I guess you have been misinformed, at least a little bit.
Macs do all of the above, now, what with iMovie and iMovie2, straight out of the box, without dealing with buying a video card and software, etc.
Grab a digital video camera, an iBook, and you have yourself a portable digital video workstation. Not terribly powerful, mind you, but very convenient.
Working over USB? How the heck do you capture film, then? From a video source to a box to be compressed before sending it over the meager USB line? Last I checked, the video quality over most USB video boxes was 320x240 motion jpeg at a fairly low framerate... as opposed to the DV standard of 720x480 DV compression at 29.xx fps...
Similarly via the ATI AiW card, though they probably get better framerates and resolutions... on the other hand, that's entirely dependent upon the CPU speed and the ability of the AGP bus/drivers to stream the data to the CPU to compress on the fly.
The whole point of the award and the contribution Apple made, with FireWire and their Macs, is that *any* two bit (well, I guess most television studios would prefer a more impressive title) hack director can make movies and films for a measly $2k investment. Television studios can now use FireWire CDRWs, DVD-Rs, HDs, camcorders, Macs, and software to keep the entire production chain digital and seemless.
So that's why Apple gets the award for FireWire =)
FireWire gave them the technical advantage.
You've got several good replies, but in bits and pieces...
Apple did...
They created FireWire
They gave it a snazzy name
They got it IEEE ratifed as IEEE-1394
They created workstations and laptops with Firewire integration
They created software (iMovie, iMovie2, and FinalCutPro) to integrate said workstations with FireWire camcorders
Gigabit ethernet, for streaming of large digital files to and fro
What Apple didn't do...
Create digital camcorders
Create FireWire camcorders
Create FireWire hard drives
Create FireWire CDRWs
Those are key components of this award, however =)
Um, you mean an Oscar, right? Emmys are given for television where Oscars are given for films...
And everything you just named is a film...
The system as described isn't impossible, I don't think. We're not talking about complete reuse of byproducts; there is waste heat and waste fuel (Nitrates and Carbon stuff), with the heat being vented into the ocean and the waste stuffs being captured for later.
Only oxygen is recycled, or whatever combustion accelerant is used.
Volvo advertises it as the Prem-aire system, but I think they developed it in conjunction with Dow or some other chemical/manufacturing giant.
It is a big catalytic converter+radiator, using the waste heat piped into the radiator plus some really expensive and fancy metal catalyst/complexes to break down some emission gasses, NO2, NO3, O3, whatever, into cleaner and safer compounds. It probably is similar to what the Japanese sub does too, actually, but directly on the output of it's own emissions. I would think that the sub is able to store/trap the emissions because of a second cycle that takes advantage of the ocean as a big cold resevoir, otherwise volume/pressure/gas storage becomes a big deal under the ocean =)
The Volvo just lets the emissions free, but because they are technically cleaner and safer, it's okay, or something.
It's probably not a 'closed system' in the scientific sense, but is perhaps a closed system in the 'catalyst, fuel, waste' sense.
It must generate waste heat, for example, and I'm pretty sure that this waste heat is lost into the effectively infinite depths of the ocean, using it as a huuuge cold resevoir. On the other hand, there's no technical reason that the waste heat, in tandem with a complex metal catalyst, and a secondary cooling cycle, plus another process to trap 'waste' fuel byproducts, couldn't scrub the exhaust in such a way that it can be reused in the combustion cycle.
More bluntly:
water cooled air + disel => work, waste heat, emissions
work is work
waste heat + catalyst + emissions => hot air, hot gases, hot waste byproducts
hot air + heatsink + ocean => water cooled air
hot gases + hot waste byproducts + catalyst => contained wastes
Then N months later, when the fuel is completely spent, the submersible is collected, the solid waste cartridge is cleaned, and a new supply of fuel is fed into the system.
I'm guessing at this cycle, of course, but it's conceivable. =)
You've just described science and knowledge, my friend.
Everything is a crutch until we get a better description, ad infintum. From Aristotle to Galileo, to Kepler, Newton, Maxwell, Einstein, to Feynman, Hawking, and Thorne. Each generation of scientists and mathematicians uses the truths of the previous generation, breaks it, and refashions it according to modern experiences.
It's the *strength* of science, not a weakness.
Anyway, rather than running comparisons of emulated vs native code, why not something like Python, Java, or Perl benchmarks, on the assumption that none of those languages are native, all of them are widely available, and most of them are very utilitarian/useful?
The rant lays out a good question, then. What do you use to gauge value if not Photoshop benchmarks and CPU MHz?
My first intuitive guess would have to be dollars, but then people have the unfortunate habit of trying to get the absolute damn cheapest product out there, which does nothing for quality and performance.
We would need a value per dollar metric to compare systems, then. What value?
Features? That gets hard to compare, as different people value different options, and some people don't even know what features they value until they grow into the system.
Then there is the hard to even see metric, quality . Fit, finish, durability, ease of use, etc. Short of using a system for a couple of days, most laptops/PCs are superficially the same, until you need to open the box, swap video cards, add a new hard drive, etc.
Performance? At least you can use time as a measure, but what would you be measuring with time? Photoshop? Office? It would be twisted, but how about comparing a Windows benchmark running under Virtual PC vs a Windows benchmark on a Windows machine? Given that the virtualization would take a performance hit, you could apply some scalar or multiplier to try to normalize the scores.
I dunno. I know I bought a Mac because it looked good and felt good, and that has no bearing on MHz or performance.
I guess. Does that mean I've interpreted it at least somewhat correctly? It was puzzling why so many of my friends seemed to think it would be impossible to understand, or rather, impossible to absorb, in just one sitting...
Geek dating!
I don't get what the big deal is. I had a friend or two mention I'd be confused as heck while watching the Akira movie on the silver screen, and I thought it made sense!
Of course, I'm not a newbie. Still, why would people say it shouldn't make sense?
Tell me if I got the story wrong:
Inferred: Akira the psychic monster is found/created, and later destroyed, yet his power and influence is so great that there is still a cult surrounding him and that he is still talked about and planned for by the government/military/psychic research institutes.
Implied by the end: Akira, and now Tetsuo, have the power to create universes, or something like that.
Story:
Tetsuo, average biker punk, has a run in with psychic escapee who's name escapes me at the moment. Government takes both.
Kaneda, trying to be smooth, has a run in with an anti-Akira/psychic group and joins them and tries to rescue/avenge/punish/find Tetsuo
Tetsuo is found to be a very powerful psychic, with the proper activation drugs.
The other psychics think he's too powerful and try to 'contain' him, but he's powerful enough to beat back all three of the kids. Confused and angry over the pain and treatment he's getting, he decides to confront Akira, who everyone compares him to.
He finds Akira; Kaneda finds him. Akira's history is explained to him by the general. Kaneda and the general both want to end Tetsuo, as he is a threat. Enter SOL, sub-orbital laser.
Tetsuo, in a drug and pain induced frenzy, loses control of his body and powers.
Akira re-appears, his psychic powers more than enough to overcome death and a lack of body. He takes Tetsuo with him, until everyone is ready for the next page in history, whatever that is. This triggers something like the birth of a universe, as implied by a stupid scientist who allowed Tetsuo to become too powerful.
Kaneda loses his best friend and rival.
That's what I saw in the theatre, and it seemed to make sense to me!
Geek dating!
It's not just the userbase, you understand, but the graphics and print culture that has to exist in Linux.
If Adobe were to port Photoshop, Illustrator, etc, to Linux, it almost requires that Linux have it's own printshop culture to sustain the growth and development efforts.
It's like asking the Japanese to import dolphin meat into the US just because we like Anime and eat sushi; there isn't the cultural support for the eating of dolphins for that to be feasible...
Geek dating!
Art is art regardless of how it was generated; ink, oils, canvas, paper, computer, etc.
:)
On the other hand, because it's computer generated and it's visual doesn't mean it's art, either. The definition of art is vague and left as an exercise to the reader
If I were to claim computer generated art as, well, art, I'd be using it to do things impossible in any other medium. Truly push the computer generated portion. Animated 3d stereograms rendered on the fly from a filtered video sequence picked up from a USB cam. Or using multiple speakers and 3d sound generated from IP traffic modifying sounds picked up from the room itself, creating a shifting, moving, living soundspace.
My own take on art is that it's an expression of your soul.
Geek dating!
DNA is not merely a blueprint.
Unless you're going to tell me that binary machine language is just a blueprint?
Executables in the right platform are instructions.
It's just that DNA become a set of instructions executed by the human machine inside the womb.
Your high school education is insufficient. It is a blueprint, yes. The DNA forms the blueprint for protiens, which then go off and do stuff. However that just means they are about as close to blueprints as a stream of Java byte codes are blueprints for a program ^^;
As per the recessiveness... if you work out your logic, then a recessive gene exists in 25% of the population, inactive. Because it never expresses itself, it doesn't get weeded out or promoted. In true random fashion, it never, ever, goes away.
Only dominant genes that have negative survival value get removed from the pool. Dominant genes *always* express themselves, and if they always reduce the chance for survival, then they will statistically over time get removed.
Geek dating!
Um, you really want to know?
What the Zentradi are looking for;
What the connection between Zentradi, Maltrendi, and humans are;
The power of music;
Post-apocalyptic earth;
What else is there? I mean, that's the whole story, isn't it?
Geek dating!
Oh, Macross Plus is another anime with a decent dub. In fact, I think it's dub sounds better than the Japanese track!
Geek dating!
I wouldn't cout Akira, Ghost in the Shell, or Ninja Scroll as 'popular' anime.
Popular anime: Ranma one half, Rouroni Kenshin, Evangelion are popular anime.
So you've fallen for the classic trap of anime is just a 'friggin cartoon'. It's basic storytelling (no different than TV, movie, CG, or any other live acting) but expressed in paints and cels.
So if you want good anime, you need to know what you like. Do you want drama and adventure? Soul searching?
Here are a smattering of good anime:
Evangelion: Story of a boy pilot and 100 feet tall robots. The crux of the story is the humanity and fraility of the boy and his peers.
Why to watch Evangelion: Very strong portrayals of human emotion without actually jerking you around on a rollercoaster.
Escaflowne: The story of a girl transported to an alternative world with 40 feet tall robots. She's mystical and can see the future. The story is really about fate, conviction, and strength of will.
Why to watch Escaflowne: Exciting and touching
Mononoke Hime: Evidently you didn't like this one. The story of Iron Town, the Great Forest, and immortality. A prince is cursed by a dying Boar God/Demon and travels to the Great Forest and Iron Town to try to lift the curse. Focus is on the conflict between human nature, human expansion, and the health of the world we live in and depend on.
Why to watch Mononoke: Very mystic, spiritual, and exciting.
Macross Plus: Story of a fighter pilot Isamu Dyson who gets to fly a state of the art airplane as part of a military design competition. Things get complicated when a complex AI system starts taking over everything. This story is mainly about the complex love triangle between the two X-plane pilots and their best friend/singer.
Why to watch Macross Plus: It's a love story and the story about best friends.
Trigun: A western sci-fi set on a desert planet. Vash is a wandering gunman with a bounty on his head. You follow his adventures as you figure out who this mysterious gunman is and why someone hates him so much. In the end it's a morality tale about the value of life and living.
Why to watch Trigun: It's funny, it's exciting, it's emotional. Very cool.
Jubei-Chan: A great samurai dies leaving the legacy of a legendary eyepatch bestowed with is soul and spirit. Jiyo Nanohana is his spiritual reincarnation when she wears this eyepatch. The story is about her struggles against who she is, what she is, what she's capable of, and why she's doing it, especially when her friends and loved ones cannot escape her destiny.
Why to watch Jubei-Chan: It's cute, it's funny, it's sad. Did I mention it's funny?
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You have *perfectly* described science, my anonymous friend.
The big problem then is that if you choose to ignore science and it's many approximations, you lose out on the wonderful things we get out of it...
Like cars, watches, computers, TVs, radios, plastic bottles, aluminum alloy wheels, titanium golf clubs, etc.
With each refinement of science we get ever more unexpected observations, and with each new observation we get new opportunities in which to create new and unexpected devices.
As we refine the neutrino and the elementary particles we can eventually devise gadgets that rely on the characteristics that these neutrinos have.
Seriously, what would you have us do? Decide "Physics, chemistry, and science is done. No more research, everything is finished."
Science is the process by which we try to deduce the pattern, the weave, the weft, of creation, and to satisfy your set of beliefs, the underlying structure as given to us by God. Without science we would have no understanding. Science is constrained to be an approximation, to use heretical thoughts, because the Universe and God is unknowable; we can get infinitely close without ever reaching our destination.
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The neat thing about radar is that a stealth aircraft also has the ability and opportunity to broadcast signals as well as absorb and redirect signals.
So this bistatic radar, these cellular networks, are working off of reflected signals off multi band and distributed receivers, without taking into account that a squad of stealthy aircraft can broadcast, in a manner, misinformation about location and direction and velocity.
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Very well put.
Somehow you manage to be funny where TLA doesn't.
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