Neuromancer vs. Snow Crash
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0wnz0red
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· Score: 2
Comparing these two books is a little like comparing _Stagecoach_ with _Blazing Saddles_. Both movies are Westerns, after a fashion, but one came at the beginning of the genre and was a movie which everyone took seriously and emulated for years; the other came at the end of the genre and ensured that nobody could take Westerns entirely seriously again.
I prefer _Neuromancer_ to _Snow Crash_. Gibson, to my mind, exhibits a real flair for creating memorable images. Armitage wordlessly breaking his wine glass, Case knocking down the wasp's nest, Case's meetings with Wintermute in various personae. He also occasionally manages a beautiful economy of language (e.g. when Case shoots the image of Julius, "he was right about the blood." Or his finding the picture of Corto: "the eyes were Armitage's.") Compare Gibson's spare prose with Stephenson's exhausting, aggressively illiterate style in _Snow Crash_.
hyacinthus.
Re:This guy will start hollering for a human soon.
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Shop Till It Drops
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· Score: 2
This is like a standing ovation for me. I've been called a lot of things, but this is the first time I've ever been called a "redneck", and I wear it as a badge of honor. Not many second-generation immigrants get to be rednecks, but somehow I managed it--and I've got the can of Pabst Blue Ribbon and the Billy Bob teeth to prove it.
"No really, can you come over my house and tell me which soaps and cereals to buy too? Hey maybe you could tell me which sexual positions to use because of course it comes straight from God's brain to your keyboard.
Get this straight Nimnertz:"
I don't think he had to tell us that you were an asshole--you just did a pretty good job of telling us yourself.
Hey, your usage "requires" broadband? (The same way that my neighbor's desire to have the biggest car on the block "requires" him to own an SUV with a quarter the gas mileage of my compact car?) Fine. Have a computer in every room in your apartment including the laundry room and the bathroom, download the source tree for Mozilla nightly just so you can be running the latest build, grab all those bootlegged episodes of "The Family Guy". Just don't whine when the ISPs wise up and start charging guys like you what you deserve to pay. The rest of us, _most_ of us, don't care that with your cable modem service you can't serve up pirated music and the "Ultimate 'Lexx' Episode Guide" you've been working on for weeks.
"I would probably not have a job since I could not work at home and I have to work from home at least sometimes."
"Work". I know someone who is practically broke because her health was ruined after two decades of working for Kaiser Aluminum but the state decided she didn't qualify for disability. My partner of three years, a gardener, comes home exhausted every night because some rich fool on the Eastside woke up one morning and decided that he or she wanted the pine trees on his or her lakeside property removed to improve the view.
Don't ever, _ever_ mistake sitting in your bathrobe in front of your computer with a beer and a slice of cold pizza for _work_.
hyacinthus.
This guy will start hollering for a human soon...
on
Shop Till It Drops
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· Score: 3
"Whoever made this is a genius. A guy in the store can make a mistake or give you a hard time, but not the machine. I definitely prefer the machine to a person."
Just wait until this fellow puts in five dollars only to see it disappear without a trace, or until that packet of Pop-Tarts gets stuck halfway off its little rack and won't drop however much he kicks the machine. He'll start looking for someone to whine to about getting his money back.
Ah, well, I shouldn't complain. I work for a company which thinks that providing us with a couple of tables, a Coke machine and one of those automat machines which dispenses packaged Danish and five-dollar sandwiches satisfies their obligation to provide us with a cafeteria.
I hate to intrude into the creationism vs. evolution debates which seem to be dominating this discussion, but I actually have a _different_ question. We all know that high school and perhaps introductory college texts on general biology have often become seriously watered down and error-ridden. Stephen Jay Gould wrote one amusing essay on how a particular error (something to do with _Eohippus_, which isn't named _Eohippus_ anymore I guess, but I like the old name) has propagated itself, unchecked, from text to text.
Frankly I don't trust many high school or freshman level textbooks in _any_ subject. So I'd like to know: can anyone recommend a scholarly, well-referenced textbook, aimed about about the twelfth-grade level, in biology, in particular one which does a good job of covering evolution? Any particular authors and titles stand out? Any good resources to reviews and critiques of popular science textbooks?
The popular works have their place, but they're all deficient in some way. Gould is too scattershot--he's an essayist, really--and Dawkins is too polemical (frankly I think Dawkins has become an unmitigated jackass in recent years, and I'm not a creationist.)
It is a disturbing assumption, but all too honestly, a true one. I worked three computer jobs before quitting the business, and I remember _one_ woman programmer out of dozens, and no gay male programmers other than myself. _One_ of my computer science professors at San Diego State University was a woman. And according to a couple of articles I found after a quick search, the percentage of women earning baccalaureate degrees in computer science is _dropping_ (at least it was a couple of years ago.)
I wonder what the mean age of a software engineer is. For me, "software engineer" conjures up an image of a slovenly man in his twenties who hasn't lived in one place for more than a year at a stretch--but that's certainly not a true picture.
I more or less enjoyed watching _X-Men_, although I found that it wasn't really worth watching more than once, except to see Hugh Jackman without his shirt. The thing that I found myself wondering when I watched the movie the second time was how on earth Xavier could expect a bunch of mutants--especially mutant teenagers--to get along with one another, simply because they're all mutants.
Think about it. "Hi, my name's Gene Hartford, but you can call me, uh, Laserray or something [insert name from Silly Superhero Moniker Generator here.] (I guess that mutant superheroes, like neo-pagans and Slashdot readers like myself, can't resist the special narcissism of adopting a pseudonym, often more than one. "What kind of name is Silver Ravenmoon?") I can punch holes through six inches of steel at five hundred yards. What can you do?" "Oh, I can make ice sculptures." Does anyone really expect that these two will be able to get along as social equals?
I'd also like to know how Cyclops got through life from the time when his, er, ability first developed, and when Xavier was able to design those goggles of his. Did he spend a year with his eyes tightly shut? But I guess that question, like the question of where the superheroes get their numerous costume changes, doesn't bear close examination.
hyacinthus (whose neo-pagan superhero pseudonym is Ernest Samuel Tomlinson.)
"Also, the alternating 1/2 bond representation of carbon rings is a bit arbitrary; another symbol might be better to represent the nature of the bonds within the ring."
It is a bit arbitrary, but it would be difficult accurately to depict the real nature of the bonding in a fused heterocyclic aromatic system in any simple way. A common convention is to draw a six-electron aromatic ring (e.g. benzene, thiophene, tropylium) with a circle in the center. One organic chemistry text, March's _Advanced Organic Chemistry_, adopts this convention for single rings but does _not_ use it for fused systems, for a good reason: if you drew (say) naphthalene with a circle in the center of each ring, you would inaccurately give the impression that napthalene was a system of two independent six-electron rings, and not a fused system of ten electrons with a certain amount of bond fixation.
The anti-humanities yahoos produced by most computer science "curricula" are proud of their ignorance of history, literature, and the proper usage of their native language. This sickens me.
I should also add that a lot of the computer geeks I know are profoundly ignorant of science and of mathematics, as well. The quality of various universities' computer science programs differ widely, of course, but most of them impose much less stringent math and science requirements than (say) the physics or chemistry curricula. I worked with people at software companies who could barely manage single-variable algebra, sweated over the simplest application of trigonometry, and of course knew no calculus. The attitude seemed to me, "Hell, I'll just grab the code out of _Numerical Methods_ or wherever."
I think a lot of computer geeks think they know science because they've picked up a vague smattering of facts from popular science articles and publications. But ask your average geek how Millikan determined the charge on the electron, or how the experiment worked which first determined (with some certainty) that it was nucleic acids and not proteins which transmitted genetic information, and watch him sweat and run to Google for the answer.
C. S. Lewis, more than fifty years ago, wrote of the sort of education that is "neither Classical nor Scientific, merely Modern". Computer science is the apotheosis of this.
...where Ace Rothstein (Robert DeNiro) gives his faithless, alcoholic wife Ginger (Sharon Stone) a beeper to keep track of her after she'd run out for the umpteenth time? Anyone who's seen the movie knows how well _that_ worked.
"of course we have - but thats not the point. We have all seen many things that are similar... but in this instance we have yet to see one that is comfortable and works well for the masses and is something that can become integrated into our daily lives."
Rough luck on all those stenotypists who've been using machines like this for decades, huh? (Not one-handed, though.)
The really silly thing about "virii" is that the worst is so obviously a product of stupidity: you can almost imagine people thinking, "Gee, I sorta remember this word 'radii', so I guess the plural of 'virus' is 'virii'!" In a similar spirit I've seen "compi" (plural of "compass"), "serii" (plural of "series"), and "stati" (plural of "status".)
Moral: if you don't know Latin, leave off pretending that you do. "Viruses" is a fine English word.
I notice that the article doesn't say anything about whether the asteroid will show an apparent disc from Earth, but this is easy enough to calculate, I suppose--
Diameter of asteroid: 800 m Perigee distance: "1.3 x distance of Moon" Distance of moon: 384,000,000 m approx. Thus, perigee distance: 500,000,000 m approx.
Angle subtended by asteroid: 800 / 500,000,000
=.0000016 radians approx
=.000092 degrees approx
=.33 seconds of arc.
And this is only at perigee, of course.
By comparison, the disc of Neptune subtends about 3 seconds of arc (don't remember exactly), and just shows a disc in larger amateur telescopes. I don't think anyone with a pair of binoculars is going to be able to discern phases on this asteroid.
...because I've never seen the term PCD or "personal communication device" before. Of course I went straight to Google and punched it in to see what I could find, and found mostly press releases from various manufacturers and dealers in electronics. PCD isn't just a fancy acronym for "cellular phone", is it? Or does it imply some features on top of ordinary telephony, like a half-duplex "radio" feature, or the ability to send alphanumeric messages (like in that f**king stupid ad during the Olympics where a sleeping skier's buddies all silently agree to push him off the lift? I wasn't amused--packed snow isn't soft, and you could break a bone landing on it wrong from that height.)
My boyfriend introduced me to this delicious, no-bake confection, which can be found commercially, but it's simple to make them on your own. There are a couple of different recipes; the essentials are a base composed largely of graham cracker crumbs, chopped nuts, and coconut, topped with a layer of custard, with chocolate spread atop that. I haven't the recipe with me, however.
Well, yes. What else is rhetoric for? Use it or lose it, I say.
I'll let you in on my secret. Every couple of days, usually after work or during a break at work when I've been given a reason to hate the job more than usual (hearing the manager sitting in the room across from me say "We've got to leverage the existing technology base" three times in one conversation will do it, for example), I check out Slashdot. Most of what's on Slashdot interests me not at all, but occasionally I'll find a topic which touches a nerve. Then I take all that frustration at people who spew high-tech jargon and who value technology over tradition and information over wisdom, condense it into one choice drop of well-phrased vitriol, and submit it.
It's not a great way to build Slashdot karma, but it's quite refreshing, almost like a tonic. I won't need a holiday this year.
...you really can't do any better than _The Joy of Cooking_. It's been around forever and has been updated more times than I can remember; it is not a mere collection of recipes, but a well-organized survey of cooking techniques and ingredients (the section on ingredient substitution is excellent, for example, and has saved me from several kitchen disasters.) The chief deficiency of the book, I think, is its overemphasis on American and European dishes, but that's understandable; if the book comprehensively dealt with cuisine of every nationality, it'd be a ten-volume set.
Most importantly, _The Joy of Cooking_ is not written by someone who is more interested in bragging about his thousands of dollars of computer equipment. I'm not sure what the audience for this book is. I've never met a computer geek whose place wasn't overflowing with old pizza crusts and crumpled Jumbo Jack wrappers--computer nerds don't _cook_.
You mistake being _childish_ for being _childlike_. If you take a wild pleasure in running through the sprinklers in the park or in splashing in puddles in the rain, that's _childlike_, and there's nothing wrong with that. If you get your jollies hurling bricks through windows or (as is likely to happen in this case) heckling and name-calling the underpaid, harassed Microsoft employees staffing the booth at the conference, that's _childish_ and you deserve to have your ears boxed.
There is such a thing as courtesy. Your parents might have taught you about it.
"You really have to watch several consecutive episodes of Buffy to 'get' it. The show is meant to be viewed as a whole, not as individual episodes. My bet is that most people who immediately discount it have seen fewer than three episodes, and probably didn't come to the show with an open mind."
Ah, the "Babylon 5" excuse. It's not just a string of episode like that Star Trek crap, it's a _whole_. It's a _story arc_. Watch a whole seaons or couple of seasons of the show and you'll begin to appreciate J. Michael's Straczynski's grand plan.
Whatever. For all of JMS's design, "Babylon 5" still was badly written (especially when it came to comedy), horribly acted (with the exception of some of the supporting roles), and built up to one of the worst dramatic climaxes I've ever seen in a movie or TV show.
All of which says nothing about "Buffy the Vampire Slayer", of course, but I was just trying to explain that I'm no longer impressed by the "you can't see just one episode" argument. Either the writing is good--good on the small scale, good on the level of individual conversations and characterizations--or it's not. Either the acting is good, or it's not. No amount of long range planning will make a poorly written and poorly acted TV show good.
...is that you complain about the insertion of the "under God" into the Pledge of Allegiance in 1953, when _your_ religion, so-called (you _are_ a neo-pagan, aren't you?), didn't even _exist_ in 1953.
"The lesson Newdow's daughter should get from the court decision is that there is still hope for religious freedom in this country, even though you often have to fight for it. The lesson is that patriotism isn't demonstrated by forced and phony public prayers. When you use the tools the founders gave us to preserve the rights they guaranteed us, that is defending your country. That is patriotism. That's what young Ms. Newdow knows about her dad now."
No, I don't think you're right. Frankly, I don't believe for a second that young _Miss_ Newdow ("Ms."? It's not like we're uncertain of her marital status!) really cared one way or another about hearing the word "God" at school. When I was that age, I occasionally heard my school chums talking about God or church, and I don't remember feeling anything but mild curiosity, because I didn't go to church and my parents didn't have anything to say about God.
No, I think her father got a weed up his ass, and calculated that a First Amendment lawsuit about "one nation under God" probably wasn't going to work..._unless_ he could pretend that his little daughter was somehow "hurt" by it, and thus gain sympathy points. Basically I think Mr. Newdow used his daughter as a tool to help his cause, and I think that's low.
Now his daughter is probably going to be the most hated student at her school, and all her life she'll be dogged by the image that she was the little girl who wouldn't say the Pledge of Allegiance, even though the whole f**king mess was her father's idea and she was too young to understand how she was being used. She'll grow up to hate her father--I'll lay money on that.
Now, I'm a sort of atheist-agnostic myself, certainly not a religious man. And I've always seethed over the way that "...under God..." was crammed into the Pledge of Allegiance during the 50's. So I wouldn't be too displeased to see it go, yet, all the same...
I heard this story in a news item on NPR this afternoon, and a quote from the plaintiff Newdow, the man who filed suit because his daughter had to recite the Pledge in school, caught my attention: he claimed that it "hurt" (his word) his daughter to have to listen to those words. (Note: to _listen_ to them. Not to say them--as has been pointed out in this discussion, it has long been established that a child cannot be compelled to recite the Pledge.)
What the f**k? I mean, this kid, all her life, is going to have to hear expressions of belief that she has been trained not to approve of. (Note, _trained_. She's a second-grader; she's not old enough to have a truly independent opinion on this or anything, except maybe whether she likes broccoli or not.) She's gonna see people wearing crucifixes (and Stars of David, and pentacles, and whatever), she's gonna read and hear and see people talking about God and Jesus and Allah _wherever she goes_. What kind of lesson is it for her to learn, that a federal court has decided that she doesn't even have to _hear_ something she doesn't like, or that her father doesn't like?
I'm reminded of the imbroglio in San Diego a few years ago, when some atheist group or other tried to get the Mt. Soledad cross torn down. I could respect their arguments, and yet still think, "What a bunch of yahoos! It's a cross. There are lots of crosses around. Deal with it."
It's one reason that, even though I don't believe in God, I often can't stand the company of some atheists; they walk through life with a giant chip on their shoulders, ready to jump down the throat of anyone who so much as whispers the G-word.
Okaaay. Let me put it this way: why should I and my friends and others like us, who are usually two paychecks away from bankruptcy because of rent and taxes, and live in fear that a serious illness or a broken leg might bring us to financial ruin (as happened to an acquaintance of mine last year), work up much enthusiasm for government funding to fuel _your_ Star-Trek-inspired fantasies of going where no man has gone before? Hmm? Why should we care?
"A: Water on Mars makes Mars more interesting to visit, because where there's water there is/was life. "B: Water is to rockets what petroleum is to cars.
"Therefore, these discoveries make Mars easier to return from, and make it a more interesting place to visit."
So, in other words, the discoveries of this latest exploration of Mars are vital, because...they make it easier to explore Mars some more! Yeah!
It's odd. When I was a kid up until my late teens, I was all for space exploration. I read _Astronomy_ and _Sky and Telescope_ magazines all the time and watched out for the latest Voyager pictures, I devoured Arthur C. Clarke's writings, I waited for the day when there would be manned expeditions to the Moon and Mars. I'm not exactly sure when the disillusionment came. The fight over funding the Superconducting Supercollider versus the space station had something to do with it, because it made me aware for the first time how much the funding of these massive projects had to do with bringing the pork home to defence contractors and how little it had to do with science.
So I don't go in for these "onwards and upwards into space for no particular reason" projects any more. Periodically we're told of new evidence (often old evidence dusted off) of water/organic compounds/primitive life on Mars--all of which seems to me calculated to keep up the rate of spending on space exploration. Most of the reasons I've seen offered for why we should care about such discoveries are on the line of yours: they justify further exploration. Rather a circular justification, don't you think?
It's all about exploitation in the end. Talk all you want about scientific discovery, in the end, it's all about colonization and military exploitation. None of which will benefit people like me, of course. To quote (well, misquote) the astronomy Robert Burnham, when asked if he was excited about the prospect of someday flying to the Moon, "Are you kidding? I can barely afford to fly to New York."
I took note of Liebowitz's estimate that music downloads approximate five times the volume of CD's sold in the US. That's an impressive figure, and he correctly asks--if the volume is so huge, where's the dent in music sales?
My tentative hypothesis to explain the disparity is that relatively few people are downloading all that music. Most of my friends are not heavy computer users and either do not download music at all, or maybe look for the occasional song now and again. But the two people I know who download music regularly go ridiculously overboard with it--they've got stacks of burned CDs and huge hard drives full of downloaded music. (Before you respond and say, "Hey, all of my friends download music and I do too," think--how many of your friends _aren't_ computer geeks?)
I'd be really interested to see what the distribution is of the frequency and volume of music downloading. I suspect that maybe a tenth or twentieth part of the users are downloading most of the music--they're the ones who are stealing more than they're buying, but it doesn't matter much because everyone else is still buying CD's.
Slashdot Mirror
Comparing these two books is a little like comparing _Stagecoach_ with _Blazing Saddles_. Both movies are Westerns, after a fashion, but one came at the beginning of the genre and was a movie which everyone took seriously and emulated for years; the other came at the end of the genre and ensured that nobody could take Westerns entirely seriously again.
I prefer _Neuromancer_ to _Snow Crash_. Gibson, to my mind, exhibits a real flair for creating memorable images. Armitage wordlessly breaking his wine glass, Case knocking down the wasp's nest, Case's meetings with Wintermute in various personae. He also occasionally manages a beautiful economy of language (e.g. when Case shoots the image of Julius, "he was right about the blood." Or his finding the picture of Corto: "the eyes were Armitage's.") Compare Gibson's spare prose with Stephenson's exhausting, aggressively illiterate style in _Snow Crash_.
hyacinthus.
This is like a standing ovation for me. I've been called a lot of things, but this is the first time I've ever been called a "redneck", and I wear it as a badge of honor. Not many second-generation immigrants get to be rednecks, but somehow I managed it--and I've got the can of Pabst Blue Ribbon and the Billy Bob teeth to prove it.
hyacinthus.
"No really, can you come over my house and tell me which soaps and cereals to buy too? Hey maybe you could tell me which sexual positions to use because of course it comes straight from God's brain to your keyboard.
Get this straight Nimnertz:"
I don't think he had to tell us that you were an asshole--you just did a pretty good job of telling us yourself.
Hey, your usage "requires" broadband? (The same way that my neighbor's desire to have the biggest car on the block "requires" him to own an SUV with a quarter the gas mileage of my compact car?) Fine. Have a computer in every room in your apartment including the laundry room and the bathroom, download the source tree for Mozilla nightly just so you can be running the latest build, grab all those bootlegged episodes of "The Family Guy". Just don't whine when the ISPs wise up and start charging guys like you what you deserve to pay. The rest of us, _most_ of us, don't care that with your cable modem service you can't serve up pirated music and the "Ultimate 'Lexx' Episode Guide" you've been working on for weeks.
"I would probably not have a job since I could not work at home and I have to work from home at least sometimes."
"Work". I know someone who is practically broke because her health was ruined after two decades of working for Kaiser Aluminum but the state decided she didn't qualify for disability. My partner of three years, a gardener, comes home exhausted every night because some rich fool on the Eastside woke up one morning and decided that he or she wanted the pine trees on his or her lakeside property removed to improve the view.
Don't ever, _ever_ mistake sitting in your bathrobe in front of your computer with a beer and a slice of cold pizza for _work_.
hyacinthus.
"Whoever made this is a genius. A guy in the store can make a mistake or give you a hard time, but not the machine. I definitely prefer the machine to a person."
Just wait until this fellow puts in five dollars only to see it disappear without a trace, or until that packet of Pop-Tarts gets stuck halfway off its little rack and won't drop however much he kicks the machine. He'll start looking for someone to whine to about getting his money back.
Ah, well, I shouldn't complain. I work for a company which thinks that providing us with a couple of tables, a Coke machine and one of those automat machines which dispenses packaged Danish and five-dollar sandwiches satisfies their obligation to provide us with a cafeteria.
hyacinthus.
I hate to intrude into the creationism vs. evolution debates which seem to be dominating this discussion, but I actually have a _different_ question. We all know that high school and perhaps introductory college texts on general biology have often become seriously watered down and error-ridden. Stephen Jay Gould wrote one amusing essay on how a particular error (something to do with _Eohippus_, which isn't named _Eohippus_ anymore I guess, but I like the old name) has propagated itself, unchecked, from text to text.
Frankly I don't trust many high school or freshman level textbooks in _any_ subject. So I'd like to know: can anyone recommend a scholarly, well-referenced textbook, aimed about about the twelfth-grade level, in biology, in particular one which does a good job of covering evolution? Any particular authors and titles stand out? Any good resources to reviews and critiques of popular science textbooks?
The popular works have their place, but they're all deficient in some way. Gould is too scattershot--he's an essayist, really--and Dawkins is too polemical (frankly I think Dawkins has become an unmitigated jackass in recent years, and I'm not a creationist.)
hyacinthus.
It is a disturbing assumption, but all too honestly, a true one. I worked three computer jobs before quitting the business, and I remember _one_ woman programmer out of dozens, and no gay male programmers other than myself. _One_ of my computer science professors at San Diego State University was a woman. And according to a couple of articles I found after a quick search, the percentage of women earning baccalaureate degrees in computer science is _dropping_ (at least it was a couple of years ago.)
I wonder what the mean age of a software engineer is. For me, "software engineer" conjures up an image of a slovenly man in his twenties who hasn't lived in one place for more than a year at a stretch--but that's certainly not a true picture.
hyacinthus.
I more or less enjoyed watching _X-Men_, although I found that it wasn't really worth watching more than once, except to see Hugh Jackman without his shirt. The thing that I found myself wondering when I watched the movie the second time was how on earth Xavier could expect a bunch of mutants--especially mutant teenagers--to get along with one another, simply because they're all mutants.
Think about it. "Hi, my name's Gene Hartford, but you can call me, uh, Laserray or something [insert name from Silly Superhero Moniker Generator here.] (I guess that mutant superheroes, like neo-pagans and Slashdot readers like myself, can't resist the special narcissism of adopting a pseudonym, often more than one. "What kind of name is Silver Ravenmoon?") I can punch holes through six inches of steel at five hundred yards. What can you do?" "Oh, I can make ice sculptures." Does anyone really expect that these two will be able to get along as social equals?
I'd also like to know how Cyclops got through life from the time when his, er, ability first developed, and when Xavier was able to design those goggles of his. Did he spend a year with his eyes tightly shut? But I guess that question, like the question of where the superheroes get their numerous costume changes, doesn't bear close examination.
hyacinthus (whose neo-pagan superhero pseudonym is Ernest Samuel Tomlinson.)
"Also, the alternating 1/2 bond representation of carbon rings is a bit arbitrary; another symbol might be better to represent the nature of the bonds within the ring."
It is a bit arbitrary, but it would be difficult accurately to depict the real nature of the bonding in a fused heterocyclic aromatic system in any simple way. A common convention is to draw a six-electron aromatic ring (e.g. benzene, thiophene, tropylium) with a circle in the center. One organic chemistry text, March's _Advanced Organic Chemistry_, adopts this convention for single rings but does _not_ use it for fused systems, for a good reason: if you drew (say) naphthalene with a circle in the center of each ring, you would inaccurately give the impression that napthalene was a system of two independent six-electron rings, and not a fused system of ten electrons with a certain amount of bond fixation.
hyacinthus.
The anti-humanities yahoos produced by most computer science "curricula" are proud of their ignorance of history, literature, and the proper usage of their native language. This sickens me.
I should also add that a lot of the computer geeks I know are profoundly ignorant of science and of mathematics, as well. The quality of various universities' computer science programs differ widely, of course, but most of them impose much less stringent math and science requirements than (say) the physics or chemistry curricula. I worked with people at software companies who could barely manage single-variable algebra, sweated over the simplest application of trigonometry, and of course knew no calculus. The attitude seemed to me, "Hell, I'll just grab the code out of _Numerical Methods_ or wherever."
I think a lot of computer geeks think they know science because they've picked up a vague smattering of facts from popular science articles and publications. But ask your average geek how Millikan determined the charge on the electron, or how the experiment worked which first determined (with some certainty) that it was nucleic acids and not proteins which transmitted genetic information, and watch him sweat and run to Google for the answer.
C. S. Lewis, more than fifty years ago, wrote of the sort of education that is "neither Classical nor Scientific, merely Modern". Computer science is the apotheosis of this.
hyacinthus.
...where Ace Rothstein (Robert DeNiro) gives his faithless, alcoholic wife Ginger (Sharon Stone) a beeper to keep track of her after she'd run out for the umpteenth time? Anyone who's seen the movie knows how well _that_ worked.
hyacinthus.
"of course we have - but thats not the point. We have all seen many things that are similar... but in this instance we have yet to see one that is comfortable and works well for the masses and is something that can become integrated into our daily lives."
Rough luck on all those stenotypists who've been using machines like this for decades, huh? (Not one-handed, though.)
hyacinthus.
The really silly thing about "virii" is that the worst is so obviously a product of stupidity: you can almost imagine people thinking, "Gee, I sorta remember this word 'radii', so I guess the plural of 'virus' is 'virii'!" In a similar spirit I've seen "compi" (plural of "compass"), "serii" (plural of "series"), and "stati" (plural of "status".)
Moral: if you don't know Latin, leave off pretending that you do. "Viruses" is a fine English word.
hyacinthus.
I notice that the article doesn't say anything about whether the asteroid will show an apparent disc from Earth, but this is easy enough to calculate, I suppose--
.0000016 radians approx .000092 degrees approx .33 seconds of arc.
Diameter of asteroid: 800 m
Perigee distance: "1.3 x distance of Moon"
Distance of moon: 384,000,000 m approx.
Thus, perigee distance: 500,000,000 m approx.
Angle subtended by asteroid: 800 / 500,000,000
=
=
=
And this is only at perigee, of course.
By comparison, the disc of Neptune subtends about 3 seconds of arc (don't remember exactly), and just shows a disc in larger amateur telescopes. I don't think anyone with a pair of binoculars is going to be able to discern phases on this asteroid.
hyacinthus.
...because I've never seen the term PCD or "personal communication device" before. Of course I went straight to Google and punched it in to see what I could find, and found mostly press releases from various manufacturers and dealers in electronics. PCD isn't just a fancy acronym for "cellular phone", is it? Or does it imply some features on top of ordinary telephony, like a half-duplex "radio" feature, or the ability to send alphanumeric messages (like in that f**king stupid ad during the Olympics where a sleeping skier's buddies all silently agree to push him off the lift? I wasn't amused--packed snow isn't soft, and you could break a bone landing on it wrong from that height.)
hyacinthus.
My boyfriend introduced me to this delicious, no-bake confection, which can be found commercially, but it's simple to make them on your own. There are a couple of different recipes; the essentials are a base composed largely of graham cracker crumbs, chopped nuts, and coconut, topped with a layer of custard, with chocolate spread atop that. I haven't the recipe with me, however.
hyacinthus.
Well, yes. What else is rhetoric for? Use it or lose it, I say.
I'll let you in on my secret. Every couple of days, usually after work or during a break at work when I've been given a reason to hate the job more than usual (hearing the manager sitting in the room across from me say "We've got to leverage the existing technology base" three times in one conversation will do it, for example), I check out Slashdot. Most of what's on Slashdot interests me not at all, but occasionally I'll find a topic which touches a nerve. Then I take all that frustration at people who spew high-tech jargon and who value technology over tradition and information over wisdom, condense it into one choice drop of well-phrased vitriol, and submit it.
It's not a great way to build Slashdot karma, but it's quite refreshing, almost like a tonic. I won't need a holiday this year.
Cheers!
hyacinthus.
...you really can't do any better than _The Joy of Cooking_. It's been around forever and has been updated more times than I can remember; it is not a mere collection of recipes, but a well-organized survey of cooking techniques and ingredients (the section on ingredient substitution is excellent, for example, and has saved me from several kitchen disasters.) The chief deficiency of the book, I think, is its overemphasis on American and European dishes, but that's understandable; if the book comprehensively dealt with cuisine of every nationality, it'd be a ten-volume set.
Most importantly, _The Joy of Cooking_ is not written by someone who is more interested in bragging about his thousands of dollars of computer equipment. I'm not sure what the audience for this book is. I've never met a computer geek whose place wasn't overflowing with old pizza crusts and crumpled Jumbo Jack wrappers--computer nerds don't _cook_.
hyacinthus.
You mistake being _childish_ for being _childlike_. If you take a wild pleasure in running through the sprinklers in the park or in splashing in puddles in the rain, that's _childlike_, and there's nothing wrong with that. If you get your jollies hurling bricks through windows or (as is likely to happen in this case) heckling and name-calling the underpaid, harassed Microsoft employees staffing the booth at the conference, that's _childish_ and you deserve to have your ears boxed.
There is such a thing as courtesy. Your parents might have taught you about it.
hyacinthus.
"You really have to watch several consecutive episodes of Buffy to 'get' it. The show is meant to be viewed as a whole, not as individual episodes. My bet is that most people who immediately discount it have seen fewer than three episodes, and probably didn't come to the show with an open mind."
Ah, the "Babylon 5" excuse. It's not just a string of episode like that Star Trek crap, it's a _whole_. It's a _story arc_. Watch a whole seaons or couple of seasons of the show and you'll begin to appreciate J. Michael's Straczynski's grand plan.
Whatever. For all of JMS's design, "Babylon 5" still was badly written (especially when it came to comedy), horribly acted (with the exception of some of the supporting roles), and built up to one of the worst dramatic climaxes I've ever seen in a movie or TV show.
All of which says nothing about "Buffy the Vampire Slayer", of course, but I was just trying to explain that I'm no longer impressed by the "you can't see just one episode" argument. Either the writing is good--good on the small scale, good on the level of individual conversations and characterizations--or it's not. Either the acting is good, or it's not. No amount of long range planning will make a poorly written and poorly acted TV show good.
hyacinthus.
...is that you complain about the insertion of the "under God" into the Pledge of Allegiance in 1953, when _your_ religion, so-called (you _are_ a neo-pagan, aren't you?), didn't even _exist_ in 1953.
hyacinthus.
"The lesson Newdow's daughter should get from the court decision is that there is still hope for religious freedom in this country, even though you often have to fight for it. The lesson is that patriotism isn't demonstrated by forced and phony public prayers. When you use the tools the founders gave us to preserve the rights they guaranteed us, that is defending your country. That is patriotism. That's what young Ms. Newdow knows about her dad now."
No, I don't think you're right. Frankly, I don't believe for a second that young _Miss_ Newdow ("Ms."? It's not like we're uncertain of her marital status!) really cared one way or another about hearing the word "God" at school. When I was that age, I occasionally heard my school chums talking about God or church, and I don't remember feeling anything but mild curiosity, because I didn't go to church and my parents didn't have anything to say about God.
No, I think her father got a weed up his ass, and calculated that a First Amendment lawsuit about "one nation under God" probably wasn't going to work..._unless_ he could pretend that his little daughter was somehow "hurt" by it, and thus gain sympathy points. Basically I think Mr. Newdow used his daughter as a tool to help his cause, and I think that's low.
Now his daughter is probably going to be the most hated student at her school, and all her life she'll be dogged by the image that she was the little girl who wouldn't say the Pledge of Allegiance, even though the whole f**king mess was her father's idea and she was too young to understand how she was being used. She'll grow up to hate her father--I'll lay money on that.
hyacinthus.
Now, I'm a sort of atheist-agnostic myself, certainly not a religious man. And I've always seethed over the way that "...under God..." was crammed into the Pledge of Allegiance during the 50's. So I wouldn't be too displeased to see it go, yet, all the same...
I heard this story in a news item on NPR this afternoon, and a quote from the plaintiff Newdow, the man who filed suit because his daughter had to recite the Pledge in school, caught my attention: he claimed that it "hurt" (his word) his daughter to have to listen to those words. (Note: to _listen_ to them. Not to say them--as has been pointed out in this discussion, it has long been established that a child cannot be compelled to recite the Pledge.)
What the f**k? I mean, this kid, all her life, is going to have to hear expressions of belief that she has been trained not to approve of. (Note, _trained_. She's a second-grader; she's not old enough to have a truly independent opinion on this or anything, except maybe whether she likes broccoli or not.) She's gonna see people wearing crucifixes (and Stars of David, and pentacles, and whatever), she's gonna read and hear and see people talking about God and Jesus and Allah _wherever she goes_. What kind of lesson is it for her to learn, that a federal court has decided that she doesn't even have to _hear_ something she doesn't like, or that her father doesn't like?
I'm reminded of the imbroglio in San Diego a few years ago, when some atheist group or other tried to get the Mt. Soledad cross torn down. I could respect their arguments, and yet still think, "What a bunch of yahoos! It's a cross. There are lots of crosses around. Deal with it."
It's one reason that, even though I don't believe in God, I often can't stand the company of some atheists; they walk through life with a giant chip on their shoulders, ready to jump down the throat of anyone who so much as whispers the G-word.
hyacinthus.
Okaaay. Let me put it this way: why should I and my friends and others like us, who are usually two paychecks away from bankruptcy because of rent and taxes, and live in fear that a serious illness or a broken leg might bring us to financial ruin (as happened to an acquaintance of mine last year), work up much enthusiasm for government funding to fuel _your_ Star-Trek-inspired fantasies of going where no man has gone before? Hmm? Why should we care?
hyacinthus.
"A: Water on Mars makes Mars more interesting to visit, because where there's water there is/was life.
"B: Water is to rockets what petroleum is to cars.
"Therefore, these discoveries make Mars easier to return from, and make it a more interesting place to visit."
So, in other words, the discoveries of this latest exploration of Mars are vital, because...they make it easier to explore Mars some more! Yeah!
It's odd. When I was a kid up until my late teens, I was all for space exploration. I read _Astronomy_ and _Sky and Telescope_ magazines all the time and watched out for the latest Voyager pictures, I devoured Arthur C. Clarke's writings, I waited for the day when there would be manned expeditions to the Moon and Mars. I'm not exactly sure when the disillusionment came. The fight over funding the Superconducting Supercollider versus the space station had something to do with it, because it made me aware for the first time how much the funding of these massive projects had to do with bringing the pork home to defence contractors and how little it had to do with science.
So I don't go in for these "onwards and upwards into space for no particular reason" projects any more. Periodically we're told of new evidence (often old evidence dusted off) of water/organic compounds/primitive life on Mars--all of which seems to me calculated to keep up the rate of spending on space exploration. Most of the reasons I've seen offered for why we should care about such discoveries are on the line of yours: they justify further exploration. Rather a circular justification, don't you think?
It's all about exploitation in the end. Talk all you want about scientific discovery, in the end, it's all about colonization and military exploitation. None of which will benefit people like me, of course. To quote (well, misquote) the astronomy Robert Burnham, when asked if he was excited about the prospect of someday flying to the Moon, "Are you kidding? I can barely afford to fly to New York."
hyacinthus.
I took note of Liebowitz's estimate that music downloads approximate five times the volume of CD's sold in the US. That's an impressive figure, and he correctly asks--if the volume is so huge, where's the dent in music sales?
My tentative hypothesis to explain the disparity is that relatively few people are downloading all that music. Most of my friends are not heavy computer users and either do not download music at all, or maybe look for the occasional song now and again. But the two people I know who download music regularly go ridiculously overboard with it--they've got stacks of burned CDs and huge hard drives full of downloaded music.
(Before you respond and say, "Hey, all of my friends download music and I do too," think--how many of your friends _aren't_ computer geeks?)
I'd be really interested to see what the distribution is of the frequency and volume of music downloading. I suspect that maybe a tenth or twentieth part of the users are downloading most of the music--they're the ones who are stealing more than they're buying, but it doesn't matter much because everyone else is still buying CD's.
hyacinthus.