My particular take on the phrase "we only use 10% of our brains to think" is that it's about as useful as saying "we only use 10% of our cars to drive." In other words, a motor without a chassis is pretty much a convenient way to turn gasoline into carbon dioxide and heat.
There's another statistic that states that the brain uses ~20% of our caloric intake. What's interesting about this is that all this energy is basically used to keep the sodium potential high enough for cognition to work--and cognition is basically a "free lunch." (I got this from "The Man Who Tasted Shapes" by Cytowic.)
Funny thing is, things like cement, paraffin and water are better shielding per unit weight.
Paraffin? That's cool. What's the comparison between cement and water? If you used it in a reactor, say, would it glow blue from Cerenkov radiation? Could you use it in liquid form as a radiation-resistant heat transfer fluid? Does this mean that Superman couldn't see through the top of Liberace's piano?
Wholeheartedly, WHOPPINGLY ironic that I get moderated for flamebait for a posting a comment that generated 10 sincere, intelligent replies to my query.
I find this rather amusing myself, although the original comment didn't strike me as obvious flamebait. Regardless, as a regular/. reader, I couldn't pass up a chance to soapbox about my Mac when x86 gets all the press around here.:)
I'm a Mac user, and I have a B&W G3 at home. I use it for font design, layout, prepress, and music. Okay-- why would I want to run Linux?
A little background. For a long time, I was a DOS-head. Macs were beige toasters--good concept, bad price. DOS 3.3 was a decently stable OS for the day. And it had a command line! Anything that wouldn't let me grab the OS by the balls and force it to do what I wanted was infuriating.
Then Windows came along. I resisted as long as I could, not the least because it was so *cheesy*. It didn't help that I took a detour into the Wild Land of Unix for a couple of years. Unix was bizarre--it had a command line, but it made no pretense of making concessions to the human operating it. It said, "I'm a computer. I'm a box of silicon. Don't pretend I'm your friend. Realize I'm an appliance." I saw the light.
However, apps were hard to come by. DOS faded, Windows emerged as the unfortunate platform of choice. I eventually made my piece with Win 3.11. It was usable, and didn't make grandiose promises about its usability.
I drifted into graphic design, and had a chance to get a Power PC when they first came out. Suddenly, the Mac was less of a toy, more of a powerhouse. Plus, the lack of command line wasn't a problem any more--the OS had been massaged so that I could get along without the infuriating sense of "something bad going on without my knowledge." Yes, some tweaking would have been nice, but there were OS extensions for many things.
Windows 95 came along. I was repulsed by the obvious crib from the Mac, and the new attitude of Microsoft. Win95 was *the* answer to all your problems! I tok a test drive and said, "*This* is the OS for Luddite grandmothers."
About this time, Apple started to lose big-time. I wondered if I was stuck on a dying platform. I started looking around for options.
NT came along. Could this be a quality MS product? I thought maybe, and with $$$$ in my eyes, took a couple of MCSE courses. Hah! What a crock! Three classes in, I quit with disgust. I would have to be happy with my niche-market machine. As a graphic designer, I *was* a niche market.
So, I was happy with MacOS up all the way through 8.1. It wasn't perfect, but it wasn't annoying. Yes, it did crash, but I usually knew *why*, since I was doing something really stupid at the time. Windows become more and more cloying and gooey. Everything I thought about Macs in 1987 was now true of Wintel boxes--toys for cretins.
Then Microsoft bailed out Apple. The new G3's (a bleeding-edge commercially-available desktop box if I've ever seen one) came with MacOS 8.5. And the horror! The aliases had little Windows arrows! There was native Wintel TrueType support! FILE EXTENSIONS WERE STARTING TO BECOME NECESSARY!
In vain I tried to go back to 8.1. It didn't have the architecture support, USB support, FireWire support, or DVD support. I was screwed! Then, some of my most cherished design tools started acting up, for no apparent reason! Suddenly, I WANTED A COMMAND LINE.
Enter Linux. It's stable and free. It doesn't lard the system with crap. It says, "Treat me as an appliance, not as a friend. If you want a friend, talk to my friend X, or KDE, or GNOME." The users of the system like to share ideas and workarounds. I could get back to hacking a box, if I felt the desire.
The only problem I have with Linux right now is the dearth of applications. To truly migrate from Microtosh OS 8.5, I need a layout program with CMYK prepress capabilities, and PostScript font controls. These may already exist--I haven't yet looked because I'm not running Linux yet.
Yellow Dog Linux has my wholehearted support. When more Mac-heads come into the fold, the more chance there will be a port of PageMaker or Quark or Adobe Type Manager or Freehand or Illustrator--or even a GPL version of these fine tools.
I don't think I would ever have expected the phrase "IBM is mainly a service company" to be used with a straight face by anyone, if you'd asked me in 1989.
This strikes me just as humorous as seeing a Micro$oft ad on TV that basically states, "You should use M$ products because we're the established brand." Same attitude as IBM back in the day. Truth is indeed stranger than fiction.
Heck, when all those dimbulb Republicans took over in January 1995, they wondered what the big boxy building housed. It was the National Reconnaissance Agency, something with a billion dollar budget.
Y'know, I was gonna laugh at those silly Congresspeople, but then I remembered--the CIA forgot where the Chinese embassy in Serbia was.
"You mean the same government that gave us Amtrak--" "As well as the Susan B. Anthony dollar--" "--Are responsible for the biggest conspiracies on the planet?" --The Lone Gunmen
I'm wondering if there are spook geeks sitting around the coffee pot bitching about the audacity of the US Congress trying to meddle in something it has absolutely no clue about.:)
It's kinda ballsy to say, "Fsck no!" to Congress tho. I wonder if you can declare an entire agency in contempt of Congress and throw them all in the nearest Club Fed.
Pretty close. Basically, a black hole, from far enough away, affects you just like any other object of the same mass. If the sun turned into a black hole right now, it's get dark and cold and we'd have other problems after a while but our orbit wouldn't be affected and we wouldn't have to worry about getting "sucked in".
Basically, if Eta Carinae did turn into a black hole, we would be trading a visible 100+ solar mass for an invisible 100+ solar mass. (Okay, we'd see the accretion disk, but that's chickenfeed.)
Actually, the 9th level of Hell was a huge sheet of ice with Lucifer frozen in the center.:) I think he had three heads and was chewing on Judas, Brutus and Cassius, but I could be mistaken.
the Pengiun doesn't really reflect the cutting-edge, high-tech image of Linux
I think for hairy-scary Un*x versions to make it into the warm-fuzzy desktop world a nice penguin or two would be just the ticket. Although, for those fanatics out there, perhaps a "bleeding edge" dagger, dripping blood, would work just as well.:)
As for Redhat's eponymous red hat, for brand recognition it just doesn't get any better than that. It may be a silly name to call a company or organization, but, then again, so is "GNU" or even "Slashdot".
At least they didn't choose the Dogbert Method of Naming, using random words from technology and astronomy. I'd love to use the "Uranus-Hertz" distro of Linux. Imagine the logo for that.
1. Where are we? Are we at the "edge"? The "center"? Since all galaxies (except a couple of nearby ones) are moving away from us, maybe we're at the center. Maybe it's like the old "spots on a balloon" example: to each spot on an expanding balloon, everyone is moving away.
2. Let's say we're at the center. The age of the Universe is 12 billion years. That means we can see 12 billion light-years in all directions, which we take as the "edge". Let's say we travel at the speed of light so we can reach the edge as fast as possible. Once we go 12 billion light-years, we stop and look around. Whoops! It's been 12 billion years! The "edge" has moved! The Universe is much bigger now.
3. Let's say we're at the center again. We can see 12 billion light-years in all directions. However, the light from the "edge" is 12 billion years old, the age of the Universe. We're seeing the hydrogen from the Big Bang, the center of it all, in all directions. Does this mean that the "edge" is actually the original center of all things?
Censorship is not automatically and always wrong. If you think so, please enumerate how many issues of "Hustler" magazine you've given to your children.
Parental control of net access, or of other objectionable material, is perfectly acceptable. Until a certain age, kids don't have the mental skills perfected to handle these things. Plus, they don't have the world experience to put these things in perspective. It is also in keeping with "what plays in Peoria"--those people who find things offensive have the right to not view those offensive things.
However, the straw man argument here is kinda lame. I can be against censorship (for those over the age of consent) without handing about porno mags. That's not the opposite of censorship; that's active distribition. If one of my kids found a porno mag, well, then it's incumbent upon me as a parent to make sure the child understands exactly what why where and how those things may be objectionable.
After checking out all the other responses, I had a silly idea. We (Netizens) could provide mirrors and suchlike for the Aussie ISP's and stuff, but we could also erect a myriad of "offensive" sites to keep the film board swamped, and then shut those sites down as soon as they were banned.
I think it's pretty damn funny that they'll be using the Australian film board to review the content of these web sites. Just think if Jack Valenti was in charge of rating/.
Of course, I'd like to know how a web site will be nominated for review, and exactly how much time the censo--I mean, film board will have to make their decision. If they're planning on reviewing the entire Web, they'd better get started now. And the manpower requirements would pretty much deplete the entire Australian legislature, including aides, security guards, secretaries and janitors.
I'm talking about a designer using his eye for colors, font, and positioning. Someone who has to have immediate feedback.
Just my own two cents, of course, but it sounds like you're describing an Adobe product here.
At a service bureau I worked at, we charged people a minimum of one hour design time to try to squeeze separations out of Word, and two hours for Publisher.
Anybody feel like calling up their local news station with an indignant story about how Neiman-Marcus screwed them over? Maybe we could get the recipie spammed over the airwaves, too.
I still can't imagine what would happen if we actually used that 80% of the brain that we supposedly don't.
You'd stop breathing.:) Saying that we only use 20% (or 15% or 10% or whatever) of our brains to think is like saying we only use 10% of our cars to drive. Although the engine gives it the impulse to go, it wouldn't get anywhere without the frame, or the wheels, or the drivetrain, etc. etc. etc.
Slashdot Mirror
My particular take on the phrase "we only use 10% of our brains to think" is that it's about as useful as saying "we only use 10% of our cars to drive." In other words, a motor without a chassis is pretty much a convenient way to turn gasoline into carbon dioxide and heat.
There's another statistic that states that the brain uses ~20% of our caloric intake. What's interesting about this is that all this energy is basically used to keep the sodium potential high enough for cognition to work--and cognition is basically a "free lunch." (I got this from "The Man Who Tasted Shapes" by Cytowic.)
Funny thing is, things like cement, paraffin and water are better shielding per unit weight.
Paraffin? That's cool. What's the comparison between cement and water? If you used it in a reactor, say, would it glow blue from Cerenkov radiation? Could you use it in liquid form as a radiation-resistant heat transfer fluid? Does this mean that Superman couldn't see through the top of Liberace's piano?
How about:
Uranus (god of the Universe): the Internet
Kronos (not really the god of Time, but the name fits): NTP, chron jobs
This list got buried in the thread hierarchy, so I was jonesing for my 15 seconds of fame:
St. Marconi of Unlimited Bandwidth
St. Turing the Mystic
St. Hopper of Transubstantiation of Bugs
St. Ada the Inscrutable
St. Stallman of Hoofed Mammals
St. Torvalds the Flightless
and from Jimhotep:
St. Tesla the Enabler
"Hired man... there is a sick girl in my house. I hear the dice being tossed for her bloody dress."
I tried to remember the rest, but I think this says it all.
St. Marconi of Unlimited Bandwidth
St. Turing the Mystic
St. Hopper of Transubstantiation of Bugs
St. Ada the Inscrutable
St. Stallman of Hoofed Mammals
St. Torvalds the Flightless
Wholeheartedly, WHOPPINGLY ironic that I get moderated for flamebait for a posting a comment that generated 10 sincere, intelligent replies to my query.
/. reader, I couldn't pass up a chance to soapbox about my Mac when x86 gets all the press around here. :)
I find this rather amusing myself, although the original comment didn't strike me as obvious flamebait. Regardless, as a regular
I'm a Mac user, and I have a B&W G3 at home. I use it for font design, layout, prepress, and music. Okay-- why would I want to run Linux?
A little background. For a long time, I was a DOS-head. Macs were beige toasters--good concept, bad price. DOS 3.3 was a decently stable OS for the day. And it had a command line! Anything that wouldn't let me grab the OS by the balls and force it to do what I wanted was infuriating.
Then Windows came along. I resisted as long as I could, not the least because it was so *cheesy*. It didn't help that I took a detour into the Wild Land of Unix for a couple of years. Unix was bizarre--it had a command line, but it made no pretense of making concessions to the human operating it. It said, "I'm a computer. I'm a box of silicon. Don't pretend I'm your friend. Realize I'm an appliance." I saw the light.
However, apps were hard to come by. DOS faded, Windows emerged as the unfortunate platform of choice. I eventually made my piece with Win 3.11. It was usable, and didn't make grandiose promises about its usability.
I drifted into graphic design, and had a chance to get a Power PC when they first came out. Suddenly, the Mac was less of a toy, more of a powerhouse. Plus, the lack of command line wasn't a problem any more--the OS had been massaged so that I could get along without the infuriating sense of "something bad going on without my knowledge." Yes, some tweaking would have been nice, but there were OS extensions for many things.
Windows 95 came along. I was repulsed by the obvious crib from the Mac, and the new attitude of Microsoft. Win95 was *the* answer to all your problems! I tok a test drive and said, "*This* is the OS for Luddite grandmothers."
About this time, Apple started to lose big-time. I wondered if I was stuck on a dying platform. I started looking around for options.
NT came along. Could this be a quality MS product? I thought maybe, and with $$$$ in my eyes, took a couple of MCSE courses. Hah! What a crock! Three classes in, I quit with disgust. I would have to be happy with my niche-market machine. As a graphic designer, I *was* a niche market.
So, I was happy with MacOS up all the way through 8.1. It wasn't perfect, but it wasn't annoying. Yes, it did crash, but I usually knew *why*, since I was doing something really stupid at the time. Windows become more and more cloying and gooey. Everything I thought about Macs in 1987 was now true of Wintel boxes--toys for cretins.
Then Microsoft bailed out Apple. The new G3's (a bleeding-edge commercially-available desktop box if I've ever seen one) came with MacOS 8.5. And the horror! The aliases had little Windows arrows! There was native Wintel TrueType support! FILE EXTENSIONS WERE STARTING TO BECOME NECESSARY!
In vain I tried to go back to 8.1. It didn't have the architecture support, USB support, FireWire support, or DVD support. I was screwed! Then, some of my most cherished design tools started acting up, for no apparent reason! Suddenly, I WANTED A COMMAND LINE.
Enter Linux. It's stable and free. It doesn't lard the system with crap. It says, "Treat me as an appliance, not as a friend. If you want a friend, talk to my friend X, or KDE, or GNOME." The users of the system like to share ideas and workarounds. I could get back to hacking a box, if I felt the desire.
The only problem I have with Linux right now is the dearth of applications. To truly migrate from Microtosh OS 8.5, I need a layout program with CMYK prepress capabilities, and PostScript font controls. These may already exist--I haven't yet looked because I'm not running Linux yet.
Yellow Dog Linux has my wholehearted support. When more Mac-heads come into the fold, the more chance there will be a port of PageMaker or Quark or Adobe Type Manager or Freehand or Illustrator--or even a GPL version of these fine tools.
I don't think I would ever have expected the phrase "IBM is mainly a service company" to be used with a straight face by anyone, if you'd asked me in 1989.
This strikes me just as humorous as seeing a Micro$oft ad on TV that basically states, "You should use M$ products because we're the established brand." Same attitude as IBM back in the day. Truth is indeed stranger than fiction.
Heck, when all those dimbulb Republicans took over in January 1995, they wondered what the big boxy building housed. It was the National Reconnaissance Agency, something with a billion dollar budget.
Y'know, I was gonna laugh at those silly Congresspeople, but then I remembered--the CIA forgot where the Chinese embassy in Serbia was.
"You mean the same government that gave us Amtrak--"
"As well as the Susan B. Anthony dollar--"
"--Are responsible for the biggest conspiracies on the planet?"
--The Lone Gunmen
I'm wondering if there are spook geeks sitting around the coffee pot bitching about the audacity of the US Congress trying to meddle in something it has absolutely no clue about. :)
It's kinda ballsy to say, "Fsck no!" to Congress tho. I wonder if you can declare an entire agency in contempt of Congress and throw them all in the nearest Club Fed.
Where's the Immodium P38 Space Modulator when you need it?
Obviously the aliens think we have a case of intergalactic diarrhea if they're launching Immodium at us.
Okay, tag this at "-1" and move on...
Pretty close. Basically, a black hole, from far enough away, affects you just like any other object of the same mass. If the sun turned into a black hole right now, it's get dark and cold and we'd have other problems after a while but our orbit wouldn't be affected and we wouldn't have to worry about getting "sucked in".
Basically, if Eta Carinae did turn into a black hole, we would be trading a visible 100+ solar mass for an invisible 100+ solar mass. (Okay, we'd see the accretion disk, but that's chickenfeed.)
Actually, the 9th level of Hell was a huge sheet of ice with Lucifer frozen in the center. :) I think he had three heads and was chewing on Judas, Brutus and Cassius, but I could be mistaken.
Because "Debian" looks vaguely like "Deneb", I always thought of a star, or of the constellation Cygnus, the swan.
the Pengiun doesn't really reflect the cutting-edge, high-tech image of Linux
:)
I think for hairy-scary Un*x versions to make it into the warm-fuzzy desktop world a nice penguin or two would be just the ticket. Although, for those fanatics out there, perhaps a "bleeding edge" dagger, dripping blood, would work just as well.
As for Redhat's eponymous red hat, for brand recognition it just doesn't get any better than that. It may be a silly name to call a company or organization, but, then again, so is "GNU" or even "Slashdot".
At least they didn't choose the Dogbert Method of Naming, using random words from technology and astronomy. I'd love to use the "Uranus-Hertz" distro of Linux. Imagine the logo for that.
Here's a couple of cool ways of looking at this:
1. Where are we? Are we at the "edge"? The "center"? Since all galaxies (except a couple of nearby ones) are moving away from us, maybe we're at the center. Maybe it's like the old "spots on a balloon" example: to each spot on an expanding balloon, everyone is moving away.
2. Let's say we're at the center. The age of the Universe is 12 billion years. That means we can see 12 billion light-years in all directions, which we take as the "edge". Let's say we travel at the speed of light so we can reach the edge as fast as possible. Once we go 12 billion light-years, we stop and look around. Whoops! It's been 12 billion years! The "edge" has moved! The Universe is much bigger now.
3. Let's say we're at the center again. We can see 12 billion light-years in all directions. However, the light from the "edge" is 12 billion years old, the age of the Universe. We're seeing the hydrogen from the Big Bang, the center of it all, in all directions. Does this mean that the "edge" is actually the original center of all things?
Fun with cosmology.
Censorship is not automatically and always wrong. If you think so, please enumerate how many issues of "Hustler" magazine you've given to your children.
Parental control of net access, or of other objectionable material, is perfectly acceptable. Until a certain age, kids don't have the mental skills perfected to handle these things. Plus, they don't have the world experience to put these things in perspective. It is also in keeping with "what plays in Peoria"--those people who find things offensive have the right to not view those offensive things.
However, the straw man argument here is kinda lame. I can be against censorship (for those over the age of consent) without handing about porno mags. That's not the opposite of censorship; that's active distribition. If one of my kids found a porno mag, well, then it's incumbent upon me as a parent to make sure the child understands exactly what why where and how those things may be objectionable.
After checking out all the other responses, I had a silly idea. We (Netizens) could provide mirrors and suchlike for the Aussie ISP's and stuff, but we could also erect a myriad of "offensive" sites to keep the film board swamped, and then shut those sites down as soon as they were banned.
I think it's pretty damn funny that they'll be using the Australian film board to review the content of these web sites. Just think if Jack Valenti was in charge of rating /.
Of course, I'd like to know how a web site will be nominated for review, and exactly how much time the censo--I mean, film board will have to make their decision. If they're planning on reviewing the entire Web, they'd better get started now. And the manpower requirements would pretty much deplete the entire Australian legislature, including aides, security guards, secretaries and janitors.
I'm talking about a designer using his eye for colors, font, and positioning. Someone who has to have immediate feedback.
Just my own two cents, of course, but it sounds like you're describing an Adobe product here.
At a service bureau I worked at, we charged people a minimum of one hour design time to try to squeeze separations out of Word, and two hours for Publisher.
Okay, I vote for SCOGNUX too! Anybody wanna do a "SCOGNUX Inside" logo?
I think to finish it off you'd need the penguin to resemble a certain Mr. Torvals (sic) and the gnu to bear a striking similarity to a pissed-off RMS.
Anybody feel like calling up their local news station with an indignant story about how Neiman-Marcus screwed them over? Maybe we could get the recipie spammed over the airwaves, too.
I still can't imagine what would happen if we actually used that 80% of the brain that we supposedly don't.
:) Saying that we only use 20% (or 15% or 10% or whatever) of our brains to think is like saying we only use 10% of our cars to drive. Although the engine gives it the impulse to go, it wouldn't get anywhere without the frame, or the wheels, or the drivetrain, etc. etc. etc.
You'd stop breathing.