I'd like to expand upon skeptic Susan Blackmore's "dangerous idea".
I think that one of the most detrimental notions of all time has been the supposition that we exist for some purpose, to fulfill some design, and that if we could only find it and align ourselves with it we would find happiness.
Too many young men and women kill themselves in despair when their search for this "purpose" has failed. Swindlers and megalomaniacs have exploited masses of people for the dubious "comfort of knowing".
It would be more noble to say to our children, "I don't know exactly how we got here, but here we are; free to think, to make and to do whatever we dare."
Of course this philosophy might work against the type of person who would be more inclined to say, "Hold my beer and watch this!"
I did something similar, but I respected people's personal property and didn't steal the key.
Instead of moving the locks to different lockers, I simply turned them around backwards. To make my own key, I bought a spare lock and took it apart, then made a key to fit it. I made mine out of a piece of 3mm steel welding rod. I flattened and cut one end for the key and I curved the other end so it fit nicely behind my ear.
It worked well. People said that locks just popped open when I pulled, like magic.
Of course the "Dean of Students" eventually had to summon me. He had assumed that I had stolen a key, until he saw the thing. When he demanded that I give it to him, I pushed the end of the key into the edge of his desk and broke the tip off, then handed him the pieces. I said, "If I'm not allowed to have this key, then I'm probably not allowed to give it to anyone else."
Later, I made another key the same way and wrote up several pages of HOWTO instructions for my friends. Ain't I a stinker?
My asking "Why?" certainly had no teleological sense. I mean it strictly in the sense of, "What makes it do that?" read also as, "What is the cause behind the effect?"
Ptolemaic astronomers claimed that the sun, moon and planets circled around the earth. They didn't know why anything should circle around something else without being attatched to it. Maybe they thought that on a cosmic scale things just "quantized" into circles.
They corrected for apparent retrograde motion by adding that each of these bodies also circled around an imaginary point in a smaller circle called an epicycle. They had no idea why something should circle around nothing, but the circles within circles idea seemed to fit the data.
They had something right when thinking about things going around other things, even though they didn't know that objects attract each other. When the concept of gravitation came along, it was new and strange but it wasn't illogical. A teacher can tell a child that by gravity the earth is pulling everything downward; force at a distance like a toy magnet but a different kind. It makes sense.
However, objects being affected by moving imaginary points of nothing does not make sense. Why should this point of nothing act any differently than that point of nothing? Can "nothing" be said to follow a path? How can we detect one of these special "nothings"? What if two of these "nothings" collide? What if the whole universe is full of colliding nothings?!?
The idea of "virtual" particles springing spontaneously out of nowhere smacks of the same logical flaw. If nothing becomes something for no reason in one place, then logically we should expect the same thing everywhere. I've heard that this has already been speculated but really, it's just a re-hash of causeless effect, as nonsensical as epicycles.
So would you call me a heretic simply because I say that quantum theory doesn't make sense?
There is an explainable reason that energy levels are said to be quantized: the Schrödinger equation. It is the wavefunction version of conservation of energy, and is a simple PDE (i.e., if you consider each particle to have a spatial wavefunction, which makes more sense than saying that every particle is just a hard sphere, you can derive it).
So, a particle has a spatial wavefunction. Yup. Well, there's a nice bit of math behind that and it's horribly handy I'm sure... but what does it mean?
Does it mean that a subatomic particle is some sort of self-propagating dynamic pattern of electromagnetic waves? If so, then what exactly is that pattern? If not, then what's doing the waving?
And then you're off talking about virtual particles and equations which predict this and that, and how I am simply reacting to something which I don't "understand". Well sure, I'll readily admit that I'm not very familiar with the equations of Quantum Mechanics but let me remind you of something. You don't "understand" it either.
You can go right ahead and talk about virtual particles and 99.9999% accuracy all you want, just like 17th-century Ptolemaic astronomers talked about epicycles and equants. These were orbits around "virtual" centers, a behavior which no one had any rational cause to believe in... but the math worked. They claimed to "understand" planetary motion simply because their math could accurately predict it. The difference is that accurate prediction is not sufficient proof that a theory explains the way things really work. I would further tend to doubt any theory which depends heavily upon things which happen for no apparent reason.
In the same way, I doubt this business of "virtual particles". Things don't spontaneously appear and dissappear just to make equations turn out. If you claim that they do, then I'd tolerate your viewpoint but don't say that you "understand" it until you can give me a better reason than, "because the math works".
Just because a theory is useful does not prove that it describes the way that things really work.
In the 1600's, the Ptolemaic system of deferents, epicycles and equants described the motion of the planets accurately. No one could explain why a planet should befuddle its circular path around the earth by doing smaller circles around a point of nothing, but it mostly worked. It was refined by adding that the little point of nothing did its own little circles too, and accuracy increased.
People thought that they "understood" the motion of the planets just because the math worked. They hung onto the Ptolemaic system even though no one could explain why anything should behave in such a strange way.
That's the way I see modern physics going. The math is getting more accurate but more and more fundamental questions are getting glossed over. A question that needs to be asked more often is, "What makes it do that?"
It may be that we need a completely different perspective, like that of Copernicus. What are subatomic particles, really? What are they made of? Why do some have electric charge? How does gravity work and what about those nuclear forces?
Refining the math in strange ways without getting a grasp of what's going on will delay real understanding.
This article is just proof that modern physics has gone wrong. It had to happen, of course. This is just the logical result of the popular ideas.
If something being in a "state" which is simultaneously two mutually exclusive conditions seems kind of weird to you, well... you're right.
Remember highschool Algebra class? You would solve for some variable, find its value, then plug that value back into the problem you had at the beginning to double-check whether you got it right. If you ended up with something like "2=3", then you knew that you had done something wrong.
Likewise, if you think you see a contradiction in the physical universe, like something existing in two opposite states at the same time, it just means that you have made a mistake. Either your assumptions are wrong or your reasoning is faulty.
Reality isn't self-contradictory.
The first theories about the movement of the planets were monstrous things involving "retrograde motion". They predicted the locations of the planets accurately, but no one could make any sense of why planets should shuffle back and forth like that. Astronomers/astrologers put forth theories involving juxtapositions, elemental natures, or even the temperaments of the gods but none of that would lead to a better understanding. They were only trying to bind something understandable to the mathematics of a system which they didn't understand.
The fact that a theory gives accurate predictions is not sufficient proof that it "explains" anything. If the answer to "Why?" seems contrived, maybe that's all it is.
This is the state of modern subatomic physics. There are theories which apparently succeed in predicting new observations but the explanations are intuitively repulsive. Can there really be a particle which "spins both ways at the same time"? What is this "spin"? Why only two ways, and why isn't there an amount of spin instead of only a binary answer? Doesn't that just scream to you that the whole idea is flawed from the start?
What we need is a Copernican leap. Instead of just blindly accepting that things happen in a quantized way at subatomic levels, we need to figure out why it seems that way. When people talk about things appearing out of nowhere, vanishing, reappearing, etc. for no explainable reason, you have every right to laugh in their faces.
But remember, ordinary unmotivated computer and biological viruses are very common!
This common misconception shows that although Richard Carrigan may be a fine particle physicist, he doesn't really know much about computer viruses. Please, folks... If you're going to cite someone as an "expert", make sure they've at least got a clue about the topic in question.
To properly debunk this person's fearmongering though, let's remember a little program called "crashme":
Generate a file full of random bits.
Try to execute that file.
Repeat from the beginning.
It was a great way to find flaws in the robustness of user space verses system space, back when Linux was young. (A user program should never be able to crash the whole system.) There are two amazing things about this program:
It tries to execute a data file!
It hasn't produced a single virus yet!
A distant civilization will have no knowledge of our computer systems' machine language and it would be impossible for them to guess. There are so many ways we could have arranged such things. Any information coming from them would essentially be random data as far as computer instructions go, even if it contained enough patterns to show that it came from a sentient source.
Nobody executes raw data! Even SETI wouldn't execute their data. They'd analyze it, plot it, and try to decipher it but they're not going to name it "ALIEN.EXE" and try to run it like a program. But what if they did?
Well, this "crashme" program has been doing just that, for more than a decate and on many machines. No viruses yet.
This "SETI virus" scare is just a plot device for a low budget movie. It's a shame that it even made it onto slashdot.
When someone spouts lots of confusing stuff about a topic which you feel you have some expertise in... or there seems to be some logical inconsistency...
Hierarchy is a form of organization, grouping related things for the purpose of broader comprehension and/or control, whether they be people in a company or subroutines in a program. Organization is a necessary tool for logical thinking.
Unfortunately, Mr. Nelson doesn't seem to favor organization at all except for the nebulous group of humanists dedicated to furthering his concept of "transclusion"... a group which apparently only has one memeber; himself.
His idea that everything should always remain linked to its original context is impossible to implement. Whose responsibility would it be to maintain the space and accessibility of those originals? Would I have to store and serve a copy of everything quoted by my work, and everything quoted by each of those, and so forth ad infinatum? Who would enforce this?
In short, these "ideas" are garbage dreamed up by a disorganized mind.
Okay, maybe many of you either never had chemistry or have long since forgotten the basics but it goes like this:
You want to find out the concentration of an acidic solution, so you put in an acid/base indicator which will change color when the pH goes from acid to base, then you slowly add an alkaline solution with a known concentration until the indicator starts to change. The amount of known solution you add, by simple ratio, will show you the concentration of the unknown.
However, the author of the article couldn't even get the "slowly" part, since he described himself swamping his unknown with its pH opposite not once but seven consecutive times.
I don't care how many shiny stars he got in gradeschool, nor that his parents had a "Proud parent of an honor student" sticker on their bumper. If he couldn't even manage a simple titration procedure, then he's obviously not the type of person for a chemical engineering career.
In my opinion, this is a good example of where the system has succeeded. The weed-out worked.
I can understand the mistaken arrest, but not the way they seem to think that the offended individual should simply accept an apology while the authorities keep all the false accusations on record and fail to return confiscated posessions.
I like the laser-pointer idea, but only for an audience which is expected to handle the pointers in a responsible manner. There wouldn't be much difficulty in "aiming" as some have suggested, because once you wiggle it a bit, you can tell which dot is your own but you're still anonymous to anyone else.
Advantages:
anonymous - most cheap pointers are indistinguishable by their dots unless you want to have a unique look
ubiquitous - anybody can get a cheap laser pointer
zero cost for institution - students buy their own pointers and replace any lost ones themselves.
flexible survey possibilities:
yes/no
multiple choice
point to a place on the picture or map
multi-purpose - students can use pointers to indicate parts of an image being displayed to clarify their questions
low-tech and very reliable
Disadvantages:
everyone in the area is in some limited danger of eye damage, but mostly the speaker
Unfortunately, that single disadvantage is a pretty big one. Laser pointers may not have enough advantage over a simple show of hands to overcome this difficulty, certainly not with younger students.
You're exactly right... you don't need a wireless solution since the "clickers" are only really needed in lecture settings... which typically happen in lecture halls, which can be wired.
Don't worry about too many wires, though. There are lots of 1-wire or 2-wire communications chips which can be strung along the same wire and still communicate individually.
A wired lecture hall would also eliminate the problems of lost clickers and false clickers. Wireless systems would be vulnerable to all sorts of false inputs.
Doesn't sound legitimate to me. Just because they chose the same name beforehand doesn't mean that their "GMail" has more right to the name.
Did they trademark it? Evidently not. That kind of tells us all that they didn't care much about the name at the time. Of course now that another "GMail" seems to have scads of cash, they think they should get some of it.
Did Google really use IIR's "intellectual property"? Was there something uniquely new or innovative about putting a "G" in front of the word "Mail"? No, for IIR it was just a pun. (For Google, it very obviously represents their name!)
Is Google getting extra business at the expense of IIR or is IIR losing business due to competition from Google? No, and no again.
Now in all fairness, it may turn out that Google's lawyers initially contacted IIR and sent a cease-and-desist. That might sound ridiculous, but in the world of Intellectual Property one unfortunately must publicly challenge any possible infringement or risk setting a precedent which would undermine any later effort to protect the IP. (e.g., "You didn't object to so-and-so using your name, so you can't object to us using it either!") Such a case can be quickly and simply settled by an out-of-court agreement which could cost IIR as little as a single coin just to make it legal.
I could understand if the folks at IIR felt wronged if such was their circumstance but... are they going to claim that they were ignorant of the importance of a Trademark? Hardly anyone had ever heard of IIR's "G-Mail", and probably very few people ever would have, even if Google had chosen a different name. They have an extremely limited market, and there's basically nothing unique about their service, using e-mail to communicate about a niche interest. Now we have Google's GMail which has continued to combine innovative features (excellent searching, perpetual storage instead of deleting, spam filtering, tagging, not to mention that it's free...) and their market is almost as humongous as the parent company's name.
If I were counselling IIR, I would tell them to just pick another name for their little service because nobody is even going to care and they certainly don't deserve any share of Google's success.
UNIX is indeed old... but my favorite, Linux, is still under active development. I download a new distro release about once a month just to see what folks are doing with it lately.
OS/2, on the other hand, hasn't even been fixed for over four years.
Maybe you should have gotten a clue when the guys who invented OS/2 lost interest in it. Those who knew it best are mostly using something else nowadays.
You met your foreign language requirement in highschool and/or college... Okay, let's see you translate your resume. Do you think you could get a job in a locale where that foreign tongue is the language of day-to-day operation?
Unless you answered "yes", most of that time you spent "learning" a foreign language was wasted. I support the goal of foreign language fluency but it's pretty obvious that the methods used in most US schools are not achieving much.
There are better ways to learn foreign languages. Schools should be using them.
There is one such way which, surprisingly, isn't much of a departure from the way it's done right now but produces far better results: teach one year of Esperanto first, and then procede with the so-called "natural" languages. In one study, French secondary-school (highschool) students had one year of Esperanto and then three years of either English or German. At the end of the four year program, they were more advanced than the students who had gone through four contiguous years of English or German, and they could read and write fluently in Esperanto as well!
There are theories about why it turns out this way but the important point is that it works. Not only do the students progress further toward the original goal but they also gain another language to a point where they can use it for real-life correspondence. Even if the current system isn't ready to handle more efficient language-learning techniques (used by language schools and them military, for example), this system of teaching Esperanto as a "foreign language primer" could be implemented just as quickly as some teachers could learn it... which is to say, in only a couple years.
Just so you know I'm not pulling this out of my ear, consider that I've been teaching myself Esperanto for only two years now. Starting from a great web site called Lernu.net, I can already comprehend and participate in Esperanto-language meetings, read unabridged literature in Esperanto, and instant-message chat with girls, er, people all over the world in Esperanto. Some of my Esperantist net-pals use Skype and PalTalk a lot too, though I don't have that much time for that myself.
Re:When I was a little boy...
on
Makers of MAKE
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· Score: 1
There were FOUR VOLUMES?
Awww, I only found one at a local GoodWill store. It had some "Schwartz" kid's name scribbled inside the front cover.
Great book for the most part, but like many Popular Mechanics publications of its day, somewhat short on verification.
For example, the "How to build a one-man glider" article had a wingspan too short for a 20-pound toddler and the illustration suggested a flight path which began from the edge of a cliff and proceded over a road and a railway.
I'm guessing that the author was a "hopeful Darwinist".
I think the test was flawed because they were trying to measure an abstract thing, "trust". That's like trying to measure "love", "curiosity", etc. You have to be careful about testing it so that other things don't mess you up.
Like in this test... oxytocin is a hormone, known to be released during sexual stimulation. That just screams "INTERFERENCE!"
I see the test scenario going like this:
CONTROL GROUP: "This is a dumb test. Why am I doing this instead of hanging out with my friends? I hope it's over soon. Okay, I guess I'll 'trust' this person with some of these tokens."
OXYTOCIN GROUP: "This is a dumb...uh-oh. For some reason, I feel like I should be interacting intensely with another person! Tokens? Sure! Take 'em all!! Feelin' lucky?"
COMPUTER GROUP: "This is a dumb...uh-oh. When can I stop screwing around with this computer and find my girlfriend? Tokens? Dumb computer, why should I trust you? I wanna get outta here."
In other words, my guess is that the extra "trust" they thought they were measuring was just a side-effect of the subjects wanting to do something with another human being due to elevated hormone levels. That would also explain why they wouldn't "trust" a computer.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that one of the most detrimental notions of all time has been the supposition that we exist for some purpose, to fulfill some design, and that if we could only find it and align ourselves with it we would find happiness.
Too many young men and women kill themselves in despair when their search for this "purpose" has failed. Swindlers and megalomaniacs have exploited masses of people for the dubious "comfort of knowing".
It would be more noble to say to our children, "I don't know exactly how we got here, but here we are; free to think, to make and to do whatever we dare."
Of course this philosophy might work against the type of person who would be more inclined to say, "Hold my beer and watch this!"
Instead of moving the locks to different lockers, I simply turned them around backwards. To make my own key, I bought a spare lock and took it apart, then made a key to fit it. I made mine out of a piece of 3mm steel welding rod. I flattened and cut one end for the key and I curved the other end so it fit nicely behind my ear.
It worked well. People said that locks just popped open when I pulled, like magic.
Of course the "Dean of Students" eventually had to summon me. He had assumed that I had stolen a key, until he saw the thing. When he demanded that I give it to him, I pushed the end of the key into the edge of his desk and broke the tip off, then handed him the pieces. I said, "If I'm not allowed to have this key, then I'm probably not allowed to give it to anyone else."
Later, I made another key the same way and wrote up several pages of HOWTO instructions for my friends. Ain't I a stinker?
Ptolemaic astronomers claimed that the sun, moon and planets circled around the earth. They didn't know why anything should circle around something else without being attatched to it. Maybe they thought that on a cosmic scale things just "quantized" into circles.
They corrected for apparent retrograde motion by adding that each of these bodies also circled around an imaginary point in a smaller circle called an epicycle. They had no idea why something should circle around nothing, but the circles within circles idea seemed to fit the data.
They had something right when thinking about things going around other things, even though they didn't know that objects attract each other. When the concept of gravitation came along, it was new and strange but it wasn't illogical. A teacher can tell a child that by gravity the earth is pulling everything downward; force at a distance like a toy magnet but a different kind. It makes sense.
However, objects being affected by moving imaginary points of nothing does not make sense. Why should this point of nothing act any differently than that point of nothing? Can "nothing" be said to follow a path? How can we detect one of these special "nothings"? What if two of these "nothings" collide? What if the whole universe is full of colliding nothings?!?
The idea of "virtual" particles springing spontaneously out of nowhere smacks of the same logical flaw. If nothing becomes something for no reason in one place, then logically we should expect the same thing everywhere. I've heard that this has already been speculated but really, it's just a re-hash of causeless effect, as nonsensical as epicycles.
So would you call me a heretic simply because I say that quantum theory doesn't make sense?
So, a particle has a spatial wavefunction. Yup. Well, there's a nice bit of math behind that and it's horribly handy I'm sure... but what does it mean?
Does it mean that a subatomic particle is some sort of self-propagating dynamic pattern of electromagnetic waves? If so, then what exactly is that pattern? If not, then what's doing the waving?
And then you're off talking about virtual particles and equations which predict this and that, and how I am simply reacting to something which I don't "understand". Well sure, I'll readily admit that I'm not very familiar with the equations of Quantum Mechanics but let me remind you of something. You don't "understand" it either.
You can go right ahead and talk about virtual particles and 99.9999% accuracy all you want, just like 17th-century Ptolemaic astronomers talked about epicycles and equants. These were orbits around "virtual" centers, a behavior which no one had any rational cause to believe in... but the math worked. They claimed to "understand" planetary motion simply because their math could accurately predict it. The difference is that accurate prediction is not sufficient proof that a theory explains the way things really work. I would further tend to doubt any theory which depends heavily upon things which happen for no apparent reason.
In the same way, I doubt this business of "virtual particles". Things don't spontaneously appear and dissappear just to make equations turn out. If you claim that they do, then I'd tolerate your viewpoint but don't say that you "understand" it until you can give me a better reason than, "because the math works".
In the 1600's, the Ptolemaic system of deferents, epicycles and equants described the motion of the planets accurately. No one could explain why a planet should befuddle its circular path around the earth by doing smaller circles around a point of nothing, but it mostly worked. It was refined by adding that the little point of nothing did its own little circles too, and accuracy increased.
People thought that they "understood" the motion of the planets just because the math worked. They hung onto the Ptolemaic system even though no one could explain why anything should behave in such a strange way.
That's the way I see modern physics going. The math is getting more accurate but more and more fundamental questions are getting glossed over. A question that needs to be asked more often is, "What makes it do that?"
It may be that we need a completely different perspective, like that of Copernicus. What are subatomic particles, really? What are they made of? Why do some have electric charge? How does gravity work and what about those nuclear forces?
Refining the math in strange ways without getting a grasp of what's going on will delay real understanding.
If something being in a "state" which is simultaneously two mutually exclusive conditions seems kind of weird to you, well... you're right.
Remember highschool Algebra class? You would solve for some variable, find its value, then plug that value back into the problem you had at the beginning to double-check whether you got it right. If you ended up with something like "2=3", then you knew that you had done something wrong.
Likewise, if you think you see a contradiction in the physical universe, like something existing in two opposite states at the same time, it just means that you have made a mistake. Either your assumptions are wrong or your reasoning is faulty.
Reality isn't self-contradictory.
The first theories about the movement of the planets were monstrous things involving "retrograde motion". They predicted the locations of the planets accurately, but no one could make any sense of why planets should shuffle back and forth like that. Astronomers/astrologers put forth theories involving juxtapositions, elemental natures, or even the temperaments of the gods but none of that would lead to a better understanding. They were only trying to bind something understandable to the mathematics of a system which they didn't understand.
The fact that a theory gives accurate predictions is not sufficient proof that it "explains" anything. If the answer to "Why?" seems contrived, maybe that's all it is.
This is the state of modern subatomic physics. There are theories which apparently succeed in predicting new observations but the explanations are intuitively repulsive. Can there really be a particle which "spins both ways at the same time"? What is this "spin"? Why only two ways, and why isn't there an amount of spin instead of only a binary answer? Doesn't that just scream to you that the whole idea is flawed from the start?
What we need is a Copernican leap. Instead of just blindly accepting that things happen in a quantized way at subatomic levels, we need to figure out why it seems that way. When people talk about things appearing out of nowhere, vanishing, reappearing, etc. for no explainable reason, you have every right to laugh in their faces.
This common misconception shows that although Richard Carrigan may be a fine particle physicist, he doesn't really know much about computer viruses. Please, folks... If you're going to cite someone as an "expert", make sure they've at least got a clue about the topic in question.
To properly debunk this person's fearmongering though, let's remember a little program called "crashme":
- Generate a file full of random bits.
- Try to execute that file.
- Repeat from the beginning.
It was a great way to find flaws in the robustness of user space verses system space, back when Linux was young. (A user program should never be able to crash the whole system.) There are two amazing things about this program:A distant civilization will have no knowledge of our computer systems' machine language and it would be impossible for them to guess. There are so many ways we could have arranged such things. Any information coming from them would essentially be random data as far as computer instructions go, even if it contained enough patterns to show that it came from a sentient source.
Nobody executes raw data! Even SETI wouldn't execute their data. They'd analyze it, plot it, and try to decipher it but they're not going to name it "ALIEN.EXE" and try to run it like a program. But what if they did?
Well, this "crashme" program has been doing just that, for more than a decate and on many machines. No viruses yet.
This "SETI virus" scare is just a plot device for a low budget movie. It's a shame that it even made it onto slashdot.
When someone spouts lots of confusing stuff about a topic which you feel you have some expertise in... or there seems to be some logical inconsistency...
It's probably bullshit.
Unfortunately, Mr. Nelson doesn't seem to favor organization at all except for the nebulous group of humanists dedicated to furthering his concept of "transclusion"... a group which apparently only has one memeber; himself.
His idea that everything should always remain linked to its original context is impossible to implement. Whose responsibility would it be to maintain the space and accessibility of those originals? Would I have to store and serve a copy of everything quoted by my work, and everything quoted by each of those, and so forth ad infinatum? Who would enforce this?
In short, these "ideas" are garbage dreamed up by a disorganized mind.
However, the author of the article couldn't even get the "slowly" part, since he described himself swamping his unknown with its pH opposite not once but seven consecutive times.
I don't care how many shiny stars he got in gradeschool, nor that his parents had a "Proud parent of an honor student" sticker on their bumper. If he couldn't even manage a simple titration procedure, then he's obviously not the type of person for a chemical engineering career.
In my opinion, this is a good example of where the system has succeeded. The weed-out worked.
I can understand the mistaken arrest, but not the way they seem to think that the offended individual should simply accept an apology while the authorities keep all the false accusations on record and fail to return confiscated posessions.
Advantages:
Disadvantages:
Unfortunately, that single disadvantage is a pretty big one. Laser pointers may not have enough advantage over a simple show of hands to overcome this difficulty, certainly not with younger students.
Don't worry about too many wires, though. There are lots of 1-wire or 2-wire communications chips which can be strung along the same wire and still communicate individually.
A wired lecture hall would also eliminate the problems of lost clickers and false clickers. Wireless systems would be vulnerable to all sorts of false inputs.
Did they trademark it? Evidently not. That kind of tells us all that they didn't care much about the name at the time. Of course now that another "GMail" seems to have scads of cash, they think they should get some of it.
Did Google really use IIR's "intellectual property"? Was there something uniquely new or innovative about putting a "G" in front of the word "Mail"? No, for IIR it was just a pun. (For Google, it very obviously represents their name!)
Is Google getting extra business at the expense of IIR or is IIR losing business due to competition from Google? No, and no again.
Now in all fairness, it may turn out that Google's lawyers initially contacted IIR and sent a cease-and-desist. That might sound ridiculous, but in the world of Intellectual Property one unfortunately must publicly challenge any possible infringement or risk setting a precedent which would undermine any later effort to protect the IP. (e.g., "You didn't object to so-and-so using your name, so you can't object to us using it either!") Such a case can be quickly and simply settled by an out-of-court agreement which could cost IIR as little as a single coin just to make it legal.
I could understand if the folks at IIR felt wronged if such was their circumstance but ... are they going to claim that they were ignorant of the importance of a Trademark? Hardly anyone had ever heard of IIR's "G-Mail", and probably very few people ever would have, even if Google had chosen a different name. They have an extremely limited market, and there's basically nothing unique about their service, using e-mail to communicate about a niche interest. Now we have Google's GMail which has continued to combine innovative features (excellent searching, perpetual storage instead of deleting, spam filtering, tagging, not to mention that it's free...) and their market is almost as humongous as the parent company's name.
If I were counselling IIR, I would tell them to just pick another name for their little service because nobody is even going to care and they certainly don't deserve any share of Google's success.
Didn't anyone see what happened to Harrison Ford in "The Mosquito Coast"?
Hm, I wonder if leaked Hydrogen would have environmental effects. Would Hydrogen be potentially worse for the ozone layer than methane?
Have fun, by all means... but don't even bother putting up a stink when someone says, "You are old, Father William!"
By the way, Rich... Your homepage is the most gawd-awful blinking mess I've seen since 1995. Very nostalgic.
OS/2, on the other hand, hasn't even been fixed for over four years.
Maybe you should have gotten a clue when the guys who invented OS/2 lost interest in it. Those who knew it best are mostly using something else nowadays.
Get over it.
The last fix for your darling OS/2 came out more than four years ago and the vendor is dropping it.
Deal with it, loser.
As soon as something is published, there is no practical means of controlling it; and if you don't control it, then you don't "own" it.
OS/2 Warp-whatever was released about ten years ago!
It's dead, folks. Let it rest.
Unless you answered "yes", most of that time you spent "learning" a foreign language was wasted. I support the goal of foreign language fluency but it's pretty obvious that the methods used in most US schools are not achieving much.
There are better ways to learn foreign languages. Schools should be using them.
There is one such way which, surprisingly, isn't much of a departure from the way it's done right now but produces far better results: teach one year of Esperanto first, and then procede with the so-called "natural" languages. In one study, French secondary-school (highschool) students had one year of Esperanto and then three years of either English or German. At the end of the four year program, they were more advanced than the students who had gone through four contiguous years of English or German, and they could read and write fluently in Esperanto as well!
There are theories about why it turns out this way but the important point is that it works. Not only do the students progress further toward the original goal but they also gain another language to a point where they can use it for real-life correspondence. Even if the current system isn't ready to handle more efficient language-learning techniques (used by language schools and them military, for example), this system of teaching Esperanto as a "foreign language primer" could be implemented just as quickly as some teachers could learn it... which is to say, in only a couple years.
Just so you know I'm not pulling this out of my ear, consider that I've been teaching myself Esperanto for only two years now. Starting from a great web site called Lernu.net, I can already comprehend and participate in Esperanto-language meetings, read unabridged literature in Esperanto, and instant-message chat with girls, er, people all over the world in Esperanto. Some of my Esperantist net-pals use Skype and PalTalk a lot too, though I don't have that much time for that myself.
Awww, I only found one at a local GoodWill store. It had some "Schwartz" kid's name scribbled inside the front cover.
Great book for the most part, but like many Popular Mechanics publications of its day, somewhat short on verification.
For example, the "How to build a one-man glider" article had a wingspan too short for a 20-pound toddler and the illustration suggested a flight path which began from the edge of a cliff and proceded over a road and a railway.
I'm guessing that the author was a "hopeful Darwinist".
Like in this test... oxytocin is a hormone, known to be released during sexual stimulation. That just screams "INTERFERENCE!"
I see the test scenario going like this:
In other words, my guess is that the extra "trust" they thought they were measuring was just a side-effect of the subjects wanting to do something with another human being due to elevated hormone levels. That would also explain why they wouldn't "trust" a computer.