Do you remember the MTV show Popup Video? They showed older music videos with popup balloons that gave extra information, like actors in the video that later became famous or mistakes made during production. If Google analyzed the sounds coming into your laptop and gave you a link to a site like the Internet Movie Database then you could have Popup Television. Learn more about the specific episode you are watching, and even have the ability to edit that information yourself.
It'd make an interesting toy. I'm sure that anyone with some imagination could think of even cooler applications.
Maybe we don't need to try libertarianism on a large scale to know what a horrible disaster it would be.
More seriously, I think that libertarianism should be tried. Let a state like Montana or South Dakota secede from the Union and adopt a libertarian government. Release its residents from all federal laws and taxes. Let any American who wants to be free of big government move there. I'd be very interested to see what their society is like once free of the tyranny of public education, public roads, FDA regulations, environmental protection, and antitrust laws.
I read that Discover article and the point seemed to be that since modern gadgets are based on 40-year old discoveries we aren't implementing new technologies anymore.
But I think that 40 years is how long it takes to move from scientific discovery to mature, widespread adoption. Many modern gadgets were prototyped in the 60's and 70's (cell phones, satellite communication, networking, UNIX). Likewise the technological boom around World War II was based on discoveries from the 1890's and 1900's (radio, atomic energy, pharmaceuticals).
I think that more recent discoveries are being commercialized at least as quickly as before. But it will be 2020 before we see the cutting-edge discoveries of 1980 widely available, and 2046 before today's ideas are fully realized.
I have lived in cities of 1,200 people and cities over 1,000,000. I have seen eggs laid, eggs developing, eggs hatching, and eggs cooking, thank you very much.
Yes, we can eat fertilized eggs from chickens. In fact, the way to tell a fertilized egg from an unfertilized one is the presence of a white spot on the yolk. Most eggs in grocery stores are unfertilized.
But whether they are both "chicken eggs" depends on your definitions. If you say that a "chicken egg" is what's laid by a chicken, then they both satisfy the definition. But if you say that a "chicken egg" is what becomes a chicken, then the unfertilized one does not. The panel in the article settled the question through definition. You can call the contents of your carton "chicken eggs", but that is the opposite of their definition and will lead you to the opposite conclusion (the chicken came first).
Did you read the article, or even any of the other posts?
I'm not sure how you decided that an egg's fertilization status changes it's makeup. Regardless of it's potential, it's still an egg from a chicken.
The fine article quotes Mr. Papineau as saying: "I would argue it is a chicken egg if it has a chicken in it. If a kangaroo laid an egg from which an ostrich hatched, that would surely be an ostrich egg, not a kangaroo egg."
So I'm not the one who chose that definition. The point of my post is that if you adopt that definition then most of what you will find in a grocery store are not chicken eggs. They do not contain chickens. The lack of fertilization makes quite a big difference to the contents of those shells biologically, if not chemically.
Somatic mutations are not passed on to offspring.
1) Germline cells exist within the body of an adult. If a transcription error or cosmic ray changes a sequence of DNA, it is within a germline cell that is part of an adult. I never said that a mutation in a somatic cell would produce a chicken.
2) Was the originator of egg-laying a multicellular organism? Perhaps the first organisms were single cells that reproduced by division into symmetric daughter cells. Then a mutation happened in one of those organisms that caused it to split asymmetrically into a larger portion and a smaller portion. We might consider the smaller portion to be an egg if it required time to grow before becoming capable of reproduction itself. Labels of somatic and germline are inappropriate before that stage of evolution.
Please use a little thought and open-mindedness before you tell me where to hop.
1) Do we eat chicken eggs? Their resolution of the argument seems based on the fact that the first genetic chicken was assembled as an egg before growing into a pecking, clucking creature capable of reproduction. But aren't the eggs that we eat unfertilized and unable to grow into chickens? If their definition of "chicken egg" is that which can grow into a chicken, then we apparently eat omelet eggs, cake eggs, and key lime pie eggs.
2) What was the first entity in the adult/egg cycle? Before the first chicken egg, there were ever-so-chickenlike adults with mutated strands of DNA in their unfertilized egg or sperm. It's hard to say that their offspring was 100% chicken while they were 0% chicken. So chickeness gradually evolved from the first entity capable of adult/egg reproduction, and that entity was certainly not very chickenlike at all. But it did start the cycle rolling. Since the creatures before this entity did not lay eggs, I posit that the egg-laying gene mutated within an adult creature. Therefore the chicken, metaphorically, came first.
I was mainly thinking of using the extra hour at night for hobbies, household chores, or nighttime activities like movies or concerts. So even if you get home later, you can spend more quality time with the kids since you can postpone your own chores and hobbies until they go to bed.
Actually, there was an error in my earlier message. If you shift the end of your work day by one hour, then you should shift the start of your work day by more than an hour. Less travel time means less time away from home for the same number of work hours. So you actually get to stay awake 1 + X hours later or spend an extra X hours at home in the morning.
Leaving late costs you time at home only if you fail to adjust your arrival time. You could, you know, leave an hour later (for a shorter commute) and also arrive an hour later (probably also shorter). That would mean you could wake up an hour later and therefore stay awake an hour later spending quality time with your family, friends, or hobbies.
I think the point of the article is that you can use your time more efficiently if you pay attention to how your commute duration correlates with departure time. When I got my job and moved from another state, I specifically chose where to reside so that my commute would be counter to most of the traffic.
Over the years I've also discovered which routes are clearest during which hours and which months. For example, there are 6-lane roads that are split 4-2 inbound in the morning, 4-2 outbound in the evening, and 3-3 at other times with parking in the outer lanes. If I time my travel so that I hit those roads just as they become 3-3, then the traffic moves smoothly and the outer lanes aren't full of parked cars yet.
Unless they are
cancer stem cells which will continue spawning adult cells that multiply without restraint. Then Google could grow until it consumes the world or achieves conciousness.
Actually, any stem cell continues spawning adult cells until it fails due to DNA degradation or expiration of its host's body. It's the offspring that become static and expendable.
"Seems odd that we need taxpayers to subsidize what is so obviously in people's economic self-interest in the first place."
Huh? Open source software benefits the users, but it's still a drain on the resources of the individual who writes it. The writer might gain from having others contribute to his project, but users who neither write nor contribute have the best cost-benefit ratio.
Taxpayers subsidize work precisely because it benefits them. Patents are granted because we all gain from the disclosure of inventions. Copyrights are granted because we want to encourage the creation of art and knowledge. Research is funded because it leads to economic growth.
If open source software is an economic benefit for the nation, then it could be a good investment to encourage its production. The wisdom of the investment remains even if some writers are profiting already.
Note that the proposal allows deductions only for expenses (hardware, services) and not for the writer's time and effort. In my open source work, my contribution in time is far more valuable than my expenses so there would be little impact. My motivations are altruism and the improvement of my tools from the attention of many eyes.
A good comparison for the potential of eBooks is the iPod.
What's great about the iPod? It lets me listen to a large personal collection of music and is very small. The equivalent of my iPod in previous technology would be a portable CD player plus 200 CDs. So the iPod is smaller, longer lasting, and drastically lighter. Do eBooks have any similar advantage over paper books?
What eBooks do share with the iPod are the drawbacks:
Expensive, prone to loss or theft
Electronic, need recharging
Electronic, forbidden during takeoff and landing. I already have to turn off my iPod during a flight. Do I have to turn off my book too?
Tied to computers, you can't add songs/text without access to a personal computer
One area where eBooks might have potential is as a replacement for magazines. If the eBook were cheap and durable, then having the equivalent of twenty magazines in my backpack would provide convenient entertainment. And magazines are already filled with advertisements, so the downloads should be cheap and DRM-free. For this purpose, the ideal eBook format might be 8 by 10 inches, 1/8" thick, 8 ounces, and durable.
I actually like going out and watching a new movie with a bunch of strangers. I spend enough time at home on the computer, and my TV is decent but nothing like a good theater. Dinner and a movie is still a good date plan -- my girlfriend and I would go almost every weekend if there were something good playing. A comedy or action movie is more enjoyable when you feel the reaction of others around you.
The biggest problem I see is just bad movies. I've found that Rotten Tomatoes is a good guide to the quality of new releases. Take a look most weeks and you'll see one decent movie and four bad ones in the top five releases. Considering that half of the good ones won't appeal to me based on subject matter, that means there's only one appealing movie every 2-3 weeks.
I'd like to see less of the formulaic filler clogging the theaters. Try to show more smaller or independent films. For example, I'd love to see all the short films that received Oscar nominations this year. How about showing them together in place of a regular feature?
I don't think that theaters are obsolete. Sure the popcorn is expensive, but I can choose to buy it or eat before. Cell phones are rarely a problem here in DC, at least now that most theaters have a "silence your cell phone" message before the feature starts. The experience could be improved with better food options including good coffee or beer. And during the Lord of the Rings trilogy I definitely appreciated my local theater that has Tempur-Pedic seat cushions.
For my two cents, here are my favorite movies of the past year:
I'm pleased to see that the author's advice is similar to my own outlook. I was diagnosed with a rare form of metastatic colon cancer at age 31, just months out of graduate school and employed in my computer-focused career.
After surgery to remove the primary tumor, I was faced with chemotherapy and a 50% chance of dying within two years. My first reaction was like many of yours: give up work and move home to be close to family and friends. Or, pack up and travel the world with my remaining days.
But then I realized that giving up work and moving home would be depressing. I'd just be a cancer victim sitting around, waiting to die. It's hard to have any more good times in such a grim situation.
And traveling the world wouldn't be much fun either. One of the problems when you're sick with cancer is that you don't feel good. It's not like the doctor says "you have two weeks to live" after which you feel fine for two weeks and then pass away in your sleep. No, when the end is that close it's a struggle just to stay comfortable and enjoy things like food and warmth. So traveling the world would mean feeling crappy in a foreign land surrounded by strangers.
So I decided that I liked where I was in my life and would keep doing what I liked doing. That meant continuing to work, continuing to meet new people, continuing to learn things and watch movies and play games. That meant trying to be a person plus cancer, rather than a person destroyed by cancer. Sure, my perspective changed. I straightened out my personal relationships and felt freer to express my own quirky personality.
Continuing with normal things helped me to survive chemotherapy and more surgeries. And with the help of a great employer and coworkers I continued to be productive -- a little bit on bad days and a lot on good days -- and feel good about myself. The benefit of working with computers was that I could be productive from home and the computer would wait patiently when I was hit with a bout of nausea or fatigue.
These days I'm feeling fine but I know that any day the cancer could rear its ugly head again. My motto is to go on with life as if you have two years to live. Don't panic and drop everything and curl up on the couch. But remember that you don't have forever to do the things you want to do.
I think it's premature to say that the his charity hasn't improved Bill Gates' image. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation started in 2000; his bad reputation started much earlier.
I'm pretty impressed with some of the work that his foundation funds. Fifty years from now, he will probably be remembered more for the organizations he funded than for how he made his money. Just think of Carnegie or Rockefeller.
You might want to check DSL prices in your area. In my experience, they've dropped tremendously in the last couple years.
When I was in grad school (1998-2003) my brother paid $50/month for his cable modem. I couldn't afford anything like that, so I relied on free dial-up from my university. When I started a postdoc in 2004, the local phone company (Verizon) offered DSL for $30/month. A bit more income and a bit lower price, so I got it. A few months ago my phone company started advertising $15/month plans. Those were for a lower speed than the standard DSL, but I called and got discounted to $25/month for my connection.
As a chemical engineer, sloppy reasoning like this makes me cringe:
"Compared to 2004, world oil production was up 0.8 percent in 2005, nowhere near enough to compensate for a demand rise of roughly 3 percent."
How exactly is demand measured? Does he mean consumption? Consumption must equal production, otherwise we would be rapidly draining/filling enormous reserve tanks. Current production is around 70 million barrels per day. Overproduction of 3% would fill a large oil tanker every day with nowhere to go.
This is a common misunderstanding in talking about oil production. "Oh no, we're consuming 100% of the oil we produce. The world will end next Tuesday!". Do you buy twice the food you need at the grocery store? Will you starve if you have company over next week and your demand goes up? No, you will buy (drill/research) more food when you need it.
And did we really need a graph to show linear interpolation between 0.9812 trillion and 1.00748 trillion barrels? The author assumed that the total world supply of oil started at 2.013 trillion barrels, so the halfway point would be reached in 2005. The production rate stayed near his estimate, so the halfway point stayed in 2005. Wow. December 16, 2005 is a day which will live in infamy. Unless of course his supply estimate was off by 0.5%. Then February 28, 2006 shall be a day which will live in infamy. Obviously, the author of
Beyond Oil is just trying to sell more copies of Beyond Oil.
I do believe that the world's energy future needs attention. I think we'd be wise to invest $100 billion in fusion and renewable energy, rather than spending ten times that on destroying and rebuilding nations. But I don't think crying wolf is a wise way to change policy.
Sometimes it's staggering to think how much my life has been shaped by the home computer revolution. The first computer I owned was a TI-99/4A that my mom bought on clearance from Sears. I spent countless hours programming in Extended Basic, having fun with sprites and sounds and, eventually, a speech synthesizer peripheral.
My interest in computers actually started a couple years earlier. I had been playing my Atari 2600 and saw an ad for the Programmer cartridge. The box showed somebody writing "Dear computer", and I thought it would be so cool to program my Atari like that. I got the cartridge and was pretty disappointed in how clumsy and limited it was, but then again it just sparked my interest more and so I got started on TRS-80's at my elementary school.
My next computer after the TI was a Commodore 128 at age thirteen. It had bitmap graphics, a PLAY command that understood musical notation (QD4 = quarter note of 4th-octave D), and a built-in assembler. I also got my first modem for dialing up Q-Link at 1200 baud. That was my first exposure to public domain software and the joys of sharing my programs online.
By age 16 I had an Amiga 500. That baby was sweet! A window GUI, 4-channel sound, thousands of colors, and a spacious 512 kB of memory. I started writing scientific programs, like a physics simulator and an artificial neural network. I didn't discover until a few years later that I had been solving differential equations numerically before even reaching calculus in high school.
I didn't use my Amiga much in college. There was still a social stigma for having a computer in your dorm room in 1991. But I used Macs and PCs in the computer labs for writing reports and running chemical engineering simulations. During my senior year, I noticed Netscape running on a lab computer. I had been using Gopher for a while, but it was cool to have graphics and mouse control. I bought a second-hand 14.4 modem so I could surf the Web on my Amiga.
After graduation, I used PCs at work. But I didn't own one myself until going to grad school. Linux was just getting popular, which was convenient since I was a poor student and couldn't afford software otherwise. With easy access to a compiler and decent computational power, I started writing more simulations and eventually switched my thesis from experimental to computational work.
Now I am a postdoctoral researcher, writing atomistic simulations of materials. I use Linux at work and Mac OS X at home. And since one doesn't meet many ladies in my field of work, I met my girlfriend through Match.com. So it's pretty amazing to think how much different my life would be if the home computer boom hadn't coincided with my adolescence.
It wasn't until your skillful use of bold that I realized the offending poster wrote "English comes from German through Greek". That was such an anachronism that I had to reread it three times before my brain would accept that he didn't write "English comes from Greek through German".
Maybe the poster just wrote that absent-mindedly. Is there any more merit to the statement than German is derived significantly from Greek?
Could I get that in Libraries of Congress per fortnight?
In addition to Libraries of Congress, I want to see barrels of monkeys become a standard measurement. Sort of the emotional axis orthogonal to the Libraries of Congress axis in information-space.
A game of Settlers of Catan = 0.8 barrels of monkeys
Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit = 1.5 barrels of monkeys
Regular customer: "Do you have any used cars available?"
Used car dealer: "Yes, we have 3 Toyotas and a Ford starting at $8,000."
Search engine: "Do you have any used cars available?"
Used car dealer: "Used cars. Used cars. Used cars. Used cars. Used cars. Toyota Ford Honda GM Chrysler Kia Lexus Chevrolet BMW Ferrari. $1000 $2000 $3000 $4000. Low low low low low low low low low prices."
Unethical web sites often look like the second example, even to regular users. I don't know what BMW was serving to Google, but it's easy to imagine something similarly unethical. I don't think legality needs to enter the argument -- if BMW can say what they want (used cards used cars used cars), then Google can say what they want (BMW? Who's that?).
Cyberspace is now considered to be a likely arena for future wars (or terrorism, or organized crime). Sure, the Kama Sutra worm seems trivial. But when a virus threatens to bring down a major part of the US economy, then a little investment in improved communication will pay off.
Until I read your comment, it didn't even occur to me that someone would assume I was female just because I played a female dwarf on WoW. So finding that 50% of female characters are played by males seems like a big "Duh" to me. I figured players picked their character based on appearance or the personality of the role, not based upon their personal gender preference. Would you assume that J. K. Rowlings is a man because she writes about Harry Potter?
The bigger surprise to me is that so few females play male characters. I question the survey -- it just seems too one-sided. If the result is real, then maybe it's because females have no choice in most games and are forced into female characters. So when they do get a choice, they overwhelmingly play as females.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you remember the MTV show Popup Video? They showed older music videos with popup balloons that gave extra information, like actors in the video that later became famous or mistakes made during production. If Google analyzed the sounds coming into your laptop and gave you a link to a site like the Internet Movie Database then you could have Popup Television. Learn more about the specific episode you are watching, and even have the ability to edit that information yourself.
It'd make an interesting toy. I'm sure that anyone with some imagination could think of even cooler applications.
AlpineR
Maybe we don't need to try libertarianism on a large scale to know what a horrible disaster it would be.
More seriously, I think that libertarianism should be tried. Let a state like Montana or South Dakota secede from the Union and adopt a libertarian government. Release its residents from all federal laws and taxes. Let any American who wants to be free of big government move there. I'd be very interested to see what their society is like once free of the tyranny of public education, public roads, FDA regulations, environmental protection, and antitrust laws.
AlpineR
I read that Discover article and the point seemed to be that since modern gadgets are based on 40-year old discoveries we aren't implementing new technologies anymore.
But I think that 40 years is how long it takes to move from scientific discovery to mature, widespread adoption. Many modern gadgets were prototyped in the 60's and 70's (cell phones, satellite communication, networking, UNIX). Likewise the technological boom around World War II was based on discoveries from the 1890's and 1900's (radio, atomic energy, pharmaceuticals).
I think that more recent discoveries are being commercialized at least as quickly as before. But it will be 2020 before we see the cutting-edge discoveries of 1980 widely available, and 2046 before today's ideas are fully realized.
AlpineR
Yes, we can eat fertilized eggs from chickens. In fact, the way to tell a fertilized egg from an unfertilized one is the presence of a white spot on the yolk. Most eggs in grocery stores are unfertilized.
But whether they are both "chicken eggs" depends on your definitions. If you say that a "chicken egg" is what's laid by a chicken, then they both satisfy the definition. But if you say that a "chicken egg" is what becomes a chicken, then the unfertilized one does not. The panel in the article settled the question through definition. You can call the contents of your carton "chicken eggs", but that is the opposite of their definition and will lead you to the opposite conclusion (the chicken came first).
The fine article quotes Mr. Papineau as saying: "I would argue it is a chicken egg if it has a chicken in it. If a kangaroo laid an egg from which an ostrich hatched, that would surely be an ostrich egg, not a kangaroo egg."
So I'm not the one who chose that definition. The point of my post is that if you adopt that definition then most of what you will find in a grocery store are not chicken eggs. They do not contain chickens. The lack of fertilization makes quite a big difference to the contents of those shells biologically, if not chemically.
1) Germline cells exist within the body of an adult. If a transcription error or cosmic ray changes a sequence of DNA, it is within a germline cell that is part of an adult. I never said that a mutation in a somatic cell would produce a chicken.
2) Was the originator of egg-laying a multicellular organism? Perhaps the first organisms were single cells that reproduced by division into symmetric daughter cells. Then a mutation happened in one of those organisms that caused it to split asymmetrically into a larger portion and a smaller portion. We might consider the smaller portion to be an egg if it required time to grow before becoming capable of reproduction itself. Labels of somatic and germline are inappropriate before that stage of evolution.
Please use a little thought and open-mindedness before you tell me where to hop.
1) Do we eat chicken eggs? Their resolution of the argument seems based on the fact that the first genetic chicken was assembled as an egg before growing into a pecking, clucking creature capable of reproduction. But aren't the eggs that we eat unfertilized and unable to grow into chickens? If their definition of "chicken egg" is that which can grow into a chicken, then we apparently eat omelet eggs, cake eggs, and key lime pie eggs.
2) What was the first entity in the adult/egg cycle? Before the first chicken egg, there were ever-so-chickenlike adults with mutated strands of DNA in their unfertilized egg or sperm. It's hard to say that their offspring was 100% chicken while they were 0% chicken. So chickeness gradually evolved from the first entity capable of adult/egg reproduction, and that entity was certainly not very chickenlike at all. But it did start the cycle rolling. Since the creatures before this entity did not lay eggs, I posit that the egg-laying gene mutated within an adult creature. Therefore the chicken, metaphorically, came first.
3) I always read Slashdot comments nested.
AlpineR
Actually, there was an error in my earlier message. If you shift the end of your work day by one hour, then you should shift the start of your work day by more than an hour. Less travel time means less time away from home for the same number of work hours. So you actually get to stay awake 1 + X hours later or spend an extra X hours at home in the morning.
I think the point of the article is that you can use your time more efficiently if you pay attention to how your commute duration correlates with departure time. When I got my job and moved from another state, I specifically chose where to reside so that my commute would be counter to most of the traffic.
Over the years I've also discovered which routes are clearest during which hours and which months. For example, there are 6-lane roads that are split 4-2 inbound in the morning, 4-2 outbound in the evening, and 3-3 at other times with parking in the outer lanes. If I time my travel so that I hit those roads just as they become 3-3, then the traffic moves smoothly and the outer lanes aren't full of parked cars yet.
Actually, any stem cell continues spawning adult cells until it fails due to DNA degradation or expiration of its host's body. It's the offspring that become static and expendable.
AlpineR
It's supposed to make the point that you care so little that saying you could care less is ridiculous.
Taxpayers subsidize work precisely because it benefits them. Patents are granted because we all gain from the disclosure of inventions. Copyrights are granted because we want to encourage the creation of art and knowledge. Research is funded because it leads to economic growth.
If open source software is an economic benefit for the nation, then it could be a good investment to encourage its production. The wisdom of the investment remains even if some writers are profiting already.
Note that the proposal allows deductions only for expenses (hardware, services) and not for the writer's time and effort. In my open source work, my contribution in time is far more valuable than my expenses so there would be little impact. My motivations are altruism and the improvement of my tools from the attention of many eyes.
AlpineR
What's great about the iPod? It lets me listen to a large personal collection of music and is very small. The equivalent of my iPod in previous technology would be a portable CD player plus 200 CDs. So the iPod is smaller, longer lasting, and drastically lighter. Do eBooks have any similar advantage over paper books?
What eBooks do share with the iPod are the drawbacks:
One area where eBooks might have potential is as a replacement for magazines. If the eBook were cheap and durable, then having the equivalent of twenty magazines in my backpack would provide convenient entertainment. And magazines are already filled with advertisements, so the downloads should be cheap and DRM-free. For this purpose, the ideal eBook format might be 8 by 10 inches, 1/8" thick, 8 ounces, and durable.
AlpineR
The biggest problem I see is just bad movies. I've found that Rotten Tomatoes is a good guide to the quality of new releases. Take a look most weeks and you'll see one decent movie and four bad ones in the top five releases. Considering that half of the good ones won't appeal to me based on subject matter, that means there's only one appealing movie every 2-3 weeks.
I'd like to see less of the formulaic filler clogging the theaters. Try to show more smaller or independent films. For example, I'd love to see all the short films that received Oscar nominations this year. How about showing them together in place of a regular feature?
I don't think that theaters are obsolete. Sure the popcorn is expensive, but I can choose to buy it or eat before. Cell phones are rarely a problem here in DC, at least now that most theaters have a "silence your cell phone" message before the feature starts. The experience could be improved with better food options including good coffee or beer. And during the Lord of the Rings trilogy I definitely appreciated my local theater that has Tempur-Pedic seat cushions.
For my two cents, here are my favorite movies of the past year:
AlpineR
After surgery to remove the primary tumor, I was faced with chemotherapy and a 50% chance of dying within two years. My first reaction was like many of yours: give up work and move home to be close to family and friends. Or, pack up and travel the world with my remaining days.
But then I realized that giving up work and moving home would be depressing. I'd just be a cancer victim sitting around, waiting to die. It's hard to have any more good times in such a grim situation.
And traveling the world wouldn't be much fun either. One of the problems when you're sick with cancer is that you don't feel good. It's not like the doctor says "you have two weeks to live" after which you feel fine for two weeks and then pass away in your sleep. No, when the end is that close it's a struggle just to stay comfortable and enjoy things like food and warmth. So traveling the world would mean feeling crappy in a foreign land surrounded by strangers.
So I decided that I liked where I was in my life and would keep doing what I liked doing. That meant continuing to work, continuing to meet new people, continuing to learn things and watch movies and play games. That meant trying to be a person plus cancer, rather than a person destroyed by cancer. Sure, my perspective changed. I straightened out my personal relationships and felt freer to express my own quirky personality.
Continuing with normal things helped me to survive chemotherapy and more surgeries. And with the help of a great employer and coworkers I continued to be productive -- a little bit on bad days and a lot on good days -- and feel good about myself. The benefit of working with computers was that I could be productive from home and the computer would wait patiently when I was hit with a bout of nausea or fatigue.
These days I'm feeling fine but I know that any day the cancer could rear its ugly head again. My motto is to go on with life as if you have two years to live. Don't panic and drop everything and curl up on the couch. But remember that you don't have forever to do the things you want to do.
AlpineR
I'm pretty impressed with some of the work that his foundation funds. Fifty years from now, he will probably be remembered more for the organizations he funded than for how he made his money. Just think of Carnegie or Rockefeller.
From the FAQ:
Ten percent of 128 kb/s is a heck of a lot more than 15 b/s. Maybe he meant to say 15 additional kilobits per second.
AlpineR
When I was in grad school (1998-2003) my brother paid $50/month for his cable modem. I couldn't afford anything like that, so I relied on free dial-up from my university. When I started a postdoc in 2004, the local phone company (Verizon) offered DSL for $30/month. A bit more income and a bit lower price, so I got it. A few months ago my phone company started advertising $15/month plans. Those were for a lower speed than the standard DSL, but I called and got discounted to $25/month for my connection.
AlpineR
How exactly is demand measured? Does he mean consumption? Consumption must equal production, otherwise we would be rapidly draining/filling enormous reserve tanks. Current production is around 70 million barrels per day. Overproduction of 3% would fill a large oil tanker every day with nowhere to go.
This is a common misunderstanding in talking about oil production. "Oh no, we're consuming 100% of the oil we produce. The world will end next Tuesday!". Do you buy twice the food you need at the grocery store? Will you starve if you have company over next week and your demand goes up? No, you will buy (drill/research) more food when you need it.
And did we really need a graph to show linear interpolation between 0.9812 trillion and 1.00748 trillion barrels? The author assumed that the total world supply of oil started at 2.013 trillion barrels, so the halfway point would be reached in 2005. The production rate stayed near his estimate, so the halfway point stayed in 2005. Wow. December 16, 2005 is a day which will live in infamy. Unless of course his supply estimate was off by 0.5%. Then February 28, 2006 shall be a day which will live in infamy. Obviously, the author of Beyond Oil is just trying to sell more copies of Beyond Oil.
I do believe that the world's energy future needs attention. I think we'd be wise to invest $100 billion in fusion and renewable energy, rather than spending ten times that on destroying and rebuilding nations. But I don't think crying wolf is a wise way to change policy.
AlpineR
My interest in computers actually started a couple years earlier. I had been playing my Atari 2600 and saw an ad for the Programmer cartridge. The box showed somebody writing "Dear computer", and I thought it would be so cool to program my Atari like that. I got the cartridge and was pretty disappointed in how clumsy and limited it was, but then again it just sparked my interest more and so I got started on TRS-80's at my elementary school.
My next computer after the TI was a Commodore 128 at age thirteen. It had bitmap graphics, a PLAY command that understood musical notation (QD4 = quarter note of 4th-octave D), and a built-in assembler. I also got my first modem for dialing up Q-Link at 1200 baud. That was my first exposure to public domain software and the joys of sharing my programs online.
By age 16 I had an Amiga 500. That baby was sweet! A window GUI, 4-channel sound, thousands of colors, and a spacious 512 kB of memory. I started writing scientific programs, like a physics simulator and an artificial neural network. I didn't discover until a few years later that I had been solving differential equations numerically before even reaching calculus in high school.
I didn't use my Amiga much in college. There was still a social stigma for having a computer in your dorm room in 1991. But I used Macs and PCs in the computer labs for writing reports and running chemical engineering simulations. During my senior year, I noticed Netscape running on a lab computer. I had been using Gopher for a while, but it was cool to have graphics and mouse control. I bought a second-hand 14.4 modem so I could surf the Web on my Amiga.
After graduation, I used PCs at work. But I didn't own one myself until going to grad school. Linux was just getting popular, which was convenient since I was a poor student and couldn't afford software otherwise. With easy access to a compiler and decent computational power, I started writing more simulations and eventually switched my thesis from experimental to computational work.
Now I am a postdoctoral researcher, writing atomistic simulations of materials. I use Linux at work and Mac OS X at home. And since one doesn't meet many ladies in my field of work, I met my girlfriend through Match.com. So it's pretty amazing to think how much different my life would be if the home computer boom hadn't coincided with my adolescence.
AlpineR
Maybe the poster just wrote that absent-mindedly. Is there any more merit to the statement than German is derived significantly from Greek?
AlpineR
And if I read "Mod me down for this, but..." one more time, I'm going to scream. Or, if I have mod points, mod you down.
AlpineR
AlpineR
Used car dealer: "Yes, we have 3 Toyotas and a Ford starting at $8,000."
Search engine: "Do you have any used cars available?"
Used car dealer: "Used cars. Used cars. Used cars. Used cars. Used cars. Toyota Ford Honda GM Chrysler Kia Lexus Chevrolet BMW Ferrari. $1000 $2000 $3000 $4000. Low low low low low low low low low prices."
Unethical web sites often look like the second example, even to regular users. I don't know what BMW was serving to Google, but it's easy to imagine something similarly unethical. I don't think legality needs to enter the argument -- if BMW can say what they want (used cards used cars used cars), then Google can say what they want (BMW? Who's that?).
Cyberspace is now considered to be a likely arena for future wars (or terrorism, or organized crime). Sure, the Kama Sutra worm seems trivial. But when a virus threatens to bring down a major part of the US economy, then a little investment in improved communication will pay off.
The bigger surprise to me is that so few females play male characters. I question the survey -- it just seems too one-sided. If the result is real, then maybe it's because females have no choice in most games and are forced into female characters. So when they do get a choice, they overwhelmingly play as females.
AlpineR