Meh, all the same, he has a point. World leaders aren't going to enact any significant environmental regulation this until people start dying.
Regulating CFCs to help restore the ozone hole was the only piece of environmental regulation in my limited knowledge of recent history that I'm aware of that was enacted without anyone dying. I'd like to attribute that to a brief time in the 80s when people actually trusted scientists, but it was probably more public fear of scientists and radioactivity against a weak aerosol manufacturer lobby.
There are close to 200 countries in the world. The US is mentioned one time in a list of Top Ten and somehow that's not enough? Please. There are at least 190 countries that don't even have ONE city mentioned.
Shoot, I did my master's thesis in python. Using the psyco JIT engine (sorry, 32-bit only for old python), my stuff ran ~10 - 100x faster by just including one import statement.
I'll play with running it under PyPy and see how it does nowadays. But yeah, I find stuff like PyPy essential for a lot of the stuff I like doing.
... also, they're probably butthurt from their python tweaks not compiling because they don't know how to configure their editor to replace tabs with [248] spaces
Heh, not as funny as job reqs that wanted "10 years of java experience" in 1996, but I guess I could have stretched "tweaked a thing in Crystal Reports on a site I consulted on in 10th grade" into "5 years of Crystal Reports"
But after all those years of striving to meet academic precision and ethical guidelines, it's still funny and bewildering and remarkable how the job market is anything but, and that I would have voluntarily eliminated many promising jobs from consideration because I didn't meet some small criteria that some HR drone copied-n-pasted probably erroneously from something else.
Nowadays I just look at "Job Requirements" as "Desirements"... both from what the employer is looking for, and from what I would like to build my own expertise in. Makes much more sense that way, and all requirements are temporary anyway since every employer is usually in the process of migrating to the $next_best_thing .
Never got into any co-op programs or internships in HS or U, but in retrospect I think I came out ahead of my classmates who did, since I much more time for many more AP classes / electives / team projects / part-time jobs / etc. that managed to put just as many or more buzzwords on my resume.
I did kinda want to pick up a Zune, since it seems to be one of the few handheld devices that had an HD radio tuner.
But then it turns out that NPR typically broadcasts over HD Radio as a "talk" digital format (low quality mono), so it actually sounds much better to listen to things like "Prarie Home Companion" and "This American Life" in FM stereo:/ FAIL
Meh, Cat 5e is good enough for gigabitch storm systems. If you want to push any more than that, might was well go fiber. MMmm... multimode storms... with fricken' lasers.
Yep, sounds like what they wanted was a quick, symbolic victory, and they got it.
Symbolizing what, though, will be the topic of many a journal article. I suppose it's a good time to be a journalist, if people are jumping up and down to help you make news?
Heh, it's also sort of awesome that the US is trying to do everything in its power to get rid of teachers and replace them with some form of technology. When again and again one of the best correlations of student achievement is from maintaining low student-teacher ratios.
But yeah correlation is not causation. So let's strip away the teachers anyway.
eh, I heard that drowning was still plenty better than dehydration, which probably ranks among the most painful and traumatic ways to go.
So does that make waterboarding more humane? Or the ancient Chinese form of water torture more vicious? (as a kid, I heard it involved getting strapped down and having drops of water dripping onto your forehead for several days. After you get used to it, they take it away and you go absolutely crazy)
Discover magazine had something similar, where they studied nematodes and found that some sort of signal propagated through the gut that would tell all of the cells to shut the whole thing down. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2612587/
More interestingly, they were looking at ways to block or delay that signal. So then even if part of a multi-cellular organism died, the rest of it wouldn't know about it and keep going in a zombielike state.
But yeah, the cellular shutdown mechanism had something to do with the mitochondria, and it did release visible light in the brain cells as it was propagating through that area of the nematodes they were studying. So the bright light at the end of the tunnel is probably just the mitochondria of nearby cells in your optical cortex exploding.
Go find some exercise you enjoy, and set up a routine where you get to do it. Your body will adjust (over 6-12 months) to whatever shape you need to do that exercise more effectively.
Fad / deficiency / hunger / starvation diets just trigger your body to go into "hoarding mode", as you were evolved to do to get through a few months of winter scarcity. Keep your metabolism up by feeding yourself well and exercising well, and you'll train your body to just take what it needs and pass the rest.
I think most nerds are just too bored with most gyms and exercise routines. Hiking / biking / exploring is a great way to make exercise more cerebral. Also you might enjoy enrolling in some form of Martial Arts (though certainly shop around for good school that isn't too focused on sparring and beating people up) where you can concentrate on translating the wisdom of the ancients into modern physics and biomechanics hacks.
http://www.hardware-revolution.com/best-ssd-best-hdd-for-your-money-may-2013/ has been my favorite resource when it's time to buy. I never really cared about warranties and just a bit about reliability. I just always expect a drive to fail eventually and make sure my RAID & backups are configured to help me recover from it.
If you're happy with HDDs, though, by all means stick with it. I prefer spending my money on RAM instead of SSDs, since once you get your stuff cached in RAM, it's not going to hit the SSD anymore anyway. And even if you don't suspend to RAM, HDDs can still perform pretty well nowadays on reboots since most modern OSs do a pretty good job of optimizing disk accesses to make maximum use of readahead and get the initial "lots of small files" reads at closer to block-read speeds (~100MB/s) instead of random-read speeds (~10MB/s + seek latency).
When I was a kid, I heard that Nostradamus sorta predicted the world wars ("Hissler" did the second one). For the unknown future, he wrote something about a 3rd world war, then a drought, followed by an eerily worded "everlasting peace".
The people who made CouchDB bought NorthScale, the people who made Membase, which was an attempt to get memcached to automagically store all of its data in a backend database, so the lazy front-end devs would no longer have to worry about doing the whole "is it in memcache? get it from memcache : get it from DB and put it in memcache" logic.
Couchbase 1.8 was still using SQLite as its backend database. But starting from Couchbase 2.0 they managed to start using CouchDB as the backend, which added a bunch of query stuff which wasn't practical with the old way. But yeah, it's still primarily memcached in a big way... except that you have to worry about disk write performance.
Slashdot Mirror
Meh, all the same, he has a point. World leaders aren't going to enact any significant environmental regulation this until people start dying. Regulating CFCs to help restore the ozone hole was the only piece of environmental regulation in my limited knowledge of recent history that I'm aware of that was enacted without anyone dying. I'd like to attribute that to a brief time in the 80s when people actually trusted scientists, but it was probably more public fear of scientists and radioactivity against a weak aerosol manufacturer lobby.
Huh, strange, I don't get that anymore. Oh well, I guess I'll bookmark your post ;)
There are close to 200 countries in the world. The US is mentioned one time in a list of Top Ten and somehow that's not enough? Please. There are at least 190 countries that don't even have ONE city mentioned.
OK, here's another "Top 10 Internet Countries" from earlier this year made just for you:
http://www.bloomberg.com/slideshow/2013-01-23/top-10-countries-with-the-fastest-internet.html#slide1
Spoiler: US is not on the list; Israel is.
But I've kinda learned from all the BuzzFeed lists spam not to pay attention to any of these lists.
Don't worry if your city wasn't included, I'm sure it's on this "Top 100" list:
http://www.symantec.com/about/news/release/article.jsp?prid=20120215_01
Heh, marketing.
Slashdot is fine, though not ideal, for posting code stuff, since you have some HTML tags available, such as <pre> :
def make_adder(n):
def adder(x):
return x + n
return adder
def make_adder(n):
return lambda x: x + n
The full list of HTML that's not filtered out is supposedly somewhere on the http://slashdot.org/faq , but I can't find it right now.
Shoot, I did my master's thesis in python. Using the psyco JIT engine (sorry, 32-bit only for old python), my stuff ran ~10 - 100x faster by just including one import statement.
I'll play with running it under PyPy and see how it does nowadays. But yeah, I find stuff like PyPy essential for a lot of the stuff I like doing.
... also, they're probably butthurt from their python tweaks not compiling because they don't know how to configure their editor to replace tabs with [248] spaces
This. Though I have to admit, I've often been tempted to insert meaningful whitespace in there.
Maybe someday when I submit to the temptation to play with https://github.com/mame/quine-relay
Heh, not as funny as job reqs that wanted "10 years of java experience" in 1996, but I guess I could have stretched "tweaked a thing in Crystal Reports on a site I consulted on in 10th grade" into "5 years of Crystal Reports"
But after all those years of striving to meet academic precision and ethical guidelines, it's still funny and bewildering and remarkable how the job market is anything but, and that I would have voluntarily eliminated many promising jobs from consideration because I didn't meet some small criteria that some HR drone copied-n-pasted probably erroneously from something else.
Nowadays I just look at "Job Requirements" as "Desirements"... both from what the employer is looking for, and from what I would like to build my own expertise in. Makes much more sense that way, and all requirements are temporary anyway since every employer is usually in the process of migrating to the $next_best_thing .
Never got into any co-op programs or internships in HS or U, but in retrospect I think I came out ahead of my classmates who did, since I much more time for many more AP classes / electives / team projects / part-time jobs / etc. that managed to put just as many or more buzzwords on my resume.
I did kinda want to pick up a Zune, since it seems to be one of the few handheld devices that had an HD radio tuner.
But then it turns out that NPR typically broadcasts over HD Radio as a "talk" digital format (low quality mono), so it actually sounds much better to listen to things like "Prarie Home Companion" and "This American Life" in FM stereo :/ FAIL
Meh, Cat 5e is good enough for gigabitch storm systems. If you want to push any more than that, might was well go fiber. MMmm... multimode storms... with fricken' lasers.
Yep, sounds like what they wanted was a quick, symbolic victory, and they got it.
Symbolizing what, though, will be the topic of many a journal article. I suppose it's a good time to be a journalist, if people are jumping up and down to help you make news?
Heh, it's also sort of awesome that the US is trying to do everything in its power to get rid of teachers and replace them with some form of technology. When again and again one of the best correlations of student achievement is from maintaining low student-teacher ratios.
But yeah correlation is not causation. So let's strip away the teachers anyway.
Not to mention that part of the budget is for a fleet of high-performance chase cars:
https://www.google.com/search?q=U2+air+force+chase+cars
I wore jackets in Thailand in 40C weather. If you do it right, it helps shield you from the sun more than it prevents your sweat from evaporating.
But for the lulz, go ahead and queue Weird Al's "Young, Dumb, and Ugly:" "We wear black leather in the hottest weather; you can't imagine the smell"
Ah, yeah, that's the closest thing I could google for, and at least it did the job for most of the "citation please" people...
Here's something that looks more like the article I thought I misremembered :D
http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/36670/title/Dying-Worms-Emit-Ethereal-Glow/
eh, I heard that drowning was still plenty better than dehydration, which probably ranks among the most painful and traumatic ways to go.
So does that make waterboarding more humane? Or the ancient Chinese form of water torture more vicious? (as a kid, I heard it involved getting strapped down and having drops of water dripping onto your forehead for several days. After you get used to it, they take it away and you go absolutely crazy)
Discover magazine had something similar, where they studied nematodes and found that some sort of signal propagated through the gut that would tell all of the cells to shut the whole thing down.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2612587/
More interestingly, they were looking at ways to block or delay that signal. So then even if part of a multi-cellular organism died, the rest of it wouldn't know about it and keep going in a zombielike state.
But yeah, the cellular shutdown mechanism had something to do with the mitochondria, and it did release visible light in the brain cells as it was propagating through that area of the nematodes they were studying. So the bright light at the end of the tunnel is probably just the mitochondria of nearby cells in your optical cortex exploding.
This.
Go find some exercise you enjoy, and set up a routine where you get to do it. Your body will adjust (over 6-12 months) to whatever shape you need to do that exercise more effectively.
Fad / deficiency / hunger / starvation diets just trigger your body to go into "hoarding mode", as you were evolved to do to get through a few months of winter scarcity. Keep your metabolism up by feeding yourself well and exercising well, and you'll train your body to just take what it needs and pass the rest.
I think most nerds are just too bored with most gyms and exercise routines. Hiking / biking / exploring is a great way to make exercise more cerebral. Also you might enjoy enrolling in some form of Martial Arts (though certainly shop around for good school that isn't too focused on sparring and beating people up) where you can concentrate on translating the wisdom of the ancients into modern physics and biomechanics hacks.
Gee, thanks for making me GIS for Samuel Clemens... apparently there are more topless pics of him out there than I cared to see.
http://www.hardware-revolution.com/best-ssd-best-hdd-for-your-money-may-2013/ has been my favorite resource when it's time to buy. I never really cared about warranties and just a bit about reliability. I just always expect a drive to fail eventually and make sure my RAID & backups are configured to help me recover from it.
If you're happy with HDDs, though, by all means stick with it. I prefer spending my money on RAM instead of SSDs, since once you get your stuff cached in RAM, it's not going to hit the SSD anymore anyway. And even if you don't suspend to RAM, HDDs can still perform pretty well nowadays on reboots since most modern OSs do a pretty good job of optimizing disk accesses to make maximum use of readahead and get the initial "lots of small files" reads at closer to block-read speeds (~100MB/s) instead of random-read speeds (~10MB/s + seek latency).
Never put your beer down! Priorities!
Yes! Especially when you have friends like us to hold your beer for you!
I'm all in favor of finding technical solutions to political problems.
Bring on the Frigidaire peacekeepers!
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2012/08/air_conditioning_haters_it_s_not_as_bad_for_the_environment_as_heating_.html
When I was a kid, I heard that Nostradamus sorta predicted the world wars ("Hissler" did the second one). For the unknown future, he wrote something about a 3rd world war, then a drought, followed by an eerily worded "everlasting peace".
But I have no citations.
It's getting there...
The people who made CouchDB bought NorthScale, the people who made Membase, which was an attempt to get memcached to automagically store all of its data in a backend database, so the lazy front-end devs would no longer have to worry about doing the whole "is it in memcache? get it from memcache : get it from DB and put it in memcache" logic.
Couchbase 1.8 was still using SQLite as its backend database. But starting from Couchbase 2.0 they managed to start using CouchDB as the backend, which added a bunch of query stuff which wasn't practical with the old way. But yeah, it's still primarily memcached in a big way... except that you have to worry about disk write performance.