This is true, and it raises the importance of design and build quality in paper books -- which is often lacking. Find a volume from the late 1800s in a used bookstore; in many ways that era was the pinnacle of dead tree book UX, or at least the surviving books from that era are. Good enough but not elaborately precious typography, quality paper and binding, fine covers -- they're a pleasure to use in a way that a ten year-old paperback or even most 21st century hardbound volumes are not.
In general if you let the average marketer anywhere near the UX design process the user will never feel like he's in control of the browsing experience. I guess it's just that mediocrity is the norm in any field, but you'd think the goal would be to make the user feel like he's in control while subtly influencing his decisions. But subtle, marketing influence in user interface design is not. I always feel like I'm fighting with the Apple Store, that the store wants to steer me towards what everyone else is supposed to be buying. That's why I steer clear of the Apple store and get my music in MP3 format from Amazon -- a company I'm not particularly enamored of politically but which is smart enough not to make me fight against the tide to get what I want.
If that narrative were true you wouldn't be able to by phosphates in other forms, such as TSP for degreasing your walls before wallpapering. That's a much more useful and concentrated source of phosphate than dishwashing liquid for your home bomb-maker.
No, phosphates were banned in dishwashing detergents because their widespread daily use put so much phosphate into the phosphorous-limited riparian ecosystems. People don't use nearly as much phosphate washing their walls or decks.
There's nothing braindead about XML, it's just not the right tool for many jobs it is used for. It's over-engineering a solution to a simple problem because everyone else is doing it that way that's braindead.
When XML became hot around the end of the 90s, people did what they always do with a hot technology; they used it whether or not it made sense just to have it on their resume. It never made sense for things like an over-the-network data serialization format; or as a configuration file format where some kind of key/value file format would do; but it was all over the place in those kinds of roles. What it's really good at is encoding complex documents re-using multiple heterogeneous standards (e.g. a text document with SVG diagrams, MathML expressions, and Dublin Core metadata). It's a comprehensive and practical tool to use on those kinds of problems.
I have no idea why people insist on boot times. You are aware that a machine spends little time booting and a hell of a lot more running things?
Sure, except when you do reboot it might be important to do it quickly some of the time.
It's absolutely true that it's more important to optimize the common case over the uncommon case, but that doesn't mean the uncommon case is necessarily insignificant.
however i'm sure there are projects in flight, whether to kill people or to educate people or to channel storm drainage that would have shown a substantially greater benefit if they had 230M
That's absolutely clear in hindsight. The question is whether it should have been absolutely obvious beforehand. That's not clear given the reason cited for program cancellation, which was not technical failure -- the program seems not to have got far enough along for that. It was the sequestration, which means to predict this particular failure you'd have to be able to predict that the President and Congress would be willing to take across the board spending cuts, even to defense, rather than reach a budget agreement.
It's also a pain dealing with trash accumulating in the front seat of your car, but that doesn't make it OK to throw it out the window.
If Finish powerballs work for you, then you should use them; phosphates were banned for a good reason (in most places). If you have problem with spotting then use a rinse aid; I make a cheap homemade rinse aid using food grade citric acid, which I buy in bulk for other uses; it's very handy as a household cleaner and can be used as "sour salt" to give food recipes like sourdough bread an extra kick. A citric acid solution is way cheaper than store bought rinse aid; white vinegar is even cheaper, although citric acid works better IMO.
Or you could get a newer dishwasher. I find that a modern dishwasher works fine with the new detergents, and eutrophication is a serious environmental problem especially where wastewater is discharged into freshwater systems. Newer units are also considerably quieter than older dishwashers.
You add up all the people using phosphates they don't really need all along the watershed and what you get downstream is water covered in green algal scum over dead zones where the oxygen has been depleted. Nutrients can cause also toxic dinoflagellate blooms that kill fish and even sicken people. Phosphates may be particularly damaging in brackish estuaries where it may harm juvenile populations of economically important fish.
So I strongly advise against routinely adding TSP to your dishwasher.
Now microorganisms need both phosphorous (for nucleotide and ATP synthesis) and nitrogen (for proteins); if your sewage treatment plant discharges into saltwater it may be that the receiving waters are nitrogen limited rather than phosphorous limited, due to a paucity of nitrogen fixing bacteria. In that case phosphates might not be a major concern, and it might be relatively harmless to add phosphates. I'd check with the public affairs people at your sewage treatment first. But if your treatment plant discharges into freshwater, or if you aren't sure whether it discharges into nitrogen-limited marine waters, I'd stay away from adding phosphates.
That's begging the question. The media account of the paper is so garbled that it's simply not useful at all. The paper is a different story. However the usefulness of that depends on your ability to think critically, particularly about statistics, and pay attention to details. If your takeaway after skimming the paper is that "Star Wars fans are narcissists" then you're probably better off not having opinions about the paper, period.
From what I can see the paper contains nothing that should be surprising or controversial. If you know geek fandom you know that odd or socially maladjusted behavior is more common than in the general population, but also that most participants are pretty normal except for being more interesting and imaginative than a random sample of the general population would be. The correlation of the authors' geek culture index to the personality trait "open to new experiences" is actually stronger than the correlation to narcissism, although for some reason the author of the article in The Independent chooses to ignore that finding. I think that may be a bit of pandering to the mundane crowd, who'd prefer to think of themselves as more socially well-adjusted than geeks than as less adventurous.
This stuff has limitless possibilities. Everything from knives to bumpers to bike frames....the list of potential applications is endless.
Well, steel has one under-appreciated quality that this material (being partly ceramic) probably doesn't have: a benign failure mode -- at least if it hasn't been hardened. This makes it an excellent material for something like bumpers where it will absorb energy by continuing to deform instead of shattering.
The classic example used by logical positivists in the early 20th century was any conjecture about the far side of the Moon. Until we developed spacecraft any statement about the half of the Moon we can't see would have been untestable in practical terms, but it would have been testable in principle.
That wasn't the government. That was the airline not wanting to give up 11 fares. Not that I'm defending the government here; given the incompetence of the no-fly program in the past it's very likely this is a case of something stupid, like mixing up names that sound similar.
Well, in this case it makes sense. If they aren't going to be allowed in through the checkpoint at the end of their flight then it makes sense not to let them board the flight.
So the means (preventing them from boarding) at least are reasonable; whether the objective (preventing them from entering the country) made any sense is an entirely different matter.
Stuff way cooler than a bug zapper for sure. The coolest thing I ever saw was a sonar device that killed mosquito larvae. Mosquito larvae are aquatic, but they can't extract oxygen from the water; they have to attach to the surface. This device emitted a powerful, upward sweeping frequency chirp, and when it hit the resonant frequency of the larvae's buoyancy bladder the larvae would pop like popcorn and sink to the bottom of the tank. All you needed was a fish tank full of larvae and he had one hell of an impressive demo.
The guy thought he was going to sell tens of thousands of these things, that mosquito control agencies would send armies of workers out to lower these things into stuff like storm drains to kill all the larvae. The thing is it's a lot cheaper to hire a college student at the beginning of summer, put him on a scooter with a bag of 180 day briquets; he doesn't even have to stop the scooter to chuck them into the storm drains as he passes. Even the environmental justification is relatively weak; the pesticides used on mosquito larvae tend to be very narrow spectrum to aquatic flies or arthropods and break down rapidly in the environment after being emitted by an extended release briquet. Used in things like storm drains and abandoned swimming pools they're extremely benign.
But the guy has been moderately successful; from what I hear agencies buy them to bring to public education events and fairs to do the same awesome demo he'd done, then they put them away.
Well, I don't know. You'd think the guy's claim would be easy enough to test, but to do it properly you'd have to set up some kind of double blind test against an expert mosquito identifier, because it's clearly possible to delude yourself into thinking something like this works. All I know is that he wasn't back again the following year. That could be because his device didn't work, or because he couldn't convince anyone to test it, or (very likely) even if it worked in principle, there was no obvious way to make a practical and useful instrument from the idea. That happens all the time in mosquito control, which attracts way more than its share of Rube Goldberg inventions.
Well, I'm not so sure that different mosquitoes sound different enough for the idea to work, but if it did clearly you wouldn't want to wait for a mosquito to fly close enough you can pick it up against all the background noise. What you would do is bait a sound insulated trap with octenol and CO2 so it smells like a sweaty animal. This is very similar to one technique used to to collect mosquitoes for identification; the advantage is that you wouldn't have to bring a bag of mosquitoes and assorted duff back to the lab to wait for someone trained in systematics to sort through it under a microscope.
Taxonomy is pedantry. For example someone noticed that sum populations of the mosquito Cx pipiens have a couple of little white dots on their abdomen, so they proposed a new species Cx restuans, and the proposal was accepted. Cx pipiens and Cx restuans are except for a couple of minor color markings interchangeable, and they interbreed in many places to produce populations of fully fertile "hybrids".
Life is a DAG because an organism can't be an ancestor of one of its own ancestors; however that doesn't mean that in sexually reproduced life that some ancestor can't appear on both the maternal and paternal lines. That's very different than the topology of a tree's branches.
You are laboring under the misapprehension that all US states do education the same way they apparently do in our part of the country. Students in some states get world class educations; if Massachusetts were a country it would be tied with Japan for student math achievement.
Massachusetts does have charter schools, but they're a relatively small part of the system. Although Massachusetts charter schools perform well, so do public schools there on average. Only about 3% of students attend charter schools there so competition doesn't drive it's overall excellent public school performance.
Well, if the data said we're stupid then that'd mean we're stupid -- even if we wouldn't like to accept that. But that's not the data is saying.
What the data says is that growing up poor in the US limits your intellectual development in a way it doesn't other countries. Since this is based on siblings-raised-apart data this excludes the explanation that poor people in America are poor because they're inherently stupider than people who are wealthier. Since this discrepancy between siblings raised apart doesn't happen in similarly advanced countries, it is not something that is inherent in poverty, either.
Provided that the data stand up to scrutiny, this indicates that America squanders at least some of its intellectual potential.
Slashdot Mirror
... out of life. If you have to get up and drive 30 miles to fly your drone, why bother getting out of bed in the morning?
It's support for functional programming?
This is true, and it raises the importance of design and build quality in paper books -- which is often lacking. Find a volume from the late 1800s in a used bookstore; in many ways that era was the pinnacle of dead tree book UX, or at least the surviving books from that era are. Good enough but not elaborately precious typography, quality paper and binding, fine covers -- they're a pleasure to use in a way that a ten year-old paperback or even most 21st century hardbound volumes are not.
In general if you let the average marketer anywhere near the UX design process the user will never feel like he's in control of the browsing experience. I guess it's just that mediocrity is the norm in any field, but you'd think the goal would be to make the user feel like he's in control while subtly influencing his decisions. But subtle, marketing influence in user interface design is not. I always feel like I'm fighting with the Apple Store, that the store wants to steer me towards what everyone else is supposed to be buying. That's why I steer clear of the Apple store and get my music in MP3 format from Amazon -- a company I'm not particularly enamored of politically but which is smart enough not to make me fight against the tide to get what I want.
If that narrative were true you wouldn't be able to by phosphates in other forms, such as TSP for degreasing your walls before wallpapering. That's a much more useful and concentrated source of phosphate than dishwashing liquid for your home bomb-maker.
No, phosphates were banned in dishwashing detergents because their widespread daily use put so much phosphate into the phosphorous-limited riparian ecosystems. People don't use nearly as much phosphate washing their walls or decks.
There's nothing braindead about XML, it's just not the right tool for many jobs it is used for. It's over-engineering a solution to a simple problem because everyone else is doing it that way that's braindead.
When XML became hot around the end of the 90s, people did what they always do with a hot technology; they used it whether or not it made sense just to have it on their resume. It never made sense for things like an over-the-network data serialization format; or as a configuration file format where some kind of key/value file format would do; but it was all over the place in those kinds of roles. What it's really good at is encoding complex documents re-using multiple heterogeneous standards (e.g. a text document with SVG diagrams, MathML expressions, and Dublin Core metadata). It's a comprehensive and practical tool to use on those kinds of problems.
I have no idea why people insist on boot times. You are aware that a machine spends little time booting and a hell of a lot more running things?
Sure, except when you do reboot it might be important to do it quickly some of the time.
It's absolutely true that it's more important to optimize the common case over the uncommon case, but that doesn't mean the uncommon case is necessarily insignificant.
what you say is true.
however i'm sure there are projects in flight, whether to kill people or to educate people
or to channel storm drainage that would have shown a substantially greater benefit
if they had 230M
That's absolutely clear in hindsight. The question is whether it should have been absolutely obvious beforehand. That's not clear given the reason cited for program cancellation, which was not technical failure -- the program seems not to have got far enough along for that. It was the sequestration, which means to predict this particular failure you'd have to be able to predict that the President and Congress would be willing to take across the board spending cuts, even to defense, rather than reach a budget agreement.
It's also a pain dealing with trash accumulating in the front seat of your car, but that doesn't make it OK to throw it out the window.
If Finish powerballs work for you, then you should use them; phosphates were banned for a good reason (in most places). If you have problem with spotting then use a rinse aid; I make a cheap homemade rinse aid using food grade citric acid, which I buy in bulk for other uses; it's very handy as a household cleaner and can be used as "sour salt" to give food recipes like sourdough bread an extra kick. A citric acid solution is way cheaper than store bought rinse aid; white vinegar is even cheaper, although citric acid works better IMO.
Or you could get a newer dishwasher. I find that a modern dishwasher works fine with the new detergents, and eutrophication is a serious environmental problem especially where wastewater is discharged into freshwater systems. Newer units are also considerably quieter than older dishwashers.
You add up all the people using phosphates they don't really need all along the watershed and what you get downstream is water covered in green algal scum over dead zones where the oxygen has been depleted. Nutrients can cause also toxic dinoflagellate blooms that kill fish and even sicken people. Phosphates may be particularly damaging in brackish estuaries where it may harm juvenile populations of economically important fish.
So I strongly advise against routinely adding TSP to your dishwasher.
Now microorganisms need both phosphorous (for nucleotide and ATP synthesis) and nitrogen (for proteins); if your sewage treatment plant discharges into saltwater it may be that the receiving waters are nitrogen limited rather than phosphorous limited, due to a paucity of nitrogen fixing bacteria. In that case phosphates might not be a major concern, and it might be relatively harmless to add phosphates. I'd check with the public affairs people at your sewage treatment first. But if your treatment plant discharges into freshwater, or if you aren't sure whether it discharges into nitrogen-limited marine waters, I'd stay away from adding phosphates.
How is this information useful?
That's begging the question. The media account of the paper is so garbled that it's simply not useful at all. The paper is a different story. However the usefulness of that depends on your ability to think critically, particularly about statistics, and pay attention to details. If your takeaway after skimming the paper is that "Star Wars fans are narcissists" then you're probably better off not having opinions about the paper, period.
From what I can see the paper contains nothing that should be surprising or controversial. If you know geek fandom you know that odd or socially maladjusted behavior is more common than in the general population, but also that most participants are pretty normal except for being more interesting and imaginative than a random sample of the general population would be. The correlation of the authors' geek culture index to the personality trait "open to new experiences" is actually stronger than the correlation to narcissism, although for some reason the author of the article in The Independent chooses to ignore that finding. I think that may be a bit of pandering to the mundane crowd, who'd prefer to think of themselves as more socially well-adjusted than geeks than as less adventurous.
Because so many people are absolute morons. Geeks are somewhat different from people in general, but they're still people, after all.
This stuff has limitless possibilities. Everything from knives to bumpers to bike frames....the list of potential applications is endless.
Well, steel has one under-appreciated quality that this material (being partly ceramic) probably doesn't have: a benign failure mode -- at least if it hasn't been hardened. This makes it an excellent material for something like bumpers where it will absorb energy by continuing to deform instead of shattering.
The classic example used by logical positivists in the early 20th century was any conjecture about the far side of the Moon. Until we developed spacecraft any statement about the half of the Moon we can't see would have been untestable in practical terms, but it would have been testable in principle.
That wasn't the government. That was the airline not wanting to give up 11 fares. Not that I'm defending the government here; given the incompetence of the no-fly program in the past it's very likely this is a case of something stupid, like mixing up names that sound similar.
So -- Alatar or Pallando?
Well, in this case it makes sense. If they aren't going to be allowed in through the checkpoint at the end of their flight then it makes sense not to let them board the flight.
So the means (preventing them from boarding) at least are reasonable; whether the objective (preventing them from entering the country) made any sense is an entirely different matter.
No, I'm just out of date, most likely.
But I'm not sure a dinosaur skull counts as a cultural artifact, unless it was looted from the temple of a dinosaur worshipping cult or something.
Stuff way cooler than a bug zapper for sure. The coolest thing I ever saw was a sonar device that killed mosquito larvae. Mosquito larvae are aquatic, but they can't extract oxygen from the water; they have to attach to the surface. This device emitted a powerful, upward sweeping frequency chirp, and when it hit the resonant frequency of the larvae's buoyancy bladder the larvae would pop like popcorn and sink to the bottom of the tank. All you needed was a fish tank full of larvae and he had one hell of an impressive demo.
The guy thought he was going to sell tens of thousands of these things, that mosquito control agencies would send armies of workers out to lower these things into stuff like storm drains to kill all the larvae. The thing is it's a lot cheaper to hire a college student at the beginning of summer, put him on a scooter with a bag of 180 day briquets; he doesn't even have to stop the scooter to chuck them into the storm drains as he passes. Even the environmental justification is relatively weak; the pesticides used on mosquito larvae tend to be very narrow spectrum to aquatic flies or arthropods and break down rapidly in the environment after being emitted by an extended release briquet. Used in things like storm drains and abandoned swimming pools they're extremely benign.
But the guy has been moderately successful; from what I hear agencies buy them to bring to public education events and fairs to do the same awesome demo he'd done, then they put them away.
Well, I don't know. You'd think the guy's claim would be easy enough to test, but to do it properly you'd have to set up some kind of double blind test against an expert mosquito identifier, because it's clearly possible to delude yourself into thinking something like this works. All I know is that he wasn't back again the following year. That could be because his device didn't work, or because he couldn't convince anyone to test it, or (very likely) even if it worked in principle, there was no obvious way to make a practical and useful instrument from the idea. That happens all the time in mosquito control, which attracts way more than its share of Rube Goldberg inventions.
Well, I'm not so sure that different mosquitoes sound different enough for the idea to work, but if it did clearly you wouldn't want to wait for a mosquito to fly close enough you can pick it up against all the background noise. What you would do is bait a sound insulated trap with octenol and CO2 so it smells like a sweaty animal. This is very similar to one technique used to to collect mosquitoes for identification; the advantage is that you wouldn't have to bring a bag of mosquitoes and assorted duff back to the lab to wait for someone trained in systematics to sort through it under a microscope.
Taxonomy is pedantry. For example someone noticed that sum populations of the mosquito Cx pipiens have a couple of little white dots on their abdomen, so they proposed a new species Cx restuans, and the proposal was accepted. Cx pipiens and Cx restuans are except for a couple of minor color markings interchangeable, and they interbreed in many places to produce populations of fully fertile "hybrids".
Life is a DAG because an organism can't be an ancestor of one of its own ancestors; however that doesn't mean that in sexually reproduced life that some ancestor can't appear on both the maternal and paternal lines. That's very different than the topology of a tree's branches.
You are laboring under the misapprehension that all US states do education the same way they apparently do in our part of the country. Students in some states get world class educations; if Massachusetts were a country it would be tied with Japan for student math achievement.
Massachusetts does have charter schools, but they're a relatively small part of the system. Although Massachusetts charter schools perform well, so do public schools there on average. Only about 3% of students attend charter schools there so competition doesn't drive it's overall excellent public school performance.
Well, if the data said we're stupid then that'd mean we're stupid -- even if we wouldn't like to accept that. But that's not the data is saying.
What the data says is that growing up poor in the US limits your intellectual development in a way it doesn't other countries. Since this is based on siblings-raised-apart data this excludes the explanation that poor people in America are poor because they're inherently stupider than people who are wealthier. Since this discrepancy between siblings raised apart doesn't happen in similarly advanced countries, it is not something that is inherent in poverty, either.
Provided that the data stand up to scrutiny, this indicates that America squanders at least some of its intellectual potential.