I chose trees as my area of natural science geekdom, because I couldn't stand those snotty birders who take a glance at a streak through the trees that an ordinary mortal couldn't narrow down to "bird" then say something like, "Ah, a Stimpson's downy breasted tit." Trees stand still long enough to put an identification to an objective test.
Oak species often display yearly variations in acorn production. This may be helpful in that you want surplus acorns from the point of view of squirrels; producing lots of acorns every year means you get lots of squirrels. Producing a bumper crop every three or four years and a small crop otherwise maximizes the number of surplus acorns you make.
I've heard some say that White Oaks (with smoothly rounded leaf lobes) have three to four year cycles and Red Oaks (with pointy veins that stick out past the end of the leaf lobes) are acyclic. I've also heard the opposite, that White Oaks produce acorns every year and Red Oaks have longer cycles of five or even six years. My own experience is that the White Oaks I know produce bumper crops ever several years, and the Red Oaks seem to produce reliably every year. However, individual trees often vary considerably from the normal habit of their species. In my experience the yearly variations in the Red Oaks I know are small, and the acorns produced are always extremely bitter, however some Red Oaks seem to produce acorns like White Oaks: sweet, and in bumper crops.
That said, the Red Oaks in my yard have for the last fourteen years produced healthy crops of extremely bitter acorns every year. I've lived in this house fifteen years and every year, like clockwork, there has been a night in early November where I've woken up to a continual refrain of "pok-pok-pok-tumble", as the oaks shed the bulk of their acorns in one day.
It didn't happen this year. This article made me go out an look, and the tree is completely bare and there is very little acorn debris around the tree or the gutters.
Weird.
Still, the Northern Red Oak species is reported by some as having long annual crop cycles, and nobody really knows what might trigger a good or bad year. It stands to reason that trees in an area ought to have some kind of climatic trigger for coordinating their production variations. Otherwise, the winner would be a tree that produces lots of acorns every year.
This could be a situation where a meme gains steam because somebody reports a mysterious lack of acorns, and then others (like me) run out and look at their tree and say, "good lord, there aren't any acorns." Chance are if we'd been paying attention, we'd have noticed that there is occasionally a year in which the trees don't produce many acorns.
It's still a weird feeling, though, to read this story and realize that my trees produced hardly any acorns this year.
If this is real, it may be trees responding to a common climatic cue, a cue which is not necessarily a sign of a widespread disaster (unless you are a squirrel). I'd hypothesize that they ought to have some kind of cue that helps keep the squirrel population in check.
And let me say this: forget about it. Not these days.
I speak this as somebody who did what you are asking about, only decades ago. Back then they didn't have enough people who had ever actually seen a computer to fill all the open jobs. That is not the case these days, I should remark. In any case, if you'd ever touched a computer (wheedling computer time off of system admins used to be quite common) and you seemed bright enough to figure things out, you were hired. Math geeks were preferred. It wasn't a bad way of doing things, but it's as extinct as medieval style apprenticeship. It's as different as going out West in the pioneering days and staking claim to some land, and trying the same thing today.
These days, no degree means that from an employer's standpoint, you're damaged goods. That has always been true once you reached a certain level. I became an MIS director, then later lead engineer in a software development firm, and what I found was that I could no longer apply for entry level jobs and work my way up, but I couldn't pass the filter for high level jobs. It was always a limit on mobility, a filter of which jobs I could apply for and which I couldn't. So, my choice was consulting, or getting the degree. I'd done enough consulting to know that I didn't care for the things I'd need to do to run my own business, so I went back and got the degree.
The degree-less career path was always a dead end, it's just how long you could travel it that has changed; once that path was long enough to make a reasonable career, now it's not.
There's only one option (other than going back to school) when you hit the degree dead end: starting your own business. It could be a screwdriver shop, it could be a web business, or it could be a consultancy (if you have experience worth selling). These days you hit the dead end from the get-go, so I'd say we're looking at a screwdriver shop or a web business. Either way you're going to be self-employed, and most likely won't break even unless you have a hidden gift for business.
Alternatively, you go back to school. A computer related degree is of course, ideal, but really any degree will do, especially if you can scrape together a minor in CS. That, and some luck and fast talking, can get your foot in the door. Maybe you're English major means you can write; maybe your Art History major gets you a position at a museum's IT staff, or at a software developer who sees the advantage of bringing some visual sophistication onto staff. Then once you have a few years of experience plus a degree, you're in much better shape, especially if you continue to take night courses in technology and claim you're working towards a Master's. A CS minor working towards a master's and with two or three years of experience should be pretty competitive with CS majors coming out of school.
Um... not really. 17.6 billion remains a great deal of money to spend on something you can't sell later to retrieve at least most of your capital (if not make a profit). The "$700 billion dollar" bailout program doesn't mean we will spend that much money; we will convert that money into other kinds of assets which can be sold later, possibly at a small profit
Personally, I think a future stimulus package may be a worthwhile thing to spend money on, but timing is important. We took steps to stabilize the credit markets too late, and did the stimulus too early. We should have done them in the opposite order. The last stimulus was like blowing into a balloon when somebody was about to poke it with a pin. First, remove the pin, then blow into the balloon.
Well, that's why you put payloads into space that have a high value for weight.
That's why robotic exploration of the Solar System makes sense; knowledge and information have the highest possible value per mass of any commodity we could retrieve from space.
Obama, far left? Oh buh-ruther. People have no freaking idea in this country what a real leftist is. Obama is by any reasonable definition, looking across the spectrum of possible opinion, center-right.
Oh, yes, because FDR didn't leave any kind of lasting legacy...
I mean, who needs something like the FDIC these days? The Securities and Exchange Commission only restrains Wall Street from operating in a fully unencumbered and thus efficient way.
Lend-lease? Forward thinking? A forward looking leader would have kept us out of WW2 by being carefully neutral, rather than provoking an attack by Japan by preparing for eventual entry into the war.
Well... the problem with the spin-off theory, it always seemed to me, that there was no reason to believe that the space program was the cheapest way to get those spin-offs, or that those spin-offs were the best purchase for our money.
Furthermore, we have to be careful about what we call a "spin-off" of what. Satellites, for example, are arguably as much or more a spin-off of nuclear weapons delivery systems than they are of space exploration.
We also have to ask about the opportunity of manned space presence. It may be that the fastest and most economical path to human space colonization is through developing basic technology using robots.
Well, one way to make an army cheaper is to use it less. It's important to realize that not doing something because you can't isn't at all the same as not doing something because you want to.
Imagine you have the most amazing collection of hammers in the world in your toolbox. If you don't have any screwdrivers or wrenches then a lot of tasks are going to be awkward.
The US military is poorly equipped and organized for the kind of thing we were trying to do in Iraq. A lot of the money goes into things that are force multipliers: making individual soldiers more deadly, making units of force agile and able to move in a precisely coordinated way. In a way, we made our military a powerful instrument for imposing our will upon regimes; imposing your will on a country requires a different set of skills and a different organization.
I just let iTunes update my iPod touch, and it bricked it. Checking the system log when I connect it, I get the message "AMDeviceConnect: This is not the droid you're looking for. Move along, move along."
Now, that's not all that funny when you've got a $300 brick sitting on your desk. Fortunately, a little quality time with Google and I found the not-documented hardware reset sequence, but it points out something important. Don't be funny when there is ANY chance a user might see you being funny in an un-funny situation.
My attitude towards Easter Eggs is that they're kind of like signing the software with your name. No software is perfect, but it's OK to say that "yes, I'm proud of some of the stuff I put in here." Just use your common sense, and one of thing that ought to be common sense is that you should not make light of any difficulties users might encounter; keep it well hidden and out of the way of any kind of real activity or troubleshooting, and especially don't get clever with diagnostic messages.
Being able to exploit the difference requires both intent and artistic talent in that direction. I'd bet it makes a bigger difference watching something like Kurosawa's Ran in HD than it makes watching old Friends episodes. Likewise I'd bet you'll get more out of moving to HD in Lawrence of Arabia than Clerks, even if you like Clerks better..
Sure, but mechanical ingenuity is what makes robotics fun. The really technologically advanced aspects of robotics, like machine vision, could be done entirely in simulation.
It'd be cool to have him working for a year as a visiting scholar or artist in residence at an engineering school.
He has an important characteristic of a great inventor though. He sees an invention shaped hole in the universe, and cannot resist the compulsion to twist metal into a shape that will fill it.
In other circumstances, he'd be an engineer or an artist. He is an artist. I won't be surprised if collectors and museums don't end up spending big bucks for a genuine "Wu".
Well, then, when was the last time you went to the Franklin Institute? Damn great museum. I have no hesitation saying it kicks the crap out of Boston's Museum of Science. On the other hand, nothing in Philly touches the MFA or Gardner.
Of course, it's a bit of an apples and oranges comparison.
I don't think for a minute that the total impact of the MFA is as large on the Boston economy as the Red Sox. However -- the disparity is much less than you'd think. You wouldn't think any museum could pump as much into the economy that even 1% of what a dominant sports franchise does. The bottom line is that your friends sitting around watching the Sox don't spend money with the kind of dollar multiplier effect that people who actually visit the city do, whether it is to take in a game or visit a museum. Ordering Red Sox stuff off a website is good for the Sox, and good for clothing importers, but it does nothing for a city.
And I'm not saying it has to. I'm just sick of sports being looked at as the only kind of public amenity that matters, as the paradigm for raising the status of a city and driving economic growth. A great sports team is an asset to a city; it's just not the only kind.
I endorse your recommendations. Also, if you've been to the MFA, definitely ought to walk across the street to the Gardner. It's a must see. I'm serious, if you think the MFA is a reason to visit Boston, you have to do the Gardner.
With respect to Harvard's museums, you should consider in addition to Natural History the Fogg, (art), Peabody (archaeology) and most especially in the Spring or Summer the Arnold Arboretum (the tree museum), which is a must see.
The Peabody Essex in Salem can be combined with a side trip to Salem (worthwhile). This museum is another must see. On the South Shore, I think Plimouth Plantation and the Mayflower replica is worth a side trip in the summer. This time of year you can have Thanksgiving dinner. A third really worthwhile side trip is to the Higgins armory in Worcestor, which displays antique armor and swords. If you're interested in that sort of thing you might also consider a trip to Gloucester's Hammond Museum. A side side trip to Dogtown is recommended as well.
Those are just the major museums; we haven't started on the historical sites: the Paul Revere house, the Old North Church, the Constitution, the Adams National Historic Park, Lexington & Concord. Many towns here have historical societies and museums, and offer worthwhile lectures (e.g., the Somerville Museum).
The Boston Harbor Islands host two museums, one on Spectacle Island and Fort Warren on George's Island, although you'd need to be hardy to take the boat trip this time of year. For a change of pace, the Trustees of Reservations (http://www.thetrustees.org/ ) operates a number of outstanding natural sites, many of which are also important historical sites -- Castle Hill in Ipswich and the Old Manse come to mind.
Since you're in Cambridge, you can also try the MIT Museum; while you're there check out the Hart nautical museum's model ships. Then you can nip across the Charles and visit the Maparium at the Christian Science Mother Church.
The point is museums are a lot bigger thing than you'd think. Of course everyone knows Boston has a lot of museum, but I doubt very few people know how mind-bogglingly many there are here. I haven't even name all the significant ones. I'd bet you could draw a one hour drive radius around Boston and within that circle you could visit a different museum every single day of the week (except Mondays) and it would literally, without exaggeration, take you years to exhaust them all.
And it's not just college towns like Boston. I visited Cinncinati a few years ago, and easily found three world class museums: the Zoo, of course; The Cinncinati Art Museum (excellent collection of Dutch Masters); and the Krohn Conservatory. I was visiting friends, but these institutions were worth a visit in themselves.
Museums, it turns out, have much higher attendance in aggregate than professional sports. They have a much greater net economic impact than professional sports as well. A single headliner museum in a city can bring in a quarter of a billion dollars annually; the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (an absolutely amazing place) was shown to bring in 369 million annually to the Boston area in a recent study. This is actually comparable to the annual revenue of the Red Sox; the net impact of the Red Sox on regional economy might be somewhat more, but there are a lot more comparable cultural institutions in Boston than there are comparable sports teams. You can walk across the street from the MFA to the Gardner, a smaller but equally culturally significant art museum. Boston is a famous sports town, but it is stuffed to the gills with cultural institutions that have heavy attendance every day (except possibly Mondays) year round.
I think one of the reasons for the outsize impact of cultural institutions is that they have a mission to have an impact. They're supposed to maximize bodies in the doors, eyeballs on the exhibits. Sports franchises aren't run that way. They're run to maximize profit.
Gaming's higher impact is likewise related to the fact you can do it every day. However it isn't going to have the same economic impact as having strong cultural institutions.
It's funny how so many people seem to have gone to school on a different planet than I did...
I guess maybe it's how you look at things. Eleanor Roosevelt once said, "No one can make you feel inferior without your permission." I'd put it differently: whether you are an insider and outsider is a matter of perspective. If you aspire to be something you aren't cut out to be, then you're an outsider.
The patent doesn't claim that representing a web site in XML is original. Instead, it seems to be claiming patent rights on a caching mechanism somewhat like the tiling scheme used in Google maps, except that instead of converting a map into a series of image tiles, they convert a web page into a series of tiles on the server. In Google Maps, this allows a huge document, if you will, to be served in bandwidth efficient chunks to support a responsive user interface.
This tiling strategy is clearly not original, so the claim is for a mechanism for doing this by converting a web page, server-side, into an XML document, portions of which can be fetched (in cases of adjacent tiles preemptively) from the server, updating the display using DOM style manipulations. The HTML->XML transformation is used to try to convert a number of common practices, inventions:tiling and caching content, displaying advertisements in response to web page navigation events, doing said things on the server side or client side, doing it on mobile devices and set-top devices; doing it in response to voice command, doing it in response to keyboard entries, doing it in response to mouse clicks; allowing the user to zoom in on a tile, etc.
The supposed secret sauce is converting an HTML web site into geometric tiles represented by XML. That's what's supposed to make this thing stick when thrown against the wall. Everything else in the patent is there to maximize the size of the blob sticking to the wall. Oh, yes and mumbo jumbo that makes the idea sound a lot more mysterious than it really is.
I'm guessing that what they are going after is Apple's implementation of something analogous to tabbed browsing on the iPhone, an interface that has a coverflowish feel. The patent claims rights to using zooming/magnification with three dimensional representations of web sites created with their secret XML sauce. You can sort of imagine confusing the Safari interface with this if you had never seen it in action, but the inexplicable thing is that Apple isn't using the secret sauce of HTML-XML conversion to produce their interface. You can sort of imagine going after low end phone news and messaging browsers that use WML as looking something like the secret sauce in that it uses HTML to XML conversion, but it doesn't use it in the way specified by the secret sauce. And it's prior art.
Basically, this is a worthless BS patent. Even if this were not BS, what it describes doesn't apply to the iPhone browser. They don't have any chance at all. So I can only speculate they're trying to hype the value of their "property" to attract stupid investors.
Well, trademark is not a license to extend copyright claims. "Godzilla" is a character in a movie, and therefore I think any trademark rights have to be narrowly construed.
For example, suppose that the movie Godzilla is in the public domain. That means you can make derivative works, including, say, an action figure of the star. What would you call that toy? Clearly, it's a Godzilla doll. It's not a "Godzilla brand doll". If the copyright holders were to do the same, they could use "Godzilla" both ways: to identify the thing represented (the character Godzilla) and as a brand (asserting that this product is authentic, that is to say authorized by the creators).
It's like trying to market "Spicy(tm) Hot Sauce". Since you don't own the word "spicy" as it applies to hot sauces, you can't claim it as a distinguishing mark; it cannot describe your sauce's origin, because it describes an intrinsic property of a sauce. You could call it "Diabolical(tm) Hot Sauce"; you can't own the word "diabolical" in general, but you can own it as applied to sauces. Diabolicalness is not a property of sauces; it is merely suggestive.
Many of the references to Godzilla I've seen clearly use it in the same way as "diabolical" in my example above, for example to suggest certain qualities of a wine without actually naming them. IANAL, but this feels wrong. Clearly they are using the name in a brand-like way. If the character is under copyright, it seems wrong that others are allowed to use something which is the exclusive intellectual property of somebody else as an identifying mark.
On the other hand, de facto extension of copyrights by trademark claims feels wrong too, as in quashing the publication of a book about the movie. In that case "Godzilla" describes the subject of a book -- an intrinsic property of any book necessary to understanding its content. A "civil war" book is about the civil war, no matter who it is written by or published. A "Dummies" book isn't about dummies, it is by a certain publisher who uses that mark as suggestive of simplicity and clarity. Any trademark claims by that publisher to books actually about stupid people wouldn't be right.
Now what seems interesting to me is what happens when a character goes into the public domain. It seems to me reasonable (although this might not be the same as legal) that anybody could use it like any other of the common stock of words when it comes to trademarking. You could make a Godzilla brand wine, for example. However, just as in the case of any other word such uses would have to respect preexisting uses of the word as a brand. I'd posit that if a term like "Godzilla" were protected by copyright, then the copyright holders would be able to establish trademarks with that word exclusively during the copyright term, and after the term those trademarks would be like any other trademark using a common word, neither more nor less.
In the case of a Godzilla action figure, unlicensed figures would have to be clear they aren't using "Godzilla" as a trademark, and licensed figures would have to be clear that they are.
You are correct. However, I think the original poster has a point. The fact that they became extinct and we did not does not prove we are smarter. We could be better adapted in other ways. I can think of several dozens of ways we might be better adapted off the bat: we might have better immune systems. We might have been better at storing food as fat. We're appear better adapted for a nomadic lifestyle, giving us a survival advantage.
However, here's the interesting one: going by the skeletons, the size of the attachment points of tendons and so on, Neandertals were powerful brutes who could take apart an elite modern strength athlete with ease. It's been estimated that Neandertals could lift as much as 2000 pounds, twice the current world deadlift record.
Neandertal skeletons also reveal two other interesting features. They often show signs of broken bones. The nature of these injuries have lead some to speculate that Neandertals often wrestled large prey to the ground. The other feature is that the majority of Nandertals skeletons show signs of malnutrition during development.
Modern humans, by comparison, are puny wimps. This gives us lower energy requirements, which is a survival advantage. Imagine two equally intelligent species, one much more physically powerful but with high energy requirements, and one much less powerful but better able to survive periods of famine. The latter might well be spurred to rely on its intelligence more.
So, I'm speculating that having to make do with less meant we discovered more possibilities in our greatest asset, which is our intelligence.
Yes, but capacity isn't the only dimension on which a water purification system has to "scale". How long it can operate it without resupplying filters is a relevant factor.
One of the reasons that poor people are poor is that they have to buy things in more expensive packages. We in the US have fabulously expensive infrastructure that that allows us to "buy" a teaspoon of clean water by turning the tap. Water filtration is a much more expensive, but it doesn't take the millions of dollars of investment a city water supply would. It may well be a cheaper solution in situations where people share a well and carry their cooking and drinking water home. Not cheaper per gallon, just a cheaper way to get people the minimum amount of clean water needed for health.
The sticking point, as far as I can see, is there isn't enough money dedicated to any kind of solution, whether the fabulously expensive to build but cheap per gallon first world solution, or the relatively cheap to install but expensive per gallon approach of water filtration.
If there is a place for Kamen's invention, it would be in a world that is willing to invest up front in some kind of filtration system for everybody. We do not, I suspect, live in such a world, but if we did we might be interested in ways of reducing the cost per gallon of filtered water, say by installing a system like this with solar panels.
My wife had an interesting observation
on
Anathem
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Neal Stephenson is a writer who simply adores a shaggy dog story.
I think he writes for the love of being clever; cleverness for its own sake, whether or not it leads to anything. Contrast this to other, even more wildly inventive authors such as Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett, where absurdity seems to have more of a purpose, which is to make the characters struggles more sympathetic. Everyone can put himself in Arthur Dent's place, because while we might be a little self-absorbed, we're surrounded by even more aggressively self-absorbed people. In the case of Terry Pratchett, we have more pure fantasy; we can imagine ourselves to be stronger and cleverer when faced with the absurdity and corruption of everyday life than we are.
Stephenson's characters seem to me a lot less sympathetic -- not that the have to be. He seems a lot less interested in something you might call "the human condition"; more interested in ideas, places, and things than people perhaps. Cryptonomicon is perhaps the most appealing of his novels that I have read, especially the Goto Dengo character. His survival story is immediately understandable and compelling.
Slashdot Mirror
I chose trees as my area of natural science geekdom, because I couldn't stand those snotty birders who take a glance at a streak through the trees that an ordinary mortal couldn't narrow down to "bird" then say something like, "Ah, a Stimpson's downy breasted tit." Trees stand still long enough to put an identification to an objective test.
Oak species often display yearly variations in acorn production. This may be helpful in that you want surplus acorns from the point of view of squirrels; producing lots of acorns every year means you get lots of squirrels. Producing a bumper crop every three or four years and a small crop otherwise maximizes the number of surplus acorns you make.
I've heard some say that White Oaks (with smoothly rounded leaf lobes) have three to four year cycles and Red Oaks (with pointy veins that stick out past the end of the leaf lobes) are acyclic. I've also heard the opposite, that White Oaks produce acorns every year and Red Oaks have longer cycles of five or even six years. My own experience is that the White Oaks I know produce bumper crops ever several years, and the Red Oaks seem to produce reliably every year. However, individual trees often vary considerably from the normal habit of their species. In my experience the yearly variations in the Red Oaks I know are small, and the acorns produced are always extremely bitter, however some Red Oaks seem to produce acorns like White Oaks: sweet, and in bumper crops.
That said, the Red Oaks in my yard have for the last fourteen years produced healthy crops of extremely bitter acorns every year. I've lived in this house fifteen years and every year, like clockwork, there has been a night in early November where I've woken up to a continual refrain of "pok-pok-pok-tumble", as the oaks shed the bulk of their acorns in one day.
It didn't happen this year. This article made me go out an look, and the tree is completely bare and there is very little acorn debris around the tree or the gutters.
Weird.
Still, the Northern Red Oak species is reported by some as having long annual crop cycles, and nobody really knows what might trigger a good or bad year. It stands to reason that trees in an area ought to have some kind of climatic trigger for coordinating their production variations. Otherwise, the winner would be a tree that produces lots of acorns every year.
This could be a situation where a meme gains steam because somebody reports a mysterious lack of acorns, and then others (like me) run out and look at their tree and say, "good lord, there aren't any acorns." Chance are if we'd been paying attention, we'd have noticed that there is occasionally a year in which the trees don't produce many acorns.
It's still a weird feeling, though, to read this story and realize that my trees produced hardly any acorns this year.
If this is real, it may be trees responding to a common climatic cue, a cue which is not necessarily a sign of a widespread disaster (unless you are a squirrel). I'd hypothesize that they ought to have some kind of cue that helps keep the squirrel population in check.
And let me say this: forget about it. Not these days.
I speak this as somebody who did what you are asking about, only decades ago. Back then they didn't have enough people who had ever actually seen a computer to fill all the open jobs. That is not the case these days, I should remark. In any case, if you'd ever touched a computer (wheedling computer time off of system admins used to be quite common) and you seemed bright enough to figure things out, you were hired. Math geeks were preferred. It wasn't a bad way of doing things, but it's as extinct as medieval style apprenticeship. It's as different as going out West in the pioneering days and staking claim to some land, and trying the same thing today.
These days, no degree means that from an employer's standpoint, you're damaged goods. That has always been true once you reached a certain level. I became an MIS director, then later lead engineer in a software development firm, and what I found was that I could no longer apply for entry level jobs and work my way up, but I couldn't pass the filter for high level jobs. It was always a limit on mobility, a filter of which jobs I could apply for and which I couldn't. So, my choice was consulting, or getting the degree. I'd done enough consulting to know that I didn't care for the things I'd need to do to run my own business, so I went back and got the degree.
The degree-less career path was always a dead end, it's just how long you could travel it that has changed; once that path was long enough to make a reasonable career, now it's not.
There's only one option (other than going back to school) when you hit the degree dead end: starting your own business. It could be a screwdriver shop, it could be a web business, or it could be a consultancy (if you have experience worth selling). These days you hit the dead end from the get-go, so I'd say we're looking at a screwdriver shop or a web business. Either way you're going to be self-employed, and most likely won't break even unless you have a hidden gift for business.
Alternatively, you go back to school. A computer related degree is of course, ideal, but really any degree will do, especially if you can scrape together a minor in CS. That, and some luck and fast talking, can get your foot in the door. Maybe you're English major means you can write; maybe your Art History major gets you a position at a museum's IT staff, or at a software developer who sees the advantage of bringing some visual sophistication onto staff. Then once you have a few years of experience plus a degree, you're in much better shape, especially if you continue to take night courses in technology and claim you're working towards a Master's. A CS minor working towards a master's and with two or three years of experience should be pretty competitive with CS majors coming out of school.
Um... not really. 17.6 billion remains a great deal of money to spend on something you can't sell later to retrieve at least most of your capital (if not make a profit). The "$700 billion dollar" bailout program doesn't mean we will spend that much money; we will convert that money into other kinds of assets which can be sold later, possibly at a small profit
Personally, I think a future stimulus package may be a worthwhile thing to spend money on, but timing is important. We took steps to stabilize the credit markets too late, and did the stimulus too early. We should have done them in the opposite order. The last stimulus was like blowing into a balloon when somebody was about to poke it with a pin. First, remove the pin, then blow into the balloon.
Well, that's why you put payloads into space that have a high value for weight.
That's why robotic exploration of the Solar System makes sense; knowledge and information have the highest possible value per mass of any commodity we could retrieve from space.
Obama, far left? Oh buh-ruther. People have no freaking idea in this country what a real leftist is. Obama is by any reasonable definition, looking across the spectrum of possible opinion, center-right.
Oh, yes, because FDR didn't leave any kind of lasting legacy...
I mean, who needs something like the FDIC these days? The Securities and Exchange Commission only restrains Wall Street from operating in a fully unencumbered and thus efficient way.
Lend-lease? Forward thinking? A forward looking leader would have kept us out of WW2 by being carefully neutral, rather than provoking an attack by Japan by preparing for eventual entry into the war.
Well ... the problem with the spin-off theory, it always seemed to me, that there was no reason to believe that the space program was the cheapest way to get those spin-offs, or that those spin-offs were the best purchase for our money.
Furthermore, we have to be careful about what we call a "spin-off" of what. Satellites, for example, are arguably as much or more a spin-off of nuclear weapons delivery systems than they are of space exploration.
We also have to ask about the opportunity of manned space presence. It may be that the fastest and most economical path to human space colonization is through developing basic technology using robots.
Well, one way to make an army cheaper is to use it less. It's important to realize that not doing something because you can't isn't at all the same as not doing something because you want to.
Imagine you have the most amazing collection of hammers in the world in your toolbox. If you don't have any screwdrivers or wrenches then a lot of tasks are going to be awkward.
The US military is poorly equipped and organized for the kind of thing we were trying to do in Iraq. A lot of the money goes into things that are force multipliers: making individual soldiers more deadly, making units of force agile and able to move in a precisely coordinated way. In a way, we made our military a powerful instrument for imposing our will upon regimes; imposing your will on a country requires a different set of skills and a different organization.
I just let iTunes update my iPod touch, and it bricked it. Checking the system log when I connect it, I get the message "AMDeviceConnect: This is not the droid you're looking for. Move along, move along."
Now, that's not all that funny when you've got a $300 brick sitting on your desk. Fortunately, a little quality time with Google and I found the not-documented hardware reset sequence, but it points out something important. Don't be funny when there is ANY chance a user might see you being funny in an un-funny situation.
My attitude towards Easter Eggs is that they're kind of like signing the software with your name. No software is perfect, but it's OK to say that "yes, I'm proud of some of the stuff I put in here." Just use your common sense, and one of thing that ought to be common sense is that you should not make light of any difficulties users might encounter; keep it well hidden and out of the way of any kind of real activity or troubleshooting, and especially don't get clever with diagnostic messages.
Oh, I agree, but I think it make a difference.
Being able to exploit the difference requires both intent and artistic talent in that direction. I'd bet it makes a bigger difference watching something like Kurosawa's Ran in HD than it makes watching old Friends episodes. Likewise I'd bet you'll get more out of moving to HD in Lawrence of Arabia than Clerks, even if you like Clerks better..
Sure, but mechanical ingenuity is what makes robotics fun. The really technologically advanced aspects of robotics, like machine vision, could be done entirely in simulation.
It'd be cool to have him working for a year as a visiting scholar or artist in residence at an engineering school.
He has an important characteristic of a great inventor though. He sees an invention shaped hole in the universe, and cannot resist the compulsion to twist metal into a shape that will fill it.
In other circumstances, he'd be an engineer or an artist. He is an artist. I won't be surprised if collectors and museums don't end up spending big bucks for a genuine "Wu".
Well, then, when was the last time you went to the Franklin Institute? Damn great museum. I have no hesitation saying it kicks the crap out of Boston's Museum of Science. On the other hand, nothing in Philly touches the MFA or Gardner.
Of course, it's a bit of an apples and oranges comparison.
I don't think for a minute that the total impact of the MFA is as large on the Boston economy as the Red Sox. However -- the disparity is much less than you'd think. You wouldn't think any museum could pump as much into the economy that even 1% of what a dominant sports franchise does. The bottom line is that your friends sitting around watching the Sox don't spend money with the kind of dollar multiplier effect that people who actually visit the city do, whether it is to take in a game or visit a museum. Ordering Red Sox stuff off a website is good for the Sox, and good for clothing importers, but it does nothing for a city.
And I'm not saying it has to. I'm just sick of sports being looked at as the only kind of public amenity that matters, as the paradigm for raising the status of a city and driving economic growth. A great sports team is an asset to a city; it's just not the only kind.
I endorse your recommendations. Also, if you've been to the MFA, definitely ought to walk across the street to the Gardner. It's a must see. I'm serious, if you think the MFA is a reason to visit Boston, you have to do the Gardner.
With respect to Harvard's museums, you should consider in addition to Natural History the Fogg, (art), Peabody (archaeology) and most especially in the Spring or Summer the Arnold Arboretum (the tree museum), which is a must see.
The Peabody Essex in Salem can be combined with a side trip to Salem (worthwhile). This museum is another must see. On the South Shore, I think Plimouth Plantation and the Mayflower replica is worth a side trip in the summer. This time of year you can have Thanksgiving dinner. A third really worthwhile side trip is to the Higgins armory in Worcestor, which displays antique armor and swords. If you're interested in that sort of thing you might also consider a trip to Gloucester's Hammond Museum. A side side trip to Dogtown is recommended as well.
Those are just the major museums; we haven't started on the historical sites: the Paul Revere house, the Old North Church, the Constitution, the Adams National Historic Park, Lexington & Concord. Many towns here have historical societies and museums, and offer worthwhile lectures (e.g., the Somerville Museum).
The Boston Harbor Islands host two museums, one on Spectacle Island and Fort Warren on George's Island, although you'd need to be hardy to take the boat trip this time of year. For a change of pace, the Trustees of Reservations (http://www.thetrustees.org/ ) operates a number of outstanding natural sites, many of which are also important historical sites -- Castle Hill in Ipswich and the Old Manse come to mind.
Since you're in Cambridge, you can also try the MIT Museum; while you're there check out the Hart nautical museum's model ships. Then you can nip across the Charles and visit the Maparium at the Christian Science Mother Church.
The point is museums are a lot bigger thing than you'd think. Of course everyone knows Boston has a lot of museum, but I doubt very few people know how mind-bogglingly many there are here. I haven't even name all the significant ones. I'd bet you could draw a one hour drive radius around Boston and within that circle you could visit a different museum every single day of the week (except Mondays) and it would literally, without exaggeration, take you years to exhaust them all.
And it's not just college towns like Boston. I visited Cinncinati a few years ago, and easily found three world class museums: the Zoo, of course; The Cinncinati Art Museum (excellent collection of Dutch Masters); and the Krohn Conservatory. I was visiting friends, but these institutions were worth a visit in themselves.
Museums, it turns out, have much higher attendance in aggregate than professional sports. They have a much greater net economic impact than professional sports as well. A single headliner museum in a city can bring in a quarter of a billion dollars annually; the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (an absolutely amazing place) was shown to bring in 369 million annually to the Boston area in a recent study. This is actually comparable to the annual revenue of the Red Sox; the net impact of the Red Sox on regional economy might be somewhat more, but there are a lot more comparable cultural institutions in Boston than there are comparable sports teams. You can walk across the street from the MFA to the Gardner, a smaller but equally culturally significant art museum. Boston is a famous sports town, but it is stuffed to the gills with cultural institutions that have heavy attendance every day (except possibly Mondays) year round.
I think one of the reasons for the outsize impact of cultural institutions is that they have a mission to have an impact. They're supposed to maximize bodies in the doors, eyeballs on the exhibits. Sports franchises aren't run that way. They're run to maximize profit.
Gaming's higher impact is likewise related to the fact you can do it every day. However it isn't going to have the same economic impact as having strong cultural institutions.
It's funny how so many people seem to have gone to school on a different planet than I did ...
I guess maybe it's how you look at things. Eleanor Roosevelt once said, "No one can make you feel inferior without your permission." I'd put it differently: whether you are an insider and outsider is a matter of perspective. If you aspire to be something you aren't cut out to be, then you're an outsider.
Yes, but that doesn't explain why lacrosse isn't more popular.
No way. Shatner maybe a sci-fi actor but he is old school.
What I mean is that he's just not plastic. The stuff of his performances is comprised of natural materials: wood, cheese and ham.
The patent doesn't claim that representing a web site in XML is original. Instead, it seems to be claiming patent rights on a caching mechanism somewhat like the tiling scheme used in Google maps, except that instead of converting a map into a series of image tiles, they convert a web page into a series of tiles on the server. In Google Maps, this allows a huge document, if you will, to be served in bandwidth efficient chunks to support a responsive user interface.
This tiling strategy is clearly not original, so the claim is for a mechanism for doing this by converting a web page, server-side, into an XML document, portions of which can be fetched (in cases of adjacent tiles preemptively) from the server, updating the display using DOM style manipulations. The HTML->XML transformation is used to try to convert a number of common practices, inventions:tiling and caching content, displaying advertisements in response to web page navigation events, doing said things on the server side or client side, doing it on mobile devices and set-top devices; doing it in response to voice command, doing it in response to keyboard entries, doing it in response to mouse clicks; allowing the user to zoom in on a tile, etc.
The supposed secret sauce is converting an HTML web site into geometric tiles represented by XML. That's what's supposed to make this thing stick when thrown against the wall. Everything else in the patent is there to maximize the size of the blob sticking to the wall. Oh, yes and mumbo jumbo that makes the idea sound a lot more mysterious than it really is.
I'm guessing that what they are going after is Apple's implementation of something analogous to tabbed browsing on the iPhone, an interface that has a coverflowish feel. The patent claims rights to using zooming/magnification with three dimensional representations of web sites created with their secret XML sauce. You can sort of imagine confusing the Safari interface with this if you had never seen it in action, but the inexplicable thing is that Apple isn't using the secret sauce of HTML-XML conversion to produce their interface. You can sort of imagine going after low end phone news and messaging browsers that use WML as looking something like the secret sauce in that it uses HTML to XML conversion, but it doesn't use it in the way specified by the secret sauce. And it's prior art.
Basically, this is a worthless BS patent. Even if this were not BS, what it describes doesn't apply to the iPhone browser. They don't have any chance at all. So I can only speculate they're trying to hype the value of their "property" to attract stupid investors.
Well, trademark is not a license to extend copyright claims. "Godzilla" is a character in a movie, and therefore I think any trademark rights have to be narrowly construed.
For example, suppose that the movie Godzilla is in the public domain. That means you can make derivative works, including, say, an action figure of the star. What would you call that toy? Clearly, it's a Godzilla doll. It's not a "Godzilla brand doll". If the copyright holders were to do the same, they could use "Godzilla" both ways: to identify the thing represented (the character Godzilla) and as a brand (asserting that this product is authentic, that is to say authorized by the creators).
It's like trying to market "Spicy(tm) Hot Sauce". Since you don't own the word "spicy" as it applies to hot sauces, you can't claim it as a distinguishing mark; it cannot describe your sauce's origin, because it describes an intrinsic property of a sauce. You could call it "Diabolical(tm) Hot Sauce"; you can't own the word "diabolical" in general, but you can own it as applied to sauces. Diabolicalness is not a property of sauces; it is merely suggestive.
Many of the references to Godzilla I've seen clearly use it in the same way as "diabolical" in my example above, for example to suggest certain qualities of a wine without actually naming them. IANAL, but this feels wrong. Clearly they are using the name in a brand-like way. If the character is under copyright, it seems wrong that others are allowed to use something which is the exclusive intellectual property of somebody else as an identifying mark.
On the other hand, de facto extension of copyrights by trademark claims feels wrong too, as in quashing the publication of a book about the movie. In that case "Godzilla" describes the subject of a book -- an intrinsic property of any book necessary to understanding its content. A "civil war" book is about the civil war, no matter who it is written by or published. A "Dummies" book isn't about dummies, it is by a certain publisher who uses that mark as suggestive of simplicity and clarity. Any trademark claims by that publisher to books actually about stupid people wouldn't be right.
Now what seems interesting to me is what happens when a character goes into the public domain. It seems to me reasonable (although this might not be the same as legal) that anybody could use it like any other of the common stock of words when it comes to trademarking. You could make a Godzilla brand wine, for example. However, just as in the case of any other word such uses would have to respect preexisting uses of the word as a brand. I'd posit that if a term like "Godzilla" were protected by copyright, then the copyright holders would be able to establish trademarks with that word exclusively during the copyright term, and after the term those trademarks would be like any other trademark using a common word, neither more nor less.
In the case of a Godzilla action figure, unlicensed figures would have to be clear they aren't using "Godzilla" as a trademark, and licensed figures would have to be clear that they are.
You are correct. However, I think the original poster has a point. The fact that they became extinct and we did not does not prove we are smarter. We could be better adapted in other ways. I can think of several dozens of ways we might be better adapted off the bat: we might have better immune systems. We might have been better at storing food as fat. We're appear better adapted for a nomadic lifestyle, giving us a survival advantage.
However, here's the interesting one: going by the skeletons, the size of the attachment points of tendons and so on, Neandertals were powerful brutes who could take apart an elite modern strength athlete with ease. It's been estimated that Neandertals could lift as much as 2000 pounds, twice the current world deadlift record.
Neandertal skeletons also reveal two other interesting features. They often show signs of broken bones. The nature of these injuries have lead some to speculate that Neandertals often wrestled large prey to the ground. The other feature is that the majority of Nandertals skeletons show signs of malnutrition during development.
Modern humans, by comparison, are puny wimps. This gives us lower energy requirements, which is a survival advantage. Imagine two equally intelligent species, one much more physically powerful but with high energy requirements, and one much less powerful but better able to survive periods of famine. The latter might well be spurred to rely on its intelligence more.
So, I'm speculating that having to make do with less meant we discovered more possibilities in our greatest asset, which is our intelligence.
Yes, but capacity isn't the only dimension on which a water purification system has to "scale". How long it can operate it without resupplying filters is a relevant factor.
One of the reasons that poor people are poor is that they have to buy things in more expensive packages. We in the US have fabulously expensive infrastructure that that allows us to "buy" a teaspoon of clean water by turning the tap. Water filtration is a much more expensive, but it doesn't take the millions of dollars of investment a city water supply would. It may well be a cheaper solution in situations where people share a well and carry their cooking and drinking water home. Not cheaper per gallon, just a cheaper way to get people the minimum amount of clean water needed for health.
The sticking point, as far as I can see, is there isn't enough money dedicated to any kind of solution, whether the fabulously expensive to build but cheap per gallon first world solution, or the relatively cheap to install but expensive per gallon approach of water filtration.
If there is a place for Kamen's invention, it would be in a world that is willing to invest up front in some kind of filtration system for everybody. We do not, I suspect, live in such a world, but if we did we might be interested in ways of reducing the cost per gallon of filtered water, say by installing a system like this with solar panels.
Neal Stephenson is a writer who simply adores a shaggy dog story.
I think he writes for the love of being clever; cleverness for its own sake, whether or not it leads to anything. Contrast this to other, even more wildly inventive authors such as Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett, where absurdity seems to have more of a purpose, which is to make the characters struggles more sympathetic. Everyone can put himself in Arthur Dent's place, because while we might be a little self-absorbed, we're surrounded by even more aggressively self-absorbed people. In the case of Terry Pratchett, we have more pure fantasy; we can imagine ourselves to be stronger and cleverer when faced with the absurdity and corruption of everyday life than we are.
Stephenson's characters seem to me a lot less sympathetic -- not that the have to be. He seems a lot less interested in something you might call "the human condition"; more interested in ideas, places, and things than people perhaps. Cryptonomicon is perhaps the most appealing of his novels that I have read, especially the Goto Dengo character. His survival story is immediately understandable and compelling.