One of the things I like about Judaeism is the culture of examination of the texts. Kind of amusing though how they seem to spend a great deal of time finding loopholes.
This can work both ways. One of the more fun parts of the biblical dietary rules is that, while it's forbidden in general to eat invertebrates, there is a specific "loophole" listed in two places that allows eating Orthoptera (grasshoppers, locusts, etc.). What you do is ask someone who believes in such things whether they eat shrimp or crayfish or lobster. If they say they do, you ask if they eat grasshoppers or locusts or katydids. They'll probably look at you in disgust, and say "Of course not."
You then point out that they've violated biblical rules on both counts. This gives you ground to ridicule whatever other supposed biblical laws they may have been supporting. If they can't even get simple things like "shrimp forbidden; grasshoppers allowed" right, how credible can they be on anything else?
(Meanwhile, nutritionists have pointed out that insects are not just edible, but are a good source of easily-digested proteins. Humans don't eat them much, but this is probably mostly because they're rather small, and we're top-level predators adapted to catching much bigger game.)
The trouble is that most people mix up which of those two examples is doing the news and which is doing the "making shit up".
Yeah, an part of the fun is that both Fox and the Onion carefully maintain a public "face" as a serious news agency. OTOH, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert both repeatedly point out that they are professional comedians who work for Comedy Central. Part of their status of comedians is from stories like this one, in which people take their stories as fact despite their repeated disclaimers that they're comedians, not reporters. The Onion's and Fox's stories are also mistaken as straight news, although they have always been pure satire. There is a strong suspicion that the people at Fox aren't aware that they're writing satire. The people at The Onion are very conscious of this, and some of them have commented that the most difficult part of writing satire is that the Real World keeps producing extreme events that they wouldn't dared have written as satire.
Disclaimer: I have family ties to The Onion. My daughter was a staff reporter/photographer for them while she was a college student in Madison, and has lots of fun stories about the gang's inner workings. One of their favorite signs of "success" was someone repeating a story of theirs as fact. It seems they often do "fact checking", to verify that what they've written hasn't actually happened. I don't know whether they treat the folks at Fox as colleagues or subject matter. Maybe we should ask them. But they might take such a question as an opportunity for more satire. And on the third hand, if they say that they have friends working at Fox as satirical writers, we should probably assume that they've fact-checked and found it to be untrue, so it's proper "professional conduct" for them to report it as fact.
There's a lot of slippery logic involved in satire...
Of course, you're right, the other stations are doing it too... and it's all terrible. That's why I get my news from Slashdot:|
And you're probably correct to do so. As with the Daily Show, the Colbert Report and The Onion, Slashdot can be taken as a good source of interesting news stories. You can then google them and find a number of sources that report the actual stories with various slants. This may well be why the pollsters have found that the people who follow Stewart and Colbert are among the best-informed voters. I wouldn't be surprised if a poll showed that/. readers are among the best-informed in tech subjects, but I wouldn't infer that it's because they get their information here. Everyone here knows about google, right? Right? Hmmm....
Another similar source of good news stories/tipoffs is NPR's "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me" program (which I'm right now hearing on the radio). They're basically a comedy show based on real news, but part of what they do it tell made-up stories, and challenge people to distinguish them from true stories. They've also had the fun of hearing their fake news stories repeated as fact. I don't think the pollsters have included them in their poll questions, but it wouldn't be surprising if their listeners would come up as among the best-informed. Their humor is similar to the Stewart/Colbert/Onion approach to news, though in a slightly different format, and they're likely to attract an audience that knows enough to appreciate their very topical humor.
Do you know how hard it is to get parrot shit out of clothes????
Yeah; it's quite easy.;-)
Due to my wife's allergies to most furry critters (luckily not including me), we've long had pet birds, mostly various sorts of parrots. The little darlings are always landing on our shoulders and leaving their calling cards. If we notice right away, we pick it off with a bit of tissue paper, which most bird owners have strategically scattered around their house. If we don't notice, and it dries, a quick brushing with a damp sponge usually removes all signs it was there. No need for detergent (though I'd still advise it in washing, to remove the human sweat and other contaminants).
Of course, this sorta ruins the joke, which I LOL'd at. Bird owners are always looking around for good bird-shit jokes. Some time back, I was playing music at an event, with a pick-up band. Suddenly one of the musicians, a fiddler that I didn't know, said "Hey, I see you have a cockatiel, too!" She could even identify the species that left the little marking. We both laughed, and went back to playing music.
The explanation is straightforward. We mammals have digestive systems that try to extract maximum nutrition from our food, because to our ancestors, that was cheaper than going out and hunting for food more often. This leads to a long process that involves many bacteria, in a low-oxygen environment, and the result is familiar to us all. But birds have a strong need to conserve weight. So their digestive systems are short and fast, extracting the most digestible stuff for flight fuel, and quickly reaching the point that it takes more energy to fly the food around than it contains. At that point, typically only a few hours after eating, the bird dumps the rest, which still contains lots of nutrients (and is very good plant food), but hasn't had time for bacteria to use up the oxygen and turn it into a stinky mess.
If bird droppings were like our output, we probably wouldn't have them at pets. But bird shit is fairly innocuous stuff that's highly water soluble, and birds tend to drop most of it beneath only a few favorite perches, so it's easy to clean up after them.
OTOH, there's that Far Side cartoon of a bird's view of the world, looking down at a city street scene in which everything has a bullseye painted on its top.
Where, exactly, do you propose that an iOS6 user download this alleged Google Maps app from?
Well, someone else already suggested firing up Safari and typing "maps.google.com" to it. Various people have commented that this is somewhat better than the google-maps app on earlier iPhones. I haven't compared them myself, and I'd suspect that this might depend on just what you're trying to do with it. But I use Safari on this Macbook Pro a lot to visit maps.google.com, and I can tell that it's noticeably better than the "Maps" app on my wife's iPhone 4 - or the one on my Android phone. So I wouldn't be surprised if maps.google.com inside any random browser turns out better than the specialized Apple Maps app (or the Google Maps app, when it's available).
Sometimes specialized apps merely duplicate something available via the Web, but are built as standalone apps to maintain the "walled garden". Theoretically, a specialized app should be smaller and/or faster than a web site, but this is often not true. They do tend to have their own variant of the UI, which can mean relearning something that a browser can make similar everywhere. Anyway, it might be interesting to read comparisons among the various "maps" apps and what can be done with the various map web sites.
I actually use my (Android) phone more for the maps and the browser than I use it as a phone. I consider it more a portable email, Web and GPS mapping tool that can also make phone calls. But YMMV, I guess.
Except most of the "wire" in screening isn't actually wire anymore, it's stranded synthetics with a vinyl coating.
Yeah, we just discovered this in the window screens that were installed in an enclosed porch that we had built recently. One day we had a window open, with the screen keeping the bugs out, and we left the porch for a while with some food sitting on a small table. When we went back to the porch, we saw a squirrel dashing back through the gash it had torn in the "screen" to get at the food.
Now we have a new project, of finding a real screen that will keep those cute little critters out the way we thought the fake screens would. But it's not easy to get an honest answer about the materials in screens. The folks at the hardware stores (and the dealers' web sites) will tell you whatever they think will make the sale, knowing full well that it won't be worth your while to sue them over such a small purchase.
Every programmer will get to the point where they don't want to programmers anymore. They start to see how monkey-like programming as a profession is. Then they want to be designers, those who actually need to think of the bigger picture than just putting together basic pieces of code in Visual Studio.
This sounds like something from the 90's when most people were still thinking that the waterfall model works. Do people still think that code monkeys just write code according to some UML and flow diagrams that designers have drawn....
Actually, that attitude goes back to the earliest days of programming languages. Back in the 1950s, the first "higher-level" languages were developed, Fortran (for techies) and Cobol (for business folks). If you dig up the early wide-eyed announcements for either language, you'll find widespread claims that they would "end the need for programming", which at the time meant what we call assembly or machine language. They did no such thing, of course; they merely introduced new programming languages that solved some of the problems with the previous languages, but did little to alleviate the more general problems.
The "Visual" approach mentioned by the OP was just one in a long chain of such attempts to eliminate the need for programming, by introducing yet another programming language that solved a few low-level problems in previous software-development schemes. It also failed to eliminate the need for programming, as you can easily see by trying to use some of the balky, buggy products built using that software.
The idea that we can end the need for programming is best understood as a marketing technique, to sell yet another "solution" to whatever its designers saw as the problems with programming. At best, such things can somewhat simplify a few parts of the task that the designers were consciously aware of. So far, there's little evidence that such tools can do more than "move the problems to a higher level". But don't worry; we haven't seen the end of such claimed panaceas. Marketers will continue to tout their "solution" to programming as long as people continue to pay attention (and money) to the people making such claims.
There's something else that's a significant barrier for most people: Pretty much every successful programmer will tell you about their first lesson when trying to write some small programs, and their discovery that no matter how hard they tried, their first efforts always had bugs. They quickly discovered that this was a permanent part of programming, accepted it, and studied debugging techniques.
But most people can't get past this problem, because they can't admit to themselves that they will never be able to write a significant chunk of code without error. The good programmers are the people who can admit that they're hopelessly fallible, face the fact, and learn how to deal with it.
Also, the good programmers tend to have a sense of humor about it all. One explanation I heard years ago from someone who was a very good programmer is that programming is actually a sort of computer game. The way the scoring works is that, every time you write something and the computer does what you wanted it to do, you get a point. But when something inside one of the many libraries in the computer finds a way to interpret something you wrote in a way that's different than what you expected, the programmer who wrote that chunk of code gets a point. A good programmer is one who can maintain a score that is usually positive in this game.
Using this understanding, one way of explaining why I and many other programmers like unix-type systems is that we can usually win at the programming game. Things in such systems tend to (mostly) work the way the documentation says they work -- and the documentation exists. I've worked on a lot of other kinds of computer systems, and on all the others, I constantly lose points to things that work differently than I expected, but often what I expected was just a guess, because the documentation is so sketchy or 17 releases out of date;-).
Even this sort of humor is just an acknowledgement of the fact that the deck is stacked against us, we'll never get it right the first try, and the people who built the computers systems we're using like it that way. But I was willing to face my limitations in the face of a game that's biased against me from the start and has grown to be so complex that I know I can't keep track of all the gotchas in my conscious mind. Most people can't admit their own fallibility in this way, so they will never be good programmers.
I find it amusing how a phone cannot be a phone. No no, it has to have that same icon hell we have on desktop computers. Because without icons, we absolutely can. not. make. calls. Or take pics, or browse the net, or play music.
Heh. In another forum, I recently read a discussion started by an article about the history of humanity's various writing systems. It explained that all of them started with pictorial symbols, that quickly got used in a "rebus" fashion to represent words sounding like the names of the things pictured. Then, with time, the symbols got reduced, typically to represent only the initial syllables, then finally single phonemes. The main exception is Chinese writing, which for historical reasons got stuck in the pictograph transitioning to syllabic stage (with "artistic" development of the symbols that has left them no longer very pictorial;-). It's clear that alphabetic writing is superior in all respects to pictorial writing. But the computer industry has recently "progressed" backwards to an awkward pictographic stage, masked by calling them "icons" rather than "pictographs".
What we can probably expect is a near-future generation that only understands the icons, and is unable to use a keyboard. As the keyboard is lost, input will probably be with software that understands coarse finger-drawn icons, and then most users will be able to dispense with keyboard-style (i.e, alphabetic) input entirely. The general public will then be back to the stage of the earliest writings from several thousands of years ago. We already see the rebus-like developments in things like use of '2' for "too", '4' for "four", 'u' for "you", and so on, which will progress rapidly when writing icons with a finger on the screen becomes practical and icons can be easily included in messages.
Then, after a few more thousand years, computer systems will slowly develop an amazing new, more efficient input system that uses only a small set of a few dozen symbols that represent phonemes in the spoken language. This will be widely viewed as a huge advance in computer usability, especially since it will replace slowly drawing icons with efficient single touches to a small array of these new "letter" symbols.
Stick around for a few thousand years, and see if this prediction comes true or not...
One day soon, [the US] is going to get its economic arse kicked by poor brown people...
Don't look now, but it has already happened. The economic recession in the US over the past few years was in great part triggered by the fact that so much manufacturing has moved to third-world countries with much lower wages. The US no longer actually builds much of anything; it just imports things and tries to sell them as cheaply as possible to people who more and more don't have jobs or have low-wage jobs. All the political posturing aside, this isn't being fixed by the US's "system".
The iPhone most other Apple products are poster children for this phenomenon. They're all made in Asia. Yes, the design was is great part done in the US, but that only employs a small number of people. The people actually making the hardware all "poor brown people". Or yellow people, if you prefer.
An obvious prediction is that the current topic is talking about what may be the follow-on products to Apple's vaunted phones, which will do well because it sells well to the growing American lower classes.
You're conflating two kinds of law: human law can be broken, laws of nature can't.
Actually, this is one of the examples that has been used to support what linguists call the "Sapir-Whorf hypothesis" (or Whorfianism for short). This is the idea that your language has either influence (in the "weak form") or control (in the "strong form") over your cognitive abilities, your beliefs, and your behavior.
There are languages that use different words for these two concepts, and the fun part of this linguistic analysis is that, while statements such as "The universe obeys laws, and if there are laws, there must be a law-giver, which we call God" can be translated into such languages, the results doesn't make sense. But a native speaker of a language such as English which conflatest the two concepts is likely to accept such statements as logical and valid.
It isn't all that hard to explain the situation in English, though, at least to someone able to follow basic mathematical-style reasoning. We just define two marked versions of the word, for example:
Llaw (legal law):
A statement of what people should or shouldn't do.
Nlaw (natural law):
A statement of how something in the physical universe works.
I've also seen it described as: Llaws describe what what we think should happen; Nlaws describe what actually does happen. But English uses the same word for both.
The above proof-of-God argument now may be rewritten as "The universe obeys Nlaws, and if there are Nlaws, there must be a Llaw-giver, which we call God" . This replicates the problem of translating into languages that use different words for the two concepts.
For people who can't follow that, we might further comment on the reaction when we discover someone violating a Llaw. They are typically arrested, tried, and punished for the violation. In the case of something found violating an NLaw, however, we react by deciding that the Nlaw was wrong, and finding a way to revise it so that the new observation is "legal".
For example, suppose we observe a violation of the Nlaw of Gravity. Would we react by punishing the object that was doing it? Probably not; we'd more likely study it and learn to build an anti-gravity drive. But suppose we observed someone committing a murder. Would we say "Hmmm; it looks like murder isn't against the Llaw after all; how can we rewrite it so that this murder becomes legal?"
If someone can't handle the logic of this, they're probably hopeless. Or maybe they can be used as a real-life example of the Whorfianism at work.;-)
In any case, the serious suggestion that the existence of natural laws proves the existence of a god or gods is a classical example of what amounts to a pun in English (and French and German, and dates back to Latin) that has historically been viewed as a valid argument for an ultimate creator and law-giver. It's easy to argue in this case that a bug in the language has had a strong influence on the concepts and beliefs of at least some speakers of that language.
And the existence of explanations like the above is a counter-argument that, with a bit of thought, people can understand and resist this sort of trick, counteracting the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in at least one case.
Then in the afterlife when you find out you're going to burn in hell for eternity, don't say I didn't tell you so.
Except that the real problem is that we have so many religions that have their own models of heaven and hell, all of them incompatible, with no evidence to tell us which one to believe. So even if we pick one, there's a chance approaching certainty that we chose the wrong one, and we're doomed anyway.
And it's possible that all our religious leaders got the details wrong. It'll turn out that when we die, we'll face a god, and find that She hates all creatures with only two legs and no exoskeleton.
So we're better off picking one of the gods that just wants us to live a good life. Then, when it turns out we were wrong, at least we'll have had a few years of life as an independent, thinking creature. And if we do have to face whatever actual god exists, we'll have good grounds for condemning it to its face for denying us the facts we needed to make the right choice.
Not really, because that term has too many emotional/political/social connotations, and is routinely misused in common speech. Biologists mostly use the term "subspecies", which is a synonym without the connotations.
"A species is often defined as a group of organisms capable of interbreeding and producing fertile offspring."
That's often the first definition given in textbooks, followed by explanations of why it's not a very good definition due to its fuzziness. Thus, one of the common textbook examples discusses wolves, jackals and domestic dogs. Our pet dogs can interbreed with both wolves and jackals, so they're all one species, right? Except that wolves and jackals can't interbreed (or at least don't produce healthy, fertile hybrids), so they're different species. There are many examples like this.
A common rephrasing that works better is "Populations are the same species if they can and do interbreed in their natural habitat". Wolves, jackals and domestic dogs don't naturally interbreed, mostly because their ranges don't overlap. Wolves are northern, temperate-zone forest creatures, while jackals are primarily tropical and subtropical, and prefer more open landscapes. The "natural habitat" of the domestic dog, of course, is in the vicinity of human habitation, which wolves and jackals avoid due to the powerful predator there that likes to kill them. So wolves, jackals and dogs are classified as separate species due to habitat specilization, despite the fact that we can capture them, interbreed them, and (if one of the pair is a domestic dog) the offspring are viable.
That second definition is also somewhat fuzzy, of course, but biologists tend to just shrug and say that nature can't be pigeonholed the way we might like. "Species" is a very useful concept, but you have to understand its problems.
No; you're missing the meaning of the term "star". This word refers solely to how well known someone is. It has little (if anything) to do with actual talent. Rihanna is a star simply because she's well known. That's mostly the result of marketing.
The term "rock star", when used as a metaphor, is basically an insult. It means that the name is known to the people walking into most of the customers at retail computer outlets like Walmart and the Apple Store. Being know to the readers of/. doesn't qualify you for the term, just as being known to the denizens of the local indie record story doesn't qualify you as a "rock star", no matter how good you may be.
Yeah, somehow when an incoming object explodes and injures or kills a bunch of people (or worse, destroys property;-), it seems to be difficult to keep the fact secret. The friends and relatives of the victims have a way of noticing the event, and it's hard to prevent them from talking about it.
But I can loathe a company that tries to stop competition with frivolous lawsuits, that copies everything and patents the most obvious stuff to stop others doing the same, blocking innovation the same way James Watt's patents blocked the evolution of the steam engine for 30 years.
It's interesting to read comments pointing out what assorted historians have been saying for a long time: The primary use of patent laws has always been to block technical progress. We keep hearing the propaganda (enshrined in the US Constitution, among other places), that patent law is to encourage progress. But the historical evidence is contrary to this.
The only actual use of a patent to to prevent your competitors from using something. Yes, you can use it to extract royalties, but this is just an indirect way of making the products more expensive, and thus interfering with competitors' development and sales.
But more important than price is the effect of multiple patents. The historians' explanation of Watts' delay of the steam locomotive is that a practical locomotive required a number of other inventions in addition to Watt's efficient steam engine. But Watt and several other inventors each wanted to own it all, and refused to license their inventions to each other unless they each got the lion's share of the results. They pretty much all held out until their patents expired. Then, since Watt had the largest bunch of good engineers working for him, he was able to quickly start manufacturing and selling practical locomotives. He became rather wealthy late in life, but could have become rich decades earlier if he and the other inventors hadn't been so greedy, and had agreed to share the proceeds in a reasonable manner.
Part of the history is also the patenting of well-known ideas. But that's a different story from Watt's. It is a lot of what's going on now in the US, as exemplified by the Apple-Samsung case. We have somewhat reduced it to an ongoing series of jokes about patenting a rectangle with rounded corners. But it's a lot more pervasive than that. There was a cute offshoot of this humor yesterday on SMBC, based on the idea of lawyers in India filing suit against the Western computer industry, based on the fact that the number 0 was invented in India, and stolen by Western traders. (Actually, it was stolen by Arabian traders, but that's "Western" to people in India.;-)
We just had a cloudless day around here. I wonder how well cloud computing works on such days. How would parts of the cloud communicate with each other?
No no, you cannot put it into the same processor. That changes everything right there.
Heh. I have this image of millions of geeks hard at work writing patent applications for various Apple features, with the additional claim "on an ARM processor".
It was formerly thought impossible for a binary star system to have planets.
Well, on seeing the diagram of the system, my immediate thought was that with the two star s so close together, it doesn't seem likely that any planets in the "habitable" zone would be able to tell that there are two suns. Even the closer-in planet would just think that it's orbiting a single big mass down at the center. Could a pair of stars so close together (and one of them so small) actually have any effects that are measurably different from a single star with the sum of their masses?
Of course, Newton himself observed that the planets don't actually revolve around the sun, but rather they orbit the barycenter (center of mass) of the entire solar system. He also determined that, in the case of our solar system, the barycenter is usually outside the sun, mostly due to Jupiter. So if double-star systems have problems with stable planetary orbits, you'd think that our system would also have similar problems.
in the case of Kepler-47, it seems likely that the barycenter is always inside the larger star. Does anyone know whether this is true? If so, the "unbalanced" mass in our system may have a bigger effect than the second (tiny) star in Kepler-47.
It may just be a matter of time until some legislature deals with the problem by banning sea level rises in its jurisdiction.;-)
There is supposedly precedent for this approach. I've read a number of historical accounts of the Swiss town that had a glacier slowly approaching, back around 1850, so the town council passed an ordinance forbidding the entry of glaciers. This apparently worked, since the glacier stopped its advance and started slowly retreating. You can google "little ice age" for the actual explanation.
(I've long wondered whether this story is apocryphal, or historians have reliable documentation to support it.)
Slashdot Mirror
One of the things I like about Judaeism is the culture of examination of the texts. Kind of amusing though how they seem to spend a great deal of time finding loopholes.
This can work both ways. One of the more fun parts of the biblical dietary rules is that, while it's forbidden in general to eat invertebrates, there is a specific "loophole" listed in two places that allows eating Orthoptera (grasshoppers, locusts, etc.). What you do is ask someone who believes in such things whether they eat shrimp or crayfish or lobster. If they say they do, you ask if they eat grasshoppers or locusts or katydids. They'll probably look at you in disgust, and say "Of course not."
You then point out that they've violated biblical rules on both counts. This gives you ground to ridicule whatever other supposed biblical laws they may have been supporting. If they can't even get simple things like "shrimp forbidden; grasshoppers allowed" right, how credible can they be on anything else?
(Meanwhile, nutritionists have pointed out that insects are not just edible, but are a good source of easily-digested proteins. Humans don't eat them much, but this is probably mostly because they're rather small, and we're top-level predators adapted to catching much bigger game.)
The trouble is that most people mix up which of those two examples is doing the news and which is doing the "making shit up".
Yeah, an part of the fun is that both Fox and the Onion carefully maintain a public "face" as a serious news agency. OTOH, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert both repeatedly point out that they are professional comedians who work for Comedy Central. Part of their status of comedians is from stories like this one, in which people take their stories as fact despite their repeated disclaimers that they're comedians, not reporters. The Onion's and Fox's stories are also mistaken as straight news, although they have always been pure satire. There is a strong suspicion that the people at Fox aren't aware that they're writing satire. The people at The Onion are very conscious of this, and some of them have commented that the most difficult part of writing satire is that the Real World keeps producing extreme events that they wouldn't dared have written as satire.
Disclaimer: I have family ties to The Onion. My daughter was a staff reporter/photographer for them while she was a college student in Madison, and has lots of fun stories about the gang's inner workings. One of their favorite signs of "success" was someone repeating a story of theirs as fact. It seems they often do "fact checking", to verify that what they've written hasn't actually happened. I don't know whether they treat the folks at Fox as colleagues or subject matter. Maybe we should ask them. But they might take such a question as an opportunity for more satire. And on the third hand, if they say that they have friends working at Fox as satirical writers, we should probably assume that they've fact-checked and found it to be untrue, so it's proper "professional conduct" for them to report it as fact.
There's a lot of slippery logic involved in satire ...
Of course, you're right, the other stations are doing it too... and it's all terrible. That's why I get my news from Slashdot :|
And you're probably correct to do so. As with the Daily Show, the Colbert Report and The Onion, Slashdot can be taken as a good source of interesting news stories. You can then google them and find a number of sources that report the actual stories with various slants. This may well be why the pollsters have found that the people who follow Stewart and Colbert are among the best-informed voters. I wouldn't be surprised if a poll showed that /. readers are among the best-informed in tech subjects, but I wouldn't infer that it's because they get their information here. Everyone here knows about google, right? Right? Hmmm ....
Another similar source of good news stories/tipoffs is NPR's "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me" program (which I'm right now hearing on the radio). They're basically a comedy show based on real news, but part of what they do it tell made-up stories, and challenge people to distinguish them from true stories. They've also had the fun of hearing their fake news stories repeated as fact. I don't think the pollsters have included them in their poll questions, but it wouldn't be surprising if their listeners would come up as among the best-informed. Their humor is similar to the Stewart/Colbert/Onion approach to news, though in a slightly different format, and they're likely to attract an audience that knows enough to appreciate their very topical humor.
Do you know how hard it is to get parrot shit out of clothes????
Yeah; it's quite easy. ;-)
Due to my wife's allergies to most furry critters (luckily not including me), we've long had pet birds, mostly various sorts of parrots. The little darlings are always landing on our shoulders and leaving their calling cards. If we notice right away, we pick it off with a bit of tissue paper, which most bird owners have strategically scattered around their house. If we don't notice, and it dries, a quick brushing with a damp sponge usually removes all signs it was there. No need for detergent (though I'd still advise it in washing, to remove the human sweat and other contaminants).
Of course, this sorta ruins the joke, which I LOL'd at. Bird owners are always looking around for good bird-shit jokes. Some time back, I was playing music at an event, with a pick-up band. Suddenly one of the musicians, a fiddler that I didn't know, said "Hey, I see you have a cockatiel, too!" She could even identify the species that left the little marking. We both laughed, and went back to playing music.
The explanation is straightforward. We mammals have digestive systems that try to extract maximum nutrition from our food, because to our ancestors, that was cheaper than going out and hunting for food more often. This leads to a long process that involves many bacteria, in a low-oxygen environment, and the result is familiar to us all. But birds have a strong need to conserve weight. So their digestive systems are short and fast, extracting the most digestible stuff for flight fuel, and quickly reaching the point that it takes more energy to fly the food around than it contains. At that point, typically only a few hours after eating, the bird dumps the rest, which still contains lots of nutrients (and is very good plant food), but hasn't had time for bacteria to use up the oxygen and turn it into a stinky mess.
If bird droppings were like our output, we probably wouldn't have them at pets. But bird shit is fairly innocuous stuff that's highly water soluble, and birds tend to drop most of it beneath only a few favorite perches, so it's easy to clean up after them.
OTOH, there's that Far Side cartoon of a bird's view of the world, looking down at a city street scene in which everything has a bullseye painted on its top.
[Yeah, I know; facts, facts, facts, ... boring. ;-]
I'm pretty sure, the last time I looked, the UK was still considered part of Europe ;)
Not by the French. ;-)
Where, exactly, do you propose that an iOS6 user download this alleged Google Maps app from?
Well, someone else already suggested firing up Safari and typing "maps.google.com" to it. Various people have commented that this is somewhat better than the google-maps app on earlier iPhones. I haven't compared them myself, and I'd suspect that this might depend on just what you're trying to do with it. But I use Safari on this Macbook Pro a lot to visit maps.google.com, and I can tell that it's noticeably better than the "Maps" app on my wife's iPhone 4 - or the one on my Android phone. So I wouldn't be surprised if maps.google.com inside any random browser turns out better than the specialized Apple Maps app (or the Google Maps app, when it's available).
Sometimes specialized apps merely duplicate something available via the Web, but are built as standalone apps to maintain the "walled garden". Theoretically, a specialized app should be smaller and/or faster than a web site, but this is often not true. They do tend to have their own variant of the UI, which can mean relearning something that a browser can make similar everywhere. Anyway, it might be interesting to read comparisons among the various "maps" apps and what can be done with the various map web sites.
I actually use my (Android) phone more for the maps and the browser than I use it as a phone. I consider it more a portable email, Web and GPS mapping tool that can also make phone calls. But YMMV, I guess.
Jimmy Kimmel has a good illustration of how successful Apple's marketing has been for the iPhone 5.
Except most of the "wire" in screening isn't actually wire anymore, it's stranded synthetics with a vinyl coating.
Yeah, we just discovered this in the window screens that were installed in an enclosed porch that we had built recently. One day we had a window open, with the screen keeping the bugs out, and we left the porch for a while with some food sitting on a small table. When we went back to the porch, we saw a squirrel dashing back through the gash it had torn in the "screen" to get at the food.
Now we have a new project, of finding a real screen that will keep those cute little critters out the way we thought the fake screens would. But it's not easy to get an honest answer about the materials in screens. The folks at the hardware stores (and the dealers' web sites) will tell you whatever they think will make the sale, knowing full well that it won't be worth your while to sue them over such a small purchase.
Every programmer will get to the point where they don't want to programmers anymore. They start to see how monkey-like programming as a profession is. Then they want to be designers, those who actually need to think of the bigger picture than just putting together basic pieces of code in Visual Studio.
This sounds like something from the 90's when most people were still thinking that the waterfall model works. Do people still think that code monkeys just write code according to some UML and flow diagrams that designers have drawn. ...
Actually, that attitude goes back to the earliest days of programming languages. Back in the 1950s, the first "higher-level" languages were developed, Fortran (for techies) and Cobol (for business folks). If you dig up the early wide-eyed announcements for either language, you'll find widespread claims that they would "end the need for programming", which at the time meant what we call assembly or machine language. They did no such thing, of course; they merely introduced new programming languages that solved some of the problems with the previous languages, but did little to alleviate the more general problems.
The "Visual" approach mentioned by the OP was just one in a long chain of such attempts to eliminate the need for programming, by introducing yet another programming language that solved a few low-level problems in previous software-development schemes. It also failed to eliminate the need for programming, as you can easily see by trying to use some of the balky, buggy products built using that software.
The idea that we can end the need for programming is best understood as a marketing technique, to sell yet another "solution" to whatever its designers saw as the problems with programming. At best, such things can somewhat simplify a few parts of the task that the designers were consciously aware of. So far, there's little evidence that such tools can do more than "move the problems to a higher level". But don't worry; we haven't seen the end of such claimed panaceas. Marketers will continue to tout their "solution" to programming as long as people continue to pay attention (and money) to the people making such claims.
There's something else that's a significant barrier for most people: Pretty much every successful programmer will tell you about their first lesson when trying to write some small programs, and their discovery that no matter how hard they tried, their first efforts always had bugs. They quickly discovered that this was a permanent part of programming, accepted it, and studied debugging techniques.
But most people can't get past this problem, because they can't admit to themselves that they will never be able to write a significant chunk of code without error. The good programmers are the people who can admit that they're hopelessly fallible, face the fact, and learn how to deal with it.
Also, the good programmers tend to have a sense of humor about it all. One explanation I heard years ago from someone who was a very good programmer is that programming is actually a sort of computer game. The way the scoring works is that, every time you write something and the computer does what you wanted it to do, you get a point. But when something inside one of the many libraries in the computer finds a way to interpret something you wrote in a way that's different than what you expected, the programmer who wrote that chunk of code gets a point. A good programmer is one who can maintain a score that is usually positive in this game.
Using this understanding, one way of explaining why I and many other programmers like unix-type systems is that we can usually win at the programming game. Things in such systems tend to (mostly) work the way the documentation says they work -- and the documentation exists. I've worked on a lot of other kinds of computer systems, and on all the others, I constantly lose points to things that work differently than I expected, but often what I expected was just a guess, because the documentation is so sketchy or 17 releases out of date ;-).
Even this sort of humor is just an acknowledgement of the fact that the deck is stacked against us, we'll never get it right the first try, and the people who built the computers systems we're using like it that way. But I was willing to face my limitations in the face of a game that's biased against me from the start and has grown to be so complex that I know I can't keep track of all the gotchas in my conscious mind. Most people can't admit their own fallibility in this way, so they will never be good programmers.
I find it amusing how a phone cannot be a phone. No no, it has to have that same icon hell we have on desktop computers. Because without icons, we absolutely can. not. make. calls. Or take pics, or browse the net, or play music.
Heh. In another forum, I recently read a discussion started by an article about the history of humanity's various writing systems. It explained that all of them started with pictorial symbols, that quickly got used in a "rebus" fashion to represent words sounding like the names of the things pictured. Then, with time, the symbols got reduced, typically to represent only the initial syllables, then finally single phonemes. The main exception is Chinese writing, which for historical reasons got stuck in the pictograph transitioning to syllabic stage (with "artistic" development of the symbols that has left them no longer very pictorial ;-). It's clear that alphabetic writing is superior in all respects to pictorial writing. But the computer industry has recently "progressed" backwards to an awkward pictographic stage, masked by calling them "icons" rather than "pictographs".
What we can probably expect is a near-future generation that only understands the icons, and is unable to use a keyboard. As the keyboard is lost, input will probably be with software that understands coarse finger-drawn icons, and then most users will be able to dispense with keyboard-style (i.e, alphabetic) input entirely. The general public will then be back to the stage of the earliest writings from several thousands of years ago. We already see the rebus-like developments in things like use of '2' for "too", '4' for "four", 'u' for "you", and so on, which will progress rapidly when writing icons with a finger on the screen becomes practical and icons can be easily included in messages.
Then, after a few more thousand years, computer systems will slowly develop an amazing new, more efficient input system that uses only a small set of a few dozen symbols that represent phonemes in the spoken language. This will be widely viewed as a huge advance in computer usability, especially since it will replace slowly drawing icons with efficient single touches to a small array of these new "letter" symbols.
Stick around for a few thousand years, and see if this prediction comes true or not ...
One day soon, [the US] is going to get its economic arse kicked by poor brown people...
Don't look now, but it has already happened. The economic recession in the US over the past few years was in great part triggered by the fact that so much manufacturing has moved to third-world countries with much lower wages. The US no longer actually builds much of anything; it just imports things and tries to sell them as cheaply as possible to people who more and more don't have jobs or have low-wage jobs. All the political posturing aside, this isn't being fixed by the US's "system".
The iPhone most other Apple products are poster children for this phenomenon. They're all made in Asia. Yes, the design was is great part done in the US, but that only employs a small number of people. The people actually making the hardware all "poor brown people". Or yellow people, if you prefer.
An obvious prediction is that the current topic is talking about what may be the follow-on products to Apple's vaunted phones, which will do well because it sells well to the growing American lower classes.
You're conflating two kinds of law: human law can be broken, laws of nature can't.
Actually, this is one of the examples that has been used to support what linguists call the "Sapir-Whorf hypothesis" (or Whorfianism for short). This is the idea that your language has either influence (in the "weak form") or control (in the "strong form") over your cognitive abilities, your beliefs, and your behavior.
There are languages that use different words for these two concepts, and the fun part of this linguistic analysis is that, while statements such as "The universe obeys laws, and if there are laws, there must be a law-giver, which we call God" can be translated into such languages, the results doesn't make sense. But a native speaker of a language such as English which conflatest the two concepts is likely to accept such statements as logical and valid.
It isn't all that hard to explain the situation in English, though, at least to someone able to follow basic mathematical-style reasoning. We just define two marked versions of the word, for example:
Llaw (legal law): A statement of what people should or shouldn't do. Nlaw (natural law): A statement of how something in the physical universe works.I've also seen it described as: Llaws describe what what we think should happen; Nlaws describe what actually does happen. But English uses the same word for both.
The above proof-of-God argument now may be rewritten as "The universe obeys Nlaws, and if there are Nlaws, there must be a Llaw-giver, which we call God" . This replicates the problem of translating into languages that use different words for the two concepts.
For people who can't follow that, we might further comment on the reaction when we discover someone violating a Llaw. They are typically arrested, tried, and punished for the violation. In the case of something found violating an NLaw, however, we react by deciding that the Nlaw was wrong, and finding a way to revise it so that the new observation is "legal".
For example, suppose we observe a violation of the Nlaw of Gravity. Would we react by punishing the object that was doing it? Probably not; we'd more likely study it and learn to build an anti-gravity drive. But suppose we observed someone committing a murder. Would we say "Hmmm; it looks like murder isn't against the Llaw after all; how can we rewrite it so that this murder becomes legal?"
If someone can't handle the logic of this, they're probably hopeless. Or maybe they can be used as a real-life example of the Whorfianism at work. ;-)
In any case, the serious suggestion that the existence of natural laws proves the existence of a god or gods is a classical example of what amounts to a pun in English (and French and German, and dates back to Latin) that has historically been viewed as a valid argument for an ultimate creator and law-giver. It's easy to argue in this case that a bug in the language has had a strong influence on the concepts and beliefs of at least some speakers of that language.
And the existence of explanations like the above is a counter-argument that, with a bit of thought, people can understand and resist this sort of trick, counteracting the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in at least one case.
Then in the afterlife when you find out you're going to burn in hell for eternity, don't say I didn't tell you so.
Except that the real problem is that we have so many religions that have their own models of heaven and hell, all of them incompatible, with no evidence to tell us which one to believe. So even if we pick one, there's a chance approaching certainty that we chose the wrong one, and we're doomed anyway.
And it's possible that all our religious leaders got the details wrong. It'll turn out that when we die, we'll face a god, and find that She hates all creatures with only two legs and no exoskeleton.
So we're better off picking one of the gods that just wants us to live a good life. Then, when it turns out we were wrong, at least we'll have had a few years of life as an independent, thinking creature. And if we do have to face whatever actual god exists, we'll have good grounds for condemning it to its face for denying us the facts we needed to make the right choice.
"Race" would be the more accurate word.
Not really, because that term has too many emotional/political/social connotations, and is routinely misused in common speech. Biologists mostly use the term "subspecies", which is a synonym without the connotations.
"A species is often defined as a group of organisms capable of interbreeding and producing fertile offspring."
That's often the first definition given in textbooks, followed by explanations of why it's not a very good definition due to its fuzziness. Thus, one of the common textbook examples discusses wolves, jackals and domestic dogs. Our pet dogs can interbreed with both wolves and jackals, so they're all one species, right? Except that wolves and jackals can't interbreed (or at least don't produce healthy, fertile hybrids), so they're different species. There are many examples like this.
A common rephrasing that works better is "Populations are the same species if they can and do interbreed in their natural habitat". Wolves, jackals and domestic dogs don't naturally interbreed, mostly because their ranges don't overlap. Wolves are northern, temperate-zone forest creatures, while jackals are primarily tropical and subtropical, and prefer more open landscapes. The "natural habitat" of the domestic dog, of course, is in the vicinity of human habitation, which wolves and jackals avoid due to the powerful predator there that likes to kill them. So wolves, jackals and dogs are classified as separate species due to habitat specilization, despite the fact that we can capture them, interbreed them, and (if one of the pair is a domestic dog) the offspring are viable.
That second definition is also somewhat fuzzy, of course, but biologists tend to just shrug and say that nature can't be pigeonholed the way we might like. "Species" is a very useful concept, but you have to understand its problems.
No; you're missing the meaning of the term "star". This word refers solely to how well known someone is. It has little (if anything) to do with actual talent. Rihanna is a star simply because she's well known. That's mostly the result of marketing.
The term "rock star", when used as a metaphor, is basically an insult. It means that the name is known to the people walking into most of the customers at retail computer outlets like Walmart and the Apple Store. Being know to the readers of /. doesn't qualify you for the term, just as being known to the denizens of the local indie record story doesn't qualify you as a "rock star", no matter how good you may be.
The guy selling the only accepted fart apps is the App Store Director:
Of course! That explains it. ;-)
Yeah, somehow when an incoming object explodes and injures or kills a bunch of people (or worse, destroys property ;-), it seems to be difficult to keep the fact secret. The friends and relatives of the victims have a way of noticing the event, and it's hard to prevent them from talking about it.
Begley's content is 'objectionable and crude' ... 'many audiences would find [it] objectionable."
It's, uh, "interesting" to read of this description being used while Apple's App Store sells the iFart app.
Or maybe they really haven't received any complaints about iFart. Ya think?
(And is it available for Android yet?)
Google should name their next Android release "Apple Pie."
Then anyone using the number pi would be infringing, right?
But I can loathe a company that tries to stop competition with frivolous lawsuits, that copies everything and patents the most obvious stuff to stop others doing the same, blocking innovation the same way James Watt's patents blocked the evolution of the steam engine for 30 years.
It's interesting to read comments pointing out what assorted historians have been saying for a long time: The primary use of patent laws has always been to block technical progress. We keep hearing the propaganda (enshrined in the US Constitution, among other places), that patent law is to encourage progress. But the historical evidence is contrary to this.
The only actual use of a patent to to prevent your competitors from using something. Yes, you can use it to extract royalties, but this is just an indirect way of making the products more expensive, and thus interfering with competitors' development and sales.
But more important than price is the effect of multiple patents. The historians' explanation of Watts' delay of the steam locomotive is that a practical locomotive required a number of other inventions in addition to Watt's efficient steam engine. But Watt and several other inventors each wanted to own it all, and refused to license their inventions to each other unless they each got the lion's share of the results. They pretty much all held out until their patents expired. Then, since Watt had the largest bunch of good engineers working for him, he was able to quickly start manufacturing and selling practical locomotives. He became rather wealthy late in life, but could have become rich decades earlier if he and the other inventors hadn't been so greedy, and had agreed to share the proceeds in a reasonable manner.
Part of the history is also the patenting of well-known ideas. But that's a different story from Watt's. It is a lot of what's going on now in the US, as exemplified by the Apple-Samsung case. We have somewhat reduced it to an ongoing series of jokes about patenting a rectangle with rounded corners. But it's a lot more pervasive than that. There was a cute offshoot of this humor yesterday on SMBC, based on the idea of lawyers in India filing suit against the Western computer industry, based on the fact that the number 0 was invented in India, and stolen by Western traders. (Actually, it was stolen by Arabian traders, but that's "Western" to people in India. ;-)
We just had a cloudless day around here. I wonder how well cloud computing works on such days. How would parts of the cloud communicate with each other?
No no, you cannot put it into the same processor. That changes everything right there.
Heh. I have this image of millions of geeks hard at work writing patent applications for various Apple features, with the additional claim "on an ARM processor".
It was formerly thought impossible for a binary star system to have planets.
Well, on seeing the diagram of the system, my immediate thought was that with the two star s so close together, it doesn't seem likely that any planets in the "habitable" zone would be able to tell that there are two suns. Even the closer-in planet would just think that it's orbiting a single big mass down at the center. Could a pair of stars so close together (and one of them so small) actually have any effects that are measurably different from a single star with the sum of their masses?
Of course, Newton himself observed that the planets don't actually revolve around the sun, but rather they orbit the barycenter (center of mass) of the entire solar system. He also determined that, in the case of our solar system, the barycenter is usually outside the sun, mostly due to Jupiter. So if double-star systems have problems with stable planetary orbits, you'd think that our system would also have similar problems.
in the case of Kepler-47, it seems likely that the barycenter is always inside the larger star. Does anyone know whether this is true? If so, the "unbalanced" mass in our system may have a bigger effect than the second (tiny) star in Kepler-47.
It may just be a matter of time until some legislature deals with the problem by banning sea level rises in its jurisdiction. ;-)
There is supposedly precedent for this approach. I've read a number of historical accounts of the Swiss town that had a glacier slowly approaching, back around 1850, so the town council passed an ordinance forbidding the entry of glaciers. This apparently worked, since the glacier stopped its advance and started slowly retreating. You can google "little ice age" for the actual explanation.
(I've long wondered whether this story is apocryphal, or historians have reliable documentation to support it.)
A good summary might be that people who say "quantum jump" usually know what it means, while those who say "quantum leap" don't.