"But on Monday, Senate floor sponsor Sen. Mark Madsen, R-Eagle Mountain, said in some states children are being indoctrinated in socialism via some curriculum."
They're making an entire law without backing up their statements over there, I bet that will have more ramifications than an editorializing slashdot submitter.
I think that every male should ask for the pat-down, and then make little moans as the officer reaches the promised land. Non-violent resistance indeed!
I totally want them to make a Footfall movie and really use a Project Orion craft. Usually they just have a technobabble solution for how the humans beat the aliens, but in that case you didn't need to use technobabble. The humans really did have a big stick, they were going to kick your ass, and there wasn't anything you were going to be doing about it.
On a final note, I guess I really should see if it's possible to change the account name, because when I post something funny and people who don't know go "Dude! That was great!" I'm caught between laughing at the incongruity and going *sigh*. It makes for some interesting back-and-forth. And this account has great karma and lots of equally-great fans.
Why sigh at the incongruity? Sometimes I can't remember the name of the child who's attention I want, much less worry about the gender preferences of someone who I can't see and don't even know. Respondents are likely to say "Dude" without even having made a decision about whether your login is gendered male or female.
Life is too short to assign weight to the random stuff other people say.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to do this, but since we've been taking our kids to the museum (their favorite as well as mine), I've noticed that a lot of the exhibits I loved have been replaced by dumbed-down equivalents. Take the original computer exhibit that used to be there; yes it was sponsored by IBM (who provided all the equipment), but that exhibit taught the actual nitty-gritty about how computers work; I can still remember "getting" how binary worked standing there and to a 10 year old geek-wannabe, that was awesome. Now they've got a half-hearted "net" exhibit that is more on "wow" than the specifics of how it works. Did they feel that really trying to explain things would turn people off?
In the SF bay area, there is the Exploratorium in San Francisco, which is kind of like they took the crazy hands-on area of every science museum I've ever seen, and put them all in one place. Just about everything is physically interactive, it's awesome. Then there is The Tech Museum in San Jose, which seems like a lot of displays and button-pushing exhibits - push the buttons in the right order and you'll get a neat printout! But I was terribly disappointed by the entire thing, because it's interactive like clicking things with a mouse is interactive.
So we have a slightly more expensive, rather fragile-looking, patented way to make it possible for people to put batteries in the wrong way.
Great. I don't want one. I can tell a spring from a contact. It's not too hard even with my eyesight. But a funny hermaphrodite thing as a third option? Now that's confusing.
Well, that's not a problem, just put it in however the heck you want to.
I've always assumed that the springs were used to provide solid contact. In which case this will probably not be as reliable. Realistically, though, I have troubles imagining that expensive devices wouldn't already have a protection circuit, or that inexpensive devices would be willing to pay a licensing charge.
Being able to shed that top 1% can make a big difference.
Which is why I've never quite understood why they want to do it in a "smart" fashion, as opposed to simply giving you a rebate if your appliances are set to tweak their power usage every day during the peak window. The latter would require no elaborate communications system, just dumb timers.
I excitedly got in on the original GIGO scheme, figuring that it would be useful for my young children. The software sucked. I don't mean sucked like it was badly written and crashed a lot. I mean sucked like there was no point to it, it was just a collection of independent geeky tech toys aimed at kids. Some of them were fun, but the package didn't add up to anything nearly as worthwhile as a Leapster.
The hardware is not the right problem to solve. If someone created a comprehensive open-source early-education curriculum, the hardware would magically condense out of the ether. Well, not quite, but you get my point, the missing content means that they are building a solution which is so distant from the problem as to be worthless, except as a PR stunt. The most likely reason this won't happen is because educational curriculum is a terribly hot potato, with lobbies piled nine high on all sides.
While I understand your point of view I also understand the point of view of parents who's kids have actually died from congenital heart defects which show themselves during physical activity.
And you think it's reasonable to expect the gym teacher in a public school to use their access to data to prevent this? I always considered myself lucky (or not) if the gym teacher actually bothered to learn my *name* during the course of the year.
I think the take-away, here, is that it's better to just change your normal behavior than to change your behavior when the "smart" grid needs it. If you can run your dishwasher at night, then why not do that every single time?
Yes and no. The thing which seems to dig me out of this kind of hole are:
1) Break work down into bite-sized pieces that should take 10-30 minutes, and do one or two of those every morning before checking email or the web. 2) Work less.
#1 is similar to the Getting Things Done system by David Allen. I don't actually follow the system, but the nothing of breaking things down into doable pieces and then doing a couple seems to help. Builds momentum.
#2 is just common sense. If you are spending more time working because you aren't getting enough done, then you'll set off a vicious cycle. Last year I acquired an outside hobby that is somewhat self-limiting (*), and it helps lots. When I'm wasting time at work, that time comes directly out of time I can devote to my hobby. So I waste less time at work, mainly because I can more easily say no to sub-projects which I shouldn't be doing.
-scott
(*) Bicycling. You can trivially spend 10 hours playing an online video game, to manage that on a bike you need to plan ahead.
I can't did up the reference right now, but it turns out the eneregy requirements for maintaining the long neck outweigh the cost of simply walking to the food.
+1 to this. A decade ago when I started working at a real company (after a decade as a consultant), I noticed in interviews that a lot of candidates had postgraduate degrees, and they weren't that good. It freaked me out a bit, since I had a B.A. in computer science, and I wondered if that would impact my future prospects?
Turns out, though, that the best way to have a good career is to do something you enjoy, be good at what you do, and work with great people. Those are all somewhat orthogonal to how far you took your education. Do the postgraduate work if it seems likely that you'll be able to do interesting work with interesting people. Go out and get a job if you can do interesting work with interesting people. If none of your options involve interesting work or interesting people, try to figure out why not, because having that network of interesting people is ALL that matters in terms of your future job prospects.
Slight caveat if you're talking about doing your postgraduate work MIT or Stanford or Berkeley or UW Madison or someplace well-known for being awesome in the field. Don't skip that to work at a second-rate company.
I first used Turbo Pascal on an Apple IIsomething in 1987 or 1986. It ran via the magic of the Z80 card and CP/M. It was a real breakthrough compared to the disk-swapping joy that was UCSD Pascal.
In 2007, I got a G1G1 OLPC for my kids, and an Eee 701 (or whatever, original) for me. Honestly, the OLPC has left me feeling let-down. My kids enjoy it, but I don't think they're really learning much of anything, though they do seem to have figured out how to reboot the thing as needed. Whereas the Eee certainly isn't teaching them anything, but it's definitely more useful to me. So they really are different beasts.
I think where OLPC has really let things down is in concentrating so much on the hardware and software, when it's the content that's really important. I don't think they caused the netbook at all, unless you mean that Asus and others got so annoyed with the delays that they decided to do something about it. Rather, I think the netbooks were a right-time, right-place type of thing, which OLPC could have taken advantage of if they weren't already committed to their course.
While something like a LeapPad or Leapster is not a "computer", it's a LOT cheaper. An open-content version of the LeapPad would be very doable, and very directly world-changing, whereas the OLPC seems to be all potential and no delivery.
Why wasn't the G1G1 programming running ALL THE TIME?
My assumption is that they couldn't afford to sell that many units.
I got one for my 7-year-old son in the first pass of the program. He likes it well enough, but it's really only worth maybe $150 in value, tops.
My biggest issue is that the system seems to assume that someone else is going to go out an collect a bunch of apps to make it useful for coursework - which, to my mind, is the harder problem to solve in the first place. So my kids enjoy a few specific parts of the system, but there's no scalability to lead them onward and upward. Even something on the order of what the Leappad/Leapster systems have would be helpful. Something where they can keep learning at their own level within the system even as they become more accomplished. I can completely see the potential for the unit to be useful for kids from 4 to 12 or so, but it's not there.
Hmm, a more pointed version of my complaint is that the system has a bunch of stuff on it which I can imagine computer geeks thinking would be useful for kids, but what it needs to have is stuff to make it useful for teaching kids about the world. Computers are just a tool.
I happen to be biased, but right now I'm more excited by the potential of Android in this space. Android plus an Eee 701 seems at least as compelling as an OLPC for first-world usage, and cellphone hardware is getting cheap enough that I can imagine it being able to address third-world usage, too.
What jumps out at me is that the loop is counting 'day' backward and 'year' forward. Far better would be to have a pair of forward-counting values, which you compare with your target. That small change totally changes the character of the loop.
People who don't write code seem to think that it's like a made thing, which, once made, has some level of intrinsic value. This is not true. Poor code can have actual negative value (it can even be destructive to a company). Even good code which solves the wrong problems can be a huge hindrance. Failed projects and companies seldom fail simply because they were technically excellent. [I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but I am saying that it doesn't happen all that often, and it's often impossible to divorce code from its context.]
I still get requests to open-source a package I wrote 18 years ago for an OS which hasn't existed for 10 years. I wrote the original version of the package while I was a fulltime college student, in the two months before finals. I certainly went on to put another 3 or 6 months of fulltime work (spread over years) into improving it, so there's certainly some value I put into it. I don't think requesters really understand me when I suggest that if they were REALLY capable of using my code as a starting point, they would easily be capable of simply starting from scratch. There's maybe 10% of the code which really has value, but anyone talented enough to be able to pick that 10% out and repurpose it would probably have no desire to do so. I know that if I were tasked with solving the same problem, I'd just start over.
I usually config things in the fastest boot mode, but when I need to make changes (and thus watch boot screens and stuff), I temporarily config to a slower mode. So instead of an uber-menu, you would just have to work your way through each BIOS saying "Set slow boot, reboot" until you got to the one indicated.
Annoying, but, what, how much time do you spend in the BIOS compared to using the machine?
I am no theoretical astrophysicist, but me thinks "Dark Matter" is the name of the current fad stop-gap physics widget which is necessary to balance out equations in their current hypotheses and models.
As was quantum mechanics at one point. The equations do want to balance, one way or the other. The thing that balances them is by definition strange and wonderful.
Doctors once thought that wellness and illness within the human body were caused by the balance between the body's four humors: Yellow Bile, Black Bile, Phlegm, and Blood. Obviously, there is MUCH more to it than that. It is no different with this. The actual answers to the universe and its mass-energy balances, origins, and "dark matter", etc.. are VERY likely to also NOT be so simple.
It would be pretty depressing if things were this "simple". I think a much more relevant example would be the ether. The humors of the body were imagined out of the whole cloth, with no experimental basis at all. The ether explained experimental results (light has wave-like properties, and waves propagate through a medium), except it was wrong.
Does "Dark Matter" cease to be dark if you shine a light on it?
I found the entire post funky. It assumes that the US has problems which can be solved better by being tech savvy, and also that being able to write code has anything to do with being tech savvy. In the first case, I'll agree that we have too many head-in-the-sand luddites in congress, but that's a different problem than not having enough tech-savvy people. In the latter case, I've seen a lot of code. There are a lot of people who write code who couldn't think a big problem through logically to save their lives.
Slashdot Mirror
Consciousness is weird. Quantum theory is weird. Therefore quantum theory must explain consciousness.
Or, more likely, consciousness explains quantum theory.
The article quotes a supporter:
"But on Monday, Senate floor sponsor Sen. Mark Madsen, R-Eagle Mountain, said in some states children are being indoctrinated in socialism via some curriculum."
They're making an entire law without backing up their statements over there, I bet that will have more ramifications than an editorializing slashdot submitter.
I think that every male should ask for the pat-down, and then make little moans as the officer reaches the promised land. Non-violent resistance indeed!
I totally want them to make a Footfall movie and really use a Project Orion craft. Usually they just have a technobabble solution for how the humans beat the aliens, but in that case you didn't need to use technobabble. The humans really did have a big stick, they were going to kick your ass, and there wasn't anything you were going to be doing about it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Footfall
On a final note, I guess I really should see if it's possible to change the account name, because when I post something funny and people who don't know go "Dude! That was great!" I'm caught between laughing at the incongruity and going *sigh*. It makes for some interesting back-and-forth. And this account has great karma and lots of equally-great fans.
Why sigh at the incongruity? Sometimes I can't remember the name of the child who's attention I want, much less worry about the gender preferences of someone who I can't see and don't even know. Respondents are likely to say "Dude" without even having made a decision about whether your login is gendered male or female.
Life is too short to assign weight to the random stuff other people say.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to do this, but since we've been taking our kids to the museum (their favorite as well as mine), I've noticed that a lot of the exhibits I loved have been replaced by dumbed-down equivalents. Take the original computer exhibit that used to be there; yes it was sponsored by IBM (who provided all the equipment), but that exhibit taught the actual nitty-gritty about how computers work; I can still remember "getting" how binary worked standing there and to a 10 year old geek-wannabe, that was awesome. Now they've got a half-hearted "net" exhibit that is more on "wow" than the specifics of how it works. Did they feel that really trying to explain things would turn people off?
In the SF bay area, there is the Exploratorium in San Francisco, which is kind of like they took the crazy hands-on area of every science museum I've ever seen, and put them all in one place. Just about everything is physically interactive, it's awesome. Then there is The Tech Museum in San Jose, which seems like a lot of displays and button-pushing exhibits - push the buttons in the right order and you'll get a neat printout! But I was terribly disappointed by the entire thing, because it's interactive like clicking things with a mouse is interactive.
So we have a slightly more expensive, rather fragile-looking, patented way to make it possible for people to put batteries in the wrong way.
Great.
I don't want one. I can tell a spring from a contact. It's not too hard even with my eyesight. But a funny hermaphrodite thing as a third option? Now that's confusing.
Well, that's not a problem, just put it in however the heck you want to.
I've always assumed that the springs were used to provide solid contact. In which case this will probably not be as reliable. Realistically, though, I have troubles imagining that expensive devices wouldn't already have a protection circuit, or that inexpensive devices would be willing to pay a licensing charge.
Being able to shed that top 1% can make a big difference.
Which is why I've never quite understood why they want to do it in a "smart" fashion, as opposed to simply giving you a rebate if your appliances are set to tweak their power usage every day during the peak window. The latter would require no elaborate communications system, just dumb timers.
I excitedly got in on the original GIGO scheme, figuring that it would be useful for my young children. The software sucked. I don't mean sucked like it was badly written and crashed a lot. I mean sucked like there was no point to it, it was just a collection of independent geeky tech toys aimed at kids. Some of them were fun, but the package didn't add up to anything nearly as worthwhile as a Leapster.
The hardware is not the right problem to solve. If someone created a comprehensive open-source early-education curriculum, the hardware would magically condense out of the ether. Well, not quite, but you get my point, the missing content means that they are building a solution which is so distant from the problem as to be worthless, except as a PR stunt. The most likely reason this won't happen is because educational curriculum is a terribly hot potato, with lobbies piled nine high on all sides.
While I understand your point of view I also understand the point of view of parents who's kids have actually died from congenital heart defects which show themselves during physical activity.
And you think it's reasonable to expect the gym teacher in a public school to use their access to data to prevent this? I always considered myself lucky (or not) if the gym teacher actually bothered to learn my *name* during the course of the year.
-scott
I think the take-away, here, is that it's better to just change your normal behavior than to change your behavior when the "smart" grid needs it. If you can run your dishwasher at night, then why not do that every single time?
Survivor ISS.
Get to work. Guess why it's called work?
Yes and no. The thing which seems to dig me out of this kind of hole are:
1) Break work down into bite-sized pieces that should take 10-30 minutes, and do one or two of those every morning before checking email or the web.
2) Work less.
#1 is similar to the Getting Things Done system by David Allen. I don't actually follow the system, but the nothing of breaking things down into doable pieces and then doing a couple seems to help. Builds momentum.
#2 is just common sense. If you are spending more time working because you aren't getting enough done, then you'll set off a vicious cycle. Last year I acquired an outside hobby that is somewhat self-limiting (*), and it helps lots. When I'm wasting time at work, that time comes directly out of time I can devote to my hobby. So I waste less time at work, mainly because I can more easily say no to sub-projects which I shouldn't be doing.
-scott
(*) Bicycling. You can trivially spend 10 hours playing an online video game, to manage that on a bike you need to plan ahead.
I can't did up the reference right now, but it turns out the eneregy requirements for maintaining the long neck outweigh the cost of simply walking to the food.
Meaning dinosaurs did not have long necks. QED.
+1 to this. A decade ago when I started working at a real company (after a decade as a consultant), I noticed in interviews that a lot of candidates had postgraduate degrees, and they weren't that good. It freaked me out a bit, since I had a B.A. in computer science, and I wondered if that would impact my future prospects?
Turns out, though, that the best way to have a good career is to do something you enjoy, be good at what you do, and work with great people. Those are all somewhat orthogonal to how far you took your education. Do the postgraduate work if it seems likely that you'll be able to do interesting work with interesting people. Go out and get a job if you can do interesting work with interesting people. If none of your options involve interesting work or interesting people, try to figure out why not, because having that network of interesting people is ALL that matters in terms of your future job prospects.
Slight caveat if you're talking about doing your postgraduate work MIT or Stanford or Berkeley or UW Madison or someplace well-known for being awesome in the field. Don't skip that to work at a second-rate company.
I first used Turbo Pascal on an Apple IIsomething in 1987 or 1986. It ran via the magic of the Z80 card and CP/M. It was a real breakthrough compared to the disk-swapping joy that was UCSD Pascal.
In 2007, I got a G1G1 OLPC for my kids, and an Eee 701 (or whatever, original) for me. Honestly, the OLPC has left me feeling let-down. My kids enjoy it, but I don't think they're really learning much of anything, though they do seem to have figured out how to reboot the thing as needed. Whereas the Eee certainly isn't teaching them anything, but it's definitely more useful to me. So they really are different beasts.
I think where OLPC has really let things down is in concentrating so much on the hardware and software, when it's the content that's really important. I don't think they caused the netbook at all, unless you mean that Asus and others got so annoyed with the delays that they decided to do something about it. Rather, I think the netbooks were a right-time, right-place type of thing, which OLPC could have taken advantage of if they weren't already committed to their course.
While something like a LeapPad or Leapster is not a "computer", it's a LOT cheaper. An open-content version of the LeapPad would be very doable, and very directly world-changing, whereas the OLPC seems to be all potential and no delivery.
Why wasn't the G1G1 programming running ALL THE TIME?
My assumption is that they couldn't afford to sell that many units.
I got one for my 7-year-old son in the first pass of the program. He likes it well enough, but it's really only worth maybe $150 in value, tops.
My biggest issue is that the system seems to assume that someone else is going to go out an collect a bunch of apps to make it useful for coursework - which, to my mind, is the harder problem to solve in the first place. So my kids enjoy a few specific parts of the system, but there's no scalability to lead them onward and upward. Even something on the order of what the Leappad/Leapster systems have would be helpful. Something where they can keep learning at their own level within the system even as they become more accomplished. I can completely see the potential for the unit to be useful for kids from 4 to 12 or so, but it's not there.
Hmm, a more pointed version of my complaint is that the system has a bunch of stuff on it which I can imagine computer geeks thinking would be useful for kids, but what it needs to have is stuff to make it useful for teaching kids about the world. Computers are just a tool.
I happen to be biased, but right now I'm more excited by the potential of Android in this space. Android plus an Eee 701 seems at least as compelling as an OLPC for first-world usage, and cellphone hardware is getting cheap enough that I can imagine it being able to address third-world usage, too.
What jumps out at me is that the loop is counting 'day' backward and 'year' forward. Far better would be to have a pair of forward-counting values, which you compare with your target. That small change totally changes the character of the loop.
let's see Falcon 9 actually get off the pad first without blowing up.
Hell, I'd pay to see either option.
I changed my port to something in the 200k range, and I've had less than zero attacks.
People who don't write code seem to think that it's like a made thing, which, once made, has some level of intrinsic value. This is not true. Poor code can have actual negative value (it can even be destructive to a company). Even good code which solves the wrong problems can be a huge hindrance. Failed projects and companies seldom fail simply because they were technically excellent. [I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but I am saying that it doesn't happen all that often, and it's often impossible to divorce code from its context.]
I still get requests to open-source a package I wrote 18 years ago for an OS which hasn't existed for 10 years. I wrote the original version of the package while I was a fulltime college student, in the two months before finals. I certainly went on to put another 3 or 6 months of fulltime work (spread over years) into improving it, so there's certainly some value I put into it. I don't think requesters really understand me when I suggest that if they were REALLY capable of using my code as a starting point, they would easily be capable of simply starting from scratch. There's maybe 10% of the code which really has value, but anyone talented enough to be able to pick that 10% out and repurpose it would probably have no desire to do so. I know that if I were tasked with solving the same problem, I'd just start over.
I usually config things in the fastest boot mode, but when I need to make changes (and thus watch boot screens and stuff), I temporarily config to a slower mode. So instead of an uber-menu, you would just have to work your way through each BIOS saying "Set slow boot, reboot" until you got to the one indicated.
Annoying, but, what, how much time do you spend in the BIOS compared to using the machine?
I am no theoretical astrophysicist, but me thinks "Dark Matter" is the name of the current fad stop-gap physics widget which is necessary to balance out equations in their current hypotheses and models.
As was quantum mechanics at one point. The equations do want to balance, one way or the other. The thing that balances them is by definition strange and wonderful.
Doctors once thought that wellness and illness within the human body were caused by the balance between the body's four humors: Yellow Bile, Black Bile, Phlegm, and Blood.
Obviously, there is MUCH more to it than that. It is no different with this.
The actual answers to the universe and its mass-energy balances, origins, and "dark matter", etc.. are VERY likely to also NOT be so simple.
It would be pretty depressing if things were this "simple". I think a much more relevant example would be the ether. The humors of the body were imagined out of the whole cloth, with no experimental basis at all. The ether explained experimental results (light has wave-like properties, and waves propagate through a medium), except it was wrong.
Does "Dark Matter" cease to be dark if you shine a light on it?
Do electrons spin like a carousel?
Coding skills doesn't really affect ones ethical/political views...
I found the entire post funky. It assumes that the US has problems which can be solved better by being tech savvy, and also that being able to write code has anything to do with being tech savvy. In the first case, I'll agree that we have too many head-in-the-sand luddites in congress, but that's a different problem than not having enough tech-savvy people. In the latter case, I've seen a lot of code. There are a lot of people who write code who couldn't think a big problem through logically to save their lives.
-scott