Bills are printed on a mix of cotton and linen. The stuff is actually pretty resilient, the problem is that the average bill circulates for 5 years or so. If they were pulled from circulation and recycled earlier then our bill stock would be in better condition. In the UK, the 5 pound note is only kept in circulation for an average of 2 years. As a result they're generally in better condition than $1 and $5 US bills.
You've got the wrong idea. I had that idea too until I read the article I linked to. The idea is that the HDR is always on. Not the camera. HDR normally involves taking multiple sequentially images at different exposures and merging them off-line. With this tablet the HDR is somehow done in near-real-time, effectively in parallel. It's pretty cool, since it makes the images look a lot closer to what your eye sees.
I too would have thought it was an issue, but I have no idea about the field. Presumably the author of the essay has some reason for thinking litigation is a concern in open robotics.
None of this is really what the article is about, though. The thesis is simply that manufacturers of open robotics platforms (which are out there right now) should not be legally responsible for what people do with those platforms. The argument is that making them liable will reduce the pace of innovation.
I've often used Dropbox this way too. Re-install OS and wait for it to re-sync. Previous to Dropbox I used a remote server and rsync. Problem was that I had multiple computers syncing to the remote server and I synced manually. Sometimes I'd screw up and over-write a the wrong files, etc. Now with Dropbox that never happens. Plus, the version history has saved my ass on several occasions. Doing this sort of stuff with Dropbox is much easier for personal files than trying to figure out how to do it with rsync.
- No, never trust cloud services for backups. Never trust cloud services period the only reason to use them is convenience
Dropbox is not a bad solution if you have more than one computer. Since it syncs files between machines, your pool of machines provides the necessary redundancy. If Dropbox were to disappear tomorrow and your laptop explode the day after tomorrow, then you still have everything backed up on your desktop. I've been using Dropbox for some time now and find it very useful, particularly the paid plan with the version history.
If we wait until it's as safe as riding an elevator we'll never get there. Exploration should never wait until it's proven safe.
We never did. The chance of being killed on a shuttle mission was about 1.5:100 and those who were actually riding the thing and working on it knew that.
It's completely unrealistic at the moment. If you haven't seen it already, watch the documentary "Mars: Dead or Alive" (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0662638/) about the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. It really puts things into perspective and it's an awesome documentary. You will take away from that is that it's bloody hard to get stuff to Mars. If you can't be bothered to track down the doc, then look at the stats: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration_of_Mars#Timeline_of_Mars_exploration Most missions have failed. In fact, NASA is the only space agency to have demonstrated a consistent successes. The Russians have launched about 20 missions to Mars and they've pretty much all failed. This, let us not forget, is obviously just unmanned stuff. Landing Curiosity is the current state of the art (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwinFP8_qIM) and that's "just" a big rover. So how will these guys, with no track record that I'm aware of, be launching people there in the next 10 or 15 years? They'll take the reality TV money--maybe, if they do really well, send a crew into low Earth orbit--then they'll vanish. Either that, or Mars One is an elaborate version of Space Cadets (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Cadets_%28TV_series%29).
No, I did look at them. The newspaper's summary is shitty but you can see where it comes from in the original article. For example, the last sentence "but our results suggest a potential mechanism by which reading stories not only strengthen language processing regions but also affect the individual through embodied semantics in sensorimotor regions." The way I see it, "strengthen language processing regions" is just as wishy-washy as the term "boosted."
I want to like fMRI but, for many reasons, the technique is too easy to abuse. The finding in this paper is cute but such findings are a dime a dozen in the literature and they mostly aren't associated with a mechanistic explanation. e.g. In this study they talk about "potential mechanisms" but they don't actually elaborate on what these are. They have no clue. Now it's ok to have no clue: we're doing science and we don't know all the answers. The problem with big chunks of the fMRI field, though, is that they're trying to squeeze more out of the technique than it can deliver and they make up for it by providing pseudo-explanations rather than admitting that they need a different technique.
Normally rats and mice are kept in a bland cage, usually with other litter mates. "Environmental enrichment" means they get lots of toys to play with. e.g. running wheels, bars to run along, perhaps painted walls, etc, etc. The effects of environmental enrichment on brain structure have been shown many, many, times using different techniques and in different brain regions. Another pair of references, which I tried to track down but couldn't (I forgot the author names, oops), showed that neurons in cortex sprout more connections and maintain those connections when the animals are switched to an enriched cage. Those authors actually imaged the same living neurons across many days (weeks, actually, IIRC). The opposite has also been shown: rearing animals in an environment with few stimuli causes permanent changes in the brain and the animals have an restricted sensory perception (Google terms such as "monocular deprivation" and "stripe rearing").
What does "boosted" actually mean? Fuck all. It's impressive that the task is sensitive enough to show up changes in the brain after reading a book, but scientifically it's not surprising: if you read a book and remembered something about it then there will be physical changes in your brain. There have to be. We've known that for decades. e.g. In 1997 it was shown that environmental enrichment causes production of new neurons in the hippocampus (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v386/n6624/abs/386493a0.html).
We've seen things go horribly wrong. Plenty of times. Some are forgiven. Most are not. All are remembered permanently thanks to the internet.
Nah, these petty things are often forgotten in practice; internet or no internet. The next "scandal" that comes along erases them from most people's radar. I know they can be looked up again on the internet, but there's so much of this shit out there that it often (of course not always) gets naturally buried.
Anecdote: Our CEO (who is very famous) said some very dumb things a few years ago. What was said was reported internationally, a big scandal ensued, and it was very worrisome for the organisation. It was so big that all (>500) employees were invited to a large round-table to give their opinions on how the incident should be handled. The organisation did three things: distanced itself from the comments, issued a wrist-slapping, and hunkered down to weather the storm. A few months to a year later it was as if nothing had happened. People on the outside had either forgotten what was said or no longer cared, and the person who caused the shit-storm essentially remained in the same role. On occasion I still get questions about the event when people hear where I work, but they're not judgemental or angry questions. People just want to know what happened.
I can think of lots of other reasons why they would also be upset. But the non-Muslim reason is primary and not something you can wave away, even if you fix the other things.
I'm not so sure about that. The "non-Muslim reason" only becomes a valid reason for hating others if the Muslim in question is an extremist. Moderate Muslims don't hate non-Muslims. Extreme Muslims do hate non-Muslims, but they probably have become extreme Muslims for non-religious reasons. Extremism usually flourishes when people are unhappy and the society has major problems. There are plenty of people in the middle east who are unhappy with the West and they have very particular reasons for being unhappy. Islamic extremists are leveraging religion because it's the easiest way to create an "us vs them" mentality, to brain wash people, to de-humanise the enemy, and to make people prepared to die for their cause. The west being non-Muslim is very convenient for them, however I'm sure that if we were Muslim then the extremists would simply be telling their people that we were the wrong sort of Muslim.
I agree there's room for both in the case of MATLAB and Octave. At one point I was using S-Plus and in that case there didn't seem to be room for both it and its free competitor, R. Insightful, the company which produced S-Plus, was bought out a few years ago and S-Plus has vanished. I'm not too surprised, I've got to say. S-Plus had a crappy CLI and it didn't add enough value over R. Furthermore, Insightful behaved like idiots: I remember when dual-core CPUs became affordable, I called Insightful to ask if S-Plus would take advantage of this. I was told it would, but I'd have to buy a second licence in order to use both cores (?!). The licence manager was also a pain.
R is wonderful for statistics, I use it often for that, but as a programming language it's slow and bloody awful. If you have a lot of elaborate data pre-processing to do, such as filtering signals, identifying events in time course data, image processing, etc, then R isn't the way forward. Best approach is to use something more general-purpose to extract the descriptive statistics, then export to R to fit the models.
I've tried the switch from MATLAB to Python. I wanted to love Python, but there was just too much screwing around. No one plotting package fulfilled all of my needs, so I had learn multiple packages. One or two of those were a pain to install (particularly on a Mac) and I wasted ages on that. The OO was nice, I must say, but writing fast MATLAB code is easier for me (habit, mainly) than writing fast Numpy/Scipy code. I certainly learned a lot by figuring out how to speed up the Python code, and quite likely gaining this sort of experience is useful, but none of it helped me get my work done. I made a few nice little analysis toys in Python then went back to MATLAB. When all your colleagues use MATLAB and you already have a large suite of functions you've written, then it's hard to justify switching it all to Python.
Thanks, I'd forgotten about the Mongol empire. I'd not heard of the Mauryan, Mughal, Caliphates, Angkorian Empire, and Burmese empires. I do indeed consider the Russian and Byzantine empires to be Western. The Ottoman too, for that matter.
Yes, they've done a lot of internal killing. The numbers are large, but they also have a larger population. Humans are violent and the Chinese are no exception. They are probably no better or worse than we are in this regard (Catholics/Protestants, WWI, Nazis, etc, etc) , so why is the post I originally replied to labelled "insightful"? I think that says more about how we view China than China being violent.
Yes, they fucking should get over it. I say this to them when I hear them going on about this stuff. They're still fucking pissed at the Japanese over WWII, but none of this stuff is healthy. Another one is the Greeks who won't get over the Turks and this does them no good whatever. In both cases it's national propaganda that's the root cause of people not getting over it. I relate how the Chinese feel when hear us saying certain things because it's important we understand how our words are perceived if we wish to have the right effect. You will not get the message across if you don't know how the message is heard.
I have throughout said that the Chinese had their fair share of violence, I don't know why you attempt to pre-empt me with the "noble savage" line. All I'm saying is that we're arguably more violent than the Chinese (most of these genocides are Western, perpetrated by Westerners, or occurred because of Western meddling: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocides_in_history) and we should acknowledge that about ourselves rather than taking the superior, judgemental, attitude which often appears (as it did in this case with the poster I responded to) in relation to China. It sounds like hypocrisy to my ears and I'm not even Chinese.
After unification by the Qin about 200 BC the country itself has remained more less the same size. If you want to call that a "large empire" then go ahead. From my perspective it's a large country. Yes, there was violence inside China for centuries: my original post says this. But there's been at least as much inside Europe and individual European countries. In China, most people speak the same language and are happy to consider themselves Chinese. They don't feel like they're part of "an empire." The obvious poo in the pie of course is Tibet, where China undoubtedly behaved in a violent and heavy-handed manner.
My post is no attempt to justify China's "modern brutal oppression." All that I'm saying is that it's no worse than what we've done to our own people or our neighbour's people. In fact, quite a lot of the very shitty stuff we've done is in living memory. Yet we seem to pretend it didn't happen and call the kettle black (as the over-rated post I replied to is doing). That is what the Chinese think when they see statements like the post I replied to.
You what I said by distilling it down to "yes the British did some nasty things over a hundred years ago. It's quite clear my post is about much more than that.
That's not what the poster you replied to is saying. He's saying, I believe, that many of our governments in the West are now so powerful and complicated that elections are becoming a progressively less powerful means of keeping our leaders in check. Most of the political parties are the same, and the vast and powerful civil service machinery stays more or less unchanged no matter who is in power. If they want to go to war and kill thousands of innocent people, then we have no say in the matter.
In our democracy we put our trust in those in power to run the country for us and we usually have no direct say in what actually happens. It's supposed to work like that, but a lot of people don't seem to realise this. It's true that it's much easier for an individual to enter government in a Western democracy than in China, but overall I think our governments have more in common with the Chinese government than a lot of us are willing to admit.
Slashdot Mirror
Bills are printed on a mix of cotton and linen. The stuff is actually pretty resilient, the problem is that the average bill circulates for 5 years or so. If they were pulled from circulation and recycled earlier then our bill stock would be in better condition. In the UK, the 5 pound note is only kept in circulation for an average of 2 years. As a result they're generally in better condition than $1 and $5 US bills.
You've got the wrong idea. I had that idea too until I read the article I linked to. The idea is that the HDR is always on. Not the camera. HDR normally involves taking multiple sequentially images at different exposures and merging them off-line. With this tablet the HDR is somehow done in near-real-time, effectively in parallel. It's pretty cool, since it makes the images look a lot closer to what your eye sees.
Duh, I meant "non-issue"
But again, this is a non-issue.
I too would have thought it was an issue, but I have no idea about the field. Presumably the author of the essay has some reason for thinking litigation is a concern in open robotics.
None of this is really what the article is about, though. The thesis is simply that manufacturers of open robotics platforms (which are out there right now) should not be legally responsible for what people do with those platforms. The argument is that making them liable will reduce the pace of innovation.
In case you were wondering what always-on HDR actually means: http://androidcommunity.com/nvidia-tegra-4-always-on-hdr-camera-demo-20130320/ Looks rather nice, actually.
I've often used Dropbox this way too. Re-install OS and wait for it to re-sync. Previous to Dropbox I used a remote server and rsync. Problem was that I had multiple computers syncing to the remote server and I synced manually. Sometimes I'd screw up and over-write a the wrong files, etc. Now with Dropbox that never happens. Plus, the version history has saved my ass on several occasions. Doing this sort of stuff with Dropbox is much easier for personal files than trying to figure out how to do it with rsync.
Don't worry. It won't take long for the Europeans to self destruct again and America will be there to pick up the pieces.
I wonder, do you really believe what you're saying?
- No, never trust cloud services for backups. Never trust cloud services period the only reason to use them is convenience
Dropbox is not a bad solution if you have more than one computer. Since it syncs files between machines, your pool of machines provides the necessary redundancy. If Dropbox were to disappear tomorrow and your laptop explode the day after tomorrow, then you still have everything backed up on your desktop. I've been using Dropbox for some time now and find it very useful, particularly the paid plan with the version history.
If we wait until it's as safe as riding an elevator we'll never get there. Exploration should never wait until it's proven safe.
We never did. The chance of being killed on a shuttle mission was about 1.5:100 and those who were actually riding the thing and working on it knew that.
It's completely unrealistic at the moment. If you haven't seen it already, watch the documentary "Mars: Dead or Alive" (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0662638/) about the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. It really puts things into perspective and it's an awesome documentary. You will take away from that is that it's bloody hard to get stuff to Mars. If you can't be bothered to track down the doc, then look at the stats: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration_of_Mars#Timeline_of_Mars_exploration Most missions have failed. In fact, NASA is the only space agency to have demonstrated a consistent successes. The Russians have launched about 20 missions to Mars and they've pretty much all failed. This, let us not forget, is obviously just unmanned stuff. Landing Curiosity is the current state of the art (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwinFP8_qIM) and that's "just" a big rover. So how will these guys, with no track record that I'm aware of, be launching people there in the next 10 or 15 years? They'll take the reality TV money--maybe, if they do really well, send a crew into low Earth orbit--then they'll vanish. Either that, or Mars One is an elaborate version of Space Cadets (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Cadets_%28TV_series%29).
Thank you, I shall do that.
No, I did look at them. The newspaper's summary is shitty but you can see where it comes from in the original article. For example, the last sentence "but our results suggest a potential mechanism by which reading stories not only strengthen language processing regions but also affect the individual through embodied semantics in sensorimotor regions." The way I see it, "strengthen language processing regions" is just as wishy-washy as the term "boosted."
I want to like fMRI but, for many reasons, the technique is too easy to abuse. The finding in this paper is cute but such findings are a dime a dozen in the literature and they mostly aren't associated with a mechanistic explanation. e.g. In this study they talk about "potential mechanisms" but they don't actually elaborate on what these are. They have no clue. Now it's ok to have no clue: we're doing science and we don't know all the answers. The problem with big chunks of the fMRI field, though, is that they're trying to squeeze more out of the technique than it can deliver and they make up for it by providing pseudo-explanations rather than admitting that they need a different technique.
Normally rats and mice are kept in a bland cage, usually with other litter mates. "Environmental enrichment" means they get lots of toys to play with. e.g. running wheels, bars to run along, perhaps painted walls, etc, etc. The effects of environmental enrichment on brain structure have been shown many, many, times using different techniques and in different brain regions. Another pair of references, which I tried to track down but couldn't (I forgot the author names, oops), showed that neurons in cortex sprout more connections and maintain those connections when the animals are switched to an enriched cage. Those authors actually imaged the same living neurons across many days (weeks, actually, IIRC). The opposite has also been shown: rearing animals in an environment with few stimuli causes permanent changes in the brain and the animals have an restricted sensory perception (Google terms such as "monocular deprivation" and "stripe rearing").
What does "boosted" actually mean? Fuck all. It's impressive that the task is sensitive enough to show up changes in the brain after reading a book, but scientifically it's not surprising: if you read a book and remembered something about it then there will be physical changes in your brain. There have to be. We've known that for decades. e.g. In 1997 it was shown that environmental enrichment causes production of new neurons in the hippocampus (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v386/n6624/abs/386493a0.html).
We've seen things go horribly wrong. Plenty of times. Some are forgiven. Most are not. All are remembered permanently thanks to the internet.
Nah, these petty things are often forgotten in practice; internet or no internet. The next "scandal" that comes along erases them from most people's radar. I know they can be looked up again on the internet, but there's so much of this shit out there that it often (of course not always) gets naturally buried.
Anecdote: Our CEO (who is very famous) said some very dumb things a few years ago. What was said was reported internationally, a big scandal ensued, and it was very worrisome for the organisation. It was so big that all (>500) employees were invited to a large round-table to give their opinions on how the incident should be handled. The organisation did three things: distanced itself from the comments, issued a wrist-slapping, and hunkered down to weather the storm. A few months to a year later it was as if nothing had happened. People on the outside had either forgotten what was said or no longer cared, and the person who caused the shit-storm essentially remained in the same role. On occasion I still get questions about the event when people hear where I work, but they're not judgemental or angry questions. People just want to know what happened.
I can think of lots of other reasons why they would also be upset. But the non-Muslim reason is primary and not something you can wave away, even if you fix the other things.
I'm not so sure about that. The "non-Muslim reason" only becomes a valid reason for hating others if the Muslim in question is an extremist. Moderate Muslims don't hate non-Muslims. Extreme Muslims do hate non-Muslims, but they probably have become extreme Muslims for non-religious reasons. Extremism usually flourishes when people are unhappy and the society has major problems. There are plenty of people in the middle east who are unhappy with the West and they have very particular reasons for being unhappy. Islamic extremists are leveraging religion because it's the easiest way to create an "us vs them" mentality, to brain wash people, to de-humanise the enemy, and to make people prepared to die for their cause. The west being non-Muslim is very convenient for them, however I'm sure that if we were Muslim then the extremists would simply be telling their people that we were the wrong sort of Muslim.
I agree there's room for both in the case of MATLAB and Octave. At one point I was using S-Plus and in that case there didn't seem to be room for both it and its free competitor, R. Insightful, the company which produced S-Plus, was bought out a few years ago and S-Plus has vanished. I'm not too surprised, I've got to say. S-Plus had a crappy CLI and it didn't add enough value over R. Furthermore, Insightful behaved like idiots: I remember when dual-core CPUs became affordable, I called Insightful to ask if S-Plus would take advantage of this. I was told it would, but I'd have to buy a second licence in order to use both cores (?!). The licence manager was also a pain.
R is wonderful for statistics, I use it often for that, but as a programming language it's slow and bloody awful. If you have a lot of elaborate data pre-processing to do, such as filtering signals, identifying events in time course data, image processing, etc, then R isn't the way forward. Best approach is to use something more general-purpose to extract the descriptive statistics, then export to R to fit the models.
I've tried the switch from MATLAB to Python. I wanted to love Python, but there was just too much screwing around. No one plotting package fulfilled all of my needs, so I had learn multiple packages. One or two of those were a pain to install (particularly on a Mac) and I wasted ages on that. The OO was nice, I must say, but writing fast MATLAB code is easier for me (habit, mainly) than writing fast Numpy/Scipy code. I certainly learned a lot by figuring out how to speed up the Python code, and quite likely gaining this sort of experience is useful, but none of it helped me get my work done. I made a few nice little analysis toys in Python then went back to MATLAB. When all your colleagues use MATLAB and you already have a large suite of functions you've written, then it's hard to justify switching it all to Python.
Thanks, I'd forgotten about the Mongol empire. I'd not heard of the Mauryan, Mughal, Caliphates, Angkorian Empire, and Burmese empires. I do indeed consider the Russian and Byzantine empires to be Western. The Ottoman too, for that matter.
Yes, they've done a lot of internal killing. The numbers are large, but they also have a larger population. Humans are violent and the Chinese are no exception. They are probably no better or worse than we are in this regard (Catholics/Protestants, WWI, Nazis, etc, etc) , so why is the post I originally replied to labelled "insightful"? I think that says more about how we view China than China being violent.
Yes, they fucking should get over it. I say this to them when I hear them going on about this stuff. They're still fucking pissed at the Japanese over WWII, but none of this stuff is healthy. Another one is the Greeks who won't get over the Turks and this does them no good whatever. In both cases it's national propaganda that's the root cause of people not getting over it. I relate how the Chinese feel when hear us saying certain things because it's important we understand how our words are perceived if we wish to have the right effect. You will not get the message across if you don't know how the message is heard.
I have throughout said that the Chinese had their fair share of violence, I don't know why you attempt to pre-empt me with the "noble savage" line. All I'm saying is that we're arguably more violent than the Chinese (most of these genocides are Western, perpetrated by Westerners, or occurred because of Western meddling: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocides_in_history) and we should acknowledge that about ourselves rather than taking the superior, judgemental, attitude which often appears (as it did in this case with the poster I responded to) in relation to China. It sounds like hypocrisy to my ears and I'm not even Chinese.
After unification by the Qin about 200 BC the country itself has remained more less the same size. If you want to call that a "large empire" then go ahead. From my perspective it's a large country. Yes, there was violence inside China for centuries: my original post says this. But there's been at least as much inside Europe and individual European countries. In China, most people speak the same language and are happy to consider themselves Chinese. They don't feel like they're part of "an empire." The obvious poo in the pie of course is Tibet, where China undoubtedly behaved in a violent and heavy-handed manner.
My post is no attempt to justify China's "modern brutal oppression." All that I'm saying is that it's no worse than what we've done to our own people or our neighbour's people. In fact, quite a lot of the very shitty stuff we've done is in living memory. Yet we seem to pretend it didn't happen and call the kettle black (as the over-rated post I replied to is doing). That is what the Chinese think when they see statements like the post I replied to.
You what I said by distilling it down to "yes the British did some nasty things over a hundred years ago. It's quite clear my post is about much more than that.
That's not what the poster you replied to is saying. He's saying, I believe, that many of our governments in the West are now so powerful and complicated that elections are becoming a progressively less powerful means of keeping our leaders in check. Most of the political parties are the same, and the vast and powerful civil service machinery stays more or less unchanged no matter who is in power. If they want to go to war and kill thousands of innocent people, then we have no say in the matter.
In our democracy we put our trust in those in power to run the country for us and we usually have no direct say in what actually happens. It's supposed to work like that, but a lot of people don't seem to realise this. It's true that it's much easier for an individual to enter government in a Western democracy than in China, but overall I think our governments have more in common with the Chinese government than a lot of us are willing to admit.