You guys know that, In the UK at least, git is a moderate insult with the same meaning as bastard?
Linus likes to name his projects after himself. Hence, "Linux" and "git" - the British slang meaning of the term being the one implied. I like the Oxford definition; "an arrogant or contemptible person". "bastard" has another meaning, though its slang use approximates the same:-).
Douglas Adams famously wrote that a Computer Programmer is a Scientist who could never find their field. For me, it was certainly like that - science didn't seem to hold any new and exciting treasures.
If healing might be their thing, then I'd suggest a career in Acupuncture - the field needs bright minds so that there can be more decent scientific papers like this one. It's a lot different to your average Scientific field - it's very inter-personal, and there is a large degree of "knack" to be learned first while the mechanism continues to be elusive (I give it about 5 years myself before one or two of the key puzzles are unraveled histologically, then the fun will really start). Historically, the most renowned researchers have been accomplished physicians, and there is huge scope for learning complementing skills such as taiji, qigong, tuina massage, herbs... several of which are often combined for a patient.
Of course you need to find a good school... preferably offering degrees, in-depth Western Medical training and research opportunities. Please feel free to write to me for recommendations.
I highly recommend Apocalypse 2012: An Optimist Investigates The End of Civilization. The author, a science journalist, goes through a number of end-of-times scenarios. The difference between this book and many others is that he actually visits Scientists in the field, and travels to the relevant spots - from Guatemala to Russia. The prose is very interesting, and even though he rants far off the rails later in the book in the section on Armageddon (which is, as he writes, the most disappointing of all possible end-of-times scenarios, because it would be entirely of our making), it's still a very good read.
Fuel: anything liquid and combustible (Th!nk City); anything liquid, combustible, with a flash point equal to or greater than the equivalent of a mix of 89% octane (Aptera)
What's this "fibres overlapping" rubbish? Muscles change shape because the cells change shape, not the fibres. Go read an anatomy book.
Weart has a section on Sunspots vs Climate
on
The Quietest Sun
·
· Score: 1
There is an excellent essay in Spencer and Weart on the history of this connection, from William Herschel's suggestion of Sun-induced climate variability in 1801, to the widespread interest in 1850.
In short, nobody has been able to demonstrate that the total energy reaching the earth from the Sun changes by more than about 0.1%. As early as 100 years ago we knew this figure was under 1%.
People try to link global warming to all sorts of things, for all sorts of deluded reasons. If you have the time, or find yourself engaging with people who dispute the consensus position, do put aside an hour or so for reading the The Modern Temperature Trend essay, or the history section of the IPCC AR4 - though I found Spencer & Weart much more engaging. A lot of people arguing against the consensus haven't read the history and often don't know that the arguments they're putting forth as if nobody ever thought of it before were discredited decades ago.
Parrot is a virtual machine that pre-dates.NET and has many of the similar objectives. Probably the reason that no-ones put PPI and.NET together into something like IronPerl is that there are more interesting projects around, like JIT conversion of.NET bytecode to parrot bytecode. Then who needs Mono:-).
Let's be straight about this. The result was already in favour of the losing candidate. You can bet that if the vote was 1% more or less either way, it wouldn't have made a shred of difference. Those who believe that the US elections are for anything other than a fancy show are deceiving themselves. Exit polls don't lie, but diebold machines can very easily.
"This is the ass end of the world. The land below you is called New Zea-land. There's the North Island - that's the good one, and the South Island, which sucks. Between these two imaginatively named islands lies a stretch of water known as the Cook Strait.
"People have swum and sailed across this straight, and thousands cross it every day by plane and ferry. But only one man has ever tried... to jump it."
Re:Ignorance vs. the Unknown
on
LHC Success!
·
· Score: 1
Earth is constantly bombarded by cosmic rays of energy levels higher than the LHC can produce. If it could have destroyed us, it would have already.
That's certainly true for the proton-proton collisions. But can we be so sure when they start accelerating Lead nuclei?
Well, assuming our model of neutron stars is correct, then there are already far bigger collections of randomly conjoined nuclei in the universe. But still, anyone got a good answer to that one?
Avoiding "technical debt" may be the most important challenge of IT to date. As a person retraining into a different industry, I can see the stark difference. There is simply no ongoing liability in IT, it's almost always "as is, where is, and if I'm not producing well enough it's your problem". This is similar to the point you mention about the level of engineering and quality control faced by mechanical engineers etc.
This situation continues even when the IT guy becomes the chief technical architect. And so they will steering the systems towards making themselves indispensible, setting themselves up with cushy ongoing maintenance fees, etc. Individuals and even blue chip IT corporations do this.
I'm all for professional bodies on that front, it's not a show-stopper for unqualified people working - it's just clear when you're working with someone who is not "registered". When they are registered, you know it's a stick to beat them with later, should that arise. It's like an industry-wide guarantee, which has many benefits in making people respect the industry more - rather than just seeing "IT guys" as those freaks who stare at computers and hold everyone to mercy.
furthermore I'd just like to comment on this statement;
We practice traditional Taiji as designed by the originators, including fighting skills.
You make it sound like being true to some nostalgic past is actually important. In reality the science of tai chi has moved on considerably since the early days.
I think you're attributing far too much of this to malice, when really the thing is that the teachers just have a different emphasis on training. To many, completion of learning the form is simply not as important as good practice. They focus on minute details of movement and get everything correct to a high precision. It takes only a few moves before a skilled master can pick the mistakes which it is important to correct before moving on to the next stage. If the focus is on keeping to a timescale, then precision is necessarily compromised. Learning the sequence of moves is simply not the hard part, heck you can find many books which describe them and videos which display them.
Your assertion "NOT correct under any circumstances" is simply your point of view.
Not true. It is more important to be able to do a handful of moves correctly than to be able to do 108 moves badly. Otherwise you are not practicing Tai Chi Chuan, you are merely imitating it.
Tai Chi is a great thing to do in the morning - during the time that you are most likely to have a heart attack, it's good to do some gentle, all-body movement that will use your muscles as pumps[*] to give your heart a rest. The gentle, fluid movements sloosh around all that lymphatic fluid and interstitial fluid (this is mostly what is referred to as "Qi"), which otherwise have nothing moving them and stagnate, causing pain and discomfort.
As others have pointed out, Tai Chi Chuan is not "slow kung fu"; it's more like applied biomechanics, and can be practiced at all speeds.
Best progress and effect is made not from schools which teach the whole form as quickly as possible, but those that emphasise building up each of the basic principles of Tai Chi doing very basic movements, and then "inducting" these principles into one of the many forms. So it pays to check all of the schools in your area, and look for the one which has the students which have been going for the longest, but learned a relatively small amount of the form. The ones that tend to favour spending entire classes going over minute details. Those that call themselves "Tai Chi Elements" schools are certainly a good bet.
Tai Chi Chuan is the perfect martial art for the geek - it is the one where the mind can be fully put to work towards the problem at hand. Eventually you load Tai Chi Chuan as a subroutine into your grey matter, so that you can be benefiting from it during every exercise you do. It is low-impact, a self-sufficient practice. Then you can appear to "walk" or "run" about your daily activities, but you are actually practicing Tai Chi Chuan.
And it takes a long time (say, 3 years or so - but a blink of an eye in terms of the length of your life, really) to get proficient enough in it to get like that. In the mean-time, swimming is the next best thing to Tai Chi Chuan to help the cardiovascular system. 20 minutes of this or other exercise every week is a good beginning level; increase as you feel is beneficial and enjoyable. The number one thing is not to stress - not about your training, nor stress your body unduly as you exercise.
* - I can't find a good online reference to this action, but can be found in eg. Chapter 19 figure 19.6 of _Human A&P_, Elaine Marieb, 6th ed.
Doesn't this just sound like one of those Navel-gazing projects that programmers get into that take up all their time? You know, like Yegge's 'teenager' project. If so, isn't it great that MicroSoft are betting on these teenage ideas? They're sure to fall flat on their face, and then they'll have no choice left but to switch to basing their products on something stable like BSD or Linux:-)
When I last investigated this, the actual write cycle time was also much higher than for a 10k or 15k RPM disk. I think this is the bigger issue, not the fact that you have to read the whole page back first (something which is very fast anyway)
Well, did you see the syntax for one Perl 6 concurrency design?
contend {
maybe { this() }
maybe { that() }
}
Much better than silly words like semaphore and mutex. Good semantics, too, but that's hard to impress on people who don't think that there are any basic programming constructs you can't do with C:-).
The tzdata package needs to be at least version 2007f. So, if you think about it, this has already happened at least 6 times this year, somewhere in the world.
Personally I prefer to blame it on stupid politicians who want to push things like this through in under 6 months to give the voters the impression that they are capable of getting stuff done.
What if you have a bunch of developers working with some ( unfortunately, let me say that ) Windows-only tools for historical reasons ? Are you really saying that I should have a team of VisualStudio users install cygwin on their systems ?
Not at all. Please, continue to bury your head in the sand about the evolution of version control. By the time the Java implementation is fully complete, the C#.net implementation works on all platforms and derived git protocols show that git is a version control protocol, not a tool, your favourite tool will probably have adopted it under the hood.
Or you could just stop making objections for the sake of it and use it. your choice:-)
Slashdot Mirror
You guys know that, In the UK at least, git is a moderate insult with the same meaning as bastard?
Linus likes to name his projects after himself. Hence, "Linux" and "git" - the British slang meaning of the term being the one implied. I like the Oxford definition; "an arrogant or contemptible person". "bastard" has another meaning, though its slang use approximates the same :-).
They're online services. If you're on the edge of the internet, with lots of local bandwidth but little international, that's not terribly useful.
Douglas Adams famously wrote that a Computer Programmer is a Scientist who could never find their field. For me, it was certainly like that - science didn't seem to hold any new and exciting treasures.
If healing might be their thing, then I'd suggest a career in Acupuncture - the field needs bright minds so that there can be more decent scientific papers like this one. It's a lot different to your average Scientific field - it's very inter-personal, and there is a large degree of "knack" to be learned first while the mechanism continues to be elusive (I give it about 5 years myself before one or two of the key puzzles are unraveled histologically, then the fun will really start). Historically, the most renowned researchers have been accomplished physicians, and there is huge scope for learning complementing skills such as taiji, qigong, tuina massage, herbs... several of which are often combined for a patient.
Of course you need to find a good school ... preferably offering degrees, in-depth Western Medical training and research opportunities. Please feel free to write to me for recommendations.
I highly recommend Apocalypse 2012: An Optimist Investigates The End of Civilization. The author, a science journalist, goes through a number of end-of-times scenarios. The difference between this book and many others is that he actually visits Scientists in the field, and travels to the relevant spots - from Guatemala to Russia. The prose is very interesting, and even though he rants far off the rails later in the book in the section on Armageddon (which is, as he writes, the most disappointing of all possible end-of-times scenarios, because it would be entirely of our making), it's still a very good read.
Fuel: anything liquid and combustible (Th!nk City); anything liquid, combustible, with a flash point equal to or greater than the equivalent of a mix of 89% octane (Aptera)
This just in! Scientists in Russia have confirmed the results using Vodka! The article even mentions a Japanese lab trying using Sake...
What's this "fibres overlapping" rubbish? Muscles change shape because the cells change shape, not the fibres. Go read an anatomy book.
There is an excellent essay in Spencer and Weart on the history of this connection, from William Herschel's suggestion of Sun-induced climate variability in 1801, to the widespread interest in 1850.
In short, nobody has been able to demonstrate that the total energy reaching the earth from the Sun changes by more than about 0.1%. As early as 100 years ago we knew this figure was under 1%.
People try to link global warming to all sorts of things, for all sorts of deluded reasons. If you have the time, or find yourself engaging with people who dispute the consensus position, do put aside an hour or so for reading the The Modern Temperature Trend essay, or the history section of the IPCC AR4 - though I found Spencer & Weart much more engaging. A lot of people arguing against the consensus haven't read the history and often don't know that the arguments they're putting forth as if nobody ever thought of it before were discredited decades ago.
Parrot is a virtual machine that pre-dates .NET and has many of the similar objectives. Probably the reason that no-ones put PPI and .NET together into something like IronPerl is that there are more interesting projects around, like JIT conversion of .NET bytecode to parrot bytecode. Then who needs Mono :-).
Will people still be saying it's vapourware? :-)
Let's be straight about this. The result was already in favour of the losing candidate. You can bet that if the vote was 1% more or less either way, it wouldn't have made a shred of difference. Those who believe that the US elections are for anything other than a fancy show are deceiving themselves. Exit polls don't lie, but diebold machines can very easily.
Scoop's special USA coup feature covers it all very well.
Heh. This is just like a NZ Movie;
"This is the ass end of the world. The land below you is called New Zea-land. There's the North Island - that's the good one, and the South Island, which sucks. Between these two imaginatively named islands lies a stretch of water known as the Cook Strait.
"People have swum and sailed across this straight, and thousands cross it every day by plane and ferry. But only one man has ever tried... to jump it."
From The Devil Dared Me To
Earth is constantly bombarded by cosmic rays of energy levels higher than the LHC can produce. If it could have destroyed us, it would have already.
That's certainly true for the proton-proton collisions. But can we be so sure when they start accelerating Lead nuclei?
Well, assuming our model of neutron stars is correct, then there are already far bigger collections of randomly conjoined nuclei in the universe. But still, anyone got a good answer to that one?
Avoiding "technical debt" may be the most important challenge of IT to date. As a person retraining into a different industry, I can see the stark difference. There is simply no ongoing liability in IT, it's almost always "as is, where is, and if I'm not producing well enough it's your problem". This is similar to the point you mention about the level of engineering and quality control faced by mechanical engineers etc.
This situation continues even when the IT guy becomes the chief technical architect. And so they will steering the systems towards making themselves indispensible, setting themselves up with cushy ongoing maintenance fees, etc. Individuals and even blue chip IT corporations do this.
I'm all for professional bodies on that front, it's not a show-stopper for unqualified people working - it's just clear when you're working with someone who is not "registered". When they are registered, you know it's a stick to beat them with later, should that arise. It's like an industry-wide guarantee, which has many benefits in making people respect the industry more - rather than just seeing "IT guys" as those freaks who stare at computers and hold everyone to mercy.
furthermore I'd just like to comment on this statement;
We practice traditional Taiji as designed by the originators, including fighting skills.
You make it sound like being true to some nostalgic past is actually important. In reality the science of tai chi has moved on considerably since the early days.
I think you're attributing far too much of this to malice, when really the thing is that the teachers just have a different emphasis on training. To many, completion of learning the form is simply not as important as good practice. They focus on minute details of movement and get everything correct to a high precision. It takes only a few moves before a skilled master can pick the mistakes which it is important to correct before moving on to the next stage. If the focus is on keeping to a timescale, then precision is necessarily compromised. Learning the sequence of moves is simply not the hard part, heck you can find many books which describe them and videos which display them.
Your assertion "NOT correct under any circumstances" is simply your point of view.
So much effort and complexity! Just practice Tai Chi Chuan (see above comment)
Not true. It is more important to be able to do a handful of moves correctly than to be able to do 108 moves badly. Otherwise you are not practicing Tai Chi Chuan, you are merely imitating it.
Tai Chi is a great thing to do in the morning - during the time that you are most likely to have a heart attack, it's good to do some gentle, all-body movement that will use your muscles as pumps[*] to give your heart a rest. The gentle, fluid movements sloosh around all that lymphatic fluid and interstitial fluid (this is mostly what is referred to as "Qi"), which otherwise have nothing moving them and stagnate, causing pain and discomfort.
I recommend the book The Tai Chi Book: Refining and Enjoying a Lifetime of Practice By Robert Chuckrow; reading from someone with a Physics PhD makes it quite palatable to your average geek. (It would be even better to have been co-authored by an MD, but still very good)
As others have pointed out, Tai Chi Chuan is not "slow kung fu"; it's more like applied biomechanics, and can be practiced at all speeds.
Best progress and effect is made not from schools which teach the whole form as quickly as possible, but those that emphasise building up each of the basic principles of Tai Chi doing very basic movements, and then "inducting" these principles into one of the many forms. So it pays to check all of the schools in your area, and look for the one which has the students which have been going for the longest, but learned a relatively small amount of the form. The ones that tend to favour spending entire classes going over minute details. Those that call themselves "Tai Chi Elements" schools are certainly a good bet.
Tai Chi Chuan is the perfect martial art for the geek - it is the one where the mind can be fully put to work towards the problem at hand. Eventually you load Tai Chi Chuan as a subroutine into your grey matter, so that you can be benefiting from it during every exercise you do. It is low-impact, a self-sufficient practice. Then you can appear to "walk" or "run" about your daily activities, but you are actually practicing Tai Chi Chuan.
And it takes a long time (say, 3 years or so - but a blink of an eye in terms of the length of your life, really) to get proficient enough in it to get like that. In the mean-time, swimming is the next best thing to Tai Chi Chuan to help the cardiovascular system. 20 minutes of this or other exercise every week is a good beginning level; increase as you feel is beneficial and enjoyable. The number one thing is not to stress - not about your training, nor stress your body unduly as you exercise.
* - I can't find a good online reference to this action, but can be found in eg. Chapter 19 figure 19.6 of _Human A&P_, Elaine Marieb, 6th ed.
Doesn't this just sound like one of those Navel-gazing projects that programmers get into that take up all their time? You know, like Yegge's 'teenager' project. If so, isn't it great that MicroSoft are betting on these teenage ideas? They're sure to fall flat on their face, and then they'll have no choice left but to switch to basing their products on something stable like BSD or Linux :-)
When I last investigated this, the actual write cycle time was also much higher than for a 10k or 15k RPM disk. I think this is the bigger issue, not the fact that you have to read the whole page back first (something which is very fast anyway)
Well, did you see the syntax for one Perl 6 concurrency design? contend { maybe { this() } maybe { that() } }
Much better than silly words like semaphore and mutex. Good semantics, too, but that's hard to impress on people who don't think that there are any basic programming constructs you can't do with C :-).
The Parrot Weekly Team meeting ... is called the "Parrot Sketch" :)
The tzdata package needs to be at least version 2007f. So, if you think about it, this has already happened at least 6 times this year, somewhere in the world.
Personally I prefer to blame it on stupid politicians who want to push things like this through in under 6 months to give the voters the impression that they are capable of getting stuff done.
Not at all. Please, continue to bury your head in the sand about the evolution of version control. By the time the Java implementation is fully complete, the C# .net implementation works on all platforms and derived git protocols show that git is a version control protocol, not a tool, your favourite tool will probably have adopted it under the hood.
Or you could just stop making objections for the sake of it and use it. your choice :-)