Nonsense. These disclaimers are just "cover-your-ass" disclaimers. 'Cos you just know some idiot's going to try sue. 3D is BASED on how the eyes and brain actually evolved over millions of years to work... your eye can't even tell the difference between light rays entering it from a 3D system vs light rays entering your eyes from the real world, it's the same thing to your eyes.
The main reason some people feel disoriented is that people have variation in their interocular distance, while 3D systems must be designed based on some average interocular distance. If the distance between your eyes is notably narrower or wider than average, it'll look wrong because your brain has learned to visualize 3D based on your interocular distance. Your brain can adjust (and adjust back) but it can take a little time.
Your brain is designed to be able to adjust. In fact, this is PARTICULARLY true for small children --- if it were not, children's eyes would not be able to adapt as they grow, as their interocular distance by definition is increasing over time, and all children's eyes would be messed by age 6 because the brain 'set' itself by age 3. This doesn't happen.
The main reason to become a scientist is because it is fun.
+1. If you're not passionate about real science, please don't become a "scientist", or you will either end up in a job you're neither good at nor enjoy, or you'll become just another useless academic leeching off the system, rehashing unoriginal work to get your X papers a year. We need more GOOD academics, sure, but we actually need LESS of the majority of what passes as "academia" these days.
It's because of the mantra that everyone needs and is better off with a college degree. Which isn't true. It's not "PC" to say but we need more and better blue-collar training. There is nothing shameful about blue-collar work; ironically, it's the politically-correct desire to pretend everyone can and should have white-collar jobs that sends the indirect message that blue-collar work is shameful. Look at the cost of plumbers - it's insane - we need more plumbers. I have great respect for a good plumber. US needs more blue-collar workers so it can re-create an efficient manufacturing economy. We don't need trillions of e.g. literature majors or 'women's studies' majors; we need people who can make stuff and lower the cost of making stuff.
From, oh, about '95 to 2005 using Windows across the enterprise would also have been "asking for trouble" and yet people did it anyway. Perhaps surprisingly, the world didn't end. It's actually amazing how far the world can go on totally un-secure systems. That also proved to me that the world doesn't care nearly as much as you'd think it would about good security for their computing systems.
Or maybe, just maybe, you just weren't all that inherently interested in programming? I somehow find it very hard to believe that anyone truly interested in programming would 'give up' simply because they 'learned BASIC'.
I started on BASIC(first ZX Spectrum, later QBASIC) - for years - later learned Pascal, then C and C++, and now have programmed full-time C++ for 10 years. And from day one, every step of the way, I've been hooked - loved it, loved learning new things, loved being able to create things.
I could equally claim that I never got good at woodwork because we only had crappy tools at home (which was true). But the reality is I was just never that interested in it.
The thing is, BASIC encourages use of GOTO, rather than being an unusual thing to use when unusual circumstances call for it.
But that doesn't matter, because programming itself naturally self-limits the use of GOTO. Why? Because they are only 'easy and useful' when your code is on the scale of hundreds of lines. As soon as you start writing "real" programs, with proper code re-use, GOTO's naturally fall flat all on their own and you NEED to use subroutines.
Nobody in the real world naturally encounters large numbers of programs that are only a few hundred lines long. This is something that by definition happens only in schools teaching programming n00bs.
If you are going to spend the rest of your life developing and maintaining several-hundred line programs written by children, then sure. But in the real world, this mythical threat simply does not exist.
And you avoid learning GOTO. I don't care how easy it makes initial learning, it's building bad habits that you're going to spend years killing.
This is a common criticism - that you will spend 'years' killing the 'bad habits' you learned from using GOTO. I don't buy it. When I learned programming (on BASIC, back then, as a kid, that was 'the' language to learn on), and I progressed from GOTO's to subroutines, it didn't take me "years" to undo the "bad habit". On the contrary, the moment that I understood I had a better tool for so many jobs, I immediately started using that instead. Why would a programmer keep using a tool if it's much worse for the job? It just doesn't really happen. As soon as your programs get longer than a few hundred lines, or you want to start re-using code, you need something better than GOTO anyway... it's really only useful on a very small scale, it is naturally self-limiting in use.
Also, I think GOTO's have one advantage for a learning language aimed at small children: It's easier for a child to learn and understand, as a building block / stepping stone toward more complex things. For some reason, I even remember this learning process (using basic, that was popular then) when I was a small child, on our 48K ZX Spectrum... GOTO's were easy and obvious, but I recall seeing these weird GOSUB things that seemed more abstract somehow. But, once they were explained to me, it wasn't that bad.
Finally, any good programmer needs to do significant amounts of assembler at some point in his life, and you're gonna be doing lots of JMP's there anyway, and yet nobody considers that 'learning bad habits', because most people agree that learning assembler makes you a better high-level coder too, and there are reasons for that.
The criticisms against GOTO are largely exaggerated.
I have spent probably years cleaning up and maintaining other peoples really bad code. And yet, of all the horrors in the code I had to maintain, I don't recall once ever encountering a "GOTO problem" in the real world, where any programmer had made a big mess because they had learned GOTO's. Never. I've never seen it, and I wonder if anyone here has actually seen this mythical disaster that learning GOTO's supposedly leads to. There are many other bad habits that cause FAR more damage in real-world programming, and yet nobody even cares to teach those in formal Comp Sci or Engineering programs.
One took him out for breakfast the next day, and paid for his train ticket back into Stockholm. Another arranged a party for him the next day, during which she twittered "Sitting outside; nearly freezing; with the world's coolest people; it's pretty amazing."
Being an EU citizen allows you to live and work anywhere in the EU. Therefore, unless you're tied to a particular job, the choice of which country to attempt to establish residency in is often based on things such as how easy it is to get residency, e.g. how long you'd have to live there (which differs from country to country and under different circumstances), whether or not you have family in a particular country or are a descendant of a particular country etc. Pretty much the whole of the EU is pretty un-libertarian and pro-welfare anyway.
A claim that many feminists do attempt to make. Our society is so awash with anti-male rhetoric that our 'benchmark' has drifted to the point where we don't notice the anti-male bias anymore.
"a : sex... Examples of GENDER
Please state your name, birth date, and gender."
"gender (noun) 1 [count] : the state of being male or female : sex"
So your attempt to prove me wrong by arguing a minor semantic point is also sadly completely and utterly wrong. 'Gender' is extremely widely used as basically synonymous with 'sex', and only sometimes used as referring to the psychological construct.
Where did I say that the genders should not be treated equally? Did you forget to put on your reading glasses, or did you reply to the wrong post by mistake? I'm also not a Christian, so really you're just blathering on blindly and confusedly lashing without even a clear understanding what you're lashing out against.
You may be right in that there is a genetic component, but we will never know for sure
Actually, I think that as the science regarding our DNA improves, I suspect that we will probably someday know for sure. Possibly even within our lifetimes. Science will answer this question definitively, and real science doesn't care about our politically correct biases, it weasels out the facts even when we don't like the answer.
Now I follow; you're saying that normalized for population size it could be that the actual skill bell curve (well, presuming it's something like a bell curve) for each gender has the same shape, and that the reason the population sizes differ may be something else not related to skill. Sorry, I misunderstood that point. I guess I tend to conflate the two because I see skill and motivation as intertwined; it's through motivation and drive that you become good at something, and it seems to me that if women aren't as interested in playing chess (since nothing stops them from playing, it seems reasonable to assume that their own lack of interest is what stops them), then 'therefore' they wouldn't be as driven to become as good either. Admittedly, we're probably in the realm of conjecture since I don't think there is too much scientific research covering this territory.
Slashdot is representative of the whole of society now? That's news to me.
How about the differences in performance in athletic endeavors and physical strength and physical size and height, or are there "alternative" explanations for those too? To think that men are equal to women is a bit like denying the sky is blue.
I am told there is a thing called "chess software" that allows even a child in a remote part of Rwanda to not only play well above his skill level but to progressively select a skill level just above his own as he improves. I am also told there is a thing called "the Internet" that allows players to play against any other player in the entire world at any time, regardless of location, provided they have "Internet access".
If anything, I'd ask the question "How is it that some males manage to overcome adaptations suited to physical violence and sit still, for long periods of time, performing abstract mental operations as dispassionately as possible?
Why are you conflating physical violence with mental strategizing capabilities? Both are complementary adaptations critical to winning wars.
And the summaries are always spun to generate lively discussion, funny how it only suddenly makes a whole lot of people uncomfortable when the topic is one of society's great "taboo" subjects - the fact of gender inequality (earth round) in the face of a global cultist belief that genders are equal (world is flat).
Last, random thought: why is it so non-PC to discuss differences in mental abilities? No one disputes that there are physical differences. We don't have men and women competing together in sports. Even where both may be equally good, the physical differences lead to completely different styles (think: floor gymnastics). We are built differently - why should it be surprising if our brains are wired differently too? To the contrary: Vive la difference!
Because the 'religion of the day' is that the genders are "equal", so it's pure blasphemy to point out the glaring facts.
The answer may be simpler. Let's say you have population A that has a normal distribution of skill and many members, and you have population B with the same normal distribution of skill but few members
So you're saying there are far fewer women than men? Last I checked, the ratio was close to 50:50 (according to Wikipedia, the global average is 105:100 males:females: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sex_ratio)
The question is why fewer women would choose to play chess then; you haven't really answered the question, just shifted it slightly.
Personally I think women are just less interested in chess, which is probably genetic.
That's repeated often but let's think rationally about that for a moment.
Firstly, these young children that are so good at something particular, it's pretty much not possible that you can become so good at something unless you already enjoy it, and are highly driven. You think the government picks children purely at random and then holds a gun to their head for years until they become good? Even if they did, this wouldn't produce optimal results. No, the government picks children that are already showing themselves from a young age to be amongst the top achievers in things like gymnastics, and then primes those.
Secondly, something tells me that achieving great accomplishments at international events like the Olympics, is probably something these kids rather like. I certainly would. What, you think they go "oh I SO hate that I won a medal at the olympics, instead of being a nobody"? I don't think so.
I'd say a better analogy would be saying "You can't be a good bricklayer if you don't lay bricks fast", which does actually make sense, since speed would be extremely important to bricklaying (quality being the other primary measure). I'm not sure what mythical theoretical team you work in where you can just think out the broad overall design and have a so-called "code monkey" "just do the implementation". There is an almost fractal-like complexity that is intrinsic to the nature of programming that just makes this not very realistic. Also any real-world application IS 20% serious problem-solving and 80% simpler stuff. Any real programmer will spend a lot of time both thinking and "laying bricks". The speed at which you can think dictates the quality of the 'programming bricks' you lay; the speed at which you can type dictates the speed you can lay the 'programming bricks'. Personally I find my ability to type at 100+ wpm extremely indispensable to my productivity, all day long, every day. Being able to process emails faster, and write documentation and proposals faster and more clearly, are also directly linked to my productivity, since any serious programming job also involves documentation, email, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Nonsense. These disclaimers are just "cover-your-ass" disclaimers. 'Cos you just know some idiot's going to try sue. 3D is BASED on how the eyes and brain actually evolved over millions of years to work ... your eye can't even tell the difference between light rays entering it from a 3D system vs light rays entering your eyes from the real world, it's the same thing to your eyes.
The main reason some people feel disoriented is that people have variation in their interocular distance, while 3D systems must be designed based on some average interocular distance. If the distance between your eyes is notably narrower or wider than average, it'll look wrong because your brain has learned to visualize 3D based on your interocular distance. Your brain can adjust (and adjust back) but it can take a little time.
Your brain is designed to be able to adjust. In fact, this is PARTICULARLY true for small children --- if it were not, children's eyes would not be able to adapt as they grow, as their interocular distance by definition is increasing over time, and all children's eyes would be messed by age 6 because the brain 'set' itself by age 3. This doesn't happen.
And thanks to the new Obamacare we all get forced to pay for the healthcare of idiots like this.
The main reason to become a scientist is because it is fun.
+1. If you're not passionate about real science, please don't become a "scientist", or you will either end up in a job you're neither good at nor enjoy, or you'll become just another useless academic leeching off the system, rehashing unoriginal work to get your X papers a year. We need more GOOD academics, sure, but we actually need LESS of the majority of what passes as "academia" these days.
It's because of the mantra that everyone needs and is better off with a college degree. Which isn't true. It's not "PC" to say but we need more and better blue-collar training. There is nothing shameful about blue-collar work; ironically, it's the politically-correct desire to pretend everyone can and should have white-collar jobs that sends the indirect message that blue-collar work is shameful. Look at the cost of plumbers - it's insane - we need more plumbers. I have great respect for a good plumber. US needs more blue-collar workers so it can re-create an efficient manufacturing economy. We don't need trillions of e.g. literature majors or 'women's studies' majors; we need people who can make stuff and lower the cost of making stuff.
From, oh, about '95 to 2005 using Windows across the enterprise would also have been "asking for trouble" and yet people did it anyway. Perhaps surprisingly, the world didn't end. It's actually amazing how far the world can go on totally un-secure systems. That also proved to me that the world doesn't care nearly as much as you'd think it would about good security for their computing systems.
Or maybe, just maybe, you just weren't all that inherently interested in programming? I somehow find it very hard to believe that anyone truly interested in programming would 'give up' simply because they 'learned BASIC'.
I started on BASIC(first ZX Spectrum, later QBASIC) - for years - later learned Pascal, then C and C++, and now have programmed full-time C++ for 10 years. And from day one, every step of the way, I've been hooked - loved it, loved learning new things, loved being able to create things.
I could equally claim that I never got good at woodwork because we only had crappy tools at home (which was true). But the reality is I was just never that interested in it.
The thing is, BASIC encourages use of GOTO, rather than being an unusual thing to use when unusual circumstances call for it.
But that doesn't matter, because programming itself naturally self-limits the use of GOTO. Why? Because they are only 'easy and useful' when your code is on the scale of hundreds of lines. As soon as you start writing "real" programs, with proper code re-use, GOTO's naturally fall flat all on their own and you NEED to use subroutines.
Nobody in the real world naturally encounters large numbers of programs that are only a few hundred lines long. This is something that by definition happens only in schools teaching programming n00bs.
If you are going to spend the rest of your life developing and maintaining several-hundred line programs written by children, then sure. But in the real world, this mythical threat simply does not exist.
And you avoid learning GOTO. I don't care how easy it makes initial learning, it's building bad habits that you're going to spend years killing.
This is a common criticism - that you will spend 'years' killing the 'bad habits' you learned from using GOTO. I don't buy it. When I learned programming (on BASIC, back then, as a kid, that was 'the' language to learn on), and I progressed from GOTO's to subroutines, it didn't take me "years" to undo the "bad habit". On the contrary, the moment that I understood I had a better tool for so many jobs, I immediately started using that instead. Why would a programmer keep using a tool if it's much worse for the job? It just doesn't really happen. As soon as your programs get longer than a few hundred lines, or you want to start re-using code, you need something better than GOTO anyway ... it's really only useful on a very small scale, it is naturally self-limiting in use.
Also, I think GOTO's have one advantage for a learning language aimed at small children: It's easier for a child to learn and understand, as a building block / stepping stone toward more complex things. For some reason, I even remember this learning process (using basic, that was popular then) when I was a small child, on our 48K ZX Spectrum ... GOTO's were easy and obvious, but I recall seeing these weird GOSUB things that seemed more abstract somehow. But, once they were explained to me, it wasn't that bad.
Finally, any good programmer needs to do significant amounts of assembler at some point in his life, and you're gonna be doing lots of JMP's there anyway, and yet nobody considers that 'learning bad habits', because most people agree that learning assembler makes you a better high-level coder too, and there are reasons for that.
The criticisms against GOTO are largely exaggerated.
I have spent probably years cleaning up and maintaining other peoples really bad code. And yet, of all the horrors in the code I had to maintain, I don't recall once ever encountering a "GOTO problem" in the real world, where any programmer had made a big mess because they had learned GOTO's. Never. I've never seen it, and I wonder if anyone here has actually seen this mythical disaster that learning GOTO's supposedly leads to. There are many other bad habits that cause FAR more damage in real-world programming, and yet nobody even cares to teach those in formal Comp Sci or Engineering programs.
Prenups. (Though not legal in some parts of the world, like the UK, AFAIK.)
One took him out for breakfast the next day, and paid for his train ticket back into Stockholm. Another arranged a party for him the next day, during which she twittered "Sitting outside; nearly freezing; with the world's coolest people; it's pretty amazing."
Stockholm Syndrome perhaps? (Ha ha)
Being an EU citizen allows you to live and work anywhere in the EU. Therefore, unless you're tied to a particular job, the choice of which country to attempt to establish residency in is often based on things such as how easy it is to get residency, e.g. how long you'd have to live there (which differs from country to country and under different circumstances), whether or not you have family in a particular country or are a descendant of a particular country etc. Pretty much the whole of the EU is pretty un-libertarian and pro-welfare anyway.
A claim that many feminists do attempt to make. Our society is so awash with anti-male rhetoric that our 'benchmark' has drifted to the point where we don't notice the anti-male bias anymore.
By the way, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary (which I take to be slightly more definitive than Sebastopol) disagrees with you:
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gender?show=0&t=1293411085
"a : sex ...
Examples of GENDER
Please state your name, birth date, and gender."
"gender (noun) 1 [count] : the state of being male or female : sex"
So your attempt to prove me wrong by arguing a minor semantic point is also sadly completely and utterly wrong. 'Gender' is extremely widely used as basically synonymous with 'sex', and only sometimes used as referring to the psychological construct.
Where did I say that the genders should not be treated equally? Did you forget to put on your reading glasses, or did you reply to the wrong post by mistake? I'm also not a Christian, so really you're just blathering on blindly and confusedly lashing without even a clear understanding what you're lashing out against.
You may be right in that there is a genetic component, but we will never know for sure
Actually, I think that as the science regarding our DNA improves, I suspect that we will probably someday know for sure. Possibly even within our lifetimes. Science will answer this question definitively, and real science doesn't care about our politically correct biases, it weasels out the facts even when we don't like the answer.
Now I follow; you're saying that normalized for population size it could be that the actual skill bell curve (well, presuming it's something like a bell curve) for each gender has the same shape, and that the reason the population sizes differ may be something else not related to skill. Sorry, I misunderstood that point. I guess I tend to conflate the two because I see skill and motivation as intertwined; it's through motivation and drive that you become good at something, and it seems to me that if women aren't as interested in playing chess (since nothing stops them from playing, it seems reasonable to assume that their own lack of interest is what stops them), then 'therefore' they wouldn't be as driven to become as good either. Admittedly, we're probably in the realm of conjecture since I don't think there is too much scientific research covering this territory.
Slashdot is representative of the whole of society now? That's news to me.
How about the differences in performance in athletic endeavors and physical strength and physical size and height, or are there "alternative" explanations for those too? To think that men are equal to women is a bit like denying the sky is blue.
I am told there is a thing called "chess software" that allows even a child in a remote part of Rwanda to not only play well above his skill level but to progressively select a skill level just above his own as he improves. I am also told there is a thing called "the Internet" that allows players to play against any other player in the entire world at any time, regardless of location, provided they have "Internet access".
If anything, I'd ask the question "How is it that some males manage to overcome adaptations suited to physical violence and sit still, for long periods of time, performing abstract mental operations as dispassionately as possible?
Why are you conflating physical violence with mental strategizing capabilities? Both are complementary adaptations critical to winning wars.
Newsflash, slashdot is a blog.
And the summaries are always spun to generate lively discussion, funny how it only suddenly makes a whole lot of people uncomfortable when the topic is one of society's great "taboo" subjects - the fact of gender inequality (earth round) in the face of a global cultist belief that genders are equal (world is flat).
Last, random thought: why is it so non-PC to discuss differences in mental abilities? No one disputes that there are physical differences. We don't have men and women competing together in sports. Even where both may be equally good, the physical differences lead to completely different styles (think: floor gymnastics). We are built differently - why should it be surprising if our brains are wired differently too? To the contrary: Vive la difference!
Because the 'religion of the day' is that the genders are "equal", so it's pure blasphemy to point out the glaring facts.
The answer may be simpler. Let's say you have population A that has a normal distribution of skill and many members, and you have population B with the same normal distribution of skill but few members
So you're saying there are far fewer women than men? Last I checked, the ratio was close to 50:50 (according to Wikipedia, the global average is 105:100 males:females: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sex_ratio)
The question is why fewer women would choose to play chess then; you haven't really answered the question, just shifted it slightly.
Personally I think women are just less interested in chess, which is probably genetic.
That's repeated often but let's think rationally about that for a moment.
Firstly, these young children that are so good at something particular, it's pretty much not possible that you can become so good at something unless you already enjoy it, and are highly driven. You think the government picks children purely at random and then holds a gun to their head for years until they become good? Even if they did, this wouldn't produce optimal results. No, the government picks children that are already showing themselves from a young age to be amongst the top achievers in things like gymnastics, and then primes those.
Secondly, something tells me that achieving great accomplishments at international events like the Olympics, is probably something these kids rather like. I certainly would. What, you think they go "oh I SO hate that I won a medal at the olympics, instead of being a nobody"? I don't think so.
I'd say a better analogy would be saying "You can't be a good bricklayer if you don't lay bricks fast", which does actually make sense, since speed would be extremely important to bricklaying (quality being the other primary measure). I'm not sure what mythical theoretical team you work in where you can just think out the broad overall design and have a so-called "code monkey" "just do the implementation". There is an almost fractal-like complexity that is intrinsic to the nature of programming that just makes this not very realistic. Also any real-world application IS 20% serious problem-solving and 80% simpler stuff. Any real programmer will spend a lot of time both thinking and "laying bricks". The speed at which you can think dictates the quality of the 'programming bricks' you lay; the speed at which you can type dictates the speed you can lay the 'programming bricks'. Personally I find my ability to type at 100+ wpm extremely indispensable to my productivity, all day long, every day. Being able to process emails faster, and write documentation and proposals faster and more clearly, are also directly linked to my productivity, since any serious programming job also involves documentation, email, etc.
let me guess, they'll print dollars and shovel them into the sun to keep it going?