The article points to the key problem of high expectations of smart people. When faced with a high-pressure task, they are more likely to spend time worrying about loss of prestige or "face" if they screw up.
Huh?
Oh, I see the problem: "The study analyzed 93 undergraduate students from Michigan State University to determine their working-memory capacities."
Undergraduates, even smart undergraduates, don't know nothin' 'bout nothin'. Oh no, I can't finish this 100 question test in time! It's a crisis! I'll look foolish! Ahhhh! My life will be over! I can't think! AHHHHHHH!
Once you grow up, and get some real world experience, you realize that there will always be another test. Even for the biggies, you get multiple chances to take the GRE, MCAT, LCAT, etc. Focus on the task, do the best you can, and don't be so self-absorbed as to get sidetracked stressing about how you'll look if you don't do well. For anything that's really important, you'll be evaluated based on multiple criteria, and The Big Test, just like The Big Presentation, or The Big Speech is just one event in a series of events. The article should be about "emotionally immature smart people".
We've all seen it, or borne the brunt of it. A very skilled coder/plumber/accountant/scientist gets promoted into a management position and turns out to be a lousy manager, who makes life difficult for his underlings with his incompetence. Why does this happen?
Because, even though you were (and still are) a great coder/plumber/accountant/scientist, a high level of competence with code/pipes/money/mesons does not automatically give you the competence in the skills of budget and/or personnel management, like motivation, encouragement, discipline, conflict resolution, appropriately rewarding the good and punishing the bad, etc.
Go take a class like Introduction to Supervision, Conflict Resolution in the Workplace, Budget Process 101, etc. It sounds like PHB-type stuff, but guess what? You're a suit now. If you flail around trying to figure it out on your own, you'll end up a lousy supervisor, and you'll just make your own job harder.
Every now and again, I come across a website which has a form that simply doesn't work unless you are using IE. It's the same each time... I fill it out, try to submit, and it fails. I repeat a couple of times until it occurs to me to try it in IE. Invariably, it then works. Submitting a comment to the webmasters of these pages regarding their lack of compatibility with Firefox or Netscape gets back a response of "Then use IE." with a "What's Firefox?" thrown in.
So, I keep IE around for emergency compatibility with certain proprietary sites. Sad but true.
Interviewed for professorships, took a research job (microbiology) with the federal government instead. Decent gig - the pay is not what I'd get in industry, but the job security is better, and I don't have to teach or constantly hustle for grant money the way my univerisity colleagues do.
The New York Times (http://nytimes.com/) is nicknamed "The Gray Lady" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times), or if one is feeling expansive, The Great Gray Lady. The nickname extends from the Times decision in the 1950s to stick to plain black and white text when other newspapers started using color for illustrations, photos, ads, etc. However, the Times went color in the late 1990s, so the nickname is not really very apt anymore.
A "Painted Lady" is an ornate style of house popular in the late 19th century, a tattooed whore, and a type of butterfly, among other things.
1. Run the deflector array feedback loop through the Heisenberg compensators to phase-shift the inverted tachyon beam. 2. Merge the phase-shifted tachyons with the original tachyon beam to create an artificial zero-point warp field, which will attract the depolarized cronoton particles. 3...... 4. Profit!
Well, sure that much is obvious, anybody can see that. I mean, hell, I said as much to myself over coffee this morning, but that's the kind of thinking that could potentially lead us into a mental cul-de-sac, unless we look at the details within the context of the big picture. Sure the trees are important, but don't forget about the forest.
Oops, look at the time, I have another meeting I need to get to. Why don't you write all this up and send it to everybody as a summary, or better yet, just send it to me and I'll pass it along at the board meeting next week.
Actually, the one around Mars would have much more of a necessity for a nuclear source than the one around Earth. Solar flux in Earth orbit is ~1400 watts/m^2, and is ~600 watts/m^2 in Mars orbit. The higher the power, the higher energy can be achieved in the plasma beam, and the more energy can be transferred to the spacecraft.
A NASA study (http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/legaff/mankins9-7.h tml) on very large space-based solar power plants to be used for eletric propulsion os space vehicles, among other things, considered 5GW arrays. Assuming a conversion efficiency of 10% for amorphous crystal solar panels, you would need (5*10^9)/(1400*0.10)=3.5*10^7 m^2, or 35 km^2 of solar panels, a square almost 6 kilometers on a side. The one in Mars orbit would have to be 83 m^2, more than 9 kilometers on a side, about 3/4 the diameter of Deimos.
The big "breakthtrough" here is to decouple the propulsion system (the plasma beam) from the spacecraft. That makes the craft smaller and lighter since it doesn't have to move all that fuel around.
HOWEVER...
This system requires having another plasm beam generator to "catch" the spacecraft and slow it down with another plasma beam. That means not only sending the generator platform to Mars, but also all of the material from which to make the plasma (most likely nitrogen or one of the heavier noble gases). The generator platform needs a power source capable of sustaing the creating and acceleration of the plasma beam, which means nuclear, and a fission nuclear reaction, not radiothermic generation. All of that means a technically complex space station, with people to keep it running. To have such a system in Earth orbit would be tough enough. The cost and difficulty of shipping all of that material out to a Mars orbit, and maintaining it so it will be ready to deccelerate an incoming spacecraft would be Absolutely Enormous.
What, you think that just because you paid for that G5, you have the right to get in under the hood? A hundred million hits on your server ought to do it, you heretic. Just to be nasty, we'll post the story on/.'s front page, so the barrage will begin at 2:00 in the morning... nothing like a phone call from your webhosting ISP in the wee hours to start the day off right. No rest for the wicked, I say.
balloons would be good for getting above a significant atmosphere percentage. You could use them to lift the first 25 miles of ribbon, hence above 99.6% of the air. After that, it's a matter for rockets.
This is what I feel to be the advantage of this kind of approach. Clearly, the balloons can't carry the cable up into a vacuum, but they can provide a means of lifting a relatively heavy object (such as a spool of cable) up above most of the atmosphere without requiring an obscene fuel/payload ratio. The vastly reduced air resistance at 24 miles altitude means that rockets are more efficient in terms of pounds lifted/mile obtained, which means you can lift a larger spool with the same size rocket. This would reduce the number of splices required, speeding construction.
OT: Even if using balloons as a tool in constructing the Space Elevator in untenable, I believe it only makes sense to use them to assist in lifting the Elevator cars up to ~20 miles altitude. The buoyancy lifting is much more energy efficient than electric motors, rockets, etc. If you lift the cars above most of the atmosphere, you can get away with smaller and more efficient motors for the rest of the trip. To maximize efficiency, cargo containers would have to be transferred from one carrier (designed for 0-20 miles) to another (designed for 20-8000 miles, probably with more radiation shielding, etc.) then again (for the 8000-23,000 mile leg). A bucket brigade moving cargo up and down the ladder makes more sense than a reversible one-way street, as Liftport is suggesting. Since you'd need cargo transshipment points (a trivial extra weight compared to the weight of the cable), why not suspend at least one of them at 20 miles using buoyancy?
I don't know that I can prove anything one way or another. The size of the balloon is not particularly relevant; the balloon could be made larger, or many balloons could be daisy-chained together to get the desired lift capacity. This is a large project and it would call for large tools.
I'm not sure where the 100 day limit that you referred to comes from, since these will almost certainly be unmanned "flights" but the 130,000 foot ceiling is about right. Altitude controls would have to be a part of this, perhaps by heating/cooling the helium during night/day cycles? Having an anchoring point at that altitude might make catching a cable lowered from orbit easier, since it wouldn't have to extend all the way down where the atmosphere is thick.
Splices are weak points, true. The initial spliced cable is just a scaffolding to support the construction of the real Elevator Cable, presumably extruded/woven/spun in one continuous 65,000 mile long spool.
You need to expend energy to convey the next helium tanks/balloon/spool assembly up, but it's a slow climb... any slow-release energy system will work. Batteries, diesel engines, etc. You might even use a partially inflated balloon to assist the lifting up to the end of the growing tether.
Presuming that this project is done during a relatively calm part of the year (no hurricanes), you work with the wind. Initially, you'd allow them to drift eastward with the wind.
As each length is added, the total eastward drift gets pretty long, but once you are above 100,000 feet, the air is thin enough that wind pressure on the upper balloons won't be much of an issue. Once the final connection is made between the gound tether and the GEO counterweight, centripedal acceleration will start to pull the cable outward, ultimately ending up perpendicular to the ground. The counterweight would then be somewhat farther out than GEO, and the cable would be taught. This would be the time at which you would send up the real Elevator cable as a spool, when the distance along the scaffolding cable is shortest.
One of the companies that has been referred to in discussions of the X-Prize is going to use an inflatable balloon system. Ultimately, they plan on having a LEO space station supported by helium-filled balloons. (Insert usual joke about helium balloons. Insert usual technical rebuttal showing how It's Not As Silly As It Sounds).
If this system has potential, why not use this as the initial lift phase of a space elevator? Unspool out the first piece of carbon nanotube cable and leave the initial lift balloon tethered to its end. Hoist another spool, and splice it onto the end; inflate another balloon and send it up farther. Keep adding lengths until you reach the LEO altitude of your inflatable space station, then send it up along the tether. You'll end up with a string, supported at multiple points by small balloon and on it's end by a really big balloon.
That space station would help to support the weight of the tether, and could either serve as a launching point for the cable which would go out to GEO, or as a device to catch a cable lowered down from GEO.
The inflatable space station people claim tremendous efficiencies in lift because of the passive nature of the lifting force of balloons (negative buoyancy) vs. rockets (thrust). Why not use this approach to leverage the space elevator cable?
By the way, I'm thinking that all of this, once complete, would merely serve as the scaffold to support the climbers, splicers, etc., with which the final Space Elevator cables would be built, connecting ground to GEO.
"Practically Perfect"
on
Disney Goes Boom!
·
· Score: 2, Informative
This refers, of course, to Mary Poppins, who was "Practically Perfect in Every Way", as anyone who has seen the movie will recall. Those of you with kids and a VCR, who have seen the damn movie at least 400 fricken times already and never want to see another dancing penguin for the rest of your fricken lives, will no doubt catch the reference right away.
And no, you can't watch "Hercules" either. Go read a book, for cryin' out loud.
Have you always wanted that fashionable and useful unbreakable skeleton, but don't have the rapid mutant healing factor that would let you survive the implant surgery? Well, this offer IS FOR YOU!
Now available for the rest of us,
Wolverine's Skeleton(TM)!
With our patented new techniques, in just seven weeks(1) you can get the adamantium-matrix bone structure that you need. The Wolverine's Skeleton(TM) uses 100% adamantium in a computer-designed matrix that supports the growth of *your* bone marrow cells. No need to worry about loss of immune system function, because with the Wolverine's Skeleton(TM) system, your bone marrow will keep making T-cells and helper B-cells, just like always. Surprising affordable(2), your Wolverine's Skeleton(TM) will pay for itself in record time. From stopping.45 slugs with your molars to shrugging off I-beams to the thigh(3), Wolverine's Skeleton(TM) is the skeleton you need!
Order today!
1-888-METAL-ME
(1) per bone (2) adamantium not included (3) no protection to musculature, nerve tissue, blood vessels or other non-bone elements is stated or implied
"PC Load Letter"? What the fuck does *that* mean? Yeah, OK, c'mon, give it to me bitch, yeah, that's what I want, PC Load Letter, OK, give it to me , you know I love it, you PIECE OF SHIT!
Sounds like Michael Bolton could have tried that steel post trick.
Re:Some metals they might find next (?)
on
Amorphous Steel
·
· Score: 1
Here's a metal you might find particularly useful, xmas2003:
Remember what the nice doctor said? "Comics are not reality." You don't want to have to go back to the hospital, do you?
Say it to yourself a few times: "Comics are not reality. Comics are not reality." That's a good boy, we're all friends here, no one's going to hurt you. Just put the comic down and lets go for a walk outside in the fresh air, OK?
Absolutely. IAAS, and I review manuscripts for a number of scientific journals, mostly related to microbiology and microbial ecology. Only in a very few instances have I had to give a review of "Reject" based on poor language, and that was because the writing was so bad I couldn't make heads or tails of what the authors were actually trying to say that their data meant. Papers which were obviously written by authors whose primary language facility is not English need to be proofed/polished by a native- or fluent-speaker (assuming that the lanugage of the journal is English). I've given a review of "Revise extensively" on that basis, and have made that specific recommendation. If the paper conveys no useful information, wether because it's poorly written or uses bad experimental design or has overreaching conclusions, it doesn't belong in a reputable journal until those problems are corrected. The readership of the journal relies on the reviewers to make sure the papers are clear and of a minimum level of quality.
Most papers are pretty well written, bearing in mind that we're not talking about gripping prose, here... it's technical writing of the style of "this is the objective, this is what I did, this is how I did it, this is what happened, this is what it means". Basic technical writing is an essential skill that the scientist has to have. If you just simply cannot string the words together properly, find a collaborator to clean up your text, and give acknowledgements as appropriate. Usually, I would give a "Reject" or "Revise extensively and re-submit" if there's a problem with the experimental design or statitistics used. Overreaching or unwarranted conclusions would also be a red flag.
By the way, I have no patience with lazy or incompetent authors who submit crappy work and assume that the editor will polish it all up. Dot your own "i"s, cross your own "t"s, and you will fare much better in your reviews.
But beneath these primitive graphics is a game of such richness and endless variation it usually takes years to master, if at all.... With the all-text Nethack, the preferred graphics card is your mind's eye. This enables you to feel real terror, say, at the approach of an innocuous letter "C" hopping toward you across the screen -- since it represents the cockatrice, an occult-spawned dungeon fowl whose bite turns heroes to stone. With little predigested visual mediation between game play and your imagination, you'd often get the sense that you were, so to speak, playing against the game itself.
The best graphics are those that don't get in the way of the game.
Not only do they rack up more miles than the average consumer-driven car, they do a lot of stop-and-go driving. From an efficiency and emissions standpoint, electric cars are great at this sort of thing, much better than gas engine. The intervening longer distance driving to and from the dispatch point, or to delivery neighborhoods is where the gas engines are better (range, cruising efficiency).
Slashdot Mirror
The article points to the key problem of high expectations of smart people. When faced with a high-pressure task, they are more likely to spend time worrying about loss of prestige or "face" if they screw up.
Huh?
Oh, I see the problem: "The study analyzed 93 undergraduate students from Michigan State University to determine their working-memory capacities."
Undergraduates, even smart undergraduates, don't know nothin' 'bout nothin'. Oh no, I can't finish this 100 question test in time! It's a crisis! I'll look foolish! Ahhhh! My life will be over! I can't think! AHHHHHHH!
Once you grow up, and get some real world experience, you realize that there will always be another test. Even for the biggies, you get multiple chances to take the GRE, MCAT, LCAT, etc. Focus on the task, do the best you can, and don't be so self-absorbed as to get sidetracked stressing about how you'll look if you don't do well. For anything that's really important, you'll be evaluated based on multiple criteria, and The Big Test, just like The Big Presentation, or The Big Speech is just one event in a series of events. The article should be about "emotionally immature smart people".
Philodendron, spider plant, african violet, wandering Jew, lucky bamboo, thalinopsis orchid, snake plant (aka Mother-in-law's tounge), Ficus benjamina.
For the ambitious, Andropogon gerardii or Acer abes.
We've all seen it, or borne the brunt of it. A very skilled coder/plumber/accountant/scientist gets promoted into a management position and turns out to be a lousy manager, who makes life difficult for his underlings with his incompetence. Why does this happen?
Because, even though you were (and still are) a great coder/plumber/accountant/scientist, a high level of competence with code/pipes/money/mesons does not automatically give you the competence in the skills of budget and/or personnel management, like motivation, encouragement, discipline, conflict resolution, appropriately rewarding the good and punishing the bad, etc.
Go take a class like Introduction to Supervision, Conflict Resolution in the Workplace, Budget Process 101, etc. It sounds like PHB-type stuff, but guess what? You're a suit now. If you flail around trying to figure it out on your own, you'll end up a lousy supervisor, and you'll just make your own job harder.
Every now and again, I come across a website which has a form that simply doesn't work unless you are using IE. It's the same each time... I fill it out, try to submit, and it fails. I repeat a couple of times until it occurs to me to try it in IE. Invariably, it then works. Submitting a comment to the webmasters of these pages regarding their lack of compatibility with Firefox or Netscape gets back a response of "Then use IE." with a "What's Firefox?" thrown in.
So, I keep IE around for emergency compatibility with certain proprietary sites. Sad but true.
Interviewed for professorships, took a research job (microbiology) with the federal government instead. Decent gig - the pay is not what I'd get in industry, but the job security is better, and I don't have to teach or constantly hustle for grant money the way my univerisity colleagues do.
The New York Times (http://nytimes.com/) is nicknamed "The Gray Lady" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times), or if one is feeling expansive, The Great Gray Lady. The nickname extends from the Times decision in the 1950s to stick to plain black and white text when other newspapers started using color for illustrations, photos, ads, etc. However, the Times went color in the late 1990s, so the nickname is not really very apt anymore.
A "Painted Lady" is an ornate style of house popular in the late 19th century, a tattooed whore, and a type of butterfly, among other things.
1. Run the deflector array feedback loop through the Heisenberg compensators to phase-shift the inverted tachyon beam. .....
2. Merge the phase-shifted tachyons with the original tachyon beam to create an artificial zero-point warp field, which will attract the depolarized cronoton particles.
3.
4. Profit!
Well, sure that much is obvious, anybody can see that. I mean, hell, I said as much to myself over coffee this morning, but that's the kind of thinking that could potentially lead us into a mental cul-de-sac, unless we look at the details within the context of the big picture. Sure the trees are important, but don't forget about the forest.
Oops, look at the time, I have another meeting I need to get to. Why don't you write all this up and send it to everybody as a summary, or better yet, just send it to me and I'll pass it along at the board meeting next week.
Thank God I'd fully swallowed that mouthful of coffee before reading this, or I'd have choked to death. As it was, I salute you for your humor, sir.
Actually, the one around Mars would have much more of a necessity for a nuclear source than the one around Earth. Solar flux in Earth orbit is ~1400 watts/m^2, and is ~600 watts/m^2 in Mars orbit. The higher the power, the higher energy can be achieved in the plasma beam, and the more energy can be transferred to the spacecraft.
h tml) on very large space-based solar power plants to be used for eletric propulsion os space vehicles, among other things, considered 5GW arrays. Assuming a conversion efficiency of 10% for amorphous crystal solar panels, you would need (5*10^9)/(1400*0.10)=3.5*10^7 m^2, or 35 km^2 of solar panels, a square almost 6 kilometers on a side. The one in Mars orbit would have to be 83 m^2, more than 9 kilometers on a side, about 3/4 the diameter of Deimos.
A NASA study (http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/legaff/mankins9-7.
Solar power wouldn't cut it for this application.
The big "breakthtrough" here is to decouple the propulsion system (the plasma beam) from the spacecraft. That makes the craft smaller and lighter since it doesn't have to move all that fuel around.
HOWEVER...
This system requires having another plasm beam generator to "catch" the spacecraft and slow it down with another plasma beam. That means not only sending the generator platform to Mars, but also all of the material from which to make the plasma (most likely nitrogen or one of the heavier noble gases). The generator platform needs a power source capable of sustaing the creating and acceleration of the plasma beam, which means nuclear, and a fission nuclear reaction, not radiothermic generation. All of that means a technically complex space station, with people to keep it running. To have such a system in Earth orbit would be tough enough. The cost and difficulty of shipping all of that material out to a Mars orbit, and maintaining it so it will be ready to deccelerate an incoming spacecraft would be Absolutely Enormous.
What, you think that just because you paid for that G5, you have the right to get in under the hood? A hundred million hits on your server ought to do it, you heretic. Just to be nasty, we'll post the story on /.'s front page, so the barrage will begin at 2:00 in the morning ... nothing like a phone call from your webhosting ISP in the wee hours to start the day off right. No rest for the wicked, I say.
balloons would be good for getting above a significant atmosphere percentage. You could use them to lift the first 25 miles of ribbon, hence above 99.6% of the air. After that, it's a matter for rockets.
This is what I feel to be the advantage of this kind of approach. Clearly, the balloons can't carry the cable up into a vacuum, but they can provide a means of lifting a relatively heavy object (such as a spool of cable) up above most of the atmosphere without requiring an obscene fuel/payload ratio. The vastly reduced air resistance at 24 miles altitude means that rockets are more efficient in terms of pounds lifted/mile obtained, which means you can lift a larger spool with the same size rocket. This would reduce the number of splices required, speeding construction.
OT: Even if using balloons as a tool in constructing the Space Elevator in untenable, I believe it only makes sense to use them to assist in lifting the Elevator cars up to ~20 miles altitude. The buoyancy lifting is much more energy efficient than electric motors, rockets, etc. If you lift the cars above most of the atmosphere, you can get away with smaller and more efficient motors for the rest of the trip. To maximize efficiency, cargo containers would have to be transferred from one carrier (designed for 0-20 miles) to another (designed for 20-8000 miles, probably with more radiation shielding, etc.) then again (for the 8000-23,000 mile leg). A bucket brigade moving cargo up and down the ladder makes more sense than a reversible one-way street, as Liftport is suggesting. Since you'd need cargo transshipment points (a trivial extra weight compared to the weight of the cable), why not suspend at least one of them at 20 miles using buoyancy?
I don't know that I can prove anything one way or another. The size of the balloon is not particularly relevant; the balloon could be made larger, or many balloons could be daisy-chained together to get the desired lift capacity. This is a large project and it would call for large tools.
I'm not sure where the 100 day limit that you referred to comes from, since these will almost certainly be unmanned "flights" but the 130,000 foot ceiling is about right. Altitude controls would have to be a part of this, perhaps by heating/cooling the helium during night/day cycles? Having an anchoring point at that altitude might make catching a cable lowered from orbit easier, since it wouldn't have to extend all the way down where the atmosphere is thick.
Splices are weak points, true. The initial spliced cable is just a scaffolding to support the construction of the real Elevator Cable, presumably extruded/woven/spun in one continuous 65,000 mile long spool.
You need to expend energy to convey the next helium tanks/balloon/spool assembly up, but it's a slow climb... any slow-release energy system will work. Batteries, diesel engines, etc. You might even use a partially inflated balloon to assist the lifting up to the end of the growing tether.
Presuming that this project is done during a relatively calm part of the year (no hurricanes), you work with the wind. Initially, you'd allow them to drift eastward with the wind.
As each length is added, the total eastward drift gets pretty long, but once you are above 100,000 feet, the air is thin enough that wind pressure on the upper balloons won't be much of an issue. Once the final connection is made between the gound tether and the GEO counterweight, centripedal acceleration will start to pull the cable outward, ultimately ending up perpendicular to the ground. The counterweight would then be somewhat farther out than GEO, and the cable would be taught. This would be the time at which you would send up the real Elevator cable as a spool, when the distance along the scaffolding cable is shortest.
One of the companies that has been referred to in discussions of the X-Prize is going to use an inflatable balloon system. Ultimately, they plan on having a LEO space station supported by helium-filled balloons. (Insert usual joke about helium balloons. Insert usual technical rebuttal showing how It's Not As Silly As It Sounds).
If this system has potential, why not use this as the initial lift phase of a space elevator? Unspool out the first piece of carbon nanotube cable and leave the initial lift balloon tethered to its end. Hoist another spool, and splice it onto the end; inflate another balloon and send it up farther. Keep adding lengths until you reach the LEO altitude of your inflatable space station, then send it up along the tether. You'll end up with a string, supported at multiple points by small balloon and on it's end by a really big balloon.
That space station would help to support the weight of the tether, and could either serve as a launching point for the cable which would go out to GEO, or as a device to catch a cable lowered down from GEO.
The inflatable space station people claim tremendous efficiencies in lift because of the passive nature of the lifting force of balloons (negative buoyancy) vs. rockets (thrust). Why not use this approach to leverage the space elevator cable?
By the way, I'm thinking that all of this, once complete, would merely serve as the scaffold to support the climbers, splicers, etc., with which the final Space Elevator cables would be built, connecting ground to GEO.
This refers, of course, to Mary Poppins, who was "Practically Perfect in Every Way", as anyone who has seen the movie will recall. Those of you with kids and a VCR, who have seen the damn movie at least 400 fricken times already and never want to see another dancing penguin for the rest of your fricken lives, will no doubt catch the reference right away.
And no, you can't watch "Hercules" either. Go read a book, for cryin' out loud.
Have you always wanted that fashionable and useful unbreakable skeleton, but don't have the rapid mutant healing factor that would let you survive the implant surgery? Well, this offer IS FOR YOU!
.45 slugs with your molars to shrugging off I-beams to the thigh(3), Wolverine's Skeleton(TM) is the skeleton you need!
Now available for the rest of us,
Wolverine's Skeleton(TM)!
With our patented new techniques, in just seven weeks(1) you can get the adamantium-matrix bone structure that you need. The Wolverine's Skeleton(TM) uses 100% adamantium in a computer-designed matrix that supports the growth of *your* bone marrow cells. No need to worry about loss of immune system function, because with the Wolverine's Skeleton(TM) system, your bone marrow will keep making T-cells and helper B-cells, just like always. Surprising affordable(2), your Wolverine's Skeleton(TM) will pay for itself in record time. From stopping
Order today!
1-888-METAL-ME
(1) per bone
(2) adamantium not included
(3) no protection to musculature, nerve tissue, blood vessels or other non-bone elements is stated or implied
"PC Load Letter"? What the fuck does *that* mean? Yeah, OK, c'mon, give it to me bitch, yeah, that's what I want, PC Load Letter, OK, give it to me , you know I love it, you PIECE OF SHIT!
Sounds like Michael Bolton could have tried that steel post trick.
Here's a metal you might find particularly useful, xmas2003:
Lithium carbonate
Remember what the nice doctor said? "Comics are not reality." You don't want to have to go back to the hospital, do you?
Say it to yourself a few times: "Comics are not reality. Comics are not reality." That's a good boy, we're all friends here, no one's going to hurt you. Just put the comic down and lets go for a walk outside in the fresh air, OK?
Absolutely. IAAS, and I review manuscripts for a number of scientific journals, mostly related to microbiology and microbial ecology. Only in a very few instances have I had to give a review of "Reject" based on poor language, and that was because the writing was so bad I couldn't make heads or tails of what the authors were actually trying to say that their data meant. Papers which were obviously written by authors whose primary language facility is not English need to be proofed/polished by a native- or fluent-speaker (assuming that the lanugage of the journal is English). I've given a review of "Revise extensively" on that basis, and have made that specific recommendation. If the paper conveys no useful information, wether because it's poorly written or uses bad experimental design or has overreaching conclusions, it doesn't belong in a reputable journal until those problems are corrected. The readership of the journal relies on the reviewers to make sure the papers are clear and of a minimum level of quality.
Most papers are pretty well written, bearing in mind that we're not talking about gripping prose, here... it's technical writing of the style of "this is the objective, this is what I did, this is how I did it, this is what happened, this is what it means". Basic technical writing is an essential skill that the scientist has to have. If you just simply cannot string the words together properly, find a collaborator to clean up your text, and give acknowledgements as appropriate. Usually, I would give a "Reject" or "Revise extensively and re-submit" if there's a problem with the experimental design or statitistics used. Overreaching or unwarranted conclusions would also be a red flag.
By the way, I have no patience with lazy or incompetent authors who submit crappy work and assume that the editor will polish it all up. Dot your own "i"s, cross your own "t"s, and you will fare much better in your reviews.
To quote from a Salon article entitled The Best Game Ever:
... With the all-text Nethack, the preferred graphics card is your mind's eye. This enables you to feel real terror, say, at the approach of an innocuous letter "C" hopping toward you across the screen -- since it represents the cockatrice, an occult-spawned dungeon fowl whose bite turns heroes to stone. With little predigested visual mediation between game play and your imagination, you'd often get the sense that you were, so to speak, playing against the game itself.
But beneath these primitive graphics is a game of such richness and endless variation it usually takes years to master, if at all.
The best graphics are those that don't get in the way of the game.
... then you won't even have time for Snood, much less any fricken MMORPG.
Not only do they rack up more miles than the average consumer-driven car, they do a lot of stop-and-go driving. From an efficiency and emissions standpoint, electric cars are great at this sort of thing, much better than gas engine. The intervening longer distance driving to and from the dispatch point, or to delivery neighborhoods is where the gas engines are better (range, cruising efficiency).
Hybrids seem to be a really good option here.