Actually, while I agree with the inefficiencies of this, it would make a nice combination beer cooler/ deck air-conditioner for a party:
Get a big elevated cooler and hook the drain of it to this contraption and keep the cooler topped off with ice, water, and beer during your hot outdoor summer party and then point the big fan at the crowd on the deck.
What about performance enhancing surgery? I read an article recently about pitchers having their tendons shortened or braided to improve the speed of their pitches.
You wouldn't need a high resolution LCD projector, so I really think someone should make this (wireless paddle controllers and everything). I think it would sell great at Sharper Image, Brookstone, and Thinkgeek. I wonder if you could do it with lasers?
Read it out loud, slowly. Preferably, read it out loud slowly to someone else (if you can't trust them to proofread it carefully for you).
At work, I've found that if I just send a document to someone and ask them to proofread it, if they do so at all it will be just a cursory glance. Sure, they'll try to find at least one or two errors to show they made the effort, but it's rare that they'll do a good job.
My advice, in school or at work, is to make a deal with a friend to carefully proofread for each other. Even if you don't work in related fields, at the same company, or attend the same classes (as long as you're not sending around sensitive or classified material). Find someone you can trust and hold up your end of the bargain by doing a careful job of reviewing their writing.
It's like doing a code review. It can be painful at first and you don't want to hurt anyone's feelings by being too critical, but eventually both of you can benefit by having a critical review of spelling, grammar, formatting, and tone for your written communications.
Does anyone else in this thread feel *really* nervous about posting advice on grammar and spelling because you know that everyone will be reading what you say extra carefully looking for errors?
I see where you're coming from and I agree with a lot of what you said, but...
I'd rather watch an amatuer Shakespeare production than a really stupid screenplay produced with good actors and great special effects.
I am partial to writers in judging how I think I might like a movie. Also, with Pixar being the exception, more than two writers usually means the story is crap. I also figure that any movie written, produced, and directed by one person is likely to be interesting (may be bad or good, but it is more likely to be someone's vision and not the result of a studio marketing meeting).
The biggest misunderstanding about dowsing for wells is that, most often, there are no large flowing bodies of water underground. It's just that, in most places (see below) if you dig down far enough, the soil is wet. So, if you dig down below the water table, the water will seep into the hole you have created. There are underground rivers and caverns of water, of course, but that isn't what you're hoping to tap when you dig a well.
The "most places" comes into effect when you are testing the efficacy of dowsing. It's hard to pin down a statistical random level for how often you'll dig a successful well at a random location. Factor in experience with analyzing the lay of the land, local geography, and vegetation patterns and an experienced "water finder" is going to do better than a neophyte walking around blindfolded rolling dice and finally saying "try here". Would you need a dowser to tell you that you'd have a better chance digging a well in an oasis than in a sand dune?
I'm pretty sure Randi's experimental method would scale well to locating 1000gallon tanks of water vs. empty tanks (or water being pumped down a large bore pipe vs. a series of empty pipes), but then you're talking a great expense for testing. Besides, any self-deluded dowser would say that a false positive for an empty tank or pipe was because there was actually a huge underground river 100m below the tank and a false negative was because the extremely dry ground underneath the buried tank was distorting the readings no matter how big the tank or pipe.
Self delusion, not willful attempts to delude others, are the most powerful forces at work in dowsing (as well as faith healing, theraputic touch, homeopathy, etc.).
For years, I said that if I could download high quality music files that were reasonably DRM free without a subscription for around $1 per song, I'd happily do it. Skeptics said it would never work, music companies and radio were horrified, etc. Now, with iTunes raking in ungodly amounts of money (or at least selling millions of iPods, thereby making ungodly amounts of money), I have all of that (except for the DRM part, but then I have an iPod, I can use the iTunes songs on all my computers, and it isn't really that hard to burn to CD-RW then re-rip to non-DRM'ed MP3 for my other MP3 player).
Now we're approaching the same idea with TV. If I could "buy" an episode of a show for some small amount of money, with decent quality and no commercials and without a subscription (except maybe for my digital cable if I got it through OnDemand or Pay Per View), I would do it.
The TV and cable companies are getting all upset that people are Tivo'ing or otherwise DVR'ing their shows then skipping through the commercials, well, as the poster said, if I pay a buck or so to watch an episode without commercials or have access to, say, a feed with commercials that doesn't have skip or even FF for free, then they're making their money either way and I can choose whether I want built-in bathroom breaks or not.
The hosting and management issues are beyond the local cable companies capabilities and just targeting computer viewing may not be enough. What we need is a cooperation between cable companies, STB manufactures, and networks to allow streaming of shows through your digital cable set top box to your TV from the network servers with payment going through your cable account. The same network servers could serve computers without as much overhead and without the cable co. skimming.
Then, every week if I wanted to watch, say, Battlestar Galactica, I could:
1) Watch it when it comes on 2) Tape or DVR it and watch when I wanted 3) Watch it in a forward only stream with commercials from my On Demand or PPV screen on my STB for free 4) Watch it commercial free on On Demand or PPV for $1.50 ($0.50 to the cable company, $1 to Sci-Fi) or 5) Watch it on my computer for $1 (all to Sci-Fi)
or, to be honest, (6) download it from somewhere, but I actually don't bother doing that unless I've missed some once in a lifetime event -- it's too much hassle and I can wait for reruns.
If there any reason why this wouldn't work and make (almost) everyone happy? The cable company makes more money, the networks make more money, the advertisers might actually see lower rates and would know about how many people actually are being forced to watch the ads, and the consumer has more choices.
Interesting speech by Michael Crichton on whether global warming is science or politics and what the difference is. Highly recommended no matter what side you are on.
Of course, who wants to be on the side of ignoring or supporting the widespread destruction of the planet by humans? Therein likes the rub...
I wonder what Google's policy on this will be? On one hand, Google has been quite generous on exposing web services and allowing almost anyone to link to them (except, of course, someone who sets up a web search page that returns Google results without attribution). On the other hand, most data licensing contracts prohibit secondary use of their data (meaning I can't legally write an app that uses MapQuest to do my geocoding or map imaging).
Google's solution for displaying the maps using client side scripting instead of tons of server side processing and Java clients is fast and elegant, but the downside is that it exposes much of the interfaces required to access the data in other ways. I wonder what their official policy will be?
For some odd reason, I got hooked on Bejeweled 2 for about three days. I haven't played since I was driving home and saw three red lights spaced like this:
X X X
Where the left one was a turn lane. I actually lifted my hand to drag the left one beside the two on the right.
I also did the flinch for the 'Z' key to zoom my suit so I could see something far away the other day. Creepy.
My wife teaches high school history. One year, she had a new student from Spain who had never studied English (actually, she had just started her ESL classes). My wife doesn't speak Spanish, but she speaks some French. It turns out the Spanish girl had taken a year or two of French, so she and my wife could talk in pidgen French.
The weird thing about my wife's French skills is that she has great pronounciation and can speak enough to get by, but doesn't hear or read it very well. I, on the other hand, have a horrible accent and can't think of the right words, but when we went to Paris, I could get the gist of what people were saying and could read the signs and menus better. So, many of our conversations were three sided. The French person would say something, I would make a good guess at what he was saying and tell my wife in English, then she would answer him in French.
In my limited experience, the people we met in Paris appreciated the attempt at speaking French, even if it was just "bonjour", "merci", and "oui". On the other hand, I took a year of Japanese and, while I admit I wasn't very good at it, many Japanese people I tried to speak to just looked embarassed and always answered in English (even if they did clearly understand what I was trying to say).
My local Target got around 12 in this morning. I needed two (I ain't scalping them, I've got two spoiled kids), but they would only sell me one. I bought one, went and ate lunch, drove back and bought another from a different clerk. They only had 5 when I returned for the second one.
Like I said, I can see putting the boxes in a window to draw people in, or having a huge display of boxes in the store to get people interested in buying one once they get in stock. But, particularly in the Toys R Us case, putting them in a position where shoppers will pick up a box, stand in huge Christmas season lines, then be told that "That's only a display case, we've been sold out for two weeks" isn't good marketing -- it's a good way to alienate customers and force confrontations with cashiers.
My primary reason for posting the story was the other posters who have said that the DS must not be in short supply because store XYZ had a dozen of them. The people may have been misled by similar in-store displays that have nothing to do with actual available stock.
You know who stores often put empty boxes on display if the item is small and expensive? You bring the box up, pay for the item and then they bring you a real one from the back? Well...
A few days after release, once I had determined that there were no DS system left in Huntsville, I wandered into a Software Etc. store in the mall and there were three boxes, with price stickers, sitting on the shelf above the demo unit and games. Already feeling like an idiot for asking, I said, "Do you really have these three in stock?" The clerk said, "No, those are the boxes for the pre-orders that haven't been picked up." Jerks.
Skip ahead a coupla weeks. I go in Toys R Us to do some Christmas shopping. They have a board up toward the front of the store listing new video game releases. In big letters, they list "Nintendo DS". I already know they're lying, but when I get back in electronics, they have 30-40 boxes with price tags in a huge display in the middle of the electronics dept. Again, knowing the answer, I ask a clerk if they actually *have* the product they are displaying and she says, "No, those are just display boxes. We sold out two weeks ago, but we haven't had a chance to pull the boxes." Yeah, right. They've got middle of the aisle toy displays all over the store, overstock stacked to the ceiling, and two many people trying to maneuver shopping carts through the maze, but they haven't had time in *2 weeks* to pull 40 empty boxes off a shelf and toss them behind a counter. I guess they enjoy answering the same question over and over and having pissed off people stand in line for 20 minutes holding an empty box for a non-existent item. I'd hate to be a cashier.
The other day, I heard Sears had some, but I didn't even bother going to look.
What confuses me about this is that I can see (in a misleading way) displaying these empty boxes to get people into the store, but in all three stores, you couldn't see them until you were already in the store shopping. What possible reason could a store have to mislead shoppers and piss them off?
I always call it "Colonel Sanders rich" after I read a (probably apocryphal) quote where he was asked how much money he had and he said something like, "I don't know exactly, but I know if I want it, I can afford it."
That's my standard answer for how much money would be enough...
You are assuming that everyone who voted for Bush thought he is reducing the size of government? Even Rush Limbaugh and Neal Boortz criticize Bush for expanding government spending and programs and I'm pretty sure they didn't vote for Kerry...
Also demonstrable by the public school system in Washington, D.C. IIRC, it has the largest expenditure per student in the U.S. and one of the lowest performing school districts in the country.
Could you use strobed IR light sources and an IR pass filter? Most CCD cameras see IR quite well and usually have to filter this out. For example, the "night shot" modes on many camcorders and the IR LED illumination on some.
This isn't exactly electronics, but it's fun (and yes, it is my site and yes, it looks like crap, but it was my first web site and I keep it that way for nostalgic reasons:-)
For "real" electronics, if you just want to make a easy and fun project, most kids are usually impressed by things that blink LEDs (like a scanner sequencer type circuit) or make noise (I would suggest sirens).
I don't know *anybody* in Alabama that voted against this because they wanted the segregationist language to stay -- they voted against it because there was a huge campaign against a "hidden" education bill that got buried in the wording. Even the hick callers to the local conservative AM radio station wanted the language changed, they just wanted to send a message that you can't mix a popular measure with an unrelated unpopular measure just hoping to get them both voted in.
Even I voted for it reluctantly, even though I supported both the language change and the education bill, because I am for a re-write of then entire state consitution, which is longest and most amended one in the U.S.
And for the other Anonymous Coward who said that all Southerners are racist rednecks, I would like to point out that the only time I ever hear the word "nigger" is when I'm listening to hip-hop music, watching movies, or overhearing 70+ year old country hicks talk.
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Actually, while I agree with the inefficiencies of this, it would make a nice combination beer cooler/ deck air-conditioner for a party:
Get a big elevated cooler and hook the drain of it to this contraption and keep the cooler topped off with ice, water, and beer during your hot outdoor summer party and then point the big fan at the crowd on the deck.
What about performance enhancing surgery? I read an article recently about pitchers having their tendons shortened or braided to improve the speed of their pitches.
Knowing Google, they'll have that hard coded in by this afternoon...
transparency.
Most OS's support it, so how long before we can overlay the identification text onto the satellite imagery?
You wouldn't need a high resolution LCD projector, so I really think someone should make this (wireless paddle controllers and everything). I think it would sell great at Sharper Image, Brookstone, and Thinkgeek. I wonder if you could do it with lasers?
I don't know, I heard about a T-Shirt the other day that said something like:
"Forget Terri Schiavo, stop feeding Kirstie Alley"
and I thought it was funny...
Read it out loud, slowly. Preferably, read it out loud slowly to someone else (if you can't trust them to proofread it carefully for you).
At work, I've found that if I just send a document to someone and ask them to proofread it, if they do so at all it will be just a cursory glance. Sure, they'll try to find at least one or two errors to show they made the effort, but it's rare that they'll do a good job.
My advice, in school or at work, is to make a deal with a friend to carefully proofread for each other. Even if you don't work in related fields, at the same company, or attend the same classes (as long as you're not sending around sensitive or classified material). Find someone you can trust and hold up your end of the bargain by doing a careful job of reviewing their writing.
It's like doing a code review. It can be painful at first and you don't want to hurt anyone's feelings by being too critical, but eventually both of you can benefit by having a critical review of spelling, grammar, formatting, and tone for your written communications.
Does anyone else in this thread feel *really* nervous about posting advice on grammar and spelling because you know that everyone will be reading what you say extra carefully looking for errors?
I see where you're coming from and I agree with a lot of what you said, but...
I'd rather watch an amatuer Shakespeare production than a really stupid screenplay produced with good actors and great special effects.
I am partial to writers in judging how I think I might like a movie. Also, with Pixar being the exception, more than two writers usually means the story is crap. I also figure that any movie written, produced, and directed by one person is likely to be interesting (may be bad or good, but it is more likely to be someone's vision and not the result of a studio marketing meeting).
The biggest misunderstanding about dowsing for wells is that, most often, there are no large flowing bodies of water underground. It's just that, in most places (see below) if you dig down far enough, the soil is wet. So, if you dig down below the water table, the water will seep into the hole you have created. There are underground rivers and caverns of water, of course, but that isn't what you're hoping to tap when you dig a well.
The "most places" comes into effect when you are testing the efficacy of dowsing. It's hard to pin down a statistical random level for how often you'll dig a successful well at a random location. Factor in experience with analyzing the lay of the land, local geography, and vegetation patterns and an experienced "water finder" is going to do better than a neophyte walking around blindfolded rolling dice and finally saying "try here". Would you need a dowser to tell you that you'd have a better chance digging a well in an oasis than in a sand dune?
I'm pretty sure Randi's experimental method would scale well to locating 1000gallon tanks of water vs. empty tanks (or water being pumped down a large bore pipe vs. a series of empty pipes), but then you're talking a great expense for testing. Besides, any self-deluded dowser would say that a false positive for an empty tank or pipe was because there was actually a huge underground river 100m below the tank and a false negative was because the extremely dry ground underneath the buried tank was distorting the readings no matter how big the tank or pipe.
Self delusion, not willful attempts to delude others, are the most powerful forces at work in dowsing (as well as faith healing, theraputic touch, homeopathy, etc.).
For years, I said that if I could download high quality music files that were reasonably DRM free without a subscription for around $1 per song, I'd happily do it. Skeptics said it would never work, music companies and radio were horrified, etc. Now, with iTunes raking in ungodly amounts of money (or at least selling millions of iPods, thereby making ungodly amounts of money), I have all of that (except for the DRM part, but then I have an iPod, I can use the iTunes songs on all my computers, and it isn't really that hard to burn to CD-RW then re-rip to non-DRM'ed MP3 for my other MP3 player).
Now we're approaching the same idea with TV. If I could "buy" an episode of a show for some small amount of money, with decent quality and no commercials and without a subscription (except maybe for my digital cable if I got it through OnDemand or Pay Per View), I would do it.
The TV and cable companies are getting all upset that people are Tivo'ing or otherwise DVR'ing their shows then skipping through the commercials, well, as the poster said, if I pay a buck or so to watch an episode without commercials or have access to, say, a feed with commercials that doesn't have skip or even FF for free, then they're making their money either way and I can choose whether I want built-in bathroom breaks or not.
The hosting and management issues are beyond the local cable companies capabilities and just targeting computer viewing may not be enough. What we need is a cooperation between cable companies, STB manufactures, and networks to allow streaming of shows through your digital cable set top box to your TV from the network servers with payment going through your cable account. The same network servers could serve computers without as much overhead and without the cable co. skimming.
Then, every week if I wanted to watch, say, Battlestar Galactica, I could:
1) Watch it when it comes on
2) Tape or DVR it and watch when I wanted
3) Watch it in a forward only stream with commercials from my On Demand or PPV screen on my STB for free
4) Watch it commercial free on On Demand or PPV for $1.50 ($0.50 to the cable company, $1 to Sci-Fi)
or
5) Watch it on my computer for $1 (all to Sci-Fi)
or, to be honest, (6) download it from somewhere, but I actually don't bother doing that unless I've missed some once in a lifetime event -- it's too much hassle and I can wait for reruns.
If there any reason why this wouldn't work and make (almost) everyone happy? The cable company makes more money, the networks make more money, the advertisers might actually see lower rates and would know about how many people actually are being forced to watch the ads, and the consumer has more choices.
Wow, you should be writing for Star Trek.
http://www.crichton-official.com/speeches/speeches _quote04.html/
Interesting speech by Michael Crichton on whether global warming is science or politics and what the difference is. Highly recommended no matter what side you are on.
Of course, who wants to be on the side of ignoring or supporting the widespread destruction of the planet by humans? Therein likes the rub...
I wonder what Google's policy on this will be? On one hand, Google has been quite generous on exposing web services and allowing almost anyone to link to them (except, of course, someone who sets up a web search page that returns Google results without attribution). On the other hand, most data licensing contracts prohibit secondary use of their data (meaning I can't legally write an app that uses MapQuest to do my geocoding or map imaging).
Google's solution for displaying the maps using client side scripting instead of tons of server side processing and Java clients is fast and elegant, but the downside is that it exposes much of the interfaces required to access the data in other ways. I wonder what their official policy will be?
I think they should, it fits right in with the humor of the original books.
For some odd reason, I got hooked on Bejeweled 2 for about three days. I haven't played since I was driving home and saw three red lights spaced like this:
X X X
Where the left one was a turn lane. I actually lifted my hand to drag the left one beside the two on the right.
I also did the flinch for the 'Z' key to zoom my suit so I could see something far away the other day. Creepy.
My wife teaches high school history. One year, she had a new student from Spain who had never studied English (actually, she had just started her ESL classes). My wife doesn't speak Spanish, but she speaks some French. It turns out the Spanish girl had taken a year or two of French, so she and my wife could talk in pidgen French.
The weird thing about my wife's French skills is that she has great pronounciation and can speak enough to get by, but doesn't hear or read it very well. I, on the other hand, have a horrible accent and can't think of the right words, but when we went to Paris, I could get the gist of what people were saying and could read the signs and menus better. So, many of our conversations were three sided. The French person would say something, I would make a good guess at what he was saying and tell my wife in English, then she would answer him in French.
In my limited experience, the people we met in Paris appreciated the attempt at speaking French, even if it was just "bonjour", "merci", and "oui". On the other hand, I took a year of Japanese and, while I admit I wasn't very good at it, many Japanese people I tried to speak to just looked embarassed and always answered in English (even if they did clearly understand what I was trying to say).
My local Target got around 12 in this morning. I needed two (I ain't scalping them, I've got two spoiled kids), but they would only sell me one. I bought one, went and ate lunch, drove back and bought another from a different clerk. They only had 5 when I returned for the second one.
Yeah, but...
Like I said, I can see putting the boxes in a window to draw people in, or having a huge display of boxes in the store to get people interested in buying one once they get in stock. But, particularly in the Toys R Us case, putting them in a position where shoppers will pick up a box, stand in huge Christmas season lines, then be told that "That's only a display case, we've been sold out for two weeks" isn't good marketing -- it's a good way to alienate customers and force confrontations with cashiers.
My primary reason for posting the story was the other posters who have said that the DS must not be in short supply because store XYZ had a dozen of them. The people may have been misled by similar in-store displays that have nothing to do with actual available stock.
You know who stores often put empty boxes on display if the item is small and expensive? You bring the box up, pay for the item and then they bring you a real one from the back? Well...
A few days after release, once I had determined that there were no DS system left in Huntsville, I wandered into a Software Etc. store in the mall and there were three boxes, with price stickers, sitting on the shelf above the demo unit and games. Already feeling like an idiot for asking, I said, "Do you really have these three in stock?" The clerk said, "No, those are the boxes for the pre-orders that haven't been picked up." Jerks.
Skip ahead a coupla weeks. I go in Toys R Us to do some Christmas shopping. They have a board up toward the front of the store listing new video game releases. In big letters, they list "Nintendo DS". I already know they're lying, but when I get back in electronics, they have 30-40 boxes with price tags in a huge display in the middle of the electronics dept. Again, knowing the answer, I ask a clerk if they actually *have* the product they are displaying and she says, "No, those are just display boxes. We sold out two weeks ago, but we haven't had a chance to pull the boxes." Yeah, right. They've got middle of the aisle toy displays all over the store, overstock stacked to the ceiling, and two many people trying to maneuver shopping carts through the maze, but they haven't had time in *2 weeks* to pull 40 empty boxes off a shelf and toss them behind a counter. I guess they enjoy answering the same question over and over and having pissed off people stand in line for 20 minutes holding an empty box for a non-existent item. I'd hate to be a cashier.
The other day, I heard Sears had some, but I didn't even bother going to look.
What confuses me about this is that I can see (in a misleading way) displaying these empty boxes to get people into the store, but in all three stores, you couldn't see them until you were already in the store shopping. What possible reason could a store have to mislead shoppers and piss them off?
I always call it "Colonel Sanders rich" after I read a (probably apocryphal) quote where he was asked how much money he had and he said something like, "I don't know exactly, but I know if I want it, I can afford it."
That's my standard answer for how much money would be enough...
Talk about abusing numbers...
You are assuming that everyone who voted for Bush thought he is reducing the size of government? Even Rush Limbaugh and Neal Boortz criticize Bush for expanding government spending and programs and I'm pretty sure they didn't vote for Kerry...
Also demonstrable by the public school system in Washington, D.C. IIRC, it has the largest expenditure per student in the U.S. and one of the lowest performing school districts in the country.
Could you use strobed IR light sources and an IR pass filter? Most CCD cameras see IR quite well and usually have to filter this out. For example, the "night shot" modes on many camcorders and the IR LED illumination on some.
This isn't exactly electronics, but it's fun (and yes, it is my site and yes, it looks like crap, but it was my first web site and I keep it that way for nostalgic reasons :-)
http://fly.hiwaay.net/~palmer/motor.html
For "real" electronics, if you just want to make a easy and fun project, most kids are usually impressed by things that blink LEDs (like a scanner sequencer type circuit) or make noise (I would suggest sirens).
I don't know *anybody* in Alabama that voted against this because they wanted the segregationist language to stay -- they voted against it because there was a huge campaign against a "hidden" education bill that got buried in the wording. Even the hick callers to the local conservative AM radio station wanted the language changed, they just wanted to send a message that you can't mix a popular measure with an unrelated unpopular measure just hoping to get them both voted in.
Even I voted for it reluctantly, even though I supported both the language change and the education bill, because I am for a re-write of then entire state consitution, which is longest and most amended one in the U.S.
And for the other Anonymous Coward who said that all Southerners are racist rednecks, I would like to point out that the only time I ever hear the word "nigger" is when I'm listening to hip-hop music, watching movies, or overhearing 70+ year old country hicks talk.