Oh, Bertie, thank heavens you're here! Someone is appropriating the prose style of the greatest author the English language has ever produced, and doing it in the most dreadful manner! He's even capitalizing the word "sir", and having Jeeves make interrogatory rather than simple declarative statements!
Sorry, Gussie, he did a simple what?
Oh Bertie, you ass, Jeeves would never actually question you! He would never say, "Certainly Sir, but what if Aunt Agatha finds out?" because that's a flat out question! Besides, he certainly wouldn't refer to your relative as "Aunt Agatha"! He might say, "Certainly Sir, but I might draw attention to the fact that Mrs. Gregson would take a dim view of such an approach." Bertie, you have to do something!
All well and good, Gussie old thing, but what am I to do? The hands of the Woosters are tied, as it were.
Not you, you fathead. We want Jeeves for this sort of thing!
Ah, of course. Jeeves?
Yo, Mr. B, what up?
Jeeves, if you could forego the anachronistic and inappropriate argot for the moment, we have a problem, or rather a sort of quandry which requires your attention.
Word. I talk my talk, yo.
Sharpen your wits, Jeeves, for this is unlike any you have faced before, and I fear that even you may not be up to the task.
De nada, boss. I got yer solution right here.
Jeeves? Do I hear correctly? We've not yet set the problem before you, and you have an answer for us?
Damn, bitch, didn't I just say that? Can't I hear my own self talking? Sh*t, I know what the problem is and I got the answer. It's self-referential code, dude. The problem is the solution, and vice versa. Get the code to recognize it's own faults, and set it to modify itself.
And we would then end up with...?
Undying prose, sir.
Yes, Jeeves. How appropriate.
With sincerest apologies to the Master, P.G. Wodehouse, whose writings gave me so much pleasure over the years, until I tried to write novels myself. Then they made me want to kill myself for my inadequacies as a writer.
Congratualtions to them but there is a potential fly in the ointment: what looks like a pulsating dwarf could actually be a binary system of two white dwarfs. Dufour is unfazed. He points out that the characteristics of the system are unique so either way, they've found a new class of something or other.
Feynman gave up drinking in the middle of his career. He toasted his own Nobel prize with ginger ale.
Feynman was fascinated by the phenomenon of sensory deprivation and even tried marijuana, ketamine and LSD to experience altered consciousness. He gave up drinking alcohol after he showed early signs of alcoholism, saying that he didn't want to do anything that would harm his brain. Feynman had a very liberal view on sexuality, visiting topless bars regularly and even giving a chapter on how to pick up girls in a bar in his biography.
March 18, 2008 For Scientists, a Beer Test Shows Results as a Litmus Test By CAROL KAESUK YOON
Ever since there have been scientists, there have been those who are wildly successful, publishing one well-received paper after another, and those who are not. And since nearly the same time, there have been scholars arguing over what makes the difference.
What is it that turns one scientist into more of a Darwin and another into more of a dud?
After years of argument over the roles of factors like genius, sex and dumb luck, a new study shows that something entirely unexpected and considerably sudsier may be at play in determining the success or failure of scientists -- beer.
According to the study, published in February in Oikos, a highly respected scientific journal, the more beer a scientist drinks, the less likely the scientist is to publish a paper or to have a paper cited by another researcher, a measure of a paper's quality and importance.
The results were not, however, a matter of a few scientists having had too many brews to be able to stumble back to the lab. Publication did not simply drop off among the heaviest drinkers. Instead, scientific performance steadily declined with increasing beer consumption across the board, from scientists who primly sip at two or three beers over a year to the sort who average knocking back more than two a day.
"I was really surprised," said Dr. Tomas Grim, the author of the study and an ornithologist at Palacky University in the Czech Republic, who normally studies the behavior of birds, not scientists. "And I am happy to see that the relationship I found seems to be very well supported by my new observations in pubs, bars and restaurants."
Dr. Grim, carried out the research by surveying his fellow Czech ornithologists about their beer drinking habits first in 2002 and then in 2006. He obtained the same results each time.
The paper has quickly been making the rounds among biologists, provoking reactions like surprise, nervous titters and irritation -- often accompanied by the name of a scientist whose drinking is as impressive as his or her list of publications.
Matthew Symonds, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Melbourne who has also studied factors affecting scientific productivity, called the results remarkable.
"It's rather devastating to be told we should drink less beer in order to increase our scientific performance," Dr. Symonds said.
Though the public may tend to think of scientists as exceedingly sober, scientific schmoozing is often beer-tinged, famous for producing spectacular breakthroughs and productive collaborations, countless papers having begun as scrawls on cocktail napkins.
Yet the new study shows no indication that some level of moderate social beer drinking increases scientific productivity. Some scientists suggest that biologists in the Czech Republic could prove to be an anomaly, given that the country has a special relationship to beer, boasting the highest rate of beer consumption on earth.
More important, as Dr. Grim pointed out, the study documents a correlation between beer drinking and scientific performance without explaining any correlation. That leaves open the possibility that it is not beer drinking that causes poor scientific performance, but just the opposite.
Or, as Dr. Mike Webster, an ornithologist and a beer enthusiast at Washington State University in Pullman, said, maybe "those with poor publication records are drowning their sorrows."
In spite of his study, Dr. Grim, who said he would on occasion enjoy more than 12 beers in a night, is not on a campaign to decrease beer drinking among scientists. Why not? His answer: "I like it."
Of all the animals you had to pick from you went with cows and whales?
Actually, cows (Bos taurus) are members of the Aritodactyla order:
Cetaceans
One group of artiodactyls (which molecular biology suggests were most closely related to Hippopotamidae) returned to the sea to become whales. Thus Artiodactyla without Cetacea is a paraphyletic group. For this reason, the term Cetartiodactyla was coined to refer to the group containing both artiodactyls and whales.[3]
Commingling of sperm and egg will let you know how closely related the molecular recognition is between these related species. Count the number of divisions in the zygote until it fails due to genetic incompatibility, and you have more information on cross-species recognition. Since you already know how closely cows and whales are (by molecular fingerprinting), that will let you calibrate this information.
It's value can be seen in modern cross-breeding of more closely related animals, and how to suppress incompatibilities to allow for valuable traits to be incorporated into livestock from wild cousins.
The PC should never have been used for gaming. It took kludge on top of kludge to make it work, and the end product is so far from its roots as a general-purpose computational device that it is barely recognizable.
Your belt should match your shoes. For example, if you are wearing brown shoes, you should be wearing a brown belt. Note that tan and cordovan are different colors than brown. Belts are cheaper than shoes, so if you need to buy another belt, do so. You have my permission to own more than one belt.
Your socks should match your pants. For example, if you are wearing brown pants, you should be wearing brown socks. Note that tan, khaki, olive, navy, black and white are different colors than brown. Socks are cheaper than pants, so if you need to buy a few pairs of socks in different colors, do so. You have my permission to have lots of pairs of socks. You also have my permission to THROW THE FUCK AWAY socks with holes in the heels, and buy new ones.
As your department head, please realize that I will be much more likely to ask you to participate in meetings with the division head if you don't look like a scruffy grad student. Unlike me, she doesn't know how talented and competent you are, so she is going to judge you by your appearance almost entirely. Please give HER the opportunity to give YOU a fair chance.
Kimchi refrigerator = beer refrigerator
on
Kimchi in Space
·
· Score: 1
the spin-off technologies make our lives so much better
I was in Korea (Suwon) a few months ago, and saw the best spin-off technology you can imagine. Six of us went to a bar, and the table in the booth had round, metal-lined holes, about 8 cm in diameter. When the waitress came over to take our order, she flipped a switch on the edge of the table. The five Americans had no idea what these were for.
When our first big pitcher of beer came, these metal cup-holders were chilly. We filled our round bottomed glasses from the pitcher, and set them down in these little cold-pits. The beer wasn't that cold in the pitcher, but it got cold fast in those little icy cup-holders. By the second pitcher, the holders were icy cold, with frost around the metal rim. We were on our third pitcher by the time our plate of munchies came, and focused more on food than drink. In the US, beer gets warm in the pitcher and glass while you eat and talk, not not there. Every sip of beer was cold, right down to the last mouthful in the glass.
One guy I know is famous for issuing instructions to his staff that range from irritating to ridiculous to borderline actionable. These are done on the phone, because 1) the guy will never put anything like that in writing, and 2) he can draw you in and escalate your time and energy commitment since there's no clear record of what you agreed to do on the project.
I took to following up his phone calls with a summary e.mail, outlining his demands on my time and effort. He got mad and told me to knock it off, that there was no need for e.mails when a phone call was sufficient, etc. I persisted, prefacing it with, "Just so I have it clear what you want me to do." He stopped the vampire routine, at least with me.
Need a Wii? Walmart has them, but you have to buy a $677 bundle of console + a crappy accessory + six games. All of this, for shipping some time between December 27 and January 25.
Personally, I'm waiting for the Christmas rush to pass so I can get the console without a forced bundle.
If it were Venus, you wouldn't see anything, unfortunately, since the clouds are too dense. An IR image of the impact site might let you see the spike in heat from the impact, but with a super-dense atmosphere and high winds, the impact shock and thermal signature would be dissipated in very short order.
If it does actually hit Mars, the atmosphere won't be enough to break it up much on its way down. This crater is going to be there for a long, long time.
Point of clarification: heat and pressure will give you relatively pure aluminum oxide from bauxite ore, but you still need electricity to obtain aluminum metal in the electrolytic precipitation step.
I agree that using a small nuclear reactor as a heat source would make sense for big facilities.
Heat -> motion -> electricity -> heat is less efficient that using the heat directly.
Also, many large pumps and motors can be run off of pressurized hydrolic lines. Use the pressurized steam from the reactor to provide mechanical force directly, and you can eliminate the electric motors in the same facility.
Check out video number 7 at 3.13e+00 seconds to see the Easter egg cartoon that those wacky scientists at Sandia slipped into the simulation! Those crazy guys are having some fun for the holidays!
Funny stuff, guys, way to go! This is the best prank evar!!!!
After having read that detention report, all I have to say is that ******** is a hero for trying to use an OSS browser. ******** deserves a pat on the back, not detention. If more people emulated ********'s example, then they, like ********, would see how much better it is. And to ********'s parents, I say, "You should be proud of ********! ******** should wear this detention like a badge of honor!"
Congratulations, ********!
Also, the teacher, "P. Bealmear" is obviously a certain "S. Ballmer" doing a sabbatical in a high school. I see you, Steve!
It seams to me that this could be stronger evidence that the whole thing fluctuates in size, rather than having a hard, irregular boundary.
Small weather-like fluctuations at the periphery of this Zone are normal, but it only fluctuates wildly when there is some kind of a malignant, evil force that needs to be neutralized. The only question is how deep Earth is within the Unthinking Deeps.
This will come as no surprise to the members of the Institute of Food Technologists. All of the big-scale industrial foods have a TON of science at their core - flavor, color, texture, nutrition, marketability, shelf-life, etc., etc. ad delectum. Spaghetti sauce turned out at 10,000 jars an hour uses all kinds of special processes and ingredients (i.e. chemicals) to achieve the desired outcome. Now, this same science is finding its way into the retail market, for meals prepared at the rate of only 100/hour in a kitchen.
Better living through chemistry. Long live the food technologists!
Disclaimer: I'm a Professional Member of IFT, although I'm not employed or paid by them.
I love Slashdot, love the content and the community, and have enjoyed the inside perspective on its history and future. Congrats to Rob et al. on their achievement.
However, in/. tradition, not to be a grammar Nazi, but the misuse of "to" and "too" in this piece (as in "if it isn't to much trouble") was irritating.
Slashdot Mirror
There's someone at the door, Jeeves.
Very good, sir. Mr. Fink-Nottle, sir.
What ho, Gussie.
Oh, Bertie, thank heavens you're here! Someone is appropriating the prose style of the greatest author the English language has ever produced, and doing it in the most dreadful manner! He's even capitalizing the word "sir", and having Jeeves make interrogatory rather than simple declarative statements!
Sorry, Gussie, he did a simple what?
Oh Bertie, you ass, Jeeves would never actually question you! He would never say, "Certainly Sir, but what if Aunt Agatha finds out?" because that's a flat out question! Besides, he certainly wouldn't refer to your relative as "Aunt Agatha"! He might say, "Certainly Sir, but I might draw attention to the fact that Mrs. Gregson would take a dim view of such an approach." Bertie, you have to do something!
All well and good, Gussie old thing, but what am I to do? The hands of the Woosters are tied, as it were.
Not you, you fathead. We want Jeeves for this sort of thing!
Ah, of course. Jeeves?
Yo, Mr. B, what up?
Jeeves, if you could forego the anachronistic and inappropriate argot for the moment, we have a problem, or rather a sort of quandry which requires your attention.
Word. I talk my talk, yo.
Sharpen your wits, Jeeves, for this is unlike any you have faced before, and I fear that even you may not be up to the task.
De nada, boss. I got yer solution right here.
Jeeves? Do I hear correctly? We've not yet set the problem before you, and you have an answer for us?
Damn, bitch, didn't I just say that? Can't I hear my own self talking? Sh*t, I know what the problem is and I got the answer. It's self-referential code, dude. The problem is the solution, and vice versa. Get the code to recognize it's own faults, and set it to modify itself.
And we would then end up with...?
Undying prose, sir.
Yes, Jeeves. How appropriate.
With sincerest apologies to the Master, P.G. Wodehouse, whose writings gave me so much pleasure over the years, until I tried to write novels myself. Then they made me want to kill myself for my inadequacies as a writer.
"Professor, that's amazing! The buckyballs will bind the hydrogen so well that it won't leak out of the container?"
"That's correct. We're very pleased with these results."
"And to release the hydrogen to be able to use it, you just crack open the buckyballs, right?"
"I beg your pardon? No, no, it's bound extremely tightly to the carbon matrix. That's what we've developed, a way to bind hydrogen."
"But to actually use the hydrogen, professor, you have to get it back out. How do you get it out of the buckyballs?"
"Ah, well, that's something that we'll address in year 4 of the grant."
"Which is...?"
"2011."
Mom?
Actually, cows (Bos taurus) are members of the Aritodactyla order:
Commingling of sperm and egg will let you know how closely related the molecular recognition is between these related species. Count the number of divisions in the zygote until it fails due to genetic incompatibility, and you have more information on cross-species recognition. Since you already know how closely cows and whales are (by molecular fingerprinting), that will let you calibrate this information.
It's value can be seen in modern cross-breeding of more closely related animals, and how to suppress incompatibilities to allow for valuable traits to be incorporated into livestock from wild cousins.
YGTBKM! LOL! I like your enthusiasm, but you know the Air Force neither encourages nor condones criminal activity.
p.s. and we know where you live.
p.p.s. and we told the FBI, DHS and your state and local PD where you live.
p.p.p.s. and we all have guns.
The PC should never have been used for gaming. It took kludge on top of kludge to make it work, and the end product is so far from its roots as a general-purpose computational device that it is barely recognizable.
And those jaw bones should have been left the hell alone, too. You can barely recognize them, either, and in their current form, they are NO GOOD FOR CHEWING!
Why can't people leave well enough alone?
Your belt should match your shoes. For example, if you are wearing brown shoes, you should be wearing a brown belt. Note that tan and cordovan are different colors than brown. Belts are cheaper than shoes, so if you need to buy another belt, do so. You have my permission to own more than one belt.
Your socks should match your pants. For example, if you are wearing brown pants, you should be wearing brown socks. Note that tan, khaki, olive, navy, black and white are different colors than brown. Socks are cheaper than pants, so if you need to buy a few pairs of socks in different colors, do so. You have my permission to have lots of pairs of socks. You also have my permission to THROW THE FUCK AWAY socks with holes in the heels, and buy new ones.
As your department head, please realize that I will be much more likely to ask you to participate in meetings with the division head if you don't look like a scruffy grad student. Unlike me, she doesn't know how talented and competent you are, so she is going to judge you by your appearance almost entirely. Please give HER the opportunity to give YOU a fair chance.
the spin-off technologies make our lives so much better
I was in Korea (Suwon) a few months ago, and saw the best spin-off technology you can imagine. Six of us went to a bar, and the table in the booth had round, metal-lined holes, about 8 cm in diameter. When the waitress came over to take our order, she flipped a switch on the edge of the table. The five Americans had no idea what these were for.
When our first big pitcher of beer came, these metal cup-holders were chilly. We filled our round bottomed glasses from the pitcher, and set them down in these little cold-pits. The beer wasn't that cold in the pitcher, but it got cold fast in those little icy cup-holders. By the second pitcher, the holders were icy cold, with frost around the metal rim. We were on our third pitcher by the time our plate of munchies came, and focused more on food than drink. In the US, beer gets warm in the pitcher and glass while you eat and talk, not not there. Every sip of beer was cold, right down to the last mouthful in the glass.
That's a great technology spin off.
One guy I know is famous for issuing instructions to his staff that range from irritating to ridiculous to borderline actionable. These are done on the phone, because 1) the guy will never put anything like that in writing, and 2) he can draw you in and escalate your time and energy commitment since there's no clear record of what you agreed to do on the project.
I took to following up his phone calls with a summary e.mail, outlining his demands on my time and effort. He got mad and told me to knock it off, that there was no need for e.mails when a phone call was sufficient, etc. I persisted, prefacing it with, "Just so I have it clear what you want me to do." He stopped the vampire routine, at least with me.
An article in the NY Times proposes a solution to the curse: bring outsiders with no experience onto teams to keep creativity and innovation on track.
Great, they've managed to re-invent the Pointy Headed Boss, along with his favorite justification for existence.
Need a Wii? Walmart has them, but you have to buy a $677 bundle of console + a crappy accessory + six games. All of this, for shipping some time between December 27 and January 25.
Personally, I'm waiting for the Christmas rush to pass so I can get the console without a forced bundle.
A video test drive and gee-whiz specs breakdown at the Popular Mechanics site proves that this thing is for real.
My sarcasm meter must be broken.
Remember the famous Face on Mars?
The Sandia labs simulation of the Tunguska impact has its own face - forward the video to 3.13e+00 seconds to see the Face of Tunguska!
Clearly, the Face on Mars is the "thumbprint" of a previous Tunguska event!
If it were Venus, you wouldn't see anything, unfortunately, since the clouds are too dense. An IR image of the impact site might let you see the spike in heat from the impact, but with a super-dense atmosphere and high winds, the impact shock and thermal signature would be dissipated in very short order.
If it does actually hit Mars, the atmosphere won't be enough to break it up much on its way down. This crater is going to be there for a long, long time.
Oh, ha ha, very fsking funny. Rub it in, why don't you, you insensitive clod.
Point of clarification: heat and pressure will give you relatively pure aluminum oxide from bauxite ore, but you still need electricity to obtain aluminum metal in the electrolytic precipitation step.
I agree that using a small nuclear reactor as a heat source would make sense for big facilities.
Heat -> motion -> electricity -> heat is less efficient that using the heat directly.
Also, many large pumps and motors can be run off of pressurized hydrolic lines. Use the pressurized steam from the reactor to provide mechanical force directly, and you can eliminate the electric motors in the same facility.
Check out video number 7 at 3.13e+00 seconds to see the Easter egg cartoon that those wacky scientists at Sandia slipped into the simulation! Those crazy guys are having some fun for the holidays!
Funny stuff, guys, way to go! This is the best prank evar!!!!
After having read that detention report, all I have to say is that ******** is a hero for trying to use an OSS browser. ******** deserves a pat on the back, not detention. If more people emulated ********'s example, then they, like ********, would see how much better it is. And to ********'s parents, I say, "You should be proud of ********! ******** should wear this detention like a badge of honor!"
Congratulations, ********!
Also, the teacher, "P. Bealmear" is obviously a certain "S. Ballmer" doing a sabbatical in a high school. I see you, Steve!
It seams to me that this could be stronger evidence that the whole thing fluctuates in size, rather than having a hard, irregular boundary.
Small weather-like fluctuations at the periphery of this Zone are normal, but it only fluctuates wildly when there is some kind of a malignant, evil force that needs to be neutralized. The only question is how deep Earth is within the Unthinking Deeps.
This will come as no surprise to the members of the Institute of Food Technologists. All of the big-scale industrial foods have a TON of science at their core - flavor, color, texture, nutrition, marketability, shelf-life, etc., etc. ad delectum. Spaghetti sauce turned out at 10,000 jars an hour uses all kinds of special processes and ingredients (i.e. chemicals) to achieve the desired outcome. Now, this same science is finding its way into the retail market, for meals prepared at the rate of only 100/hour in a kitchen.
Better living through chemistry. Long live the food technologists!
Disclaimer: I'm a Professional Member of IFT, although I'm not employed or paid by them.
Thanks for giving our IT guys the URLs, Slashdot. As if they hadn't already firewalled all the good stuff already.
I love Slashdot, love the content and the community, and have enjoyed the inside perspective on its history and future. Congrats to Rob et al. on their achievement.
/. tradition, not to be a grammar Nazi, but the misuse of "to" and "too" in this piece (as in "if it isn't to much trouble") was irritating.
However, in