I'm surprised I haven't seen anyone mention this yet, but North Carolina has had something like this for at least a few months. Says 123nc.com's front page: "Why worry about someone's past when you can know the truth right now."
And they're advertising. I've seen/heard plenty of spots for these guys on radio and TV -- feel-good, soft-spoken ads that make you feel like you're choosing a health care provider or baby powder.
I see no problem with such an undertaking, per se. After all, these are public court records, and if someone wants to pay others to get the info for them, fine. But I do have a problem with
advertising that encourages the general public to look into the criminal history of the nice folks who just moved in next door,
Joe Average Citizen who will allow himself to be suckered in to paranoia by these ads.
It's certainly a gray area, ethically. All I can do is not patronize them, and hopefully they'll go away or take a low profile. --
I would think it harder to destroy an email than a tree-based letter, given the path an email has to travel. Emails received and sent are extensively logged by the servers they pass through, no?
(Or maybe I'm being too paranoid after that Law & Order episode last night...) --
Pretend that you're about to steal your own car. When the alarms sound and you get arrested show them (ok that's a tough part) its your car. Then sue them for false arrest.
Yeah, and then watch them prosecute you on some other trumped-up, bulls**t charge to save face. Remember, John Law doesn't like to be mocked.
Then again, I could spoof my car theft as you suggested, get arrested anyway, then come and sue you for putting the idea in my head and inciting anarchy... Hmm, perhaps there's money to be made here yet!
Forgive me if I'm missing the point, but why include an artist's rendition of the planet/star system on a page that otherwise contains scientific information? You can disclaim 'til you're blue in the face, yet someone is going to surf on over there and think, "man, those scientists sure can take clear pictures of faraway stuff these days!"
Seems to me that when you expect the unwashed masses to visit your site, you should consider that many folks really don't have a good grasp on the state of the technology. Monitoring the brightness of a star and noticing a 1.7% dip is a lot different from peering through an eyepiece and looking at Saturn's rings. I think in this case, the picture only obfuscates the situation.
But maybe I'm nitpicking...
The straw that broke the camel's back
on
Mutt Hits 1.0
·
· Score: 1
That's it... I've put it off for too long, I'm switching to Mutt (from Pine).
Sure, the functionality and the control are nice and all that, but dammit, that little dog on their FAQ page is so doggone (pardon) cute.
Guess that means I'll have to switch to Tin too...
But I won't miss having to go around my ass to get to my pgp-encrypted elbow.
Actually, I was wondering if it weren't related to the Gaussian Orthogonal Ensemble (GOE) distribution, which was a result of much of Wigner's work pioneering Random Matrix Theory (RMT) decades ago.
Mathematically, the GOE distribution characterizes the eigenvalues of a Gaussian distribution of orthogonal matrices containing random elements. (Forgive me if I've got the math a bit wrong; I'm a physicist by trade...)
Physically, the GOE distribution has been popping up in increasingly many physical systems for a while now. Years ago (maybe by Wigner himself? not sure) it was noticed that the energy level spacings of atomic nuclei have statistical properties consistent with the GOE distribution. Some time later, people fooling around with microwave cavities began seeing these distributions as well. The quantum dot folks have also run into the GOE distribution, I believe.
The GOE distribution seems to provide a good test for broken symmetries in a system. As a system's symmetry is gradually broken by, say, shaving off a corner of a piezoelectric crystal, the statistics followed by the eigenvalues (in this example, the resonant frequencies) gradually shift from GOE to Poisson, the latter which characterizes the eigenvalues of a truly random system.
Now, two really cool things about the apparent universality of the GOE distribution are:
The distribution is parameter-independent, and does not contain any information about the system being analyzed. I can glom together energy level data from many different nuclei and still obtain the same GOE distribution.
There appears to be a connection to chaos.
Neat, chaos! Well, sort of. If you take a classically chaotic system, say, a Sinai billiard, and quantize it (solve the Schroedinger equation), time after time you will discover that the eigenvalues of the quantized system have these nice statistical properties that happen to fall out of RMT, namely, the GOE distribution.
So does that mean all quantum systems that follow GOE statistics are chaotic? No. In fact, it's difficult to define what "chaos" really means for a quantum system that has no classical analog. But it implies there's a connection, it certainly is fun to think about, and perhaps continued research will reveal a deeper universal phenomenon at work. I wonder if these researchers haven't taken another step in that direction.
Dang, I wish I had something up on the web about how my research relates to all this... well, you can email me.
...they'll just have small 13" TV sets pop up next to your big screen whenever you change the channel. Unfortunately, you'll only be able to watch ads on the smaller one.
...to see if their homogenized, middle-America, Sunday-insert world has been rocked by the news that one of their most frequent and visible contributors liked to toke?
Should make for an interesting teen-feedback segment: Parade asks:Would you smoke pot if it meant you could write a screenplay starring Jodie Foster?
Once back when I was at Cornell, I had the pleasure of sharing an elevator with the elusive Mr. Sagan. Around about the third floor, he hit the emergency stop button, pulled out a one-hitter, and asked me if I wanted some.
True story. Except the part about where he stopped the elevator and smoked marijuana.
This "watch out for" has probably been stated elsewhere, but anyway: keep an eye out in the Senate scene, lower left corner, I believe, for a delegation of ET-characters from whatever-planet-they're-from (geeks, help me out here?).
I wasn't told about this until after I had left the theater, so I'm not making any guarantees it's really there. I'll look closely next time. YMMV.
Man, I wish I'd been at your theater. They had the volume down way too low where I saw it (Raleigh Grand in Raleigh, NC). I thought it was because I was sitting in the last row, but some friends of mine who were up front said the same thing: the lack of volume took away a lot of the movie's effect.
Kinda ruins your suspension of disbelief when you hear the projector running during the more subdued scenes...
Slashdot Mirror
Ever since I read "The Science of Hitting" as a child, I've been eager to read more of his work.
--
Yet Another Not-So-Witty Quip Regarding Bone-Shaped Asteroid:
Say, isn't that the crusted-over remains of the Discovery?
--
They said, "We stopped kicking ass a long time ago, but we're still taking names."
--
I'm surprised I haven't seen anyone mention this yet, but North Carolina has had something like this for at least a few months. Says 123nc.com's front page: "Why worry about someone's past when you can know the truth right now."
And they're advertising. I've seen/heard plenty of spots for these guys on radio and TV -- feel-good, soft-spoken ads that make you feel like you're choosing a health care provider or baby powder.
I see no problem with such an undertaking, per se. After all, these are public court records, and if someone wants to pay others to get the info for them, fine. But I do have a problem with
It's certainly a gray area, ethically. All I can do is not patronize them, and hopefully they'll go away or take a low profile.
--
I would think it harder to destroy an email than a tree-based letter, given the path an email has to travel. Emails received and sent are extensively logged by the servers they pass through, no?
(Or maybe I'm being too paranoid after that Law & Order episode last night...)
--
What can we learn from this?
That evolution ought to make us dumber, since intelligence is screwing everything up.
(cf. Galapagos, Kurt Vonnegut)
Pretend that you're about to steal your own car. When the alarms sound and you get arrested show them (ok that's a tough part) its your car. Then sue them for false arrest.
Yeah, and then watch them prosecute you on some other trumped-up, bulls**t charge to save face. Remember, John Law doesn't like to be mocked.
Then again, I could spoof my car theft as you suggested, get arrested anyway, then come and sue you for putting the idea in my head and inciting anarchy... Hmm, perhaps there's money to be made here yet!
I wonder, did they pull the chip out of an iMac?
(That would lend an interesting new meaning to the line "you are the Apple(tm) of my eye...")
groan... sorry folks.
Forgive me if I'm missing the point, but why include an artist's rendition of the planet/star system on a page that otherwise contains scientific information? You can disclaim 'til you're blue in the face, yet someone is going to surf on over there and think, "man, those scientists sure can take clear pictures of faraway stuff these days!"
Seems to me that when you expect the unwashed masses to visit your site, you should consider that many folks really don't have a good grasp on the state of the technology. Monitoring the brightness of a star and noticing a 1.7% dip is a lot different from peering through an eyepiece and looking at Saturn's rings. I think in this case, the picture only obfuscates the situation.
But maybe I'm nitpicking...
That's it... I've put it off for too long, I'm switching to Mutt (from Pine).
Sure, the functionality and the control are nice and all that, but dammit, that little dog on their FAQ page is so doggone (pardon) cute.
Guess that means I'll have to switch to Tin too...
But I won't miss having to go around my ass to get to my pgp-encrypted elbow.
Actually, I was wondering if it weren't related to the Gaussian Orthogonal Ensemble (GOE) distribution, which was a result of much of Wigner's work pioneering Random Matrix Theory (RMT) decades ago.
Mathematically, the GOE distribution characterizes the eigenvalues of a Gaussian distribution of orthogonal matrices containing random elements. (Forgive me if I've got the math a bit wrong; I'm a physicist by trade...)
Physically, the GOE distribution has been popping up in increasingly many physical systems for a while now. Years ago (maybe by Wigner himself? not sure) it was noticed that the energy level spacings of atomic nuclei have statistical properties consistent with the GOE distribution. Some time later, people fooling around with microwave cavities began seeing these distributions as well. The quantum dot folks have also run into the GOE distribution, I believe.
The GOE distribution seems to provide a good test for broken symmetries in a system. As a system's symmetry is gradually broken by, say, shaving off a corner of a piezoelectric crystal, the statistics followed by the eigenvalues (in this example, the resonant frequencies) gradually shift from GOE to Poisson, the latter which characterizes the eigenvalues of a truly random system.
Now, two really cool things about the apparent universality of the GOE distribution are:
Neat, chaos! Well, sort of. If you take a classically chaotic system, say, a Sinai billiard, and quantize it (solve the Schroedinger equation), time after time you will discover that the eigenvalues of the quantized system have these nice statistical properties that happen to fall out of RMT, namely, the GOE distribution.
So does that mean all quantum systems that follow GOE statistics are chaotic? No. In fact, it's difficult to define what "chaos" really means for a quantum system that has no classical analog. But it implies there's a connection, it certainly is fun to think about, and perhaps continued research will reveal a deeper universal phenomenon at work. I wonder if these researchers haven't taken another step in that direction.
Dang, I wish I had something up on the web about how my research relates to all this... well, you can email me.
...they'll just have small 13" TV sets pop up next to your big screen whenever you change the channel. Unfortunately, you'll only be able to watch ads on the smaller one.
...to see if their homogenized, middle-America, Sunday-insert world has been rocked by the news that one of their most frequent and visible contributors liked to toke?
Should make for an interesting teen-feedback segment: Parade asks: Would you smoke pot if it meant you could write a screenplay starring Jodie Foster?
Once back when I was at Cornell, I had the pleasure of sharing an elevator with the elusive Mr. Sagan. Around about the third floor, he hit the emergency stop button, pulled out a one-hitter, and asked me if I wanted some.
True story. Except the part about where he stopped the elevator and smoked marijuana.
I wonder what Howard Huge is up to this week...
...the ET delegation from planet Reesespieces.
This "watch out for" has probably been stated elsewhere, but anyway: keep an eye out in the Senate scene, lower left corner, I believe, for a delegation of ET-characters from whatever-planet-they're-from (geeks, help me out here?).
I wasn't told about this until after I had left the theater, so I'm not making any guarantees it's really there. I'll look closely next time. YMMV.
Man, I wish I'd been at your theater. They had the volume down way too low where I saw it (Raleigh Grand in Raleigh, NC). I thought it was because I was sitting in the last row, but some friends of mine who were up front said the same thing: the lack of volume took away a lot of the movie's effect.
Kinda ruins your suspension of disbelief when you hear the projector running during the more subdued scenes...