I wish I could remember where I read about this... it was decades and decades ago... but there was a case of a child who was brought to a psychiatrist because he had suddenly and completely stopped talking. The psychiatrist was asking the parents for details, and they said, beamingly, "Oh, here are our notebooks." They brought out an enormous stack of notebooks in which they had written down everything the child had said.
At some point, the child became disturbed by this and simply stopped talking.
The psychiatrist told the parents to stop writing down what the child said, and in due course he made a full recovery.
Moral: The observation process affects what is being observed.
Column view goes back to AT LEAST 1987 (Wang OIS
on
Creative Sues Apple
·
· Score: 1
The column view, or something very like it, goes back _at least_ to the Wang OIS (circa 1987).
I have never experienced the "stalling" problem that affected a very small number of 2004 and 2005 Priuses last year. (OK, hubris correction, make that "not yet..." although my car's VIN is outside the range of VINs supposedly affected).
It was apparently due to a firmware bug.
In any case, when it happened, according to personal reports in Prius forums from owners to whom it happened, the result was loss of internal-combustion-engine power, meaning they had about of mile of electric-powered travel to get to a safe stopping location. At that point, if you reset the computer by cycling the "power" button three times, most of the warning lights would go off, and the car would be fine again. Of course many to whom this happened didn't know the three-push trick... and those to whom it did happen usually elected to drive to the nearest Toyota dealer for a "TSB" ("technical service bulletin" = firmware patch).
These days, conventional-technology cars have a lot of firmware in them, and I'll bet they have a "reset" function available, even if it's not on the dashboard and visible to the driver.
John Graham-Cumming says that the Travelocity email at the bottom of the his blog essay "really is a genuine message from Travelocity and not a spam."
I beg to differ. I have no problem believing that it "really is a genuine message from Travelocity."
But spam doesn't mean "phony," it means "unsolicited commercial email." (And in my own opinion that includes "unknowingly 'solicited' commercial email.")
In order for Graham-Cumming or anyone else to say that Travelocity email is not spam, they would need to know whether it was solicited. You can't tell by any examination of the message itself.
If it was actively solicited by someone specifically checking a box requesting to be notified of offers, then, sure, it's not spam. If it was opt-out spam with the opt-out option hidden... or implicit... then it darn well is spam.
Mostly likely this particular email is in a grey area... quite likely an opt-out was plainly visible, but needed to be actively chosen, at some point in the travel booking process where a customers thoughts are likely to be elsewhere (where IS that security code on the back of my credit card?).
But it is absolutely wrong to stay that the Travelocity message is "not spam," just because it is really from Travelocity
Spam is spam, even if it is a genuine email from a reliable company informing me of some truly valuable opportunity... _if I didn't ask the company to send me those emails._
...right on the card. Just what is there about "Not for purposes of identification" that is hard for officials to understand?
Of course, when I was in the hospital emergency room and I said I didn't want to give them my social security number, they said they would treat me until I did. I backed down.
When I contacted the social security administration about this, and said "Am I required to give anybody but the government my SSN," their rather unhelpful reply was "No, you're not required to, but the hospital is not required to treat you without it."
Nope, it's not. For a moment there, I thought that well-dressed MIT geek had selected a virtual slide rule--a Pickett and Eckel Eye-Ease Yellow Ten-Inch Log-Log Duplex Decitrig Slide Rule--to be virtually dangling from his belt.
And I was wondering what other dangly things were available as display choices.
That yellow strap is way more eyecatching than whatever it is we're supposed to be looking at.
Gasoline go BOOM!, too. Anyone remember the Molotov cocktail?
Battery go BOOM! There's a crazy guy in Australia who soups up Priuses in his spare time. Last year he made some miscalculations in the design of his homemade battery charger, and posted some pictures of the resulting explosion and fire that came close to burning his house down.
And of course cell phone battery go BLFSTSZT! burn-um-thighs make-um heap big personal injury lawsuit. But a cell phone battery the size of a gas tank would go BOOM!
Anything that can crams enough energy to propel a car hundreds of miles into a space the size of a gas tank can go BOOM! Heap smart medicine-man engineer have-um job keep-um genie bottled tightly when not in use.
Scientists dreams: citations, not sweepstakes
on
"H-Prize" Announced
·
· Score: 1
...well, being human of course they are to some extent. But research is a game in which slow and steady wins the race. The big breakthroughs are made by people just sort of worrying at some research area over a long time, like a big tangled ball of string, pulling at it a bit here and a bit there.
And like everyone else they need food, clothing, shelter, and, of course, health insurance.
A scientist can't go to a bank and say "I have a good chance of winning a ten million dollar prize ten years from now. Could you lend me $75,000 a year for the next ten years... and a million for lab space and equipment... and something to pay a few assistants while I do that?"
If the government wants hydrogen fuel to become a reality, they shouldn't dick around with the equivalent of sweepstakes. Scientists can do the math and aren't impressed with the product of a large payoff with a small probability of getting it.
What motivates them primarily is not money--that's a "hygiene" issue, in management-theory terms. It's the respect of their peers.
What's needed is good, steady, long-term, predictable, even funding of basic research. Keep the universities healthy, quit cutting funding for alternative-energy research (the way the current administration has been doing), and keep in mind that only a few research projects will pay off--but there's no way to know in advance which.
Scientists don't dream of striking it rich. They dream of getting grants for a few more postdocs. They dream of the department head saying they can have some more lab space. And above all, they dream of writing papers that will be cited by thousands of other scientists.
I'm not sure whether this can be easily retrofitted into other computer designs, but one of the coolest things on the LINC--sometimes billed as "the first personal computer"--was the adjustable speed.
The LINC had a pair of dials on it: one was a (continuous) potentiometer, like a volume control, the other was a four-position "decade" switch. The pair of dials joint produced a signal that could be used to make any of a number of front-panel functions auto-repeat at a variable rate. In particular, you could make the "single-step" function auto-repeat. The pot adjusted the repeat rate continously over about a ten-to-one range. Each switch position was a factor of ten faster than the last. The slowest speed was about two per second.
This means that you could make the LINC single-step through its programs at an rate from about 2 to 200,000 steps per second... the later being about half of its full speed.
So, you could take a program... run it at 2 steps per second and watch the lights flash... then gradually speed it up over a five decades to 200,000 steps per second. At 2 steps per second if you watched closely from time to time you'd see one dot on the screen flash momentarily. As you sped it up the, the flashes would occur more rapidly... then you could see it was forming characters... then lines of text appearing at about the speed of a dot matrix printer... then finally a whole screen of flicker-free text.
Meanwhile, the LINC's speaker, attached to bit 6 of the accumulator, would gradually change from ticks to a buzzes to beeps.
I never saw anything that gave you such a feeling for just how incredibly goddam fast a computer was. Even one running at about 0.5 megahertz clock rate.
You actually could build a LINC from scratch, I suppose, since it was discrete components and the design was public domain. But it would be equally interesting to take a "stock" computer of almost any vintage and give it a continuously variable clock, a la the LINC.
No, because the RIAA would sue my estate, because I didn't keep all the original CDs (and LPs!) that are on it.
My will instructs my executor to destroy my iPod first, erase all the um, well, you know, erase the hard drives on my computer second, and worry about settling my debts third.
If you're completely soaked in the month-by-month history of a company's products, then something like "Intel Core Duo" means something to you, and "Intel Core 2 Duo" is a delta off of something you already know.
To Mr. and Mrs. America, standing in front of two computers at Best Buy and trying to figure out whether it's worth paying extra money for an Intel Core 2 Duo instead of an Intel Core Duo... heck, they aren't even going to be sure it's not just a misprint on the label.
Will there be an Intel Core 2 Solo?
(If they think "Intel Core" sounds like a good name for a product line, how about "Intel Drum" and "Intel Delay Line?")
Someone--I think it was Robert Kuttner but can't find the reference--was trying to explain the "paradox" that all of the economic figures seem good, yet polls consistently show U. S. citizens are pessimistic about the economic future.
His belief is that the problem is that the official inflation figures contain a mixture of prices for things like consumer electronics gadgets, which have continuously decreased in price, and things like healthcare costs and college tuition, which have continuously increased in price at far faster rate than "the" inflation rate.
The problem is that things like healthcare and education are much more important ultimately than cellular phones that can show video.
He said that we are turning into "a tchotchke society," rich in frivolous gadgets but poor in literacy rates, infant mortality, etc.
I love my iPod, but I'm worried about my medical insurance.
In 1941 a ''New York Times'' food column reported:
Yesterday, we had our first cup of coffee, our first baked beans and our first spaghetti out of the amazing self-heating cans now being introduced by a department store in Manhattan... There's a fifteen-minute wait while the canned food, enclosed in an outer tin, heats without benefit of gas, electricity, or flame of any sort. This trick is accomplished by a chemical inside the first container, and the action is started when four holes are punched in the bottom. The whole mysterious apparatus is turned upside down for the stipulated number of minutes, then righted, and presto! there is your steaming coffee, or food, all ready to serve.
Holt, Jane (1941) "News of Food: War Emphasizes Benefit of Prune Vitamins--Hammering Opens Oysters," ''The New York Times,'' March 26, 1941, p. 19
In 1947, the same column reported "Food in Self-Heating Cans Reappears" (their having been reserved for the military during the war). Referring to the cans as "Hotcans," the columnist noted that "Chocolate is made with milk and is delicious (65 to 72 cents). Four hamburgers in tomato sauce with mushrooms are small but good, and the sauce is ample (89 to 98 cents). Coffee tastes something like the instantly brewed type, leaving something to be desired (49 cents)." (49 cents in 1947 is approximately equivalent to $4.64 in 2005).
Nickerson, Jane (1947), "News of Food: Food in Self-Heating Cans Reappears Here; Recommended for Motorists and Campers," ''The New York Times,'' November 26, 1947, p. 28
I have to wonder why the technology never took off. Of course, the Wikipedia article links to a 2001 article touting the "world's first" self-heating coffee, and it does say that the calcium oxide reaction is "nowhere near as straightforward as chemistry text books suggest and that the thermal design was critical to the efficient operation of the device."
Stop all the snivelling, cavilling, whining, Nervous Nellyism. No Progress can be made without taking risks. Did a few minor scalds and burns stop Chuck Yeager?
Would you like to go back to the dark ages, before antibiotics, the flush toilet, and self-heating coffee cans? When women were barred from advancement, trapped in a lifetime of relentless toil over hot coffeepots? When people routinely perished from exposure walking miles through blizzards attempting to reach the nearest Starbucks? When greedy vending barons forced workers to dig into their pockets for their last few coins, then laughed sadistically as their machines tauntingly dispensed chicken bouillion instead of coffee?
I say, who wouldn't gladly risk a few small explosions in order to be able to enjoy a hot can of gourmet rich expresso lattee--say, what's in this stuff, anyway? Ingredients: Water, Coffee (Ingredients (Water, Coffee (Ingredients (Water, Coffee (Ingredients (Water, Coffee (Ingredients (Water, Coffee (Ingredients (Water, Coffee (Ingredients (Water, Coffee (Ingredients (Water, Coffee (Ingredients (Water, Coffee segmentation fault: core dumped
Watch for this, in an automatic "security" update coming soon.
I imagine several confirmation boxes asking you to engage in a binding legal agreement saying that you understand that Microsoft did not write the plugin, and holding Microsoft harmless in the event that the plugin does not translate documents correctly, damages your computer, or directly causes terrorist attacks on the United States.
It's not possible to "enjoy Star Wars as it first appeared in 1977."
Watching a DVD is NOT the same as watching projected film on a screen in a theatre.
But the big problem is, I don't know of any safe way to erase, then subsequently restore, my memories of the past couple of decades so that I can see the film knowing nothing about the movie except a Time magazine review and a friend saying it was great.
How can I watch the 1977 Star Wars without the burden of twenty-nine-years'-worth of accumulated "spoilers?."
All of these "cloaking" stories suffer from basically the same problem. Making something invisible is much, much more complicated than blocking light, or cancelling light, or anything like that.
The article says, rather imprecisely, "when certain objects are placed next to superlenses, the light bouncing off them is essentially erased by light reflecting off the superlens, making the object invisible."
But "erasing" the light reflecting off an object doesn't make it invisible, any more than painting a car black... even matte black... makes it invisible.
In a dark room, if you cover a light with a black box it becomes invisible. When viewing a star from the earth, if it is occulted by, say, the moon passing between you and the object, it becomes invisible. If I pull a red cloak over myself, covering myself completely, you can no longer see me. You cannot tell who I am and if I stand very still perhaps you cannot tell that I am not a statue, so, in a sense, I have become invisible.
But, to become invisible in the sense of H. G. Wells' "The Invisible Man," or a Star Trek cloaking device, or James Bond's invisible car, or what have you, requires much more than "not being able to see" the object. It means not being able to detect the presence of the object... under real-world lighting conditions, with real-world scenes _behind_ the object, and from more than one vantage point at the same time.
That last one is the problem with many of these schemes. It doesn't do any good to make an object invisible when viewed by your right eye if there are "matte lines" around it when viewed with your left eye. It doesn't do a lot of good to make an object invisible as viewed from one soldier if it is visible to everyone else in the platoon.
Learning from failure is easy. The tough part is learning from success. When a project succeeds, there's no pressure to make searching analyses of the reasons for success. The upper-level managers involved begin to think they're innately cool and have all the answers... the success of their product line proves it.
Think Netscape... think Digital Equipment Corporation (I date their decline from the day when a salesperson apologized for being slow to return a call but added "After all, we're a billion dollar corporation." Think Ashton-Tate. Think Quark...
This is not very different from saying that people with presbyopia are more likely to be persuaded by print advertising when they are wearing their reading glasses. Or that people are more likely to be persuaded by loud commercials than soft ones. Or that people who listen to radio are more likely to be persuaded by radio ads than people who do not listen to radio.
Obviously you are more likely to be persuaded by a message to which you are paying attention, focussing on, are awake for, etc. etc. That is, if the message is persuasive. You're also more likely to exercise critical acumen on a message to which you are paying attention.
This doesn't mean caffeine is some evil zombie-making, will-sapping, mysterious persuasion drug. It just means, surprise--in some situations caffeine makes us more alert.
It certainly does not mean "coffee makes us say 'yes.'" Try another study in which people are asked to read a contract containing some sneaky buried one-sided details that work against their interests. Ask them to review it with and without coffee. I'll bet that coffee helps them notice those details... and that in this case, coffee will "make them say no."
Slashdot Mirror
...than a Dell Optiplex GX520 does today.
So, what exactly is the point?
In 1962 an IBM 7094 cost $3,134,500.
Does that mean that $19,356,198.10 is a reasonable price to pay for a Dell Optiplex GX520 today?
I wish I could remember where I read about this... it was decades and decades ago... but there was a case of a child who was brought to a psychiatrist because he had suddenly and completely stopped talking. The psychiatrist was asking the parents for details, and they said, beamingly, "Oh, here are our notebooks." They brought out an enormous stack of notebooks in which they had written down everything the child had said.
At some point, the child became disturbed by this and simply stopped talking.
The psychiatrist told the parents to stop writing down what the child said, and in due course he made a full recovery.
Moral: The observation process affects what is being observed.
The column view, or something very like it, goes back _at least_ to the Wang OIS (circa 1987).
I have never experienced the "stalling" problem that affected a very small number of 2004 and 2005 Priuses last year. (OK, hubris correction, make that "not yet..." although my car's VIN is outside the range of VINs supposedly affected).
It was apparently due to a firmware bug.
In any case, when it happened, according to personal reports in Prius forums from owners to whom it happened, the result was loss of internal-combustion-engine power, meaning they had about of mile of electric-powered travel to get to a safe stopping location. At that point, if you reset the computer by cycling the "power" button three times, most of the warning lights would go off, and the car would be fine again. Of course many to whom this happened didn't know the three-push trick... and those to whom it did happen usually elected to drive to the nearest Toyota dealer for a "TSB" ("technical service bulletin" = firmware patch).
These days, conventional-technology cars have a lot of firmware in them, and I'll bet they have a "reset" function available, even if it's not on the dashboard and visible to the driver.
John Graham-Cumming says that the Travelocity email at the bottom of the his blog essay "really is a genuine message from Travelocity and not a spam."
I beg to differ. I have no problem believing that it "really is a genuine message from Travelocity."
But spam doesn't mean "phony," it means "unsolicited commercial email." (And in my own opinion that includes "unknowingly 'solicited' commercial email.")
In order for Graham-Cumming or anyone else to say that Travelocity email is not spam, they would need to know whether it was solicited. You can't tell by any examination of the message itself.
If it was actively solicited by someone specifically checking a box requesting to be notified of offers, then, sure, it's not spam. If it was opt-out spam with the opt-out option hidden... or implicit... then it darn well is spam.
Mostly likely this particular email is in a grey area... quite likely an opt-out was plainly visible, but needed to be actively chosen, at some point in the travel booking process where a customers thoughts are likely to be elsewhere (where IS that security code on the back of my credit card?).
But it is absolutely wrong to stay that the Travelocity message is "not spam," just because it is really from Travelocity
Spam is spam, even if it is a genuine email from a reliable company informing me of some truly valuable opportunity... _if I didn't ask the company to send me those emails._
Hey, you do what you like when it's you in the emergency room. I know what my priorities are.
...must... hit... preview... button....
It's actually funnier as written, but of course what the hospital said was that they would not treat me until I gave them my SSN.
...right on the card. Just what is there about "Not for purposes of identification" that is hard for officials to understand?
Of course, when I was in the hospital emergency room and I said I didn't want to give them my social security number, they said they would treat me until I did. I backed down.
When I contacted the social security administration about this, and said "Am I required to give anybody but the government my SSN," their rather unhelpful reply was "No, you're not required to, but the hospital is not required to treat you without it."
Nope, it's not. For a moment there, I thought that well-dressed MIT geek had selected a virtual slide rule--a Pickett and Eckel Eye-Ease Yellow Ten-Inch Log-Log Duplex Decitrig Slide Rule--to be virtually dangling from his belt.
And I was wondering what other dangly things were available as display choices.
That yellow strap is way more eyecatching than whatever it is we're supposed to be looking at.
Gasoline go BOOM!, too. Anyone remember the Molotov cocktail?
Battery go BOOM! There's a crazy guy in Australia who soups up Priuses in his spare time. Last year he made some miscalculations in the design of his homemade battery charger, and posted some pictures of the resulting explosion and fire that came close to burning his house down.
And of course cell phone battery go BLFSTSZT! burn-um-thighs make-um heap big personal injury lawsuit. But a cell phone battery the size of a gas tank would go BOOM!
Anything that can crams enough energy to propel a car hundreds of miles into a space the size of a gas tank can go BOOM! Heap smart medicine-man engineer have-um job keep-um genie bottled tightly when not in use.
...well, being human of course they are to some extent. But research is a game in which slow and steady wins the race. The big breakthroughs are made by people just sort of worrying at some research area over a long time, like a big tangled ball of string, pulling at it a bit here and a bit there.
And like everyone else they need food, clothing, shelter, and, of course, health insurance.
A scientist can't go to a bank and say "I have a good chance of winning a ten million dollar prize ten years from now. Could you lend me $75,000 a year for the next ten years... and a million for lab space and equipment... and something to pay a few assistants while I do that?"
If the government wants hydrogen fuel to become a reality, they shouldn't dick around with the equivalent of sweepstakes. Scientists can do the math and aren't impressed with the product of a large payoff with a small probability of getting it.
What motivates them primarily is not money--that's a "hygiene" issue, in management-theory terms. It's the respect of their peers.
What's needed is good, steady, long-term, predictable, even funding of basic research. Keep the universities healthy, quit cutting funding for alternative-energy research (the way the current administration has been doing), and keep in mind that only a few research projects will pay off--but there's no way to know in advance which.
Scientists don't dream of striking it rich. They dream of getting grants for a few more postdocs. They dream of the department head saying they can have some more lab space. And above all, they dream of writing papers that will be cited by thousands of other scientists.
I'm not sure whether this can be easily retrofitted into other computer designs, but one of the coolest things on the LINC--sometimes billed as "the first personal computer"--was the adjustable speed.
The LINC had a pair of dials on it: one was a (continuous) potentiometer, like a volume control, the other was a four-position "decade" switch. The pair of dials joint produced a signal that could be used to make any of a number of front-panel functions auto-repeat at a variable rate. In particular, you could make the "single-step" function auto-repeat. The pot adjusted the repeat rate continously over about a ten-to-one range. Each switch position was a factor of ten faster than the last. The slowest speed was about two per second.
This means that you could make the LINC single-step through its programs at an rate from about 2 to 200,000 steps per second... the later being about half of its full speed.
So, you could take a program... run it at 2 steps per second and watch the lights flash... then gradually speed it up over a five decades to 200,000 steps per second. At 2 steps per second if you watched closely from time to time you'd see one dot on the screen flash momentarily. As you sped it up the, the flashes would occur more rapidly... then you could see it was forming characters... then lines of text appearing at about the speed of a dot matrix printer... then finally a whole screen of flicker-free text.
Meanwhile, the LINC's speaker, attached to bit 6 of the accumulator, would gradually change from ticks to a buzzes to beeps.
I never saw anything that gave you such a feeling for just how incredibly goddam fast a computer was. Even one running at about 0.5 megahertz clock rate.
You actually could build a LINC from scratch, I suppose, since it was discrete components and the design was public domain. But it would be equally interesting to take a "stock" computer of almost any vintage and give it a continuously variable clock, a la the LINC.
No, because the RIAA would sue my estate, because I didn't keep all the original CDs (and LPs!) that are on it.
My will instructs my executor to destroy my iPod first, erase all the um, well, you know, erase the hard drives on my computer second, and worry about settling my debts third.
Thanks! And, thank goodness, I was pretty much accurate about the author and the gist of the article.
If you're completely soaked in the month-by-month history of a company's products, then something like "Intel Core Duo" means something to you, and "Intel Core 2 Duo" is a delta off of something you already know.
To Mr. and Mrs. America, standing in front of two computers at Best Buy and trying to figure out whether it's worth paying extra money for an Intel Core 2 Duo instead of an Intel Core Duo... heck, they aren't even going to be sure it's not just a misprint on the label.
Will there be an Intel Core 2 Solo?
(If they think "Intel Core" sounds like a good name for a product line, how about "Intel Drum" and "Intel Delay Line?")
Someone--I think it was Robert Kuttner but can't find the reference--was trying to explain the "paradox" that all of the economic figures seem good, yet polls consistently show U. S. citizens are pessimistic about the economic future.
His belief is that the problem is that the official inflation figures contain a mixture of prices for things like consumer electronics gadgets, which have continuously decreased in price, and things like healthcare costs and college tuition, which have continuously increased in price at far faster rate than "the" inflation rate.
The problem is that things like healthcare and education are much more important ultimately than cellular phones that can show video.
He said that we are turning into "a tchotchke society," rich in frivolous gadgets but poor in literacy rates, infant mortality, etc.
I love my iPod, but I'm worried about my medical insurance.
I just added some material to the Wikipedia article on self-heating cans.
In 1941 a ''New York Times'' food column reported:
Yesterday, we had our first cup of coffee, our first baked beans and our first spaghetti out of the amazing self-heating cans now being introduced by a department store in Manhattan... There's a fifteen-minute wait while the canned food, enclosed in an outer tin, heats without benefit of gas, electricity, or flame of any sort. This trick is accomplished by a chemical inside the first container, and the action is started when four holes are punched in the bottom. The whole mysterious apparatus is turned upside down for the stipulated number of minutes, then righted, and presto! there is your steaming coffee, or food, all ready to serve.
Holt, Jane (1941) "News of Food: War Emphasizes Benefit of Prune Vitamins--Hammering Opens Oysters," ''The New York Times,'' March 26, 1941, p. 19
In 1947, the same column reported "Food in Self-Heating Cans Reappears" (their having been reserved for the military during the war). Referring to the cans as "Hotcans," the columnist noted that "Chocolate is made with milk and is delicious (65 to 72 cents). Four hamburgers in tomato sauce with mushrooms are small but good, and the sauce is ample (89 to 98 cents). Coffee tastes something like the instantly brewed type, leaving something to be desired (49 cents)." (49 cents in 1947 is approximately equivalent to $4.64 in 2005).
Nickerson, Jane (1947), "News of Food: Food in Self-Heating Cans Reappears Here; Recommended for Motorists and Campers," ''The New York Times,'' November 26, 1947, p. 28
I have to wonder why the technology never took off. Of course, the Wikipedia article links to a 2001 article touting the "world's first" self-heating coffee, and it does say that the calcium oxide reaction is "nowhere near as straightforward as chemistry text books suggest and that the thermal design was critical to the efficient operation of the device."
Stop all the snivelling, cavilling, whining, Nervous Nellyism. No Progress can be made without taking risks. Did a few minor scalds and burns stop Chuck Yeager?
Would you like to go back to the dark ages, before antibiotics, the flush toilet, and self-heating coffee cans? When women were barred from advancement, trapped in a lifetime of relentless toil over hot coffeepots? When people routinely perished from exposure walking miles through blizzards attempting to reach the nearest Starbucks? When greedy vending barons forced workers to dig into their pockets for their last few coins, then laughed sadistically as their machines tauntingly dispensed chicken bouillion instead of coffee?
I say, who wouldn't gladly risk a few small explosions in order to be able to enjoy a hot can of gourmet rich expresso lattee--say, what's in this stuff, anyway? Ingredients: Water, Coffee (Ingredients (Water, Coffee (Ingredients (Water, Coffee (Ingredients (Water, Coffee (Ingredients (Water, Coffee (Ingredients (Water, Coffee (Ingredients (Water, Coffee (Ingredients (Water, Coffee (Ingredients (Water, Coffee segmentation fault: core dumped
...till ODF's plugin won't run.
Watch for this, in an automatic "security" update coming soon.
I imagine several confirmation boxes asking you to engage in a binding legal agreement saying that you understand that Microsoft did not write the plugin, and holding Microsoft harmless in the event that the plugin does not translate documents correctly, damages your computer, or directly causes terrorist attacks on the United States.
It's not possible to "enjoy Star Wars as it first appeared in 1977."
Watching a DVD is NOT the same as watching projected film on a screen in a theatre.
But the big problem is, I don't know of any safe way to erase, then subsequently restore, my memories of the past couple of decades so that I can see the film knowing nothing about the movie except a Time magazine review and a friend saying it was great.
How can I watch the 1977 Star Wars without the burden of twenty-nine-years'-worth of accumulated "spoilers?."
All of these "cloaking" stories suffer from basically the same problem. Making something invisible is much, much more complicated than blocking light, or cancelling light, or anything like that.
The article says, rather imprecisely, "when certain objects are placed next to superlenses, the light bouncing off them is essentially erased by light reflecting off the superlens, making the object invisible."
But "erasing" the light reflecting off an object doesn't make it invisible, any more than painting a car black... even matte black... makes it invisible.
In a dark room, if you cover a light with a black box it becomes invisible. When viewing a star from the earth, if it is occulted by, say, the moon passing between you and the object, it becomes invisible. If I pull a red cloak over myself, covering myself completely, you can no longer see me. You cannot tell who I am and if I stand very still perhaps you cannot tell that I am not a statue, so, in a sense, I have become invisible.
But, to become invisible in the sense of H. G. Wells' "The Invisible Man," or a Star Trek cloaking device, or James Bond's invisible car, or what have you, requires much more than "not being able to see" the object. It means not being able to detect the presence of the object... under real-world lighting conditions, with real-world scenes _behind_ the object, and from more than one vantage point at the same time.
That last one is the problem with many of these schemes. It doesn't do any good to make an object invisible when viewed by your right eye if there are "matte lines" around it when viewed with your left eye. It doesn't do a lot of good to make an object invisible as viewed from one soldier if it is visible to everyone else in the platoon.
Learning from failure is easy. The tough part is learning from success. When a project succeeds, there's no pressure to make searching analyses of the reasons for success. The upper-level managers involved begin to think they're innately cool and have all the answers... the success of their product line proves it.
Think Netscape... think Digital Equipment Corporation (I date their decline from the day when a salesperson apologized for being slow to return a call but added "After all, we're a billion dollar corporation." Think Ashton-Tate. Think Quark...
Running "Semir Osmanagic" through the Internet Anagram Server can be time well spent.
...Noah's Ark of the Convenant, perched on the pyramid's side, exactly where Nostradamus said it would be.
This is not very different from saying that people with presbyopia are more likely to be persuaded by print advertising when they are wearing their reading glasses. Or that people are more likely to be persuaded by loud commercials than soft ones. Or that people who listen to radio are more likely to be persuaded by radio ads than people who do not listen to radio.
Obviously you are more likely to be persuaded by a message to which you are paying attention, focussing on, are awake for, etc. etc. That is, if the message is persuasive. You're also more likely to exercise critical acumen on a message to which you are paying attention.
This doesn't mean caffeine is some evil zombie-making, will-sapping, mysterious persuasion drug. It just means, surprise--in some situations caffeine makes us more alert.
It certainly does not mean "coffee makes us say 'yes.'" Try another study in which people are asked to read a contract containing some sneaky buried one-sided details that work against their interests. Ask them to review it with and without coffee. I'll bet that coffee helps them notice those details... and that in this case, coffee will "make them say no."