It looks like James Webb was administor from 1961 to 1968, some very important years in spaceflight I'd say. The last moon walk was taken a year before I was born, so I don't have any direct experience with that era of space exploration. But I'm still amazed at how fast NASA moved from launching a satellite into orbit to putting men on the fricking moon and bringing them back safely. I wouldn't be surprised if this were in large part due to good leadership without which those accomplishments would have happened much slower and less successfully.
And if you want to name the telescope after a scientist, who are you going to choose? Many of the big names from centuries past are already taken: Galileo, Magellan, Ulysses. I don't know whether we've named any probes after Einstein or Newton, but they don't have all that much to do with JWST's mission. Are there other suitable scientists/explorers from the past? You can't really choose a living scientist -- for one thing modern science is produced much more by teams than by individual researchers. Maybe an administrator is an appropriate choice after all.
As the author of a couple popular open source programs, my advice is to start simple:
1) Write a working prototype. It won't have all of the features on your wish list, but it had better compile and run. You should have plenty of clear comments in the code too since you're expecting other eyes to see it.
2) Add the legalese for the license of your choice. The Gnu Public License is popular, but lately I've been using the BSD license. Definitely go with one of the available licenses rather than writing your own.
3) Make a Web page for your project. Include a description, example, screenshots, binaries (optional), and of course the code.
4) Announce the availability of your code. I used Freshmeat in the past. Paying a few tens of dollars a month for Google Adsense advertising might help get attention too.
That's all you need to start. If the project is good then you will attract users, some of whom will contribute bug reports, suggestions, or code. Grow from there.
I am a colon cancer patient myself, having been through surgery, radiation, immunotherapy, and three kinds of chemotherapy over the past three years. Last fall I was contacted by NIH about participating in a new trial to test customized vaccinations for metastatic colon cancer. The protocol is pretty scary. First they extract white cells from your blood stream. Second, they knock out your immune system with some nasty chemotherapy. Meanwhile in the lab they genetically modify the white cells to recognize your tumors. Finally, they reinject you with the modified cells to establish an immune system that will attack the cancer.
Ultimately I was rejected as a participant due to characteristics of my tumors. I was disappointed not to be able to receive a possibly miraculous treatment, but it was also a relief to avoid a nasty ordeal.
I am also watching with interest a different type of vaccination treatment. Researchers are vaccinating subjects against CEA, a common protein involved in colon cancer and other cancers. It's potentially much simpler, since the vaccination is against CEA in general rather than having to be customized for each patient.
One thing bothers me whenever people do calculations of the resolution of visual perception. They base it on some obscure fact about the limits of visual acuity. This article takes the value of 2 arcminutes and proceeds from there. But the calculation is very sensitive to that value and I don't trust the number I'm given, so I devised a test figure of my own.
The figure is a black background with a single white dot, a single-pixel line, two lines separated by one pixel, and two dots separated by one pixel.
I looked at the figure at 1:1 zoom on my 15-inch diagonal (13 x 8-inch rectangle) MacBook Pro LCD display under natural light. I have an uncorrected astigmatism and about 20/40 overall vision, so my results will be conservative relative to the supposed average vision.
I can detect the single dot at a distance of 9 feet for an acuity of 0.28 arcminutes. I can distinguish the paired dots at 3 feet (1.7 arcminutes). I can see the single line from the far side of my apartment 30 feet away (0.0015 arcminutes). And I can distinguish the pair of lines at 4 feet (1.3 arcminutes).
I've been doing some research on HDTVs and am about to buy a 32-inch 1080p LCD set. From 8 feet away the single pixel angle is 0.56 arcminutes; separated pixel pairs are 1.12 arcminutes. I should have no problem detecting single pixels, and line pairs will be just below my visual acuity.
I'm comfortable in the expectation that 1080p is a noticeable improvement over 720p and it is approaching the limit of my perception for distant viewing. Another factor in my decision is that most 720p sets are actually 1366 x 768 pixels. I am bothered by scaling artifacts on my laptop with non-native resolutions, so I think I'd notice such artifacts on a television too. It's true that actual 1080p or 1080i media might currently be lacking, but going with it now is a better bet for the future. My current standard TV is ten years old. I hope to have the new one that long, or maybe I'll get a bigger screen in five years and use the 32-incher as a massive computer monitor. I'm sure that I can appreciate 1080p resolution from three feet away.
Just a month ago I agreed that there wouldn't be much demand for HD DVD/Blu-Ray since few people have HDTVs. But I've been noticing more and more television programming being broadcast in high-definition and got interested in two particular types of show: sports and nature documentaries. The series Planet Earth looks particularly cool so I checked into HDTV prices.
I found a nice 32" LCD 720p set for $904, having fallen from around $1200 a few months ago to below the magic $1000 mark. I've always thought that $1000 for a TV is really expensive but then realized that I just spent $2000 on a MacBook Pro in November. Maybe it's not so crazy to spend that much on a nice 32" display with at least the same resolution as my computer.
I was about to buy that set, but then saw a newer 32" LCD 1080p set for $1100. So I'm selling my old Powerbook and 25" conventional TV to buy a cool new HDTV.
I'm missing the airing of Planet Earth in the meantime and I'd like to buy it on disc, but DVDs would miss tons of resolution. So I'll likely be in the market for a high-definition player within a year. HD DVD and Blu-Ray discs might not be selling much yet, but I bet sales will grow tremendously as more affordable sets become popular and one of the discs wins the format war.
Full album from iTunes Store = $11.99
Full album from Amazon = $11.97 + S&H
Full album from Best Buy = $13.99 in store
Full album from Caiman via Amazon Used & New = $11.93 with shipping
Sure iTunes isn't the absolute cheapest way to get it, but the tradeoff of price/convenience seems reasonable to me. Get it within minutes from iTunes, or pay $2.00 more and pick it up at Best Buy, or save $0.06 and get it in a few days from Caiman. I never thought the cost of the physical media was ever a big factor in the price of music.
Does the price of raw uranium matter at all in the total cost of nuclear power? So the price of a pound of unprocessed uranium rose from $64 to $95. The price for processed reactor-grade uranium is $1,787. Methinks that price is all about processing and will barely be affected by the extra $30 for ore.
I'd wager that even the price of processed uranium is insignificant compared to the cost of operating a nuclear power plant and disposing of the waste. An increase of 50% in the price for ore will definitely not lead to an increase of 50% in the cost for power.
Higher ore prices will just lead to the mining of previously uneconomical deposits. I doubt that we're anywhere close to running out of uranium on Earth.
It makes sense that an ISP with a given set of customers would want to extort content providers by slowing down the connections to those who don't engage in payola. But wouldn't that put the ISP at a big disadvantage compared to another ISP that continues to upgrade the speed of connections and not charge the content providers?
I don't know where you work, but as an American scientist/engineer myself I always use metric in my professional work. Meters, kelvin, kilograms. In school (chemical engineering) we often worked with pounds and gallons since they're common in some industries, but we were thoroughly drilled in how to convert between units.
I honestly don't see the problem with using Imperial units in daily life as long as professionals use metric in their work. In many parts of the country, roads are spaced one mile apart. Converting to metric won't change that. Refrigerators are designed to hold a gallon of milk. Converting to metric would mean either misfitting jugs or odd quantity containers.
Let the public use Imperial units. They happen to be useful for human-scale measurements. Just be sure to teach students that metric is the professional system.
I don't care about being able to use my cellphone, but can I please use other electronics on the airplane?
I'd love to listen to my iPod for the entirety of my flight, not just the half hour between reaching cruising altitude and beginning descent. Ideally I could put the earbuds in when I sit down and keep them while we taxi, fly, taxi, deboard, and collect our luggage. The flight attendents would treat me as a terrorist if I did that now.
Simplicity does not have to mean a lack of features. One object that constantly annoys me with unnecessary complexity is my Comcast cable box. Suppose that the show I'm watching is ending and I want to change to something else. I hit "Guide", scroll through the listings, highlight what I want to see, and hit "OK". Because that show hasn't started yet (it's scheduled for 8:00 and it's only 7:58 right now), the box brings up a menu of choices including "Set a reminder", "Mark channel as favorite", and who knows what else. But "Change to this channel now" is not an option. So instead I have to remember the channel number, hit "Exit", and type "68". Oops, I mean "068" because the box won't accept just two digits.
Shouldn't something as common as changing channels be an easier task than that? It's fine that the box offers reminders and such, but why does it have to tell me about all those options every time I do a common activity?
I believe Google handles searches right. They could have had twenty entry boxes on the main page, each with a different button next to it: "Search for movie", "Search for map", "Search for medication". But instead they have one box and *they* figure out whether your search is likely to be in one of those areas and then offer you a specialized entry in the results page.
I practice simplicity myself in the writing of computer code and the design of games. My random number generator is easy to use -- just declare MTRand r; and it seeds itself from/dev/urandom or time(). You can choose to seed it yourself, but it will go ahead and do what's generally wise in the likely event that you don't need to think about such things. And for my interactive Starcraft maps (authored as TheNevermind) I strive for simplicity in instructions, labels, and mechanisms. I believe the maps are better this way because they are easy to learn but offer great depth upon replay.
It's actually very challenging to design things that look simple. It takes a lot of thought about how they will be used and how different bits of logic might interact. Don't mistake simplicity for lack of richness. I have often been surpised at how complex behavior emerges in my Starcraft maps -- I may not have foreseen the circumstances that the map encounters, but it produces interesting and appropriate actions because the basic parts were designed well.
It's also incorrect to think that a tool with simple controls is not good for complex tasks. Mathematically it's known that all logic operations can be performed with a combination of NAND gates. Likewise, a tool that can do simple operations well can be just as powerful yet easier to use than another tool with a large set of complex operations.
Because in our society once you have served your time in prison you are deemed to have paid for your crimes.
I hope you are being sarcastic. If our society deemed that serving prison time paid for crimes, then nobody would ever be asked "Have you ever committed a crime?" on job applications and no ex-con would have to register for previous crimes.
My objection is that you ridicule the view that the universe has no beginning yet you are happy to suppose that some deity has no beginning.
My definition of universe was given to make clear that any reasoning about the matter created by the Big Bang must also apply to any entity causing the Big Bang. I would have just used an alternate word for "everything that ever exists, including deities" if I knew of any appropriate word other than "universe".
I don't agree to your second premise, "The universe began to exist." I define the universe as everything that ever exists. That's not just the current set of matter but also time itself and the rules that govern its physical evolution.
If something happened before the Big Bang -- a Big Crunch of a previous set of matter, or a spark ignited by some entity -- then that is all part of the universe. Anything that interacts with the universe is part of the universe. The claim that some entity is timeless is equivalent to the claim that the universe is timeless. Those claims are either both absurd or both reasonable.
I think that you are confused in your statement that it's "no longer scientifically plausible" for the universe to have no begininning. That seems like a reference to the scientific discovery that galaxies are moving apart as space expands. That discovery means that it's implausible for the distribution of matter to be static and eternal. It says nothing about the source of matter or the timelessness of the laws of physics.
What ballot system would support instant runoff voting? That's the method in which the voter ranks candidates and then, if no candidate attains a majority, the least popular candidates are eliminated and the voters' second choices counted [1,2]. It prevents third parties from spoiling elections, like Ralph Nader was accused of taking votes from Al Gore in 2000 or Ross Perot from George Bush in 1992.
With instant runoff voting, it's safe to vote for third parties since you can choose a major party as your second choice. I think the emergence of viable third parties would really improve politics and governance.
But how do you actually collect appropriate ballots? I don't know of a simple way that "connect the arrow" paper ballots would work. One of the advantages of electronic ballots is that they could theoretical handle instant runoff voting elegantly. However, I doubt that the electronic voting system manufacturers are designing for that ability, especially since they seem to be funded by the two major parties.
Macs only have one mouse button, a PC would have two or more.
This is a rare instance where that statement is neither troll nor ignorance. We're talking about laptops, so the fact that the trackpad has only one button is a real difference between a MacBook Pro and a similar PC laptop. Sure, you can plug in a two button mouse. But if you're buying hardware to run a non-OS X operating system, then the lack of a built-in second button would be considered a serious defect.
I have experienced similar language problems that originated in the brain rather than the vocal cords. Occasionally I get migraines. The first symptoms are visual -- a blind spot in the center of my vision that starts to fill with light and dark zigzags. If I don't take some aspirin quickly, then it progresses to language impairment.
In the language impairment stage, I begin to have trouble speaking my thoughts. I can think of what I want to say abstractly and my vocal abilities work fine, but I have difficulty coming up with the words I need. Listening to speech begins to feel like listening to a foreign language, just a jumble of sounds that doesn't seem familiar. At this point I usually go to a dark room and put on wordless music (classical or jazz). After a nap I'm mostly back to normal except I have a heightened awareness of how complicated language is.
The first time I experienced this language impairment it really scared me. I was trying to talk on the phone and felt very confused, like I had suffered a stroke. (I was in my mid 20's at the time.) Since I've learned that it's just part of a migraine for me and my language abilities will return, it's become an interesting study of mental function.
My mom and sister were around when I had one of these migraines and I had fun reading aloud to them as the language impairment hit. I would look at some text that was familiar, like the title of a book, and read how it appeared to me. It came out as some mixture of dyslexia and gibberish. It's interesting that both written and spoken language is affected. I'll have to test my ability to sing during the next episode.
I believe that Tufte's biggest gripe with Powerpoint is that it encourages low information density. If you use the default templates you will have just a few bullet points on each slide and lots of space lost to border embellishments. But if you know what you're doing, then you can put much higher information content into a presentation (especially when it's projected from a laptop, allowing animation). Even Tufte himself used transparencies and videos when I saw his seminar.
1) It's not really that big of a deal. This is a summertime Friday on Slashdot. There is a small possibility that there will be an article posted here with less than Earth-shattering consequences.
2) When a word appears in the dictionary, it's usage and spelling are defensible. You should no longer be considered illiterate if you write "adware" in a school report or magazine article. And the next edition of your word processor should stop trying to correct "adware" to "aware".
3) As you say, the dictionary is a record of how people use words. It has sociological value. I didn't realize that anyone was actually using the terms "cybrarian" or "mouse potato". Apparently somebody is.
Yep, this story got a FUD tag. Why is that? FUD is supposed to mean "fear, uncertainty, and doubt". It's used as an attack on change. For example:
"We can't allow the construction of wind generator turbines. They will chop our precious bald eagles to pieces!" - American Association of Snake Oil Salesmen
This story is not an attack on MacBooks, it's somebody who's sensitive to tactile details suggesting a workaround. Lots of similar stories on Slashdot are getting tagged as FUD. Why?
Maybe some people just don't know what FUD means. I see LOL misused the same way. People write "I just ate a slice of pizza, lol" and I picture them cackling alone in their apartment. Maybe they think that LOL is onomatopoeic like "heh" rather than an abbreviation for "laugh out loud".
Sure, we engineers can use Fahrenheit if it's appropriate. And it would be a reasonable unit if we were talking about temperatures in the range of 0 F to 450 F. Those are temperatures that the average person can experience firsthand in their home (freezer to oven).
But these chips were chilled down near absolute zero. That's a physically special temperature, but you'd never guess that from the Fahrenheit scale. What's the difference between -450 F and -460 F? The difference is not 10 degrees. The difference is that one is physically possible and the other is not. Minus 460 F would be below absolute zero.
So if you're talking about temperatures near absolute zero, the sensible units are K or R. This is especially true if you're talking about chilling to within fractions of a degree of absolute zero. A value of 0.01 K is meaningful. Stating a value of -459.57 F would make me question your understanding of significant figures.
I don't think that preservation of the human species requires colonization of the Moon or Mars. The disasters mentioned (global warming, nuclear war, disease) wouldn't actually destroy the Earth, just the surface ecosystem. It takes a lot more than that to destroy this 13,000 km rock, like a collision with a Moon-sized body or the death of the Sun (about 4 billion years from now).
If you want to preserve a few humans, it would be far easier to make a self-sustained colony at the bottom of the ocean or in mines deep below the surface. Power could be provided by a nuclear reactor or geothermal source. A large cavern within the Earth would likely be more hospitable than a glass dome on the surface of Mars, especially considering the dangers of solar radiation.
How would we decide who to save as the nucleus of mankind? It could easily be accomplished with a computer. And a computer could be set and programmed to accept factors from youth, health, sexual fertility, intelligence, and a cross section of necessary skills. Naturally, they would breed prodigiously, eh? There would be much time, and little to do. But ah with the proper breeding techniques and a ratio of say, ten females to each male, I would guess that they could then work their way back to the present gross national product within say, twenty years. [1]
Now if your talking about settling an Earth-like planet in another solar system, that's another story. But it'll take a long time to get there, probably too long to happen in my lifetime. Personally, I'd rather spend my years in a well-stocked mine shaft than a cramped spaceship.
If I had a sound-removing tool for TV, I'd block out the laugh tracks. I recently realized that the only network shows I watch, My Name Is Earl and The Office, don't have laugh tracks. I just can't bare to watch the majority of sitcoms that do.
Slashdot Mirror
It looks like James Webb was administor from 1961 to 1968, some very important years in spaceflight I'd say. The last moon walk was taken a year before I was born, so I don't have any direct experience with that era of space exploration. But I'm still amazed at how fast NASA moved from launching a satellite into orbit to putting men on the fricking moon and bringing them back safely. I wouldn't be surprised if this were in large part due to good leadership without which those accomplishments would have happened much slower and less successfully.
And if you want to name the telescope after a scientist, who are you going to choose? Many of the big names from centuries past are already taken: Galileo, Magellan, Ulysses. I don't know whether we've named any probes after Einstein or Newton, but they don't have all that much to do with JWST's mission. Are there other suitable scientists/explorers from the past? You can't really choose a living scientist -- for one thing modern science is produced much more by teams than by individual researchers. Maybe an administrator is an appropriate choice after all.
AlpineR
As the author of a couple popular open source programs, my advice is to start simple:
1) Write a working prototype. It won't have all of the features on your wish list, but it had better compile and run. You should have plenty of clear comments in the code too since you're expecting other eyes to see it.
2) Add the legalese for the license of your choice. The Gnu Public License is popular, but lately I've been using the BSD license. Definitely go with one of the available licenses rather than writing your own.
3) Make a Web page for your project. Include a description, example, screenshots, binaries (optional), and of course the code.
4) Announce the availability of your code. I used Freshmeat in the past. Paying a few tens of dollars a month for Google Adsense advertising might help get attention too.
That's all you need to start. If the project is good then you will attract users, some of whom will contribute bug reports, suggestions, or code. Grow from there.
AlpineR
This vaccination to treat brain tumors sounds similar to earlier research for treating skin cancer with vaccination.
I am a colon cancer patient myself, having been through surgery, radiation, immunotherapy, and three kinds of chemotherapy over the past three years. Last fall I was contacted by NIH about participating in a new trial to test customized vaccinations for metastatic colon cancer. The protocol is pretty scary. First they extract white cells from your blood stream. Second, they knock out your immune system with some nasty chemotherapy. Meanwhile in the lab they genetically modify the white cells to recognize your tumors. Finally, they reinject you with the modified cells to establish an immune system that will attack the cancer.
Ultimately I was rejected as a participant due to characteristics of my tumors. I was disappointed not to be able to receive a possibly miraculous treatment, but it was also a relief to avoid a nasty ordeal.
I am also watching with interest a different type of vaccination treatment. Researchers are vaccinating subjects against CEA, a common protein involved in colon cancer and other cancers. It's potentially much simpler, since the vaccination is against CEA in general rather than having to be customized for each patient.
AlpineR
One thing bothers me whenever people do calculations of the resolution of visual perception. They base it on some obscure fact about the limits of visual acuity. This article takes the value of 2 arcminutes and proceeds from there. But the calculation is very sensitive to that value and I don't trust the number I'm given, so I devised a test figure of my own.
The figure is a black background with a single white dot, a single-pixel line, two lines separated by one pixel, and two dots separated by one pixel.
I looked at the figure at 1:1 zoom on my 15-inch diagonal (13 x 8-inch rectangle) MacBook Pro LCD display under natural light. I have an uncorrected astigmatism and about 20/40 overall vision, so my results will be conservative relative to the supposed average vision.
I can detect the single dot at a distance of 9 feet for an acuity of 0.28 arcminutes. I can distinguish the paired dots at 3 feet (1.7 arcminutes). I can see the single line from the far side of my apartment 30 feet away (0.0015 arcminutes). And I can distinguish the pair of lines at 4 feet (1.3 arcminutes).
I've been doing some research on HDTVs and am about to buy a 32-inch 1080p LCD set. From 8 feet away the single pixel angle is 0.56 arcminutes; separated pixel pairs are 1.12 arcminutes. I should have no problem detecting single pixels, and line pairs will be just below my visual acuity.
I'm comfortable in the expectation that 1080p is a noticeable improvement over 720p and it is approaching the limit of my perception for distant viewing. Another factor in my decision is that most 720p sets are actually 1366 x 768 pixels. I am bothered by scaling artifacts on my laptop with non-native resolutions, so I think I'd notice such artifacts on a television too. It's true that actual 1080p or 1080i media might currently be lacking, but going with it now is a better bet for the future. My current standard TV is ten years old. I hope to have the new one that long, or maybe I'll get a bigger screen in five years and use the 32-incher as a massive computer monitor. I'm sure that I can appreciate 1080p resolution from three feet away.
AlpineR
Just a month ago I agreed that there wouldn't be much demand for HD DVD/Blu-Ray since few people have HDTVs. But I've been noticing more and more television programming being broadcast in high-definition and got interested in two particular types of show: sports and nature documentaries. The series Planet Earth looks particularly cool so I checked into HDTV prices.
I found a nice 32" LCD 720p set for $904, having fallen from around $1200 a few months ago to below the magic $1000 mark. I've always thought that $1000 for a TV is really expensive but then realized that I just spent $2000 on a MacBook Pro in November. Maybe it's not so crazy to spend that much on a nice 32" display with at least the same resolution as my computer.
I was about to buy that set, but then saw a newer 32" LCD 1080p set for $1100. So I'm selling my old Powerbook and 25" conventional TV to buy a cool new HDTV.
I'm missing the airing of Planet Earth in the meantime and I'd like to buy it on disc, but DVDs would miss tons of resolution. So I'll likely be in the market for a high-definition player within a year. HD DVD and Blu-Ray discs might not be selling much yet, but I bet sales will grow tremendously as more affordable sets become popular and one of the discs wins the format war.
AlpineR
Some facts to accompany your quip:
Coldplay's album "X&Y" is an EMI release.
Full album from iTunes Store = $11.99
Full album from Amazon = $11.97 + S&H
Full album from Best Buy = $13.99 in store
Full album from Caiman via Amazon Used & New = $11.93 with shipping
Sure iTunes isn't the absolute cheapest way to get it, but the tradeoff of price/convenience seems reasonable to me. Get it within minutes from iTunes, or pay $2.00 more and pick it up at Best Buy, or save $0.06 and get it in a few days from Caiman. I never thought the cost of the physical media was ever a big factor in the price of music.
AlpineR
Does the price of raw uranium matter at all in the total cost of nuclear power? So the price of a pound of unprocessed uranium rose from $64 to $95. The price for processed reactor-grade uranium is $1,787. Methinks that price is all about processing and will barely be affected by the extra $30 for ore.
I'd wager that even the price of processed uranium is insignificant compared to the cost of operating a nuclear power plant and disposing of the waste. An increase of 50% in the price for ore will definitely not lead to an increase of 50% in the cost for power.
Higher ore prices will just lead to the mining of previously uneconomical deposits. I doubt that we're anywhere close to running out of uranium on Earth.
AlpineR
It makes sense that an ISP with a given set of customers would want to extort content providers by slowing down the connections to those who don't engage in payola. But wouldn't that put the ISP at a big disadvantage compared to another ISP that continues to upgrade the speed of connections and not charge the content providers?
Joyce Hatto
Joy to cheat.
Joy octet? Ha!
I don't know where you work, but as an American scientist/engineer myself I always use metric in my professional work. Meters, kelvin, kilograms. In school (chemical engineering) we often worked with pounds and gallons since they're common in some industries, but we were thoroughly drilled in how to convert between units.
I honestly don't see the problem with using Imperial units in daily life as long as professionals use metric in their work. In many parts of the country, roads are spaced one mile apart. Converting to metric won't change that. Refrigerators are designed to hold a gallon of milk. Converting to metric would mean either misfitting jugs or odd quantity containers.
Let the public use Imperial units. They happen to be useful for human-scale measurements. Just be sure to teach students that metric is the professional system.
AlpineR
I don't care about being able to use my cellphone, but can I please use other electronics on the airplane?
I'd love to listen to my iPod for the entirety of my flight, not just the half hour between reaching cruising altitude and beginning descent. Ideally I could put the earbuds in when I sit down and keep them while we taxi, fly, taxi, deboard, and collect our luggage. The flight attendents would treat me as a terrorist if I did that now.
Simplicity does not have to mean a lack of features. One object that constantly annoys me with unnecessary complexity is my Comcast cable box. Suppose that the show I'm watching is ending and I want to change to something else. I hit "Guide", scroll through the listings, highlight what I want to see, and hit "OK". Because that show hasn't started yet (it's scheduled for 8:00 and it's only 7:58 right now), the box brings up a menu of choices including "Set a reminder", "Mark channel as favorite", and who knows what else. But "Change to this channel now" is not an option. So instead I have to remember the channel number, hit "Exit", and type "68". Oops, I mean "068" because the box won't accept just two digits.
Shouldn't something as common as changing channels be an easier task than that? It's fine that the box offers reminders and such, but why does it have to tell me about all those options every time I do a common activity?
I believe Google handles searches right. They could have had twenty entry boxes on the main page, each with a different button next to it: "Search for movie", "Search for map", "Search for medication". But instead they have one box and *they* figure out whether your search is likely to be in one of those areas and then offer you a specialized entry in the results page.
I practice simplicity myself in the writing of computer code and the design of games. My random number generator is easy to use -- just declare MTRand r; and it seeds itself from /dev/urandom or time(). You can choose to seed it yourself, but it will go ahead and do what's generally wise in the likely event that you don't need to think about such things. And for my interactive Starcraft maps (authored as TheNevermind) I strive for simplicity in instructions, labels, and mechanisms. I believe the maps are better this way because they are easy to learn but offer great depth upon replay.
It's actually very challenging to design things that look simple. It takes a lot of thought about how they will be used and how different bits of logic might interact. Don't mistake simplicity for lack of richness. I have often been surpised at how complex behavior emerges in my Starcraft maps -- I may not have foreseen the circumstances that the map encounters, but it produces interesting and appropriate actions because the basic parts were designed well.
It's also incorrect to think that a tool with simple controls is not good for complex tasks. Mathematically it's known that all logic operations can be performed with a combination of NAND gates. Likewise, a tool that can do simple operations well can be just as powerful yet easier to use than another tool with a large set of complex operations.
AlpineR
I hope you are being sarcastic. If our society deemed that serving prison time paid for crimes, then nobody would ever be asked "Have you ever committed a crime?" on job applications and no ex-con would have to register for previous crimes.
My objection is that you ridicule the view that the universe has no beginning yet you are happy to suppose that some deity has no beginning.
My definition of universe was given to make clear that any reasoning about the matter created by the Big Bang must also apply to any entity causing the Big Bang. I would have just used an alternate word for "everything that ever exists, including deities" if I knew of any appropriate word other than "universe".
AlpineR
I don't agree to your second premise, "The universe began to exist." I define the universe as everything that ever exists. That's not just the current set of matter but also time itself and the rules that govern its physical evolution.
If something happened before the Big Bang -- a Big Crunch of a previous set of matter, or a spark ignited by some entity -- then that is all part of the universe. Anything that interacts with the universe is part of the universe. The claim that some entity is timeless is equivalent to the claim that the universe is timeless. Those claims are either both absurd or both reasonable.
I think that you are confused in your statement that it's "no longer scientifically plausible" for the universe to have no begininning. That seems like a reference to the scientific discovery that galaxies are moving apart as space expands. That discovery means that it's implausible for the distribution of matter to be static and eternal. It says nothing about the source of matter or the timelessness of the laws of physics.
AlpineR
What ballot system would support instant runoff voting? That's the method in which the voter ranks candidates and then, if no candidate attains a majority, the least popular candidates are eliminated and the voters' second choices counted [1,2]. It prevents third parties from spoiling elections, like Ralph Nader was accused of taking votes from Al Gore in 2000 or Ross Perot from George Bush in 1992.
With instant runoff voting, it's safe to vote for third parties since you can choose a major party as your second choice. I think the emergence of viable third parties would really improve politics and governance.
But how do you actually collect appropriate ballots? I don't know of a simple way that "connect the arrow" paper ballots would work. One of the advantages of electronic ballots is that they could theoretical handle instant runoff voting elegantly. However, I doubt that the electronic voting system manufacturers are designing for that ability, especially since they seem to be funded by the two major parties.
AlpineR
This is a rare instance where that statement is neither troll nor ignorance. We're talking about laptops, so the fact that the trackpad has only one button is a real difference between a MacBook Pro and a similar PC laptop. Sure, you can plug in a two button mouse. But if you're buying hardware to run a non-OS X operating system, then the lack of a built-in second button would be considered a serious defect.
I have experienced similar language problems that originated in the brain rather than the vocal cords. Occasionally I get migraines. The first symptoms are visual -- a blind spot in the center of my vision that starts to fill with light and dark zigzags. If I don't take some aspirin quickly, then it progresses to language impairment.
In the language impairment stage, I begin to have trouble speaking my thoughts. I can think of what I want to say abstractly and my vocal abilities work fine, but I have difficulty coming up with the words I need. Listening to speech begins to feel like listening to a foreign language, just a jumble of sounds that doesn't seem familiar. At this point I usually go to a dark room and put on wordless music (classical or jazz). After a nap I'm mostly back to normal except I have a heightened awareness of how complicated language is.
The first time I experienced this language impairment it really scared me. I was trying to talk on the phone and felt very confused, like I had suffered a stroke. (I was in my mid 20's at the time.) Since I've learned that it's just part of a migraine for me and my language abilities will return, it's become an interesting study of mental function.
My mom and sister were around when I had one of these migraines and I had fun reading aloud to them as the language impairment hit. I would look at some text that was familiar, like the title of a book, and read how it appeared to me. It came out as some mixture of dyslexia and gibberish. It's interesting that both written and spoken language is affected. I'll have to test my ability to sing during the next episode.
AlpineR
You don't need a tropical climate to get sugar. Sugar beets grow quite nicely in states like Michigan.
I believe that Tufte's biggest gripe with Powerpoint is that it encourages low information density. If you use the default templates you will have just a few bullet points on each slide and lots of space lost to border embellishments. But if you know what you're doing, then you can put much higher information content into a presentation (especially when it's projected from a laptop, allowing animation). Even Tufte himself used transparencies and videos when I saw his seminar.
1) It's not really that big of a deal. This is a summertime Friday on Slashdot. There is a small possibility that there will be an article posted here with less than Earth-shattering consequences.
2) When a word appears in the dictionary, it's usage and spelling are defensible. You should no longer be considered illiterate if you write "adware" in a school report or magazine article. And the next edition of your word processor should stop trying to correct "adware" to "aware".
3) As you say, the dictionary is a record of how people use words. It has sociological value. I didn't realize that anyone was actually using the terms "cybrarian" or "mouse potato". Apparently somebody is.
Yep, this story got a FUD tag. Why is that? FUD is supposed to mean "fear, uncertainty, and doubt". It's used as an attack on change. For example:
"We can't allow the construction of wind generator turbines. They will chop our precious bald eagles to pieces!" - American Association of Snake Oil Salesmen
This story is not an attack on MacBooks, it's somebody who's sensitive to tactile details suggesting a workaround. Lots of similar stories on Slashdot are getting tagged as FUD. Why?
Maybe some people just don't know what FUD means. I see LOL misused the same way. People write "I just ate a slice of pizza, lol" and I picture them cackling alone in their apartment. Maybe they think that LOL is onomatopoeic like "heh" rather than an abbreviation for "laugh out loud".
AlpineR
Sure, we engineers can use Fahrenheit if it's appropriate. And it would be a reasonable unit if we were talking about temperatures in the range of 0 F to 450 F. Those are temperatures that the average person can experience firsthand in their home (freezer to oven).
But these chips were chilled down near absolute zero. That's a physically special temperature, but you'd never guess that from the Fahrenheit scale. What's the difference between -450 F and -460 F? The difference is not 10 degrees. The difference is that one is physically possible and the other is not. Minus 460 F would be below absolute zero.
So if you're talking about temperatures near absolute zero, the sensible units are K or R. This is especially true if you're talking about chilling to within fractions of a degree of absolute zero. A value of 0.01 K is meaningful. Stating a value of -459.57 F would make me question your understanding of significant figures.
AlpineR
I don't think that preservation of the human species requires colonization of the Moon or Mars. The disasters mentioned (global warming, nuclear war, disease) wouldn't actually destroy the Earth, just the surface ecosystem. It takes a lot more than that to destroy this 13,000 km rock, like a collision with a Moon-sized body or the death of the Sun (about 4 billion years from now).
If you want to preserve a few humans, it would be far easier to make a self-sustained colony at the bottom of the ocean or in mines deep below the surface. Power could be provided by a nuclear reactor or geothermal source. A large cavern within the Earth would likely be more hospitable than a glass dome on the surface of Mars, especially considering the dangers of solar radiation.
How would we decide who to save as the nucleus of mankind? It could easily be accomplished with a computer. And a computer could be set and programmed to accept factors from youth, health, sexual fertility, intelligence, and a cross section of necessary skills. Naturally, they would breed prodigiously, eh? There would be much time, and little to do. But ah with the proper breeding techniques and a ratio of say, ten females to each male, I would guess that they could then work their way back to the present gross national product within say, twenty years. [1]
Now if your talking about settling an Earth-like planet in another solar system, that's another story. But it'll take a long time to get there, probably too long to happen in my lifetime. Personally, I'd rather spend my years in a well-stocked mine shaft than a cramped spaceship.
AlpineR
If I had a sound-removing tool for TV, I'd block out the laugh tracks. I recently realized that the only network shows I watch, My Name Is Earl and The Office, don't have laugh tracks. I just can't bare to watch the majority of sitcoms that do.