If ebooks were in the $3-5 range I would buy everything, but $10 is a rip off. It's not my fault the industry hasn't laid off all the middle men and are trying to protect their jobs. So until they fire the extra costs, I say pirate away.
Baen Books do indeed fall into the price window you speak of, or very nearly. Please do your research before you shoot off another set of electrons.
The "Do Not Fly" list already has shown how well false positives work - it's caused trouble for people who are wrongly put onto the list. Those with particularly common names will have particular trouble.
Unless there's a swift and clear grievance system, this will cause so many false positives that positives will be worked around. And who says that any bad people wouldn't steal or set up identities under which to do business?
The end result in three years? There will be lots of news about false positives, and the bad guys will just use more ID theft. Which will put those with stolen IDs into still more of a mess.
I don't think that this passed the "run it by a six-year-old first" test.
This requirement for open publication is very nice for researchers and the public, but it's not completely new for research articles.
At The New England Journal of Medicine, subscribers have full access to all content, but folks who register - for free - have access to all research articles six months old and older. At Science, registered users have access to research articles at least twelve months old back to 1997. Science and NEJM are not the only journals or organizations with this option for registered users.
The real boon will not be in access to research articles for free, but in the ability to seach in a single location, rather than looking in forty places for information. The other real boon will be in access to summaries and reviews that are partially sponsored by NIH. There are many review articles in journals that aren't even abstracted at PubMed right now.
While in the past people with wealth and power tended to be selected for, and poor families tended to slowly die off, especially in feudal societies, this is no longer true as the wealthy tend to be educated and thus practice birth control. This might be good from a social justice picture, but it also means that intelligence has virtually no way of being selected for any more. After all, if intelligence didn't select for itself by helping to acquire wealth in human society, how did it select for itself?
The main question is now, is intelligence in any way still being selected for? If it isn't, then it seems likely that there will be a backwards slide in human intelligence until the situation changes.
Selection for a single trait is almost always contra-survival. If you select single-mindedly for mathematical intelligence, you'll probably end up with the higher incidence of autism that is displayed in and around San Jose. It's also possible to select for testing intelligence without selecting for emotional intelligence. The result isn't autism, but someone who has no gut instinct. See DesCartes' Error, by Antonio Damasio for why intelligence per se is not the single most important factor in evolution.
Selection, in a successful species, selects for a wide number of traits, all correlated to increased genetic survival. That's it. Further intelligence may or may not be one of those traits. Calmness in a crowded city might be one. Non-addictive personalities appear to be slowly selected for, given the rate of alcoholism in populations that were only exposed to strong drink in the nineteenth century, versus populations that were exposed to strong drink in the seventeenth century.
Who knows? If dating introductions take place over wireless in the future, an ability to text with thumbs may be selected for, over time.
But the assumption that it's a positive good for a population to use a single trait (a particular type of intelligence) for selection is erroneous.
I camped at Texas Springs for a few weeks with a college geology class. We had 50 knot winds a few days. After the first day, we learned to collapse our tents when we left them, as otherwise they behaved much like tumbleweeds, and fetched up against the nearest obstacle.
For those who think that it's best just to put solar cells out there, powering a webcam, I recommend trying to put out a solar cell and seeing how long it remains viable when dust-covered. Just as dust storms on Mars cause problems for solar cells, dust in Death Valley may also cause problems. Solar cells may well work, but they may not. It's a very dusty environment, and quite hostile.
And yes, frying an egg on the parking lot has been demonstrated at Furnace Creek. Lovely place to be from November through March. Not so much fun the rest of the year.
This looks like an exercise in finding data and pulling out numbers to support conclusions that were already reached. If you look at the pattern of papers by NC Wickramasinghe, since the 1980's he's been publishing stuff that appears to be conclusion-oriented, rather than data-oriented, all with the conclusion that fully-formed life rained down upon the earth, embedded in comets.
There's no doubt that comets rain down on the earth. There is considerable controversy regarding the frequency, size, and origin of comets raining down upon the earth.
Wickramasinghe's conclusions appear to be speculation masquerading as science. What he's proposing doesn't appear to be testable. As Wolfgang Pauli said of other proposals that were untestable, "not even wrong."
This is one of the interesting catches of life online. In order to purchase full access (as opposed to open registration) for content for NYT online, you must suppy financial data in the form of a credit card. (PayPal not accepted. ) This means that NYT Online is able to match your browsing habits to all of the financial data on file for you.
Although PayPal does provide some anonymity, it only officially guarantees goods sent to a real world address, thus losing full anonymity for purchases. Purchased credit cards also require personal data.
If you really want to prevent data mining of your personal habits, pay cash, in person. For now, there is no true anonymity online.
There's a lot you haven't said, and there are some key questions that need to be asked.
1) Do you have any experience with mapping? Knowing how to use mapping or GIS software does not make you a good mapper. I'd much rather work with a plane table and alidade map that was correlated with satellite photos by an experienced mapper than with a GIS file that was put together by someone who had no idea what they were doing.
2) Have you researched mapping rules and laws with the local embassy? Have you contacted the State department country desks for the various countries you will be visiting? I had a geology professor who had to smuggle maps of the East Anatolian Fault in and out of Turkey, because they gave too much detail of the terrain in a politically sensitive area. Are you willing to take the risk? Now, with kids, he wouldn't risk Turkish prison.
3) Do you know power availability where you will be mapping? A very good source of reviews of solar power chargers and other portable power is the ARRL - Ham operators can't operate without power of some sort for very long.:)
4) What sort of mapping will you be doing? Physical mapping? Population mapping? Disease mapping? Economic mapping? Geologic mapping? Manmade features mapping? Get the proper contact for your sort of mapping. Keep that contact in that country in the loop. You want this person on your side.
This looks like the ultimate high-tech joke to me. Do you know of any biometric sensors that can go through laundry after laundry?
Have you ever had either a battery or a GPS sensor and antenna embedded in your shorts? There's not a good way to do this and make it "invisible" to the wearer, yet.
Federal law sets a pretty low cap for "exempt" as far as salary goes - $455 per week.
The wiggle room comes into play when you consider what the job descriptions are: is the employee someone who is instrumental in computer programming, or do they merely use the computer to do their jobs better? In other words, an artist may not be exempt, while a programmer who wrote the program the artist uses would be.
I'm sorry to say this. My spouse used to work for Parsons Technology before Bob Parsons sold it and founded Go Daddy. After a year of seven-day-fourteen-hour workweeks, my spouse walked and took a job for a lower wage with more time. After two years at that job and *lots* of study, he got a job that has a 50-55 hour workweek.
You and your spouse have three choices. 1) Stick it out, because you're scared. Nobody loves a job that much after a year of hours like this. 2) Blow the whistle to California Bureau of Labor Standards and the mainstream press. Forget getting a job in the industry again. The life of a whistleblower sucks. You need to be aware of that before you call them on violating the 72 hour workweek cap that California has for even Exempt employees. 3)Get a job in another industry. The problem with whistle-blowing etc., is that your job *can* move overseas, just as a factory job can. Find a job with local stability.
"...and it's wastewater that's been purified through advanced synthetic membranes called ZeeWeed, which could help 20% of the world's population that doesn't have easy access to clean water."
Water recycling to this extent is only useful in areas with water systems. ZeeWeed, and all other municipal systems such as this, are just too expensive for people in poor rural areas, such as much of India, China, and major parts of the African continent.
A much more practical solution for poor rural areas with abundant dirty water is household filtration and chlorination. This can be done with low-tech methods. The only middling tech item is a small bottle of sodium hypochlorite (bleach) that is used on a household basis. Since the bottle costs under US$0.40, and is lasts for several (six to ten) weeks depending on the household size, this truly is an affordable solution.
Ask Mom who Linus is...
She sees the poster on the door to our workroom. She talks over whether 0S X is secure enough, and asks my Dad if he thinks they can harden both of their Macs.
She uses Open Office, and Mozilla. I think my mom knows what Open Source is.
One more thing. My mom is 73. My dad is 77. Never never never allow anyone to use the line about old dogs and new tricks in relation to computers.
Wait until you learn the problems of driving on surfaces coated with the stuff.
Wait until you also investigate the dangers of Silicon Dioxide! Most terrorists get their start throwing the stuff.
Quite seriously, I always started the year of teaching chemistry with something much like this. My goal was to help the students become better informed.
My husband gets the Communications of the ACS, and we read about these horrors as the lawsuits were filed.
Imagine my dismay when I had to climb on a radiation table a few years later for therapy following breast cancer. Later, the physician, physicist, and techs said that they had never been grilled so intensely about safety procedures, dosage, the isodosage chart, and safeguards.
I could do that, but most patients don't have a background as physics teachers. I certainly can't ask the pilot of every plane I board about the avionics suite, nor can I ask about the programming of every chip in every item that I use.
End result? Certification needs to be more intense. Best place for certification? UL - once the insurance companies can tell the difference between the insurance payouts for good stuff and bad stuff, they'll pay for an analysis.
Honor Harrington is to a great extent based on C.S. Forester's Horatio Hornblower with much more of the life of Admiral Lord Nelson thrown in.
For writing, I still prefer Bujold. She carefully crafts each sentence, and it shows. For sweeping space opera with a cast of trillions, Honor Harrington is the series to bet on.
Don't start with War of Honor, however. Either buy War of Honor and read the CD, in order, or download On Basilisk Station and Honor of the Queen from David Weber's page at the Baen Free Library.
I ordered two copies from my local independent bookseller, and donated one to be sold at a charity auction. Once people found out about the CD, they paid $60 at the auction...
Members of the permanent floating riot club at MTU in Houghton (the miners) still get through electronics by singing the song based on this experience.
I'll see if I can get lyrics. Any help?
What about Librium, polonius, and steponum?
on
Nature's Building Blocks
·
· Score: 3, Informative
If you want bedtime stories for scientists, try Tom Weller's Science Made Stupid, with its wonderful, side-splitting in jokes.
When I was teaching high-school chemistry, I would have loved this book as a starting reference for my students. Yes, they had to do "report on an element", but we always had much more fun with "report on industrial process."
Finally, who could forget Illudium pu236, the shaving cream atom?
You're implying a lot of neurological theory here that doesn't necessarily exist. More likely it was an issue of
confidence. What I have seen more frequently than any other problem in the CS program I went through
was a lack of understanding of what it means to be "programming."
You imply that it is not possible to train new patterns of thought, and that learning is not changes in patterns of thought. Pardon me? In fact, there is recent neuroscience showing that learning is quite literally brain training.
Your second assertion, that ignorance is the same as a lack of confidence, is quite frightening. All of us have seen ignorant, overconfident slobs.
I did horribly in my first CS class - I didn't take another for many years. I had more trouble with the concepts of calculus, but the teaching in
CS classes can be apalling. This is of personal interest to me now, as I teach computer classes at a college level, and plan on going back to teach high-school physics and chemistry.
I actually prefer his trilogy of Worlds, Worlds Apart, and Worlds Enough in Time, but Forever War has a couple of concepts that I come back to years afterwards. I disagree with the assessment that Forever Free and Forever Peace suck. These are different books, with different themes, in different styles. (That said, I didn't enjoy them nearly as much. If I had to recommend one book above all others as an introduction to Haldeman, it would be the short story collection Dealing in Futures
One thing that I enjoy about Haldeman's work that also maddens me is that he adores experimentimg. Although he is a consistently good writer, he really does try to fit the style to the story. Hemingway Hoax reads very differently from some of his other books, and The Coming is a study in rapid-cutting movie techniques applied to novels.
I'm glad to see this book reviewed, as Haldeman has consistently come up with some of the most interesting ideas in SF. Oh, and the tired thing about Forever War as a retread of Starship Troopers? Heinlein didn't think so. He congratulated Haldeman on "writing one of the most original stories I've ever seen."
Slashdot Mirror
If ebooks were in the $3-5 range I would buy everything, but $10 is a rip off. It's not my fault the industry hasn't laid off all the middle men and are trying to protect their jobs. So until they fire the extra costs, I say pirate away.
Baen Books do indeed fall into the price window you speak of, or very nearly. Please do your research before you shoot off another set of electrons.
The "Do Not Fly" list already has shown how well false positives work - it's caused trouble for people who are wrongly put onto the list. Those with particularly common names will have particular trouble.
Unless there's a swift and clear grievance system, this will cause so many false positives that positives will be worked around. And who says that any bad people wouldn't steal or set up identities under which to do business?
The end result in three years? There will be lots of news about false positives, and the bad guys will just use more ID theft. Which will put those with stolen IDs into still more of a mess.
I don't think that this passed the "run it by a six-year-old first" test.
This requirement for open publication is very nice for researchers and the public, but it's not completely new for research articles.
At The New England Journal of Medicine, subscribers have full access to all content, but folks who register - for free - have access to all research articles six months old and older. At Science, registered users have access to research articles at least twelve months old back to 1997. Science and NEJM are not the only journals or organizations with this option for registered users.
The real boon will not be in access to research articles for free, but in the ability to seach in a single location, rather than looking in forty places for information. The other real boon will be in access to summaries and reviews that are partially sponsored by NIH. There are many review articles in journals that aren't even abstracted at PubMed right now.
NAEB is a group trying to put together a buying club for the Bookeen by Cybook.
It looks as though they will have their act together by the end of this week.
Bookeen has by far the widest range of native formats. Using a buying club gives you a discount.
Looks good to me.
While in the past people with wealth and power tended to be selected for, and poor families tended to slowly die off, especially in feudal societies, this is no longer true as the wealthy tend to be educated and thus practice birth control. This might be good from a social justice picture, but it also means that intelligence has virtually no way of being selected for any more. After all, if intelligence didn't select for itself by helping to acquire wealth in human society, how did it select for itself?
The main question is now, is intelligence in any way still being selected for? If it isn't, then it seems likely that there will be a backwards slide in human intelligence until the situation changes.
Selection for a single trait is almost always contra-survival. If you select single-mindedly for mathematical intelligence, you'll probably end up with the higher incidence of autism that is displayed in and around San Jose. It's also possible to select for testing intelligence without selecting for emotional intelligence. The result isn't autism, but someone who has no gut instinct. See DesCartes' Error, by Antonio Damasio for why intelligence per se is not the single most important factor in evolution.
Selection, in a successful species, selects for a wide number of traits, all correlated to increased genetic survival. That's it. Further intelligence may or may not be one of those traits. Calmness in a crowded city might be one. Non-addictive personalities appear to be slowly selected for, given the rate of alcoholism in populations that were only exposed to strong drink in the nineteenth century, versus populations that were exposed to strong drink in the seventeenth century.
Who knows? If dating introductions take place over wireless in the future, an ability to text with thumbs may be selected for, over time.
But the assumption that it's a positive good for a population to use a single trait (a particular type of intelligence) for selection is erroneous.
I camped at Texas Springs for a few weeks with a college geology class. We had 50 knot winds a few days. After the first day, we learned to collapse our tents when we left them, as otherwise they behaved much like tumbleweeds, and fetched up against the nearest obstacle.
For those who think that it's best just to put solar cells out there, powering a webcam, I recommend trying to put out a solar cell and seeing how long it remains viable when dust-covered. Just as dust storms on Mars cause problems for solar cells, dust in Death Valley may also cause problems. Solar cells may well work, but they may not. It's a very dusty environment, and quite hostile.
And yes, frying an egg on the parking lot has been demonstrated at Furnace Creek. Lovely place to be from November through March. Not so much fun the rest of the year.
This looks like an exercise in finding data and pulling out numbers to support conclusions that were already reached. If you look at the pattern of papers by NC Wickramasinghe, since the 1980's he's been publishing stuff that appears to be conclusion-oriented, rather than data-oriented, all with the conclusion that fully-formed life rained down upon the earth, embedded in comets.
There's no doubt that comets rain down on the earth. There is considerable controversy regarding the frequency, size, and origin of comets raining down upon the earth.
Wickramasinghe's conclusions appear to be speculation masquerading as science. What he's proposing doesn't appear to be testable. As Wolfgang Pauli said of other proposals that were untestable, "not even wrong."
This is one of the interesting catches of life online. In order to purchase full access (as opposed to open registration) for content for NYT online, you must suppy financial data in the form of a credit card. (PayPal not accepted. ) This means that NYT Online is able to match your browsing habits to all of the financial data on file for you.
Although PayPal does provide some anonymity, it only officially guarantees goods sent to a real world address, thus losing full anonymity for purchases. Purchased credit cards also require personal data.
If you really want to prevent data mining of your personal habits, pay cash, in person. For now, there is no true anonymity online.
There's a lot you haven't said, and there are some key questions that need to be asked.
:)
1) Do you have any experience with mapping? Knowing how to use mapping or GIS software does not make you a good mapper. I'd much rather work with a plane table and alidade map that was correlated with satellite photos by an experienced mapper than with a GIS file that was put together by someone who had no idea what they were doing.
2) Have you researched mapping rules and laws with the local embassy? Have you contacted the State department country desks for the various countries you will be visiting? I had a geology professor who had to smuggle maps of the East Anatolian Fault in and out of Turkey, because they gave too much detail of the terrain in a politically sensitive area. Are you willing to take the risk? Now, with kids, he wouldn't risk Turkish prison.
3) Do you know power availability where you will be mapping? A very good source of reviews of solar power chargers and other portable power is the ARRL - Ham operators can't operate without power of some sort for very long.
4) What sort of mapping will you be doing? Physical mapping? Population mapping? Disease mapping? Economic mapping? Geologic mapping? Manmade features mapping? Get the proper contact for your sort of mapping. Keep that contact in that country in the loop. You want this person on your side.
This looks like the ultimate high-tech joke to me. Do you know of any biometric sensors that can go through laundry after laundry?
Have you ever had either a battery or a GPS sensor and antenna embedded in your shorts? There's not a good way to do this and make it "invisible" to the wearer, yet.
Nice leg pull, though.
Gosh, sir, how do you explain my 760 in math on the SATs? (Sorry. I did get a 780 verbal, so maybe I am feminine after all.)
Was I exposed to too much testosterone in my mother's womb? Does this explain why I was a perfect milch cow for my children?
Or is my niece, who's in 10th grade, and has finished honors level Diff Eq at the local university, totally unfeminine?
The theories I believe he's quoting don't have much biochemical or brain-based research to back them up.
Business Know How
Federal law sets a pretty low cap for "exempt" as far as salary goes - $455 per week.
The wiggle room comes into play when you consider what the job descriptions are: is the employee someone who is instrumental in computer programming, or do they merely use the computer to do their jobs better? In other words, an artist may not be exempt, while a programmer who wrote the program the artist uses would be.
I'm sorry to say this. My spouse used to work for Parsons Technology before Bob Parsons sold it and founded Go Daddy. After a year of seven-day-fourteen-hour workweeks, my spouse walked and took a job for a lower wage with more time. After two years at that job and *lots* of study, he got a job that has a 50-55 hour workweek.
You and your spouse have three choices.
1) Stick it out, because you're scared. Nobody loves a job that much after a year of hours like this.
2) Blow the whistle to California Bureau of Labor Standards and the mainstream press. Forget getting a job in the industry again. The life of a whistleblower sucks. You need to be aware of that before you call them on violating the 72 hour workweek cap that California has for even Exempt employees.
3)Get a job in another industry. The problem with whistle-blowing etc., is that your job *can* move overseas, just as a factory job can. Find a job with local stability.
Best wishes.
Water recycling to this extent is only useful in areas with water systems. ZeeWeed, and all other municipal systems such as this, are just too expensive for people in poor rural areas, such as much of India, China, and major parts of the African continent.
A much more practical solution for poor rural areas with abundant dirty water is household filtration and chlorination. This can be done with low-tech methods. The only middling tech item is a small bottle of sodium hypochlorite (bleach) that is used on a household basis. Since the bottle costs under US$0.40, and is lasts for several (six to ten) weeks depending on the household size, this truly is an affordable solution.
Science News ran the details some time back.She sees the poster on the door to our workroom. She talks over whether 0S X is secure enough, and asks my Dad if he thinks they can harden both of their Macs.
She uses Open Office, and Mozilla. I think my mom knows what Open Source is.
One more thing. My mom is 73. My dad is 77. Never never never allow anyone to use the line about old dogs and new tricks in relation to computers.
Wait until you learn the problems of driving on surfaces coated with the stuff.
Wait until you also investigate the dangers of Silicon Dioxide! Most terrorists get their start throwing the stuff.
Quite seriously, I always started the year of teaching chemistry with something much like this. My goal was to help the students become better informed.
My husband gets the Communications of the ACS, and we read about these horrors as the lawsuits were filed.
Imagine my dismay when I had to climb on a radiation table a few years later for therapy following breast cancer. Later, the physician, physicist, and techs said that they had never been grilled so intensely about safety procedures, dosage, the isodosage chart, and safeguards.
I could do that, but most patients don't have a background as physics teachers. I certainly can't ask the pilot of every plane I board about the avionics suite, nor can I ask about the programming of every chip in every item that I use.
End result? Certification needs to be more intense. Best place for certification? UL - once the insurance companies can tell the difference between the insurance payouts for good stuff and bad stuff, they'll pay for an analysis.
For writing, I still prefer Bujold. She carefully crafts each sentence, and it shows. For sweeping space opera with a cast of trillions, Honor Harrington is the series to bet on.
Don't start with War of Honor, however. Either buy War of Honor and read the CD, in order, or download On Basilisk Station and Honor of the Queen from David Weber's page at the Baen Free Library.
I ordered two copies from my local independent bookseller, and donated one to be sold at a charity auction. Once people found out about the CD, they paid $60 at the auction...
My ten-year-old is in love with it. Oh, cool! will it ever be seen at state fairs in the NW?
I wonder if we can convince Deere to have one at the state fair in Iowa.
Woohoo!
Members of the permanent floating riot club at MTU in Houghton (the miners) still get through electronics by singing the song based on this experience.
I'll see if I can get lyrics. Any help?
When I was teaching high-school chemistry, I would have loved this book as a starting reference for my students. Yes, they had to do "report on an element", but we always had much more fun with "report on industrial process."
Finally, who could forget Illudium pu236, the shaving cream atom?
You imply that it is not possible to train new patterns of thought, and that learning is not changes in patterns of thought. Pardon me? In fact, there is recent neuroscience showing that learning is quite literally brain training.
Your second assertion, that ignorance is the same as a lack of confidence, is quite frightening. All of us have seen ignorant, overconfident slobs.
I did horribly in my first CS class - I didn't take another for many years. I had more trouble with the concepts of calculus, but the teaching in CS classes can be apalling. This is of personal interest to me now, as I teach computer classes at a college level, and plan on going back to teach high-school physics and chemistry.
The orbital elements are available for download into many popular astronomy programs, including xephem, the open source x-windows program.
The wonderful folks at the International Astronomical Union (Smithsonian Observatory) have published orbital elements and an ephemeris for Ikeya-Zhang.
This is most useful stuff! (Doesn't look like it will be much fun for binoc/naked eye until late March.)
Watch The Producers, and when you have to be away from the tube in the kitchen, put 2000 year old man on the kitchen CD player.
Spaceballs is not as funny as some of the other stuff, but you need to see it anyway.
I actually prefer his trilogy of Worlds, Worlds Apart, and Worlds Enough in Time, but Forever War has a couple of concepts that I come back to years afterwards. I disagree with the assessment that Forever Free and Forever Peace suck. These are different books, with different themes, in different styles. (That said, I didn't enjoy them nearly as much. If I had to recommend one book above all others as an introduction to Haldeman, it would be the short story collection Dealing in Futures
One thing that I enjoy about Haldeman's work that also maddens me is that he adores experimentimg. Although he is a consistently good writer, he really does try to fit the style to the story. Hemingway Hoax reads very differently from some of his other books, and The Coming is a study in rapid-cutting movie techniques applied to novels.
I'm glad to see this book reviewed, as Haldeman has consistently come up with some of the most interesting ideas in SF. Oh, and the tired thing about Forever War as a retread of Starship Troopers? Heinlein didn't think so. He congratulated Haldeman on "writing one of the most original stories I've ever seen."