First thing I thought of, to be honest. As a Python programmer, I can say it makes me pretty happy as a language.
I read that five times before I figured out what you just said. Past my bedtime. Just for shits & giggles, though, recognize the ambiguity in how the last sentence could be parsed (the way you obviously intended, vs. the alternative my sleep-deprived brain was trying to chew on, which can be made clearer by changing the word order slightly: "I can say as a language that it makes me pretty happy." (What, he's a langauge? I don't even... oh... my caffeine levels are dangerously low...)
FWIW, I hate Python, but it's better than PHP...;p
Very true. I used to comment to students that operator overloading should only be used when it naturally makes some sort of sense. For example, making the "+" operator add your class of complex numbers. You should never do anything with operator overloading where it isn't immediately obvious what it means -- the operator's normal meaning should make sense for the types involved, and should mean essentially the same thing.
Of course, then you get to the standard C++ library and have to explain why the language standard itself violates this very principle. (If you think otherwise, explain how bitshifting a file handle should cause output?)
Since the language standard itself encourages users to ignore any sane rules for proper operator overloading, it should hardly be surprising that this "programmer problem" is widespread.
Most scientific estimates are significantly more accurate than the roadsigns telling me how many miles it is to the next few cities. Nevertheless, those signs have never caused me any problems and I'd rather have them than not. Usually, exceptional precision is unnecessary.
Eh? It's the supreme law of the land, in the US, it is written into the constitution
*whoosh*
(Answering OP) I suspect it's fantasy. With SCOTUS deciding that perpetual copyright is A-OK as long as each extension is voted on, the days of "limited times" are long past.
You've completely misunderstood. They're not saying a particular black hole is 2 to 10 times smaller than thought, or that all black holes are 2 to 10 times smaller than thought, they're saying some estimates we've made are off by a factor of two, and some are off by a factor of ten, and others are at various places in between. It's like saying people in the audience are between 12 and 77 years old. That doesn't indicate uncertainty, it indicates the fact that the youngest member is 12, and the oldest is 77. The range indicates the range of errors in various different estimates, not a range of uncertainty about how far off they are.
And, by the way, they don't say the universe is between 10 - 20 billion years old (assuming the "they" we're talking about is modern astronomers), they say the universe is 13.64 - 13.86 billion years old.
It doesn't. Changing theories of how much of a galaxy's mass is or isn't in its central black hole have no impact on the estimates about of mass of the galaxy, much less the amount of mass in the universe, it only impacts where we think it's located.
It won't. It only affects the estimates of distant black holes. The one in the center of our own galaxy has a mass determined by much more reliable methods that aren't subject to the kind of error discovered here.
You can. However, only a fluent speaker of the English language will understand what you mean when you say that, as the transformation of that into mathematical language is not straightforward.
Apparently "It would have been great without the giant blue glowing penis though," is over-the-top, bothered.... I wouldn't have known without you telling me. Thanks Internet!
It is. I don't particularly care for Fords, and that's perfectly fine. However, if I say "That would have been a great movie, except the main character drove a Ford," it's clear that I'm have an over-the-top reaction. If I simply don't care for Fords myself, I'll have a lackluster reaction to the main character's wheels, but it won't particularly bother me, it certainly won't ruin the movie for me, or even cause me to downgrade it to the point that I say "It would have been a great movie, if it hadn't been for that car." If it reaches the point that I am saying that, it's blazingly obvious that there's more going on than I simply "don't care" for Fords. If, further, I start objecting strongly to people pointing this oddity out, it only further clarifies just how big a lie it is that I'm merely not attracted to products from the Ford Motor Company.
Where in my post did I say I was offended or had a fit about the giant blue penis?... I prefer my movies without male nudity because I'm not attracted to those parts.
In any 30 second clip of most any film, if you're really looking, you will be able to identify more than a hundred separate things on screen. Unless you're a very bizarre fetishist, you will not be attracted to almost all of them. However, most of them you won't even notice, and even if you do, you won't express any interest in moving having less of them. You can lie to yourself all you want, but the fact of the matter is, the fact that you even brought this up indicates that it stuck out in your mind, and you were offended or at least bothered by it. Pardon us for pointing out the obvious lie if you weren't aware of the fact that you were lying to yourself, but it's clear to everyone that you were lying to us.
Given time, I expect that's exactly what would happen. This doesn't happen overnight, though. It'll take far, far longer to psychologically reach the point where you no longer bother taking the form you've always had since you were born. Simply discarding social conventions like clothing will be come first, long before that. One is far more closely integrated in ones sense of self than the other.
2.) The publishers probably cannot "pop it in the mail" for less. The article's author is forgetting about or intentionally ignoring the printing costs.
Are you kidding? At the price Amazon is charging, your average print magazine would cost hundreds of dollars if every image in it were charged at the rate Amazon is charging. Are you actually claiming that it costs hundreds of dollars per magazine to print and deliver?
Great use of suspense, menace, and inference. A pretty sinister film, with drug references, violence, and and an antagonist who creeps the hell out of you.
Not a single drop of blood or curse word = 12A in the UK. Quite a feat, that. I guess this director just isn't up to that standard. Probably shouldn't be making the film.
Um, the point here is, this director wanted to make a BioShock film. You're saying he should have made a film about something different and called it BioShock? I guess this director has higher standards...
[yada yada yada]... but practical as a replacement for the devices it mocks it is not.
Um, yeah. Totally misses the point. It's not meant to replace those devices. It isn't even meant to replace the much cheaper, more widespread alternative to those devices (silicon MEMS sensors). From TFA:
Harvard chemistry professor and paper device pioneer George Whitesides, who led the new work, says he does not expect the paper sensors to replace silicon accelerometers. He doesn’t currently have specific applications in mind, but he expects the low-cost, lightweight, and easy-to-fabricate devices to open up new applications in different areas, from consumer gadgets to medicine.
The only thing lacking, is a fusion reactor to provide heat, light, and propulsion along the way. It's going to be a long trip, unless someone figures out FTL travel. So, that reactor needs to fuel all the colony's needs for years to come - possibly a hundred years in space.
Ah yes, the generation ship. It's an inherently flawed concept due to the logical contradiction entailed. Anyone capable of building one has already solved all the problems necessarily to live in space indefinitely. At that point, they have no need to engage in any further colonizing, and you can leave "propulsion" out of the necessary requirements for the reactor. So, anyone who can build one no longer has a reason to want one, and indeed it would be pointless, since whatever generation does finally arrive at the destination is going to regard a planetary surface as some strangely foreign, inhospitable place to live, so unlike the cozy environment of space they and their ancestors have lived in for generations. They're now natives of space, a planet would be a foreign environment to them. The colonization happened successfully when they boarded the ship to begin with, many many generations ago, and they're unlikely to abandon their colony when it's been successful for so long. If they bother to propel their colony through space at all, any planets they discover at the destination system are going to viewed for a while, possibly raided for raw materials, but eventually left behind -- this is a recipe for generational space tourism, not colonization.
Of course, there's nothing wrong with that. Ideally human civilization will adapt to live in space if it manages to live that long, and riding around in giant space colonies touring the galaxy while you live in space is a perfectly fine thing to do. But the last thing any civilization that manages to successfully claw its way out of its original gravity well is going to want to do is climb down another one. Why regress when you can progress?
That and FlashBlock. I had to enable flash from their site before they could tell my fonts (which are, apparently, unique in their combination, unlike my plugins, which were shared by two other people [but who apparently had other differences, making my signature unique even before I enabled Flash for them]).
Interesting factoid: Apparently less than 1% of web surfers these days have 1600x1200 resolution screens (which came up as 1 in 106). I knew widescreen formats had become the norm, but that surprises me. (I have nothing against widescreen, but until ones with vertical dimensions of over 1200 become affordable... I see no reason to pay to downgrade or sidegrade -- I'll wait until it's an actual upgrade.)
Slashdot Mirror
First thing I thought of, to be honest. As a Python programmer, I can say it makes me pretty happy as a language.
I read that five times before I figured out what you just said. Past my bedtime. Just for shits & giggles, though, recognize the ambiguity in how the last sentence could be parsed (the way you obviously intended, vs. the alternative my sleep-deprived brain was trying to chew on, which can be made clearer by changing the word order slightly: "I can say as a language that it makes me pretty happy." (What, he's a langauge? I don't even... oh... my caffeine levels are dangerously low...)
FWIW, I hate Python, but it's better than PHP... ;p
Very true. I used to comment to students that operator overloading should only be used when it naturally makes some sort of sense. For example, making the "+" operator add your class of complex numbers. You should never do anything with operator overloading where it isn't immediately obvious what it means -- the operator's normal meaning should make sense for the types involved, and should mean essentially the same thing.
Of course, then you get to the standard C++ library and have to explain why the language standard itself violates this very principle. (If you think otherwise, explain how bitshifting a file handle should cause output?)
Since the language standard itself encourages users to ignore any sane rules for proper operator overloading, it should hardly be surprising that this "programmer problem" is widespread.
Most scientific estimates are significantly more accurate than the roadsigns telling me how many miles it is to the next few cities. Nevertheless, those signs have never caused me any problems and I'd rather have them than not. Usually, exceptional precision is unnecessary.
Is that fantasy or sci-fi?
Eh? It's the supreme law of the land, in the US, it is written into the constitution
*whoosh*
(Answering OP) I suspect it's fantasy. With SCOTUS deciding that perpetual copyright is A-OK as long as each extension is voted on, the days of "limited times" are long past.
Now all we need to do is upgrade the sharks...
Geneticists: Workin' on it...
I hate reading times and then having to stop and translate it in my head that they are saying something is less.
If you ever become a fluent speaker of the English language, you won't have to stop and translate, the meaning will be immediate and clear.
You've completely misunderstood. They're not saying a particular black hole is 2 to 10 times smaller than thought, or that all black holes are 2 to 10 times smaller than thought, they're saying some estimates we've made are off by a factor of two, and some are off by a factor of ten, and others are at various places in between. It's like saying people in the audience are between 12 and 77 years old. That doesn't indicate uncertainty, it indicates the fact that the youngest member is 12, and the oldest is 77. The range indicates the range of errors in various different estimates, not a range of uncertainty about how far off they are.
And, by the way, they don't say the universe is between 10 - 20 billion years old (assuming the "they" we're talking about is modern astronomers), they say the universe is 13.64 - 13.86 billion years old.
How would this relate to theories of dark matter?
It doesn't. Changing theories of how much of a galaxy's mass is or isn't in its central black hole have no impact on the estimates about of mass of the galaxy, much less the amount of mass in the universe, it only impacts where we think it's located.
It won't. It only affects the estimates of distant black holes. The one in the center of our own galaxy has a mass determined by much more reliable methods that aren't subject to the kind of error discovered here.
My tolerance for this sort of pedantry grows smaller by the day.
Yeah, my tolerance is ten times smaller than it used to be.
You _can't_ be 2 times less or 10 times less.
You can. However, only a fluent speaker of the English language will understand what you mean when you say that, as the transformation of that into mathematical language is not straightforward.
graphic novels
They are comic books.
Comic. Books.
Do you even know what the word "comic" means? lol
Apparently "It would have been great without the giant blue glowing penis though," is over-the-top, bothered.... I wouldn't have known without you telling me. Thanks Internet!
It is. I don't particularly care for Fords, and that's perfectly fine. However, if I say "That would have been a great movie, except the main character drove a Ford," it's clear that I'm have an over-the-top reaction. If I simply don't care for Fords myself, I'll have a lackluster reaction to the main character's wheels, but it won't particularly bother me, it certainly won't ruin the movie for me, or even cause me to downgrade it to the point that I say "It would have been a great movie, if it hadn't been for that car." If it reaches the point that I am saying that, it's blazingly obvious that there's more going on than I simply "don't care" for Fords. If, further, I start objecting strongly to people pointing this oddity out, it only further clarifies just how big a lie it is that I'm merely not attracted to products from the Ford Motor Company.
s/moving/movies/
Where in my post did I say I was offended or had a fit about the giant blue penis? ... I prefer my movies without male nudity because I'm not attracted to those parts.
In any 30 second clip of most any film, if you're really looking, you will be able to identify more than a hundred separate things on screen. Unless you're a very bizarre fetishist, you will not be attracted to almost all of them. However, most of them you won't even notice, and even if you do, you won't express any interest in moving having less of them. You can lie to yourself all you want, but the fact of the matter is, the fact that you even brought this up indicates that it stuck out in your mind, and you were offended or at least bothered by it. Pardon us for pointing out the obvious lie if you weren't aware of the fact that you were lying to yourself, but it's clear to everyone that you were lying to us.
Given time, I expect that's exactly what would happen. This doesn't happen overnight, though. It'll take far, far longer to psychologically reach the point where you no longer bother taking the form you've always had since you were born. Simply discarding social conventions like clothing will be come first, long before that. One is far more closely integrated in ones sense of self than the other.
Meh, I've seen better blue wieners.
o.O
2.) The publishers probably cannot "pop it in the mail" for less. The article's author is forgetting about or intentionally ignoring the printing costs.
Are you kidding? At the price Amazon is charging, your average print magazine would cost hundreds of dollars if every image in it were charged at the rate Amazon is charging. Are you actually claiming that it costs hundreds of dollars per magazine to print and deliver?
Great use of suspense, menace, and inference. A pretty sinister film, with drug references, violence, and and an antagonist who creeps the hell out of you. Not a single drop of blood or curse word = 12A in the UK. Quite a feat, that. I guess this director just isn't up to that standard. Probably shouldn't be making the film.
Um, the point here is, this director wanted to make a BioShock film. You're saying he should have made a film about something different and called it BioShock? I guess this director has higher standards...
[yada yada yada] ... but practical as a replacement for the devices it mocks it is not.
Um, yeah. Totally misses the point. It's not meant to replace those devices. It isn't even meant to replace the much cheaper, more widespread alternative to those devices (silicon MEMS sensors). From TFA:
Harvard chemistry professor and paper device pioneer George Whitesides, who led the new work, says he does not expect the paper sensors to replace silicon accelerometers. He doesn’t currently have specific applications in mind, but he expects the low-cost, lightweight, and easy-to-fabricate devices to open up new applications in different areas, from consumer gadgets to medicine.
The only thing lacking, is a fusion reactor to provide heat, light, and propulsion along the way. It's going to be a long trip, unless someone figures out FTL travel. So, that reactor needs to fuel all the colony's needs for years to come - possibly a hundred years in space.
Ah yes, the generation ship. It's an inherently flawed concept due to the logical contradiction entailed. Anyone capable of building one has already solved all the problems necessarily to live in space indefinitely. At that point, they have no need to engage in any further colonizing, and you can leave "propulsion" out of the necessary requirements for the reactor. So, anyone who can build one no longer has a reason to want one, and indeed it would be pointless, since whatever generation does finally arrive at the destination is going to regard a planetary surface as some strangely foreign, inhospitable place to live, so unlike the cozy environment of space they and their ancestors have lived in for generations. They're now natives of space, a planet would be a foreign environment to them. The colonization happened successfully when they boarded the ship to begin with, many many generations ago, and they're unlikely to abandon their colony when it's been successful for so long. If they bother to propel their colony through space at all, any planets they discover at the destination system are going to viewed for a while, possibly raided for raw materials, but eventually left behind -- this is a recipe for generational space tourism, not colonization.
Of course, there's nothing wrong with that. Ideally human civilization will adapt to live in space if it manages to live that long, and riding around in giant space colonies touring the galaxy while you live in space is a perfectly fine thing to do. But the last thing any civilization that manages to successfully claw its way out of its original gravity well is going to want to do is climb down another one. Why regress when you can progress?
That and FlashBlock. I had to enable flash from their site before they could tell my fonts (which are, apparently, unique in their combination, unlike my plugins, which were shared by two other people [but who apparently had other differences, making my signature unique even before I enabled Flash for them]).
Interesting factoid: Apparently less than 1% of web surfers these days have 1600x1200 resolution screens (which came up as 1 in 106). I knew widescreen formats had become the norm, but that surprises me. (I have nothing against widescreen, but until ones with vertical dimensions of over 1200 become affordable... I see no reason to pay to downgrade or sidegrade -- I'll wait until it's an actual upgrade.)
...IRL I don't have a beard. (I shaved it off in 2004.)
Your username is a lie! You should change it. :p
(In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that I am not, in fact, a cat.)
I at least translated my old BBS name into Japanese. That'll keep me safe... lol
...It doesnt have to be "arcane"...
Aww, that takes all the fun out of it!