You are likely confused by how often big-government types claim to be for a free market or libertarian.
No, that part does not confuse me, or progressives in general, for that matter. We are quite familiar with Republican hypocrisy in that area.:-)
Since you mentioned Ron Paul, let's take a look at him. His official campaign site does not mention climate at all, and seems mostly concerned about reducing the price of gas. He also seems to think I should make polluters "answer in court" for polluting my property. I guess I'm supposed to sue my entire city for raising my ozone levels...
His biggest fan site (or at least the first Google result for "Ron Paul on climate change") quotes him as declaring global warming a "hoax" and "terrorism", and links to a couple of hilarious conspiracy theory sites. So, er... what about Ron Paul again?
Also, this is not a 'no true Scotsman' fallacy. That only applies when there are no real Scotman.
I think you have misunderstood this. The No True Scotsman fallacy is arbitrarily narrowing a category to exclude an individual that you don't like. By definition, there must be real Scotsmen for the fallacy to apply, as in the classic example:
A: "All Scotsmen love haggis." B: "My friend is a Scotsman, and he doesn't like Haggis." A: "He must not be a TRUE Scotsman."
But of course he is. Likewise, "libertarian" is not so easy to define. The very first thing in Ron Paul's list of issues is support for the religiously-motivated banning of abortion, which many people consider to be the very essence of big-government intrusion into personal liberty. But nobody has a problem calling him a libertarian, right?
Really? He had to do a study to conclude that people who believe in the free market reject attempts to replace it with a state-run economy?
The supposed existence of such attempts is a conspiracy theory, as is the idea that people who disagree with you do not "believe in the free market". Hardcore Libertarian ideology provides a lot of the misconceptions and straw men needed to justify rejecting climate science. It's those justifications that are the issue here, not the final conclusions drawn from them.
There's no point in running if you have to lose everything that makes life worth living. Better to fight.
What you can do depends on what kind of evidence you have. "The government" is not a monolithic entity. If you have anything solid on what you witnessed, start calling congresspeople until you find one that's willing to stage a press conference and start an investigation. Or try your governor -- they love looking tough against the feds. Go with whatever party doesn't control the White House, or look for critics within the dominant party. If you can prove that you're being followed, get in touch with the internal affairs departments of the FBI and your state and local police. Raise as much of a ruckus as you can; all you need is a few people to officially take you seriously.
If you don't have enough evidence for Congress, go to the media (or maybe try that first if you're super-paranoid). Meet with a right-wing talk show host and convince them to tell the story on the air. Have them introduce you to a congressman, then see above. Entertainers, commentators, and legislators thrive on publicity. Offer it to them. Try everyone from John Boehner to Bernie Sanders, Rush Limbaugh to Oprah. *Somebody's* going to be pissed off by whatever you saw. Once the story breaks, you're probably safe, since the conspirators will be too busy covering their own asses to worry about you.
If you can't convince anyone, you're not really a threat, are you? Hammer the point home by making a psychiatrist appointment to discuss your "hallucinations". But don't really take your meds or you might forget to keep your tinfoil hat on.:-p
The issues with antidepressants aren't just hypothetical. The FDA found reports of suicide associated with antidepressant use serious enough to include a "black box" warning to the effect that antidepressants can cause an increase in suicidal thinking.
I was talking about the book he mentioned (Anatomy of an Epidemic). Note that the black box warning only applies to people under 24 years of age.
Another issue- when given to people with bipolar disorder, antidepressants can actually cause mania, and some researchers believe this can cause the disorder to actually get worse over time... Another issue is that antidepressants can cause what they call discontinuation syndrome- that is, withdrawal effects.
To add to this, if you go on medication it is very important to follow up with your psychiatrist regularly. In particular, do not abruptly stop taking your meds. Call your doctor first. This applies to any prescription drug, not just antidepressants.
I'm not saying you should never take antidepressants, but these are very powerful chemicals we're talking about, so you really need to be careful. That means be sure you're working with a good psychiatrist, not your primary care physician, who simply does not have the know-how to diagnose and treat serious mental illnesses. That means doing a lot of reading as well- educate yourself about what you're up against and what the treatments are.
I agree with this 100%. You are responsible for your own health. Only you can decide what risks and side effects are acceptable. Personally, I find years or decades of misery to be a much worse option, but everyone has to make that choice for themselves.
And it's a good idea to consider the various alternative/complementary treatments... the evidence for these things isn't fantastic (although that could be because there's not a multibillion dollar fish-oil industry sponsoring clinical research)
Actually, there is a multi-billion dollar industry. There are a lot of alt medicine journals popping up (mostly because the research didn't pass muster at real journals). They even have federal research grants. Again, it's a personal choice, but I'd say if you're worried about vitamin levels go get your blood tested.
I took Wellbutrin back in 2000 because my insurance company would cover that, but not Zyban. After about a week, I was ready to crawl out of my skin. I thought people were plotting against me and were coming to get me. That experience has biased me against antidepressants.
Ouch! Wellbutrin made me a little anxious for a few months, but nothing that bad. Sorry to hear you had such a bad experience. You (and others reading this) should know that Wellbutrin (bupropion) is kind of a weird antidepressant. It works on norepinephrine and dopamine, which is very different from e.g. SSRIs. Antidepressants are a pretty broad category of drugs. As another AC below noted, you do have to go through the trial and error process. I went on Wellbutrin to deal with SSRI sexual side effects, and tried clonazepam and lorazepam to counter the anxiety. They made me too lethargic, so I just waited the anxiety out. Had it been too bothersome, I might have had to try something else. It all depends on what side effects you get and which ones you're willing to put up with.
I was going to start taking antidepressants in the fall, but I made the mistake of starting to read Anatomy of an Epidemic. Now I don't know how to get my life back together. I've been depressed since I hit the double digits; about 1.5 decades ago:'(
People are very vocal about horror stories, but success stories don't get as much attention. I started taking antidepressants (Prozac and Wellbutrin) last year after about five years of depression, and have been feeling much better since then with minimal side effects. There are lots of different drugs, so if you have trouble with side effects from one you can try switching to another. You should also find a good therapist whether you take medication or not. If you have a primary care physician, they can also provide information and advice, and might be able to prescribe antidepressants if you can't find or afford a psychiatrist that you like/trust enough.
Please don't condemn yourself to another 15 years of depression because of a pop science book. I can almost guarantee you that staying mentally ill will be worse for your body than any hypothetical consequences from taking antidepressants.
"Show of hands: how many of you guys even knew this guy's name before the VP announcement?"
Actually, Paul Ryan has gotten a lot of mention in political news for the last few years due to his budget proposals. That's the whole reason Romney picked him for VP. If you've been paying attention to American politics (and I don't blame you for not), you should have heard of him by now. People on the left talk about him a fair bit because the media takes his "deficit-reduction" plans very seriously even though they don't actually reduce the deficit (Republicans get a free pass on this sort of thing). Here's ThinkProgress way back in 2009:
You'll note that neither Ryan's budgets nor their criticisms have changed very much. As for your friends, perhaps they felt their "cut+pasted pre-digested talking points that someone else wrote" were informative enough. There's nothing wrong with referencing someone else's writing.
The SNES does not have high-speed digital signals. The whole thing is clocked at 3.58MHz. This isn't like trying to probe a SATA connection.
Sorry, poor choice of words. Regardless, he'll need a logic analyzer, and those are a lot less common than oscilloscopes. He could probably find a cheaper one on eBay if he really wants to reverse-engineer the hardware.
you're a 4th year EE student, why not just take one apart?
Unfortunately, EE is not like ME. What happens in an electrical circuit is almost always invisible to the naked eye. Monitoring high-speed digital signals takes special (expensive) test equipment, which even a university lab might not have lying around for open use. Even figuring out a schematic can be hard if you're dealing with multi-layer circuit boards and custom integrated circuits. The ICs in a SNES are all surface mount, which means even more specialized equipment and skill to remove them with no easy way to work with them afterward. Do a Google Image search for "SNES mainboard" and you'll see what I mean.
Also, simply being a fourth-year student doesn't necessarily qualify him to reverse engineer a console. Digital electronic systems are orders of magnitude more complex than mechanical ones, and EE coursework tends to focus more on theory than practice. I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm just saying that going solo is probably not the best idea for his first foray.
Where do you guys get the money to pay for all this?
Taxes. The United States GDP is almost $15 trillion. This sort of exotic-sounding stuff is http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/budget_pie_gs.php, proportionately. The real expenses are proportional to the size of the population (and military).
It looks like the world's largest welfare state but I can't see how the money loop gets closed.
Same way it gets closed in the private sector. There's nothing magical about government revenue and spending vs. corporate or individual revenue and spending.
I understand sea levels fluctuate (tides, etc), but in theory shouldn't the entire ocean level rise and fall together?
I don't think so. Water doesn't move that quickly (think waves on a beach), and the sun, tides, and seasonal temperature changes are all adding energy. There are already ocean currents that flow continuously throughout the year. I don't see why there couldn't be a sustained force pushing up sea levels along the east coast.
But we don't have to guess -- the abstract of the article tell us:
Climate warming does not force sea-level rise (SLR) at the same rate everywhere. Rather, there are spatial variations of SLR superimposed on a global average rise. These variations are forced by dynamic processes, arising from circulation and variations in temperature and/or salinity, and by static equilibrium processes, arising from mass redistributions changing gravity and the Earth’s rotation and shape. These sea-level variations form unique spatial patterns, yet there are very few observations verifying predicted patterns or fingerprints. Here, we present evidence of recently accelerated SLR in a unique 1,000-km-long hotspot on the highly populated North American Atlantic coast north of Cape Hatteras and show that it is consistent with a modelled fingerprint of dynamic SLR. Between 1950–1979 and 1980–2009, SLR rate increases in this northeast hotspot were ~ 3–4 times higher than the global average. Modelled dynamic plus steric SLR by 2100 at New York City ranges with Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change scenario from 36 to 51cm (ref. 3); lower emission scenarios project 24–36cm (ref. 7). Extrapolations from data herein range from 20 to 29cm. SLR superimposed on storm surge, wave run-up and set-up will increase the vulnerability of coastal cities to flooding, and beaches and wetlands to deterioration.
So no, even in theory the entire ocean does not rise and fall to exactly the same level.
I attended a Comic-Con panel last year where some of the military liaisons to Hollywood talked about their jobs. They were pretty open about having criteria for accepting a script. It's not clear to me why anyone would expect them to spend time and money helping filmmakers portray them in an unflattering light. The article does give a couple odd examples of rejected films (Independence Day?), but aside from that seems to make a mountain out of a molehill.
IIRC, the panelists said that the US military doesn't/can't support historical settings, which would limit this issue to movies that comment on current events.
The founder of Autodesk takes a similar approach. His guide is very detailed and motivating. I lost sixty pounds through simple calorie counting. (And then put it back on during some bad times last year, but at least it's under my control.)
If you're seriously overweight (50-100+ pounds), this translates to all kinds of good news:
* The fatter you are, the more calories you burn. This really adds up at 100 pounds overweight. I was eating three hot, filling, satisfying meals a day and still losing two pounds per week. * It's easy to get calorie counts for junk food and fast food -- just check the label or the web site! Eating poorly actually makes it easier to lose weight. * Progress will be rapid and visible.
Most of the magazine articles and other popular material are written for neurotic skinny women who freak out about being 5-10 pounds overweight and want a simple answer to their self-image problems. Don't let them mislead you into looking for magic when the science is right in front of you. It really is this simple.
For circuit analysis, it becomes V=IZ, where Z is the complex impedance, and describes the time-varying relationship of voltage and current in resistors, capacitors, inductors and pretty much anything else you will find in a circuit.
Even in plain linear circuit analysis, this is not correct. Voltage and current sources (including dependent sources) are not modeled as impedances. Neither are switches (an admittedly trivial example). Voltage/current decay in inductors and capacitors is usually described in terms of exponential time constants.
In a real circuit you will have electronic components, which are not in any way linear or Ohmic. The "ideal" diode equation is exponential, as is the Ebers-Moll model for BJTs. The simplest MOSFET equation is quadratic. All electronic devices have complex higher-order behavior. You can model them as linear over a small range, but they're still more complex than a simple impedance.
and that there is no difference between voltage and power.
Voltage and power are related, but that doesn't mean they're the same. In fact, Ohm's Law says that they're not -- you still need information about the current (or resistance) to determine power dissipation.
Transistor switching in digital circuits is very different from plain resistance. It's more like charging and discharging capacitors. Energy loss is proportional to voltage squared, at least for dynamic power. That's why lowering the voltage is the most important thing for power consumption.
When you are finished bitching about the US, tells us about the untold millions and millions that died under Stalin, food lines, the invasions of Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Poland, the 'Stans, including Afghanistan, the rape of Chechnya, and the Berlin Wall, where people were killed trying to escape an ideology.
Er... you do know the Soviet Union was dissolved twenty years ago, right? Russia may still be a crappy place to live, but think about how long it's been since the last time it was a nice place to live.
Ah, who am I kidding. Guess this is just the latest in the flood of AC trolls.
There is plenty of demand for ICs built on non-leading-edge technology. For instance, On Semiconductor has custom foundry services at 0.18u, 0.25u, 0.35u, 0.6u, and 0.7u. 0.35 micron is about 14 years old now, IIRC.
To elaborate on this, older/larger processes have several advantages:
* Power consumption -- smaller transistors are leaky. * Startup cost -- mask sets on new processes are insanely expensive. * Yield -- older processes have better yield, which means more good die per wafer. * Quality -- older processes usually have fewer problems, and the test software has been updated to catch more defects. This is particularly important in safety-critical markets like automotive, aerospace, and medical. * Some products are pad-limited, which means that the number of external connections forces a minimum die size larger than the space needed for the core transistors. In this case, shrinking the core only costs extra money.
I work at TI. We do have our own fabs, but we also outsource manufacturing to foundries too. The new 65nm flash process I work on was developed at TSMC, and all manufacturing will be done there. I know that other processes run in TSMC as well, but I'm not sure which ones (we have a lot).
Of course. The question is, how much more cancer is caused by a given dose of radiation?
Unfortunately, this is a question that the paper in question does not answer, because it completely neglects to mention actual numbers. (The pretty colored graphs have units of "excess relative risk." How do you convert that to deaths? You can't. What are the units-- per year? Per lifetime? they don't say. Relative to what? They don't say.) I'd like to see a number, like "excess cancers per year per sievert of exposure," but they don't give one. They compare different studies, but never discuss whether the differences are statistically significant.
FIG. 3. Solid cancer dose–response function. The thick solid line is the fitted linear gender-averaged excess relative risk (ERR) dose response at age 70 after exposure at age 30 based on data in the 0- to 2-Gy dose range. The points are non-parametric estimates of the ERR in dose categories. The thick dashed line is a nonparametric smooth of the categoryspecific estimates and the thin dashed lines are one standard error above and below this smooth.
Er... which part? The TV upscanned the video to a higher than normal frame rate without anyone in the room knowing in advance. That is both double-blind and increasing FPS. It's not the same as having different source material, but it is at least a partial answer to the question.
I haven't seen 48fps, but I was accidentally subjected to a double-blind test on a 120Hz TV when I watched a Return of the Jedi DVD at my mom's house. It looked like a sitcom, and I figured out within a minute or two what was wrong. I guess I associate high frame rates with cheap TV shows.
First, I'd suggest deciding what you want to focus on -- firmware (embedded programming) or HDL. If you're coming from a CS background, you might want to start with digital systems and computer architecture before plunging into HDL. Designing a CPU at the gate level will teach you more about how the hardware works than writing a page or two of behavioral HDL. These basics are also good for embedded programming. Without knowing more about your background, it's hard to know what to suggest. If you're coming from PC application programming (or, god forbid, web scripting) with no electronics or low-level background, get ready for a shock -- you're not in Kansas anymore. Personally, I'd suggest starting with some basic 8-bit AVR or PIC projects, since there's a lot of material on the net to help you. I've mostly learned on the job, so rather than giving you books, I'll suggest some topics to study:
Software 1. C programming in general and pointers in particular. Use this as a bridge to assembly. 2. Enough assembly to understand what sort of operations there are and how they're used. Don't bother writing huge programs in assembly; just make you sure you can read your debugger's output. This is a good chance to figure out whether your CPU has a hardware multiplier (probably) and divider (probably not). This tells you which operations are fast and which are dog-slow. 3. Where all the pieces of your program go in memory (code and constants in flash, data in RAM). Learn about standard assembly sections like.text so you can parse the error messages when your program gets too big for the chip it's in. Read this article for some hints in a PC app context. 4. Bit twiddling. AND, OR, XOR, inversion, shifting. Basically, any C operator listed under the "bitwise" section.
Hardware (theory) 1. Registers. CPU registers. Memory-mapped IO registers. Read-only vs. writable registers. Reset states of registers. You're going to be dealing with a lot of registers. 2. General-purpose IO pins and all their features. Look at a schematic in a microcontroller datasheet and understand input/high-impedance vs. output vs. input with an internal pull-up/down. Maybe driver current strength if you want to make *big* blinking lights. 3. Clocking. Where the clock comes from (crystal? internal oscillator?), how precise it is, how it's divided down, and how to turn off the division so the chip will run at full speed. 4. How to read a datasheet. Figure out what voltage(s) you need to power the chip and what (if anything) should be connected to each pin on power-up. Datasheets are very long. Learn to skim. 5. How to limit the current on LEDs with resistors so they don't blow up. 6. How to use a linear voltage regulator to get a clean 5V out of whatever DC power source you can Frankenstein together. 7. At least a cursory knowledge of voltage, current, and Ohm's law. Know how to determine power dissipation in a resistor (compute it) or an LED (read it out of the datasheet).
Hardware (bench-top) 1. How to use a multimeter. Spring for a nice auto-ranging one on eBay. 2. How to wire up a breadboard. Don't bother soldering yet; this is much easier. Hint: keep your wires short and neatly-arranged. Get a wire stripper and learn how to use it. 3. (Optional) If you have some money to throw around, pick up a bench-top power supply off of eBay. A triple-output supply is the most you'll ever need, but single-output is fine for simple MCU projects. This is more convenient and reliable than cutting up a wall wart. 4. (Even more optional) If you have a lot of money and are pretty serious, get a digital storage oscilloscope (NOT an analog-only scope, unless it's really cheap). This will do wonders for your debugging. Buy used unless you're rich or hard-core. Bench-top electronic tools are not cheap. 5. Find a local electronics store. Fry's is a decent choice (for tools, too!), and many cities have smaller but cheaper
This looks like it might be a nice language for general-purpose use, too. It's got a nice blend of features borrowed from other languages such as Haskell-style data structures, Perl-style regular expressions, first-class functions, and of course powerful numerical manipulations. I might have to try it out next time I get fed up with Perl.
Slashdot Mirror
I've had math professors who could barely speak English because they were foreign countries.
I'm amazed they could fit into the classroom.
You are likely confused by how often big-government types claim to be for a free market or libertarian.
No, that part does not confuse me, or progressives in general, for that matter. We are quite familiar with Republican hypocrisy in that area. :-)
Since you mentioned Ron Paul, let's take a look at him. His official campaign site does not mention climate at all, and seems mostly concerned about reducing the price of gas. He also seems to think I should make polluters "answer in court" for polluting my property. I guess I'm supposed to sue my entire city for raising my ozone levels...
His biggest fan site (or at least the first Google result for "Ron Paul on climate change") quotes him as declaring global warming a "hoax" and "terrorism", and links to a couple of hilarious conspiracy theory sites. So, er... what about Ron Paul again?
Also, this is not a 'no true Scotsman' fallacy. That only applies when there are no real Scotman.
I think you have misunderstood this. The No True Scotsman fallacy is arbitrarily narrowing a category to exclude an individual that you don't like. By definition, there must be real Scotsmen for the fallacy to apply, as in the classic example:
A: "All Scotsmen love haggis."
B: "My friend is a Scotsman, and he doesn't like Haggis."
A: "He must not be a TRUE Scotsman."
But of course he is. Likewise, "libertarian" is not so easy to define. The very first thing in Ron Paul's list of issues is support for the religiously-motivated banning of abortion, which many people consider to be the very essence of big-government intrusion into personal liberty. But nobody has a problem calling him a libertarian, right?
Really? He had to do a study to conclude that people who believe in the free market reject attempts to replace it with a state-run economy?
The supposed existence of such attempts is a conspiracy theory, as is the idea that people who disagree with you do not "believe in the free market". Hardcore Libertarian ideology provides a lot of the misconceptions and straw men needed to justify rejecting climate science. It's those justifications that are the issue here, not the final conclusions drawn from them.
There's no point in running if you have to lose everything that makes life worth living. Better to fight.
What you can do depends on what kind of evidence you have. "The government" is not a monolithic entity. If you have anything solid on what you witnessed, start calling congresspeople until you find one that's willing to stage a press conference and start an investigation. Or try your governor -- they love looking tough against the feds. Go with whatever party doesn't control the White House, or look for critics within the dominant party. If you can prove that you're being followed, get in touch with the internal affairs departments of the FBI and your state and local police. Raise as much of a ruckus as you can; all you need is a few people to officially take you seriously.
If you don't have enough evidence for Congress, go to the media (or maybe try that first if you're super-paranoid). Meet with a right-wing talk show host and convince them to tell the story on the air. Have them introduce you to a congressman, then see above. Entertainers, commentators, and legislators thrive on publicity. Offer it to them. Try everyone from John Boehner to Bernie Sanders, Rush Limbaugh to Oprah. *Somebody's* going to be pissed off by whatever you saw. Once the story breaks, you're probably safe, since the conspirators will be too busy covering their own asses to worry about you.
If you can't convince anyone, you're not really a threat, are you? Hammer the point home by making a psychiatrist appointment to discuss your "hallucinations". But don't really take your meds or you might forget to keep your tinfoil hat on. :-p
The issues with antidepressants aren't just hypothetical. The FDA found reports of suicide associated with antidepressant use serious enough to include a "black box" warning to the effect that antidepressants can cause an increase in suicidal thinking.
I was talking about the book he mentioned (Anatomy of an Epidemic). Note that the black box warning only applies to people under 24 years of age.
Another issue- when given to people with bipolar disorder, antidepressants can actually cause mania, and some researchers believe this can cause the disorder to actually get worse over time ... Another issue is that antidepressants can cause what they call discontinuation syndrome- that is, withdrawal effects.
To add to this, if you go on medication it is very important to follow up with your psychiatrist regularly. In particular, do not abruptly stop taking your meds. Call your doctor first. This applies to any prescription drug, not just antidepressants.
I'm not saying you should never take antidepressants, but these are very powerful chemicals we're talking about, so you really need to be careful. That means be sure you're working with a good psychiatrist, not your primary care physician, who simply does not have the know-how to diagnose and treat serious mental illnesses. That means doing a lot of reading as well- educate yourself about what you're up against and what the treatments are.
I agree with this 100%. You are responsible for your own health. Only you can decide what risks and side effects are acceptable. Personally, I find years or decades of misery to be a much worse option, but everyone has to make that choice for themselves.
And it's a good idea to consider the various alternative/complementary treatments ... the evidence for these things isn't fantastic (although that could be because there's not a multibillion dollar fish-oil industry sponsoring clinical research)
Actually, there is a multi-billion dollar industry. There are a lot of alt medicine journals popping up (mostly because the research didn't pass muster at real journals). They even have federal research grants. Again, it's a personal choice, but I'd say if you're worried about vitamin levels go get your blood tested.
I took Wellbutrin back in 2000 because my insurance company would cover that, but not Zyban. After about a week, I was ready to crawl out of my skin. I thought people were plotting against me and were coming to get me. That experience has biased me against antidepressants.
Ouch! Wellbutrin made me a little anxious for a few months, but nothing that bad. Sorry to hear you had such a bad experience. You (and others reading this) should know that Wellbutrin (bupropion) is kind of a weird antidepressant. It works on norepinephrine and dopamine, which is very different from e.g. SSRIs. Antidepressants are a pretty broad category of drugs. As another AC below noted, you do have to go through the trial and error process. I went on Wellbutrin to deal with SSRI sexual side effects, and tried clonazepam and lorazepam to counter the anxiety. They made me too lethargic, so I just waited the anxiety out. Had it been too bothersome, I might have had to try something else. It all depends on what side effects you get and which ones you're willing to put up with.
I was going to start taking antidepressants in the fall, but I made the mistake of starting to read Anatomy of an Epidemic. Now I don't know how to get my life back together. I've been depressed since I hit the double digits; about 1.5 decades ago :'(
People are very vocal about horror stories, but success stories don't get as much attention. I started taking antidepressants (Prozac and Wellbutrin) last year after about five years of depression, and have been feeling much better since then with minimal side effects. There are lots of different drugs, so if you have trouble with side effects from one you can try switching to another. You should also find a good therapist whether you take medication or not. If you have a primary care physician, they can also provide information and advice, and might be able to prescribe antidepressants if you can't find or afford a psychiatrist that you like/trust enough.
Please don't condemn yourself to another 15 years of depression because of a pop science book. I can almost guarantee you that staying mentally ill will be worse for your body than any hypothetical consequences from taking antidepressants.
"Show of hands: how many of you guys even knew this guy's name before the VP announcement?"
Actually, Paul Ryan has gotten a lot of mention in political news for the last few years due to his budget proposals. That's the whole reason Romney picked him for VP. If you've been paying attention to American politics (and I don't blame you for not), you should have heard of him by now. People on the left talk about him a fair bit because the media takes his "deficit-reduction" plans very seriously even though they don't actually reduce the deficit (Republicans get a free pass on this sort of thing). Here's ThinkProgress way back in 2009:
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2009/03/30/37165/ryan-gop-budget/
Here's Paul Krugman in 2010:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/06/opinion/06krugman.html
Here's Dean Baker in 2010:
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/08/can-we-plese-shut-the-washington-post-down-today.html
Here's Bruce Bartlett in 2011:
http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Columns/2011/04/07/Wealthy-Get-Free-Pass-in-Ryan-Budget.aspx
Finally, here's some Ryan critiquing from earlier this year:
http://baselinescenario.com/2012/03/24/why-do-new-york-times-columnists-keep-swooning-for-paul-ryan/
And here's DeLong again from yesterday:
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2012/08/in-which-i-disagree-with-josh-barro-on-paul-ryan-arithmetick-has-to-be-primary-hey-rocky-watch-me-pull-a-rabbit-out-of-th.html
You'll note that neither Ryan's budgets nor their criticisms have changed very much. As for your friends, perhaps they felt their "cut+pasted pre-digested talking points that someone else wrote" were informative enough. There's nothing wrong with referencing someone else's writing.
The SNES does not have high-speed digital signals. The whole thing is clocked at 3.58MHz. This isn't like trying to probe a SATA connection.
Sorry, poor choice of words. Regardless, he'll need a logic analyzer, and those are a lot less common than oscilloscopes. He could probably find a cheaper one on eBay if he really wants to reverse-engineer the hardware.
you're a 4th year EE student, why not just take one apart?
Unfortunately, EE is not like ME. What happens in an electrical circuit is almost always invisible to the naked eye. Monitoring high-speed digital signals takes special (expensive) test equipment, which even a university lab might not have lying around for open use. Even figuring out a schematic can be hard if you're dealing with multi-layer circuit boards and custom integrated circuits. The ICs in a SNES are all surface mount, which means even more specialized equipment and skill to remove them with no easy way to work with them afterward. Do a Google Image search for "SNES mainboard" and you'll see what I mean.
Also, simply being a fourth-year student doesn't necessarily qualify him to reverse engineer a console. Digital electronic systems are orders of magnitude more complex than mechanical ones, and EE coursework tends to focus more on theory than practice. I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm just saying that going solo is probably not the best idea for his first foray.
Where do you guys get the money to pay for all this?
Taxes. The United States GDP is almost $15 trillion. This sort of exotic-sounding stuff is http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/budget_pie_gs.php, proportionately. The real expenses are proportional to the size of the population (and military).
It looks like the world's largest welfare state but I can't see how the money loop gets closed.
Same way it gets closed in the private sector. There's nothing magical about government revenue and spending vs. corporate or individual revenue and spending.
I understand sea levels fluctuate (tides, etc), but in theory shouldn't the entire ocean level rise and fall together?
I don't think so. Water doesn't move that quickly (think waves on a beach), and the sun, tides, and seasonal temperature changes are all adding energy. There are already ocean currents that flow continuously throughout the year. I don't see why there couldn't be a sustained force pushing up sea levels along the east coast.
But we don't have to guess -- the abstract of the article tell us:
So no, even in theory the entire ocean does not rise and fall to exactly the same level.
I attended a Comic-Con panel last year where some of the military liaisons to Hollywood talked about their jobs. They were pretty open about having criteria for accepting a script. It's not clear to me why anyone would expect them to spend time and money helping filmmakers portray them in an unflattering light. The article does give a couple odd examples of rejected films (Independence Day?), but aside from that seems to make a mountain out of a molehill.
IIRC, the panelists said that the US military doesn't/can't support historical settings, which would limit this issue to movies that comment on current events.
The founder of Autodesk takes a similar approach. His guide is very detailed and motivating. I lost sixty pounds through simple calorie counting. (And then put it back on during some bad times last year, but at least it's under my control.)
http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/e4/
If you're seriously overweight (50-100+ pounds), this translates to all kinds of good news:
* The fatter you are, the more calories you burn. This really adds up at 100 pounds overweight. I was eating three hot, filling, satisfying meals a day and still losing two pounds per week.
* It's easy to get calorie counts for junk food and fast food -- just check the label or the web site! Eating poorly actually makes it easier to lose weight.
* Progress will be rapid and visible.
Most of the magazine articles and other popular material are written for neurotic skinny women who freak out about being 5-10 pounds overweight and want a simple answer to their self-image problems. Don't let them mislead you into looking for magic when the science is right in front of you. It really is this simple.
For circuit analysis, it becomes V=IZ, where Z is the complex impedance, and describes the time-varying relationship of voltage and current in resistors, capacitors, inductors and pretty much anything else you will find in a circuit.
Even in plain linear circuit analysis, this is not correct. Voltage and current sources (including dependent sources) are not modeled as impedances. Neither are switches (an admittedly trivial example). Voltage/current decay in inductors and capacitors is usually described in terms of exponential time constants.
In a real circuit you will have electronic components, which are not in any way linear or Ohmic. The "ideal" diode equation is exponential, as is the Ebers-Moll model for BJTs. The simplest MOSFET equation is quadratic. All electronic devices have complex higher-order behavior. You can model them as linear over a small range, but they're still more complex than a simple impedance.
Nerds should know Ohms law.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohm's_law
and that there is no difference between voltage and power.
Voltage and power are related, but that doesn't mean they're the same. In fact, Ohm's Law says that they're not -- you still need information about the current (or resistance) to determine power dissipation.
Transistor switching in digital circuits is very different from plain resistance. It's more like charging and discharging capacitors. Energy loss is proportional to voltage squared, at least for dynamic power. That's why lowering the voltage is the most important thing for power consumption.
When you are finished bitching about the US, tells us about the untold millions and millions that died under Stalin, food lines, the invasions of Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Poland, the 'Stans, including Afghanistan, the rape of Chechnya, and the Berlin Wall, where people were killed trying to escape an ideology.
Er... you do know the Soviet Union was dissolved twenty years ago, right? Russia may still be a crappy place to live, but think about how long it's been since the last time it was a nice place to live.
Ah, who am I kidding. Guess this is just the latest in the flood of AC trolls.
There is plenty of demand for ICs built on non-leading-edge technology. For instance, On Semiconductor has custom foundry services at 0.18u, 0.25u, 0.35u, 0.6u, and 0.7u. 0.35 micron is about 14 years old now, IIRC.
To elaborate on this, older/larger processes have several advantages:
* Power consumption -- smaller transistors are leaky.
* Startup cost -- mask sets on new processes are insanely expensive.
* Yield -- older processes have better yield, which means more good die per wafer.
* Quality -- older processes usually have fewer problems, and the test software has been updated to catch more defects. This is particularly important in safety-critical markets like automotive, aerospace, and medical.
* Some products are pad-limited, which means that the number of external connections forces a minimum die size larger than the space needed for the core transistors. In this case, shrinking the core only costs extra money.
I work at TI. We do have our own fabs, but we also outsource manufacturing to foundries too. The new 65nm flash process I work on was developed at TSMC, and all manufacturing will be done there. I know that other processes run in TSMC as well, but I'm not sure which ones (we have a lot).
Of course. The question is, how much more cancer is caused by a given dose of radiation?
Unfortunately, this is a question that the paper in question does not answer, because it completely neglects to mention actual numbers. (The pretty colored graphs have units of "excess relative risk." How do you convert that to deaths? You can't. What are the units-- per year? Per lifetime? they don't say. Relative to what? They don't say.) I'd like to see a number, like "excess cancers per year per sievert of exposure," but they don't give one. They compare different studies, but never discuss whether the differences are statistically significant.
As the article states, the graph is taken from another study, Preston et al (2007) Solid Cancer Incidence in Atomic Bomb Survivors: 1958–1998. You can find many tables with actual numbers there. The caption on the graph also answers some of your questions:
FIG. 3. Solid cancer dose–response function. The thick solid line is
the fitted linear gender-averaged excess relative risk (ERR) dose response
at age 70 after exposure at age 30 based on data in the 0- to 2-Gy dose
range. The points are non-parametric estimates of the ERR in dose categories.
The thick dashed line is a nonparametric smooth of the categoryspecific
estimates and the thin dashed lines are one standard error above
and below this smooth.
Er... which part? The TV upscanned the video to a higher than normal frame rate without anyone in the room knowing in advance. That is both double-blind and increasing FPS. It's not the same as having different source material, but it is at least a partial answer to the question.
I haven't seen 48fps, but I was accidentally subjected to a double-blind test on a 120Hz TV when I watched a Return of the Jedi DVD at my mom's house. It looked like a sitcom, and I figured out within a minute or two what was wrong. I guess I associate high frame rates with cheap TV shows.
First, I'd suggest deciding what you want to focus on -- firmware (embedded programming) or HDL. If you're coming from a CS background, you might want to start with digital systems and computer architecture before plunging into HDL. Designing a CPU at the gate level will teach you more about how the hardware works than writing a page or two of behavioral HDL. These basics are also good for embedded programming. Without knowing more about your background, it's hard to know what to suggest. If you're coming from PC application programming (or, god forbid, web scripting) with no electronics or low-level background, get ready for a shock -- you're not in Kansas anymore. Personally, I'd suggest starting with some basic 8-bit AVR or PIC projects, since there's a lot of material on the net to help you. I've mostly learned on the job, so rather than giving you books, I'll suggest some topics to study:
Software .text so you can parse the error messages when your program gets too big for the chip it's in. Read this article for some hints in a PC app context.
1. C programming in general and pointers in particular. Use this as a bridge to assembly.
2. Enough assembly to understand what sort of operations there are and how they're used. Don't bother writing huge programs in assembly; just make you sure you can read your debugger's output. This is a good chance to figure out whether your CPU has a hardware multiplier (probably) and divider (probably not). This tells you which operations are fast and which are dog-slow.
3. Where all the pieces of your program go in memory (code and constants in flash, data in RAM). Learn about standard assembly sections like
4. Bit twiddling. AND, OR, XOR, inversion, shifting. Basically, any C operator listed under the "bitwise" section.
Hardware (theory)
1. Registers. CPU registers. Memory-mapped IO registers. Read-only vs. writable registers. Reset states of registers. You're going to be dealing with a lot of registers.
2. General-purpose IO pins and all their features. Look at a schematic in a microcontroller datasheet and understand input/high-impedance vs. output vs. input with an internal pull-up/down. Maybe driver current strength if you want to make *big* blinking lights.
3. Clocking. Where the clock comes from (crystal? internal oscillator?), how precise it is, how it's divided down, and how to turn off the division so the chip will run at full speed.
4. How to read a datasheet. Figure out what voltage(s) you need to power the chip and what (if anything) should be connected to each pin on power-up. Datasheets are very long. Learn to skim.
5. How to limit the current on LEDs with resistors so they don't blow up.
6. How to use a linear voltage regulator to get a clean 5V out of whatever DC power source you can Frankenstein together.
7. At least a cursory knowledge of voltage, current, and Ohm's law. Know how to determine power dissipation in a resistor (compute it) or an LED (read it out of the datasheet).
Hardware (bench-top)
1. How to use a multimeter. Spring for a nice auto-ranging one on eBay.
2. How to wire up a breadboard. Don't bother soldering yet; this is much easier. Hint: keep your wires short and neatly-arranged. Get a wire stripper and learn how to use it.
3. (Optional) If you have some money to throw around, pick up a bench-top power supply off of eBay. A triple-output supply is the most you'll ever need, but single-output is fine for simple MCU projects. This is more convenient and reliable than cutting up a wall wart.
4. (Even more optional) If you have a lot of money and are pretty serious, get a digital storage oscilloscope (NOT an analog-only scope, unless it's really cheap). This will do wonders for your debugging. Buy used unless you're rich or hard-core. Bench-top electronic tools are not cheap.
5. Find a local electronics store. Fry's is a decent choice (for tools, too!), and many cities have smaller but cheaper
This looks like it might be a nice language for general-purpose use, too. It's got a nice blend of features borrowed from other languages such as Haskell-style data structures, Perl-style regular expressions, first-class functions, and of course powerful numerical manipulations. I might have to try it out next time I get fed up with Perl.
Is the lack of public transportation not an issue for men, too? Why do women suffer from a lack of public transportation but men do not?
I can think of a few reasons.
1. They might have more obligations at home due to tradition and/or male dominance.
2. In some countries (like Saudi Arabia), women aren't allowed to drive. This is not the case for the quote, which is from a Jordanian.
3. Walking long distances alone is more dangerous if you're a woman, especially if it's dark. This is true even in Western countries.