Actually, dumping aerogel (silica or carbon) in Diet Coke doesn't really do much, since (a) it floats really well, and (b) it doesn't wet very well. You just end up with aerogel bit on top of the diet Coke.
This isn't conjecture, I have plenty of aerogel to experiment with at the office (like this piece, for example). If I can grab a digital camera, I'll see if I can get a shot of some aerogel bits just sitting on some Diet Coke.
The other bit to remember, at least when purchasing from the Apple Store US online, is that you have to pay local sales tax (6-9% on average depending on locality) if Apple has a physical presence in the state you're purchasing in. That includes almost all if not all 50 states.
Hmmm... We have an Apple Store in my state. And we don't pay sales tax. Because my state is one of several that doesn't have sales tax...
Well, the kids I work with certainly do, at least some of them.
Right now, I'm working with two kids that are capable of writing their own C code for use on PIC16 and PIC18 microcontrollers, optimizing routines to minimize memory footprint and excecution speed, and know the C language fairly well. They also understand basic algorithms and concepts like PID controllers, event loops, and interrupt routines. Yeah, most of the hardware and software tools are pretty advanced compared to what I had to work with at their age (in my case, spending my spare time with sector editors and assembly manuals defeating copy protection on Apple II games...), but I'm rather impressed with what they are able to do. They know how to do basic hardware hacking and soldering. Most importantly, they already know how to think like programmers.
Granted, I'm the programming mentor for a FIRST Robotics Team, so I'm only working with the kids that already have an interest in Robotics, but I'm generally impressed with what these students can do.
And, considering that every time I go to a competition there's usually half a basketball arena's seating worth of other kids that are interested in robots (each of which is interested in either the mechanical, electrical, or programming aspects of a robot), I'm actually not all that fearful for our future.
As a two-time contestant at finals myself, I'll split the difference between the two of you. Both times I went the problem set contained a fairly even mix:
1. Problems with obvious good solution algorithms that were easy to code (and everyone got these)
2. Problems that took careful inspect to find a non-exponential brute-force algorithm that were easy to code once you figured this out. (Most teams got these towards the end of the contest)
3. Problems with fairly obvious solutions that were challenging to code.
4. Problems that appeared to be trivial, except for exceptional input data which the judging team always used as their case (I recall a few where the sample data was designed to see if you were looking for divide by zero)
If I was at the office, I could even pull down the old problem sets and our team's solutions.
All in all, I rather liked it, since it taught you to think out things before coding them (but quickly), and think of efficient solutions over brute force approaches.
It's hard for some of you to realize that the options you take for granted simply don't exist, and won't exist for some areas.
I have this problem, too. A lot of my geek visitor friends visit my house in semi-rural NH, and complain loudly that I don't have broadband. Then I go down to my office, and pull out the file with my email from Verizon stating that DSL will be available in my town "in 2012, but we may roll out services as early as 2010", and the letter from Adelphia cable stating that to string cable to my house from the neighbor 0.1 miles away will cost $2900. That's why I (and a significant fraction of my town of around 4000) don't have broadband (I keep toying with the idea of satellite, but that latency issue is annoying). My best bet is to find one of the neighbors with broadband whose house I could get line-of-sight to if I do the lumberjack thing and set up point-to-point 802.11g.
So yes, I have 56K. And while it's no picnic after the 4 mbit/s DSL line I used to have, I seem to survive fine. At some point I can easily see save trips to the office, etc, making that $2900 for cable looking better, but that point isn't here yet. I don't have a cell phone either (no reliable service in my area), but I actually seem to prefer life without a cell phone.
So does that put me in the "not available" camp or the "too expensive" camp?
David Bassett died? Terribly sorry to hear that, he was one of the coolest teachers I ever met (I never had him, I knew him from the Science Museum and some Minneapolis teacher workshops that I helped at).
More on topic, I remember seeing the launch, since they made about half of my junior high (all that would fit in the auditorium) watch it live as part of the whole Teacher in Space thing. After about 10 minutes of everying being basically stunned and traumatized, they shut the TVs off and tried to distract us.
I guess WalMart never explained how their "mapping" algorithm works.
I'm curious, since I've found that similar algorithms sometimes can be easily manipulated, often for entertaining results
For example, Amazon has a "customers who viewed this item also viewed" feature, that I've found was fairly easy to manipulate in the past, simply by doing things such as spending 5 minutes looking at pages for various Sesame Street toys, and then spending 5 minutes looking at pages for various risque titles over in books. It wasn't long before I got it to say
'Customers who views this item ("Ernie Plush Doll 11" Sesame Street Doll by Gund") also viewed: "Homoeroticism in the Bible: A historical perspective" and "Obscenity, Child Pornography and Indecency"'
Obviously someone paid attention, since I don't seem to be able to do this very well anymore (they seem to adjust their scoring so that one person can't skew it, and that it's more likely to show items from the same part of Amazon).
I remember the Rubik's Cube from first time around. I knew a few different "complete solutions" -- depending on the initial state, one might be significantly faster than the others. I rarely needed longer than a minute.
I never managed to get much faster than two minutes, since I could only easily think a few moves ahead; most of the people I know that are much faster than me pretty much have the whole series of moves figured out in their head right away.
Still, I had to prove to my coworkers a few weeks ago that I could solve the Cube. 3 minutes, so I'm not that rusty.
Then again, in college my roommate and I had an entire shelf of weird puzzles and brain teasers, and we'd practice for speed, so I got pretty good at this sort of thing. My favorite was the Square-1, which looks a lot more intimdating than the Rubik's cube, but is actually a lot simpler, especially if you are good at getting the thing back into it's cube shape
I used to do consulting work installing and maintaining firewalls, and one of my clients insisted, over my objections, on having so many port forwards through his firewall that it was mostly worthless. Oddly, he never questioned my naming the firewall host "maginot." I suppose if he knew what that meant, he might not have continued paying me.
I asked them (SBC) when the CO is going to be updated. Their answer: They have no plans to upgrade that CO.
I have a similar situation here (semi-rural NH). No DSL. Verizon is proud of the fact that they have plans to upgrade the entire state to DSL. My town is scheduled for 2012.
Cable I can have, if I pay them to run the cable from my neighbor 1/4 mile away. At $18,000/mile installation (no, I'm not kidding). T1 runs around $1200/month.
So it's been dialup for me, with the occasional wireless when I'm in town with the laptop, and sneakernet from work.
But the crux of the matter is, that us rural and semi-rural customers are low-priority, and unless economic or legal incentives occur, it's going to stay that way. So I try not to get to worked up about it.
For A and B, the contrast/resolution may not be enough to detect the smallest droplets of yellow ink.
I did a quick test with some of my images and my HP 3700N printer. Technique A (CMYK separation) works very well, actually, even at fairly poor resolution (the dots are actually pretty big). Technique B is very noisy, but workable as well.
Now, to print a bunch of the same image at different times on two different printers to see if I can figure out the code (it's not the docucolor one).
It may be awhile before Wikipedia gets the level of respect that it deserves.
Or before Wikipedia deserves the level of respect that it gets. It's a work in progress (and an impressive one at that), but it's not a definite source. Despite that, many (most?) online communities treat it more like the latter than the former.
there are plenty of other detractors who are going to continue to hammer it for their own reasons. Those people include subject matter experts who will take exception to the way information is presented, either because it isn't written authoritatively or is factually incorrect,
Yeah, those subject matter experts are picky, aren't they, expecting an "encyclopedia" to be accurate? This is a valid criticism, as incorrect information presented as factual is often much worse than no information at all, or information presented as opinion or speculation.
but as more factually correct entries are secured in the repository then subject matter experts will warm to the idea of easily-accessible information.
Indeed, you seem to note that it needs more factually correct entries yourself.
And before you start flaming, I do, in fact, contribute to Wikipedia, and enjoy doing so. And I'm constantly impressed on how well it self-polices, and how willing people are to contribute.
But I'm also appalled at some of the terribly incorrect pages that are present, and that's just on pages discussing topics on which I'm knowledgable. I'm very hesitant to use it in the manner that an encyclopedia is most useful: instructing me on something that's outside my knowlege.
Well, for one I am. It's the only decent time of day to be outside around here. Why, at 0400-0600 (the two hours on either side of sunrise) the temperature sometimes gets down into the 80F range.
As someone who grew up in AZ, I always went the other day. I loved going out with my friends after work in the summer: it was around 80 degrees, dry, and a nice cool breeze most of all the time. It was also 11:30 at night.
I participated in the southern regional ACM programming contest. GaTech won with Florida coming in second. The questions are extremely hard. We solved one problem. They give you 5 lines of test data but when the judges test it they will use hundreds of lines of test data. Not only must your program be correct it must also be fast (less than 3 minutes)
That's what I liked about the programming contest (I was on Michigan State University's team in '92 and '94, going on to the Finals in '94). Virtually every problem they gave us in either regional or at Finals I could code up a solution for in under 10 minutes---if I was going to brute-force it. For most of the problems, the difficulty was to code it in an efficient (speed, memory, or both) manner, and that's what they were really testing.
For example: given a random set of N pairs of integers (coordinate pairs), give the largest number of points that are colinear. Incredibly trivial to write as a brute force (N^2 algorithm, compare each point to every other point), but takes some understanding to do it more efficiently (N log N). Of course, the judges gave you a huge point set and a strict execution time limit that showed that you found the efficient algorithm.
(This was Problem A from the 1994 East Central Regional)
Rarely, they were tricky in another manner (the example I can think of was coordinate determination by triangularization, and the test set made sure you could watch for divide-by-zero problems in your math and change the coordinate system to accomodate).
Where's the "treating like criminals" part, exactly? Since when is showing your ID punative in some way? I have to show my ID when I travel to other places in the world, and I don't feel like a criminal at all. I supposed it's possible that criminals might feel like criminals, though. Gosh, that would suck.
Note that it's not just showing ID in my case, I show them my bonafide US Citizen credentials. I also have to tell them where I've been, where I'm going, and what I was doing, or put up with a lot of inconvenience.
To answer your previous comment, this really concerns me because of the slippery slope. I don't really mind heavy border security, but when the definition of "border" gets extended to 100 miles (with a major intersection with another Interstate between the border and the checkpoint), I get concerned, because the same rationale they used to extend it to 100 miles can be used to extend it further (hey, people can fly from Canada to airports all over the US, we should be able to check peoples' papers anywhere!). And I'm also concerned that after showing valid ID, they still get to ask me all sorts of questions that I'm compelled to answer.
And, scarily, most people don't seem to mind. Myself, I get a little irritated when my civil liberties are put on the back burner behind convenience for a Border Patrol that isn't patroling borders...
Shouldn't be too long before interstate travel in the US requires a passport.
Sometimes I think that this might actually happen.
Consider this: on one of my regular drives, it's not unusual for me to be pulled over, asked for identification, where I was coming from, and where I'm headed to, and if the officer doesn't like my answers (or I decline to answer), I get to wait until they've checked my ID and vehicle information over.
Seriously, having my US Passport is handy (and I'm about as honky-appearing as they come, I feel sorry for the foreign-appearing folks around here)
Where does this happen? No, this isn't the desert Southwest. This is Interstate 91 in Vermont, 100 miles from the US-Canada border.
But really, with all the gee whiz about this stuff, Google has totally missed two very important things:
I'm not that picky. I'd like them to work on some of the more important things, like actually being able to look up addresses near my home. Google can't seem to map addresses in/near Grantham, NH, at all, which is odd, since I know that the upstream NavTEQ and TeleAtlas databases have the data.
I hated it, since I a bunch of them in my department I was respsonsible for. Two main reasons: (1) The butterfly mechanism was somewhat fragile, and (2) any PCMCIA peripherals that stuck out from the slot (network adapaters in particular) couldn't stick up even the slightest bit from the slot, or the butterfly action and the PCMCIA device interfered.
Slashdot Mirror
This isn't conjecture, I have plenty of aerogel to experiment with at the office (like this piece, for example). If I can grab a digital camera, I'll see if I can get a shot of some aerogel bits just sitting on some Diet Coke.
Bah! Weak and puny, compared to some of my early Slackware installs.
Hmmm... We have an Apple Store in my state. And we don't pay sales tax. Because my state is one of several that doesn't have sales tax...
Well, the kids I work with certainly do, at least some of them.
Right now, I'm working with two kids that are capable of writing their own C code for use on PIC16 and PIC18 microcontrollers, optimizing routines to minimize memory footprint and excecution speed, and know the C language fairly well. They also understand basic algorithms and concepts like PID controllers, event loops, and interrupt routines. Yeah, most of the hardware and software tools are pretty advanced compared to what I had to work with at their age (in my case, spending my spare time with sector editors and assembly manuals defeating copy protection on Apple II games...), but I'm rather impressed with what they are able to do. They know how to do basic hardware hacking and soldering. Most importantly, they already know how to think like programmers.
Granted, I'm the programming mentor for a FIRST Robotics Team, so I'm only working with the kids that already have an interest in Robotics, but I'm generally impressed with what these students can do.
And, considering that every time I go to a competition there's usually half a basketball arena's seating worth of other kids that are interested in robots (each of which is interested in either the mechanical, electrical, or programming aspects of a robot), I'm actually not all that fearful for our future.
As a two-time contestant at finals myself, I'll split the difference between the two of you. Both times I went the problem set contained a fairly even mix:
1. Problems with obvious good solution algorithms that were easy to code (and everyone got these)
2. Problems that took careful inspect to find a non-exponential brute-force algorithm that were easy to code once you figured this out. (Most teams got these towards the end of the contest)
3. Problems with fairly obvious solutions that were challenging to code.
4. Problems that appeared to be trivial, except for exceptional input data which the judging team always used as their case (I recall a few where the sample data was designed to see if you were looking for divide by zero)
If I was at the office, I could even pull down the old problem sets and our team's solutions.
All in all, I rather liked it, since it taught you to think out things before coding them (but quickly), and think of efficient solutions over brute force approaches.
I used to regularly work in a lab where I walked right by a Cray-2 with the Fluorinert waterfall. Pointless, but cool looking.
It's what we upgraded to from Banyan VINES.
That's one of the fringe benefits of having a house that I heat with a wood stove.
That runway wasn't very long, but it sure was wide...
I have this problem, too. A lot of my geek visitor friends visit my house in semi-rural NH, and complain loudly that I don't have broadband. Then I go down to my office, and pull out the file with my email from Verizon stating that DSL will be available in my town "in 2012, but we may roll out services as early as 2010", and the letter from Adelphia cable stating that to string cable to my house from the neighbor 0.1 miles away will cost $2900. That's why I (and a significant fraction of my town of around 4000) don't have broadband (I keep toying with the idea of satellite, but that latency issue is annoying). My best bet is to find one of the neighbors with broadband whose house I could get line-of-sight to if I do the lumberjack thing and set up point-to-point 802.11g.
So yes, I have 56K. And while it's no picnic after the 4 mbit/s DSL line I used to have, I seem to survive fine. At some point I can easily see save trips to the office, etc, making that $2900 for cable looking better, but that point isn't here yet. I don't have a cell phone either (no reliable service in my area), but I actually seem to prefer life without a cell phone.
So does that put me in the "not available" camp or the "too expensive" camp?
More on topic, I remember seeing the launch, since they made about half of my junior high (all that would fit in the auditorium) watch it live as part of the whole Teacher in Space thing. After about 10 minutes of everying being basically stunned and traumatized, they shut the TVs off and tried to distract us.
I'm curious, since I've found that similar algorithms sometimes can be easily manipulated, often for entertaining results
For example, Amazon has a "customers who viewed this item also viewed" feature, that I've found was fairly easy to manipulate in the past, simply by doing things such as spending 5 minutes looking at pages for various Sesame Street toys, and then spending 5 minutes looking at pages for various risque titles over in books. It wasn't long before I got it to say
'Customers who views this item ("Ernie Plush Doll 11" Sesame Street Doll by Gund") also viewed: "Homoeroticism in the Bible: A historical perspective" and "Obscenity, Child Pornography and Indecency"'
Obviously someone paid attention, since I don't seem to be able to do this very well anymore (they seem to adjust their scoring so that one person can't skew it, and that it's more likely to show items from the same part of Amazon).
I never managed to get much faster than two minutes, since I could only easily think a few moves ahead; most of the people I know that are much faster than me pretty much have the whole series of moves figured out in their head right away.
Still, I had to prove to my coworkers a few weeks ago that I could solve the Cube. 3 minutes, so I'm not that rusty.
Then again, in college my roommate and I had an entire shelf of weird puzzles and brain teasers, and we'd practice for speed, so I got pretty good at this sort of thing. My favorite was the Square-1, which looks a lot more intimdating than the Rubik's cube, but is actually a lot simpler, especially if you are good at getting the thing back into it's cube shape
I used to do consulting work installing and maintaining firewalls, and one of my clients insisted, over my objections, on having so many port forwards through his firewall that it was mostly worthless. Oddly, he never questioned my naming the firewall host "maginot." I suppose if he knew what that meant, he might not have continued paying me.
I have a similar situation here (semi-rural NH). No DSL. Verizon is proud of the fact that they have plans to upgrade the entire state to DSL. My town is scheduled for 2012.
Cable I can have, if I pay them to run the cable from my neighbor 1/4 mile away. At $18,000/mile installation (no, I'm not kidding). T1 runs around $1200/month.
So it's been dialup for me, with the occasional wireless when I'm in town with the laptop, and sneakernet from work.
But the crux of the matter is, that us rural and semi-rural customers are low-priority, and unless economic or legal incentives occur, it's going to stay that way. So I try not to get to worked up about it.
I did a quick test with some of my images and my HP 3700N printer. Technique A (CMYK separation) works very well, actually, even at fairly poor resolution (the dots are actually pretty big). Technique B is very noisy, but workable as well.
Now, to print a bunch of the same image at different times on two different printers to see if I can figure out the code (it's not the docucolor one).
Sure beats the good old days walking around campus with the shoebox full of Slackware floppies.
Or before Wikipedia deserves the level of respect that it gets. It's a work in progress (and an impressive one at that), but it's not a definite source. Despite that, many (most?) online communities treat it more like the latter than the former.
there are plenty of other detractors who are going to continue to hammer it for their own reasons. Those people include subject matter experts who will take exception to the way information is presented, either because it isn't written authoritatively or is factually incorrect,
Yeah, those subject matter experts are picky, aren't they, expecting an "encyclopedia" to be accurate? This is a valid criticism, as incorrect information presented as factual is often much worse than no information at all, or information presented as opinion or speculation.
but as more factually correct entries are secured in the repository then subject matter experts will warm to the idea of easily-accessible information.
Indeed, you seem to note that it needs more factually correct entries yourself.
And before you start flaming, I do, in fact, contribute to Wikipedia, and enjoy doing so. And I'm constantly impressed on how well it self-polices, and how willing people are to contribute.
But I'm also appalled at some of the terribly incorrect pages that are present, and that's just on pages discussing topics on which I'm knowledgable. I'm very hesitant to use it in the manner that an encyclopedia is most useful: instructing me on something that's outside my knowlege.
Until your mom turns around and sues your ass for stealing her intellectual property rights.
As someone who grew up in AZ, I always went the other day. I loved going out with my friends after work in the summer: it was around 80 degrees, dry, and a nice cool breeze most of all the time. It was also 11:30 at night.
That's what I liked about the programming contest (I was on Michigan State University's team in '92 and '94, going on to the Finals in '94). Virtually every problem they gave us in either regional or at Finals I could code up a solution for in under 10 minutes---if I was going to brute-force it. For most of the problems, the difficulty was to code it in an efficient (speed, memory, or both) manner, and that's what they were really testing.
For example: given a random set of N pairs of integers (coordinate pairs), give the largest number of points that are colinear. Incredibly trivial to write as a brute force (N^2 algorithm, compare each point to every other point), but takes some understanding to do it more efficiently (N log N). Of course, the judges gave you a huge point set and a strict execution time limit that showed that you found the efficient algorithm.
(This was Problem A from the 1994 East Central Regional)
Rarely, they were tricky in another manner (the example I can think of was coordinate determination by triangularization, and the test set made sure you could watch for divide-by-zero problems in your math and change the coordinate system to accomodate).
Note that it's not just showing ID in my case, I show them my bonafide US Citizen credentials. I also have to tell them where I've been, where I'm going, and what I was doing, or put up with a lot of inconvenience.
To answer your previous comment, this really concerns me because of the slippery slope. I don't really mind heavy border security, but when the definition of "border" gets extended to 100 miles (with a major intersection with another Interstate between the border and the checkpoint), I get concerned, because the same rationale they used to extend it to 100 miles can be used to extend it further (hey, people can fly from Canada to airports all over the US, we should be able to check peoples' papers anywhere!). And I'm also concerned that after showing valid ID, they still get to ask me all sorts of questions that I'm compelled to answer.
And, scarily, most people don't seem to mind. Myself, I get a little irritated when my civil liberties are put on the back burner behind convenience for a Border Patrol that isn't patroling borders...
Sometimes I think that this might actually happen.
Consider this: on one of my regular drives, it's not unusual for me to be pulled over, asked for identification, where I was coming from, and where I'm headed to, and if the officer doesn't like my answers (or I decline to answer), I get to wait until they've checked my ID and vehicle information over.
Seriously, having my US Passport is handy (and I'm about as honky-appearing as they come, I feel sorry for the foreign-appearing folks around here)
Where does this happen? No, this isn't the desert Southwest. This is Interstate 91 in Vermont, 100 miles from the US-Canada border.
But really, with all the gee whiz about this stuff, Google has totally missed two very important things: I'm not that picky. I'd like them to work on some of the more important things, like actually being able to look up addresses near my home. Google can't seem to map addresses in/near Grantham, NH, at all, which is odd, since I know that the upstream NavTEQ and TeleAtlas databases have the data.
I hated it, since I a bunch of them in my department I was respsonsible for. Two main reasons: (1) The butterfly mechanism was somewhat fragile, and (2) any PCMCIA peripherals that stuck out from the slot (network adapaters in particular) couldn't stick up even the slightest bit from the slot, or the butterfly action and the PCMCIA device interfered.