Exactly. I got my first computer as a kid in 1981 (a Casio PB100). The manual was excellent, and I learned BASIC as well as some numerical analysis with it : Monte-Carlo method, systems of equations, etc. My parents were short of money at the time, had a large house, and took guests who needed a place to stay for a few months. I remember long discussions with a couple of computer specialists (as we said at the time) working for major banks. They only seemed to know VM and COBOL on big iron computers, punched cards, line editors on ttys, and files on tapes, so, "serious" computers which have practically disappeared except in legacy applications. They made fun of me with my small device and my dreams of having an Apple ][ or an IBM PC, which was worth the price of a hot hatch at the time, and that my parents could not afford, saying that a real computer was worth minimum $1M, or how I was using a TI 994/A at school to play some music. I realized they had almost no concept of a backdoor, and were hardly gasping the concept of a superuser, which I knew only from books, but had understood. Now, I am using the most powerful computers of the planet in atomic energy centers, and still think of them making fun of me trying to program 2-degree equations or 3-unknown linear equations on my 512 byte computer in BASIC. They did not seem to see the point, since they only thought about (non-relational) databases and accounting.
Yes, I bought some of the Landau and Lifchitz books at the time for $3, they are now worth $150 at Springer...Younger self should have believed in himself more. Funny to see that now we can download 5000 C64 games for free, not to mention MAME roms, a good PC is $500, (at the time, $30 per game, a decent PC was $3000 of the time) but those books are 50 times more expensive...and the content still worth it.
I just had a look at his wikipedia page.
Midnight commander : hated it (when nc was fine)
WINE : never worked properly for me.
Mono : ditto
Gnumeric : even worse.
Don't get me started on GNOME or KDE, I hate both. I loved the Xwindows combination with any simple task manager (like mwm) but to me things are getting worse and worse in Linux and I have moved to MacOS in 2004, except for severs or computing work, done on Linux, but on the command line by ssh. So please, God, smite De Caza the same way you got Hans Reiser or McAffee out of the game. Those pricks just ruin it for everyone else with a huge ego and unusable software, schisms, and so on.
What you describe is exactly what de Gaulle did in France in 1944/45 and 1959-1969, allowing for unsurpassed economic growth and well being. Of course as you point out de Gaulle was not elected, or if he was, he was for other reasons than his economic program. He was wrong on individual freedoms, but he managed to make France much richer than England in 1975 starting with a destroyed country in 1944.
As someone who has demonstrated a FLIR in a science fair, I can tell you that far infrared is quite an interesting wavelength to explore body shapes...Too bad that even the cheapest 160X200 model is at least $2K (a drop of a factor 10 in 5 years, but still). It allows to pinpoint the location of certain points quite accurately, the more so if the person imaged starts to blush. Sweaty areas come out as black as much colder than the surroundings.
So basically the question is : at which wavelength does this magic film operate ? Does it correspond to black body (Planck was a perv) radiation at ambient temperature ?
I realized reading "Dark Ages America" that businesses understood that the best way to make a steady income was to push addictive products. In the past, until the fifties more or less, you would buy an expensive thing (suit, house..) once in a while, or even in a lifetime (such as a bicycle or a gold watch) and that was it. Addictive pleasures (sex, sugar, alcohol, even strong emotions...) were reserved for Saturday night or Sunday (say, a small bottle of Coca-Cola at the drugstore), everybody would smoke ONE cigarette at the end of a work day, would go to the movies once in a while, because it was so expensive, etc. But there is no brand loyalty in all this, and, more importantly, no addiction.
Advertisement and TV encouraged us to become drugged and addicted to quick pleasure inducing hits requiring exponential use : sugar, alcohol, pornography, gambling, tobacco, soap operas 6 hours a day on TV, cars and gasoline, credit to finance all this, and now that some of those pleasures have been found bad for the health (what a surprise), we are switching to mobile phones, pay TV, and internet, which all require subscription plans which end up costing a fortune over years. And we are all addicted to it, instead of critical thinking, reading, self-improvement, and even work and family commitments.
This is especially obvious in third world countries, in Africa for instance, even if our way of life is also spreading there with satellite TV : there, everybody smokes (but not much), but students are actually interested in science, see computers as tools, not toys, work and take care seriously of their friends or families, and pays cash ; actual wealth is created in farms and factories, not in web (N+1).0 startups.
This seems to be the upper bound of predictability by computers ; in other domains of artificial intelligence, such as automatic translation or speech recognition, automated statistical analysis from corpuses seems to perform better than manual encoding of rules, but ends up at maybe 90% efficiency. The rest is too random to be predicted, and it could be the part of poetry, art or intelligence in our lives.
8 and 16 bit computing are the only positive things from the eighties...with "Wargames" or "Back to the Future" and "Indiana Jones" movies.
CD marked the end of 45RPM records and hence the beginning of the domination of marketing over artistic sense in music. 1983 marked the end of interesting pop music IMHO.
Then there was AIDS. This is why we spent our time programming C64 in assembler rather than fucking hippie or disco girls like in the 60's or 70's.
The end of the cold war marked the beginning of decadence in science education and funding.
Reaganism brought to us infinite jealousy for others, permanent competition, and an obsession with money and consumerism.
The space shuttle sucked ass in comparison to Apollo program, for instance.
There were no decent cameras to speak of. Remember the german cameras from the 30's and 50's,
and japanese from the early 70's..The same for Hifi. It should say something about the period.
Global thermonuclear war : 80% less economic output in developed countries, a nuclear winter, and a selection of the fittest specimens of the human race plus a few Pygmeas, Tibetans, Polynesians, Swedes and Swiss.
Well, for noise, you need to nitrogen cool your sensor...or use a DSLR, because the sensor is not heated and permanently subjected to photons like in a point & shoot or bridge. I am however quite satisfied by digital cameras for night shooting or high ISO pictures, with film grain or lack of reciprocity can make those situations tricky. However the main selling point of film for me is dynamic range as you point out : the nonlinearity of the response makes it possible to better resolve high contrast situations than digital ; for instance, a bright face in a dark room with natural lighting seems to always give me "hot" pixels and pizza effects on the cheeks in digital, as shown on the histogram with some bunching at 255, requiring manual adjustment, bracketing, ugly HDR postprocessing, whatever, when film adapts to this situation automatically. The wedding picture with black and white clothes side to side still necessitates some manual adjustment in postprocessing, but still...
Precisely ! Glass makes the difference..and so, due to the preeminence of digital these days, quality optics incompatible with digital are dime a dozen on ebay. I now use a cheap bridge digital for random shooting, but for quality stuff I have bought dirt cheap professional gear in 35mm and 6x6 and make incredibly good pictures, (at least technically...); as good as a pro level DSLR at least. The prices of processing and digitizing film, and film in bulk, are also way down compared to the past, with archiving guaranteed to last a hundred years . So, thanks a lot, digital cameras !
In "Explorers on the Moon" he mentions ice (recently discovered) and caves. Now if we build that atomic rocket (NERVA or Orion), we could send a V2 like rocket on the moon with 8 people aboard, a dog, a tank (more impressive to selenites than a buggy) and let them stay for some weeks at first.
I agree with you : maybe there is something wrong with me, but although I seem to see 3D in real life (I can easily put a thread in a sewing needle head, for instance), I never saw anything satisfying with those red/blue glasses, polarizer glasses, etc. The only thing which worked for me was the B&W stereoscope from the early XXth century, with glass plates giving directly a different picture for each eye through a binocular-like wooden contraption.
However, when trying the wii trick in a VR lab, I was stunned by the 3D feeling I had, moving my head around and seeing the perspective change on the screen. This is the way to go since there is no color distorsion, horizontal lines from the polaroids, etc.
A combination of this and VR glasses would be the only satisfying solution (not mentioning the privacy for certain kind of movies)
that no one seems to have reposted, yet :
I am a dynamic figure, often seen scaling walls and crushing ice. I have been known to remodel train stations on my lunch breaks, making them more efficient in the area of heat retention. I translate ethnic slurs for Cuban refugees, I write award-winning operas, I manage time efficiently. Occasionally, I tread water for three days in a row.
I woo women with my sensuous and godlike trombone playing, I can pilot bicycles up severe inclines with unflagging speed, and I cook Thirty-Minute Brownies in twenty minutes. I am an expert in stucco, a veteran in love, and an outlaw in Peru.
Using only a hoe and a large glass of water, I once single-handedly defended a small village in the Amazon Basin from a horde of ferocious army ants. I play bluegrass cello, I was scouted by the Mets, I am the subject of numerous documentaries. When I?m bored, I build large suspension bridges in my yard. I enjoy urban hang gliding. On Wednesdays, after school, I repair electrical appliances free of charge. I am an abstract artist, a concrete analyst, and a ruthless bookie.
Critics worldwide swoon over my original line of corduroy evening wear. I don?t perspire. I am a private citizen, yet I receive fan mail. I have been caller number nine and have won the weekend passes. Last summer I toured New Jersey with a traveling centrifugal-force demonstration. I bat.400. My deft floral arrangements have earned me fame in international botany circles.
Children trust me.
I can hurl tennis rackets at small moving objects with deadly accuracy. I once read Paradise Lost, Moby Dick, and David Copperfield in one day and still had time to refurbish an entire dining room that evening. I know the exact location of every food item in the supermarket. I have performed several covert operations for the CIA. I sleep once a week; when I do sleep, I sleep in a chair. While on vacation in Canada, I successfully negotiated with a group of terrorists who had seized a small bakery. The laws of physics do not apply to me. I balance, I weave, I dodge, I frolic, and my bills are all paid. On weekends, to let off steam, I participate in full-contact origami. Years ago I discovered the meaning of life but forgot to write it down. I have made extraordinary four course meals using only a mouli and a toaster oven.
I breed prizewinning clams. I have won bullfights in San Juan, cliff-diving competitions in Sri Lanka, and spelling bees at the Kremlin. I have played Hamlet, I have performed open-heart surgery, and I have spoken with Elvis.
But I have not yet gone to college.
The problem with GPS units (or google maps/etc) for that matter is that they tend to compute the fastest route respecting speed limits, unless you reprogram them by hand if it is possible. Since I usually drive about 10-20% above speed limit outside towns (it is a calculated risk taking into account the probability of law enforcement presence as a function of time, rain, taxi behavior, hills, obvious traps, and limiting risks as a function of extreme weather, traffic, tractors, etc) I have been caught 4 times in 18 years but still have my driving license. I know of certain routes which cut 10% time in comparison to GPS-recommended ones thanks to this.
what you forget here (with great irony) is that the human brain needs muscle and endurance. I watch football with a beer in hand on TV, I get the "meaning" as you say, and still I suck at it ; do you know why ? Because I did not spend 3 hours a day for 15 years running around the field and kicking and passing balls. Learning facts is useless until you see it as a stupid training for your brain, exactly like pointlessly running around a field in order to be able to play an hour-long game. You will then have plenty of automatic thinking which will help you visualize instantly the solution of a problem, with creativity. And you will get the meaning of things much more easily. Nowadays I see students who want to study math, CS or physics at college level and do not know basic derivatives, limited series expansions, trigonometry and so on. They claim to be able to find them if asked because they "understood the basic principles". Not surprinsingly, they fail when asked to do so. It is a lot easier if you have memorized some results...and then you can really attack interesting science. (post-Galileo, that is). Many students fail at SAT, TOEFL and so on, even when speaking very good english, because they do not have the basic facts memorized to help them understand a sophomore level course on any subject, from dinosaurs to epistomology or linguistics. They are not able to write a well structured essay for lack of training and basic facts to fill the blanks ; they have been only rewarded for "creativity", which is impossible to teach, most of the teachers themselves being not that creative, so the only thing they have been rewarded for is some kind of psychoanalytical stream-of-consciousness garbage thrown on paper without structure or real originality ; all this because of the hunt for rote memorization on my opinion.
If memory serves, the Joliot-Curies also secretely patented the nuclear pile and nuclear bomb in 1939 in France. They buried much of the material when the Germans arrived, and retrieved it after the war which allowed the french atomic pile ZOE to run as early as 1949. There was some kind of deal with the US about the patents.
the point is that 99% of physical equations are non-linear, N-body, ordinary or partial differential equations and thus do not have an analytical solution. So the only approach to check if as you say the hypothesis are correct is numerical. Even the great Fermi had to recur to an army of mechanical calculators staffed by humans to see if his equations had a meaning. Since Galileo mathematized physics there have been 300 years without computers so people (and teaching up to nowadays) are used to approximations and analytical solutions because it gives "beauty" and beautiful exercises ; but numerical analysis if properly taught can also be beautiful and give many insights.
100 people died in Iraq, 20 000 Africans died of Aids, 20 species went extinct, 10 millions of tons of CO2 were emitted, BUT THEY ERASED GRAFFITI ON AN XBOX !! where is the FBI when needed ?
This time the media (not Diebold) are going to have an apparently nice democrat elected, since Bush went a little too far but it should be obvious that once again it won't make any notable difference. Kucinich, Paul or Nader would have, but this would be against so many interests....
G.Lippman got the nobel prize in the naughties for having developed such a process for color photography using interferometric techniques reminding of holography. People at the time said that the color pictures looked like butterfly wings.
Link : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lippmann_plate
I am pretty sure that my first contact with videogames was the arcade version of Space Invaders, in a small cafe by the port in my childhood village. I was 6 or 7 then, and for nostalgy sake I kept coming back year after year to this place until the cafe was destroyed to enlargen the port. There was no joystick (only left/right buttons) and I kept losing, but was so fascinated by the game that I insisted all the time for my schoolmates to come with me and play it. The bartender would tolerate me playing if my father was around, but not a bunch of kids with no money. Fun times though. Then I remember huge arcades full of teenagers and punks ; my father was quite reluctant even to bring me there, but I remember Silent Service, M65 Ambush, Gunsmoke, Frogger with the noises, all those shooting games..and all those pinballs of course, Xenon or Devil's Dare.
On consoles I remember Pong, Vectrex games and so on at my cousin's but I did not have any since I had a C64 with Time Pilot, Ghostbusters (in that order) and then a bunch of pirated games when the computer got popular..
I am just saying "maybe all the efforts done to fight the hatred of science are going in the exactly wrong direction". This is sociological and psychological, hardly scientific indeed.
I agree that by symmetry you can deduce the existence of the displacment current, but from that how do you deduce the existence of electromagnetic waves without writing down and solving Maxwell's equations ?
Qualitative and phenomenological physics indeed works to some extent (non-linearities, second order effects please ?), but I find it a shame to go back to middle-ages like thinking and teaching. Why do not you teach Arisotelician physics, which, without equations, describes perfectly the macroscopic world we live in ?
Maybe the problem is societal, with the huge comeback of religion and myths enforced by people who have an interest in it in order to dumb the bigger part of the population, when in between the 1850s and the 1990s the same politicians had an interest in having the best scientists emerging from the people in order to develop the best weapons.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. I got my first computer as a kid in 1981 (a Casio PB100). The manual was excellent, and I learned BASIC as well as some numerical analysis with it : Monte-Carlo method, systems of equations, etc. My parents were short of money at the time, had a large house, and took guests who needed a place to stay for a few months. I remember long discussions with a couple of computer specialists (as we said at the time) working for major banks. They only seemed to know VM and COBOL on big iron computers, punched cards, line editors on ttys, and files on tapes, so, "serious" computers which have practically disappeared except in legacy applications. They made fun of me with my small device and my dreams of having an Apple ][ or an IBM PC, which was worth the price of a hot hatch at the time, and that my parents could not afford, saying that a real computer was worth minimum $1M, or how I was using a TI 994/A at school to play some music. I realized they had almost no concept of a backdoor, and were hardly gasping the concept of a superuser, which I knew only from books, but had understood. Now, I am using the most powerful computers of the planet in atomic energy centers, and still think of them making fun of me trying to program 2-degree equations or 3-unknown linear equations on my 512 byte computer in BASIC. They did not seem to see the point, since they only thought about (non-relational) databases and accounting.
Yes, I bought some of the Landau and Lifchitz books at the time for $3, they are now worth $150 at Springer...Younger self should have believed in himself more. Funny to see that now we can download 5000 C64 games for free, not to mention MAME roms, a good PC is $500, (at the time, $30 per game, a decent PC was $3000 of the time) but those books are 50 times more expensive...and the content still worth it.
a long time ago...The Death Star destroyed a planet, and here is the result, a sudden disturbance in the Force.
I just had a look at his wikipedia page. Midnight commander : hated it (when nc was fine) WINE : never worked properly for me. Mono : ditto Gnumeric : even worse. Don't get me started on GNOME or KDE, I hate both. I loved the Xwindows combination with any simple task manager (like mwm) but to me things are getting worse and worse in Linux and I have moved to MacOS in 2004, except for severs or computing work, done on Linux, but on the command line by ssh. So please, God, smite De Caza the same way you got Hans Reiser or McAffee out of the game. Those pricks just ruin it for everyone else with a huge ego and unusable software, schisms, and so on.
What you describe is exactly what de Gaulle did in France in 1944/45 and 1959-1969, allowing for unsurpassed economic growth and well being. Of course as you point out de Gaulle was not elected, or if he was, he was for other reasons than his economic program. He was wrong on individual freedoms, but he managed to make France much richer than England in 1975 starting with a destroyed country in 1944.
As someone who has demonstrated a FLIR in a science fair, I can tell you that far infrared is quite an interesting wavelength to explore body shapes...Too bad that even the cheapest 160X200 model is at least $2K (a drop of a factor 10 in 5 years, but still). It allows to pinpoint the location of certain points quite accurately, the more so if the person imaged starts to blush. Sweaty areas come out as black as much colder than the surroundings. So basically the question is : at which wavelength does this magic film operate ? Does it correspond to black body (Planck was a perv) radiation at ambient temperature ?
I realized reading "Dark Ages America" that businesses understood that the best way to make a steady income was to push addictive products. In the past, until the fifties more or less, you would buy an expensive thing (suit, house..) once in a while, or even in a lifetime (such as a bicycle or a gold watch) and that was it. Addictive pleasures (sex, sugar, alcohol, even strong emotions...) were reserved for Saturday night or Sunday (say, a small bottle of Coca-Cola at the drugstore), everybody would smoke ONE cigarette at the end of a work day, would go to the movies once in a while, because it was so expensive, etc. But there is no brand loyalty in all this, and, more importantly, no addiction. Advertisement and TV encouraged us to become drugged and addicted to quick pleasure inducing hits requiring exponential use : sugar, alcohol, pornography, gambling, tobacco, soap operas 6 hours a day on TV, cars and gasoline, credit to finance all this, and now that some of those pleasures have been found bad for the health (what a surprise), we are switching to mobile phones, pay TV, and internet, which all require subscription plans which end up costing a fortune over years. And we are all addicted to it, instead of critical thinking, reading, self-improvement, and even work and family commitments. This is especially obvious in third world countries, in Africa for instance, even if our way of life is also spreading there with satellite TV : there, everybody smokes (but not much), but students are actually interested in science, see computers as tools, not toys, work and take care seriously of their friends or families, and pays cash ; actual wealth is created in farms and factories, not in web (N+1).0 startups.
This seems to be the upper bound of predictability by computers ; in other domains of artificial intelligence, such as automatic translation or speech recognition, automated statistical analysis from corpuses seems to perform better than manual encoding of rules, but ends up at maybe 90% efficiency. The rest is too random to be predicted, and it could be the part of poetry, art or intelligence in our lives.
8 and 16 bit computing are the only positive things from the eighties...with "Wargames" or "Back to the Future" and "Indiana Jones" movies. CD marked the end of 45RPM records and hence the beginning of the domination of marketing over artistic sense in music. 1983 marked the end of interesting pop music IMHO. Then there was AIDS. This is why we spent our time programming C64 in assembler rather than fucking hippie or disco girls like in the 60's or 70's. The end of the cold war marked the beginning of decadence in science education and funding. Reaganism brought to us infinite jealousy for others, permanent competition, and an obsession with money and consumerism. The space shuttle sucked ass in comparison to Apollo program, for instance. There were no decent cameras to speak of. Remember the german cameras from the 30's and 50's, and japanese from the early 70's..The same for Hifi. It should say something about the period.
Global thermonuclear war : 80% less economic output in developed countries, a nuclear winter, and a selection of the fittest specimens of the human race plus a few Pygmeas, Tibetans, Polynesians, Swedes and Swiss.
Well, for noise, you need to nitrogen cool your sensor...or use a DSLR, because the sensor is not heated and permanently subjected to photons like in a point & shoot or bridge. I am however quite satisfied by digital cameras for night shooting or high ISO pictures, with film grain or lack of reciprocity can make those situations tricky. However the main selling point of film for me is dynamic range as you point out : the nonlinearity of the response makes it possible to better resolve high contrast situations than digital ; for instance, a bright face in a dark room with natural lighting seems to always give me "hot" pixels and pizza effects on the cheeks in digital, as shown on the histogram with some bunching at 255, requiring manual adjustment, bracketing, ugly HDR postprocessing, whatever, when film adapts to this situation automatically. The wedding picture with black and white clothes side to side still necessitates some manual adjustment in postprocessing, but still...
Precisely ! Glass makes the difference..and so, due to the preeminence of digital these days, quality optics incompatible with digital are dime a dozen on ebay. I now use a cheap bridge digital for random shooting, but for quality stuff I have bought dirt cheap professional gear in 35mm and 6x6 and make incredibly good pictures, (at least technically...); as good as a pro level DSLR at least. The prices of processing and digitizing film, and film in bulk, are also way down compared to the past, with archiving guaranteed to last a hundred years . So, thanks a lot, digital cameras !
In "Explorers on the Moon" he mentions ice (recently discovered) and caves. Now if we build that atomic rocket (NERVA or Orion), we could send a V2 like rocket on the moon with 8 people aboard, a dog, a tank (more impressive to selenites than a buggy) and let them stay for some weeks at first.
I agree with you : maybe there is something wrong with me, but although I seem to see 3D in real life (I can easily put a thread in a sewing needle head, for instance), I never saw anything satisfying with those red/blue glasses, polarizer glasses, etc. The only thing which worked for me was the B&W stereoscope from the early XXth century, with glass plates giving directly a different picture for each eye through a binocular-like wooden contraption. However, when trying the wii trick in a VR lab, I was stunned by the 3D feeling I had, moving my head around and seeing the perspective change on the screen. This is the way to go since there is no color distorsion, horizontal lines from the polaroids, etc. A combination of this and VR glasses would be the only satisfying solution (not mentioning the privacy for certain kind of movies)
and what about Beethoven ?
that no one seems to have reposted, yet : I am a dynamic figure, often seen scaling walls and crushing ice. I have been known to remodel train stations on my lunch breaks, making them more efficient in the area of heat retention. I translate ethnic slurs for Cuban refugees, I write award-winning operas, I manage time efficiently. Occasionally, I tread water for three days in a row. I woo women with my sensuous and godlike trombone playing, I can pilot bicycles up severe inclines with unflagging speed, and I cook Thirty-Minute Brownies in twenty minutes. I am an expert in stucco, a veteran in love, and an outlaw in Peru. Using only a hoe and a large glass of water, I once single-handedly defended a small village in the Amazon Basin from a horde of ferocious army ants. I play bluegrass cello, I was scouted by the Mets, I am the subject of numerous documentaries. When I?m bored, I build large suspension bridges in my yard. I enjoy urban hang gliding. On Wednesdays, after school, I repair electrical appliances free of charge. I am an abstract artist, a concrete analyst, and a ruthless bookie. Critics worldwide swoon over my original line of corduroy evening wear. I don?t perspire. I am a private citizen, yet I receive fan mail. I have been caller number nine and have won the weekend passes. Last summer I toured New Jersey with a traveling centrifugal-force demonstration. I bat .400. My deft floral arrangements have earned me fame in international botany circles.
Children trust me.
I can hurl tennis rackets at small moving objects with deadly accuracy. I once read Paradise Lost, Moby Dick, and David Copperfield in one day and still had time to refurbish an entire dining room that evening. I know the exact location of every food item in the supermarket. I have performed several covert operations for the CIA. I sleep once a week; when I do sleep, I sleep in a chair. While on vacation in Canada, I successfully negotiated with a group of terrorists who had seized a small bakery. The laws of physics do not apply to me. I balance, I weave, I dodge, I frolic, and my bills are all paid. On weekends, to let off steam, I participate in full-contact origami. Years ago I discovered the meaning of life but forgot to write it down. I have made extraordinary four course meals using only a mouli and a toaster oven.
I breed prizewinning clams. I have won bullfights in San Juan, cliff-diving competitions in Sri Lanka, and spelling bees at the Kremlin. I have played Hamlet, I have performed open-heart surgery, and I have spoken with Elvis.
But I have not yet gone to college.
The problem with GPS units (or google maps/etc) for that matter is that they tend to compute the fastest route respecting speed limits, unless you reprogram them by hand if it is possible. Since I usually drive about 10-20% above speed limit outside towns (it is a calculated risk taking into account the probability of law enforcement presence as a function of time, rain, taxi behavior, hills, obvious traps, and limiting risks as a function of extreme weather, traffic, tractors, etc) I have been caught 4 times in 18 years but still have my driving license. I know of certain routes which cut 10% time in comparison to GPS-recommended ones thanks to this.
what you forget here (with great irony) is that the human brain needs muscle and endurance. I watch football with a beer in hand on TV, I get the "meaning" as you say, and still I suck at it ; do you know why ? Because I did not spend 3 hours a day for 15 years running around the field and kicking and passing balls. Learning facts is useless until you see it as a stupid training for your brain, exactly like pointlessly running around a field in order to be able to play an hour-long game. You will then have plenty of automatic thinking which will help you visualize instantly the solution of a problem, with creativity. And you will get the meaning of things much more easily. Nowadays I see students who want to study math, CS or physics at college level and do not know basic derivatives, limited series expansions, trigonometry and so on. They claim to be able to find them if asked because they "understood the basic principles". Not surprinsingly, they fail when asked to do so. It is a lot easier if you have memorized some results...and then you can really attack interesting science. (post-Galileo, that is). Many students fail at SAT, TOEFL and so on, even when speaking very good english, because they do not have the basic facts memorized to help them understand a sophomore level course on any subject, from dinosaurs to epistomology or linguistics. They are not able to write a well structured essay for lack of training and basic facts to fill the blanks ; they have been only rewarded for "creativity", which is impossible to teach, most of the teachers themselves being not that creative, so the only thing they have been rewarded for is some kind of psychoanalytical stream-of-consciousness garbage thrown on paper without structure or real originality ; all this because of the hunt for rote memorization on my opinion.
If memory serves, the Joliot-Curies also secretely patented the nuclear pile and nuclear bomb in 1939 in France. They buried much of the material when the Germans arrived, and retrieved it after the war which allowed the french atomic pile ZOE to run as early as 1949. There was some kind of deal with the US about the patents.
the point is that 99% of physical equations are non-linear, N-body, ordinary or partial differential equations and thus do not have an analytical solution. So the only approach to check if as you say the hypothesis are correct is numerical. Even the great Fermi had to recur to an army of mechanical calculators staffed by humans to see if his equations had a meaning. Since Galileo mathematized physics there have been 300 years without computers so people (and teaching up to nowadays) are used to approximations and analytical solutions because it gives "beauty" and beautiful exercises ; but numerical analysis if properly taught can also be beautiful and give many insights.
100 people died in Iraq, 20 000 Africans died of Aids, 20 species went extinct, 10 millions of tons of CO2 were emitted, BUT THEY ERASED GRAFFITI ON AN XBOX !! where is the FBI when needed ?
This time the media (not Diebold) are going to have an apparently nice democrat elected, since Bush went a little too far but it should be obvious that once again it won't make any notable difference. Kucinich, Paul or Nader would have, but this would be against so many interests....
G.Lippman got the nobel prize in the naughties for having developed such a process for color photography using interferometric techniques reminding of holography. People at the time said that the color pictures looked like butterfly wings. Link : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lippmann_plate
I am pretty sure that my first contact with videogames was the arcade version of Space Invaders, in a small cafe by the port in my childhood village. I was 6 or 7 then, and for nostalgy sake I kept coming back year after year to this place until the cafe was destroyed to enlargen the port. There was no joystick (only left/right buttons) and I kept losing, but was so fascinated by the game that I insisted all the time for my schoolmates to come with me and play it. The bartender would tolerate me playing if my father was around, but not a bunch of kids with no money. Fun times though. Then I remember huge arcades full of teenagers and punks ; my father was quite reluctant even to bring me there, but I remember Silent Service, M65 Ambush, Gunsmoke, Frogger with the noises, all those shooting games..and all those pinballs of course, Xenon or Devil's Dare. On consoles I remember Pong, Vectrex games and so on at my cousin's but I did not have any since I had a C64 with Time Pilot, Ghostbusters (in that order) and then a bunch of pirated games when the computer got popular..
I am just saying "maybe all the efforts done to fight the hatred of science are going in the exactly wrong direction". This is sociological and psychological, hardly scientific indeed.
I agree that by symmetry you can deduce the existence of the displacment current, but from that how do you deduce the existence of electromagnetic waves without writing down and solving Maxwell's equations ?
Qualitative and phenomenological physics indeed works to some extent (non-linearities, second order effects please ?), but I find it a shame to go back to middle-ages like thinking and teaching. Why do not you teach Arisotelician physics, which, without equations, describes perfectly the macroscopic world we live in ?
Maybe the problem is societal, with the huge comeback of religion and myths enforced by people who have an interest in it in order to dumb the bigger part of the population, when in between the 1850s and the 1990s the same politicians had an interest in having the best scientists emerging from the people in order to develop the best weapons.