Uh, Einstein, did you actually READ what I said? Or did you just decide to rant about what the voices in your head told you what I was saying?
I never said you'd get 30FPS with a 56k modem, I just said that iChatAV will work with a 56k modem, without specifying anything else like frame rates. The other guy said broadband is REQUIRED. It is not.
No it doesn't, iChatAV works fine over dialup modems too. Sure you won't get the same frame rates, but consider that these sign-language users can set a very low bandwidth for the audio, they don't need it at all. They can use more of the available bandwidth for video.
I read an interesting report (SF Chron I think) that said deaf users discovered that Apple's iChat has a sufficiently high frame rate and resolution to use sign language over video, and no other products had a high enough frame rate to do the job adequately. But then, AFAIK iChat and the iSight does 30fps. I suspect this doesn't directly apply to you, but I though you might find it interesting as some sort of benchmark.
Yep, that's the one. Or I should say, that's PART of the one, I recall this being a LOT longer, including a lot of obscure physics specialties. Must have gotten truncated somehow over all the years it's been floating around. Or maybe it's just my bad memory, and this is all there was.
Thanks a lot, I googled all over for this but never found it.
Probably not, it most likely predates the list, I remember reading this in my High School physics calss, which means it dates to the early 1970s.
BTW, here's another good Weiner story I found on the web, while searching for confirmation, original text at:
http://www.anecdotage.com/index.php?aid=11198
Norbert Weiner was notoriously absent-minded. When his family moved from Cambridge to Newton, Massachusetts, his wife wisely packed him off to MIT to keep him out of trouble while she directed things. Moreover, because she expected him to forget their new address she wrote a reminder (with directions) on a slip of paper and gave it to him.
Naturally, later in the day, Norbert had a brainstorm. Fortunately, scrap paper was close at hand - in his pocket. After scribbing out some calculations, however, he decided that the idea was not what it had seemed, and promptly threw the paper away...
At the end of the day, he arrived in Cambridge, found no one home, and realized that they had moved - and that he had no idea where he now lived. Fortunately, he spotted a young girl on the street who appeared to recognize him. "Excuse me, perhaps you know me," he began. "I'm Norbert Weiner and we've just moved. Do you happen to know where we've moved to?"
"Yes daddy," the girl is said to have replied. "Mommy thought you would forget..."
I used to see an old Cold War-era flyer on the bulletin board in the linear accellerator building on my local campus, it eventually got taken down and I've been looking for a copy ever since. Maybe someone remembers this classic physics joke, someone HAS to have a copy posted on the web somewhere. It was a list of "solutions to the submarine detection problem" or something like that. It purported to show how each scientific discipline would locate Russian submarines. I only remember a couple of the solutions. Nuclear physicists would bombard the ocean with radiation to convert all the water to heavy water, changing the neutral density point and messing up the boyancy of subs, making them all rise to the surface. Mechanical engineers would build huge dams around the Atlantic, pump all the water into the Pacific, and then the submarines would be left sitting on the ocean bottom where they could be spotted by aircraft. I think you get the basic idea, I remember it being totally hilarious, and I'm sure my two lame examples did not do it justice.
I heard this funny story which was said to be a true incident. I like the subtle frame-of-reference joke.
Norbert Weiner was driving along a country road, when he got involved in a one-car accident, he drove off the road head-on into a telephone pole. When the police arrived, they asked him what happened. He said,
"I was driving along, the telephone poles were passing me in a regular order, when suddenly they swerved!"
jebus fucking khrist, Atanasoff built on work that had been going on for several thousand years or more, starting with the Abacus. And this is relevant because....?
Thanks for the clarification that you're just mental. Go troll someone else.
What in the fuck would inspire you to spew insults at Atanasoff? Are you a descendent of Eckert or Mauchly? Or are you just mental?
What you have basically said is that the Wright Brothers were losers because Boeing and Lockheed commercialized flying. Are you beginning to see how ridiculous your statement was?
The fact remains that Atanasoff had a fully working digital computer long before E/M created ENIAC, and that E/M copied it and got caught. The fact that Atanasoff abandoned the project because he got caught up in WWII does not detract from his great achievement. Others preceded him and contributed to the great work, but Atanasoff was the first to put it all together and make it work.
This is a good place to once again mention the most widely held misconceptions in the history of computing, that the ENIAC was the first digital computer and Eckert/Mauchly invented electronic digital computers. It is not true. The first electronic digital computer was the ABC, the "Atanasoff/Berry Computer," constructed at Iowa State University in 1937.
http://www.cs.iastate.edu/jva/jva-archive.shtml/
ISU recently built a replica of the computer, you can see videos of it in operation here:
http://www.scl.ameslab.gov/ABC/
The story is a really interesting one, Sperry bought Eckert & Mauchly's patents on digital computing, Atanasoff sued for infringement and the court ruled that Atanasoff was the true inventor of digital computing and the Eckert/Mauchly/Sperry patents were invalid. It turned out that Mauchly visited Atanasoff, read his notes, and copied heavily from the ABC design when constructing ENIAC. But my favorite part of the story is how Atanasoff came up with the idea in the first place. He told about how Iowa was a dry state at that time so everyone used to drive to Illinois for a drink. Atanasoff was notorious for his high speed driving, he said he liked to work out ideas in his head while zooming along backcountry roads. The idea came to him while driving, and he sketched it out on a napkin over a whiskey when he got to his favorite Illinois roadhouse bar.
Yes, that definitely helps, thanks for your detailed reply. With the other data from this thread, I'm convinced that the anecdote is possible, but improbable. Apparently it's an exaggeration but based on a real phenomenon.
Well, Google knows, but what do these FAQ authors know? One of your citations is written (and I use that word loosely) by the notorious net.kook and former KotM nominee Tomoyuki Tanaka.
Yep, that's gotta be it, I read EGB when it first came out, and uses the push/pop stack concept just as I remembered. How the hell did you remember this was in EGB? Now I'll have to go find a copy because I gave mine away and there's obviously more context around that paragraph you quoted.
But still, I'd like to hear the original "droll tales" because I think Hofstadter is generally full of shit. And we still have no confirmation from native German speakers that this story is plausible.
I'll stack up my ancient Mac IIcx as a survivor, I still have it because nobody would ever want an old dog CPU like that. But in those days, it was state of the art. I had a RasterOps 364 video capture board, which at that time cost almost as much as the CPU. I did some amazing multimedia projects with this board, it was more valuable to me than the computer. So one day I'm sitting in my apartment working on the IIcx when I hear the shriek of a table saw coming from next door and the lights start to go dim intermittently. The landlord decided to start that remodelling job on the vacant apartment. I decided I better save my work and shut down. Just as I finished the save, but before I shut down, I heard the landlord sawing, he pushed the board too fast and jammed the saw, causing the lights to go very dim, then the lights went out, he blew the circuit breaker. And I was on the very same breaker as the table saw. I heard a short BZZT sound coming from my Mac and smelled smoke. Oh shit. So I open up the CPU, the RO364 board is toast, there are obvious signs of melting and smoke damage. It was either a huge power surge that overran my surge protector, or else the landlord was using a cheater plug and somehow managed to short 120v right through my computer when the saw motor bogged down (this was an old apartment with bad wiring). But there were no obvious signs of damage to the Mac. I dug up my original 8 bit video card to replace the blown RO364 card, maybe the CPU will work. I waited for the landlord to quit for the day, then I fired up the Mac. It still worked! As the landlord left, I told him that I wished he'd warned me before he started sawing because his saw blew out my $1500 video card, and I couldn't afford to replace it. I told him he should give me a free month's rent for compensation. You can guess how well that went. But at least I managed to preserve my perfect Apple hardware record. I have never owned anything but Apple CPUs, and I have never EVER had a piece of Apple brand-name hardware break, or develop even a minor hardware defect. My Mac IIcx even survived an incident that destroyed an internal card! I thought that was astonishing because both the CPU and the video card ran off the same power supply, and were presumably subjected to the same electric charge.
Oh yeah. The Iomega reps once came to my shop with a little dog and pony show about how reliable the Bernoulli carts were. They had several amusing stories (with notarized affadavits!) but the one I remember best was one story about a fishing boat that went down with a laptop and a portable Bernoulli drive onboard. After a few weeks, they located the boat and raised it the bottom of the ocean. The laptop was hosed, but they drained the seawater out of the carts, fired them up in a new drive, and they ran just fine. Or so they said. Of course, it's not too hard to make a reliable storage medium when you're only storing 40 or 90 Mb. If only their Jaz carts were as reliable (I had TONS of problems with Jaz carts and drives).
Don't forget there are a lot of different types of "blind." Lately the proper euphemism seems to be "low vision" rather than "legally blind" (as opposed to "blind" which implies total blindness). I've been researching this problem myself, since my little niece has detatched retinas due to a medical malpractice incident at birth, so she has no central vision, she can only see with her peripheral vision. She gets around pretty well in the real world, she doesn't need assistance like a cane or guide dog, but she has to use a CCTV magnifying system to read, so she hates to read. She's very intelligent so I feel very sad every time I hear that she hates to read. Anyway, there are other central vision defects, like macular degeneration, etc. Then there are other completely different problems, like cataracts, which cause cloudy vision, other problems cause tunnel vision, etc etc. So you've got to know what type of "blindness" you're dealing with. The original question made no attempt to even guess at any specific type of vision problem before asking for a general solution. There IS no one solution for this problem, it's dozens of similar problems with different solutions. That's why people go to Medical School to learn this stuff. Consult with professionals for this sort of medical advice, not slashdot.
Why does it have to be a VIDEO telescope? You could just get an Emoscop, which is a "magnifying telescope." I used see art curators using Emoscops in a little rig clipped to their eyeglasses. It allows them to view an object at variable magnifications while still keeping their distance. This would seem to do most of what your video telescope does, but only costs about $50. I've seen custom "bioptic" eyeglasses that seem to serve the same function, here's a photo: http://underreported.com/modules.php?op=mo dload&na me=News&file=article&sid=1164
Hey, this seems like the perfect place to try to verify an old bit of physics lore that I only vaguely recall. Maybe a native German speaker (or physics lore collectors) can verify it, or shoot it full of holes.
The story as I recall it, describes a brilliant but eccentric German physics lecturer. It described an antiquated German grammar structure, now obsolete, but still used by this lecturer due to his advanced age. It was described as "pushing and popping the stack," each sentence was left incomplete, quickly shifting to a new sentence fragment, but omitting all the verbs. Each time you came to the place where the verb belonged, you just "pushed" it onto your mental stack, and moved on to the next sentence. Then when you got to the conclusion, you'd "pop" all those verbs off the stack and speak the sentence endings in order. So hypothetically it might go something like this:
Mary little lamb, fleece white as snow, everywhere Mary, the lamb; had, was, went, sure to go.
Now I never heard anything so preposterous in my life. That was, UNTIL I read the rest of the anecdote about this lecturer. Apparently he was prone to using run-on sentences that would last nearly half an hour, which he only realized as the allotted time for the lecture was coming to a close. As the story told it, students would listen to the first half-hour of the run-on sentence, baffled by most of what he was saying, and not taking many notes because none of the sentences were complete or even sensible. Then near the end of the lecture, he'd suddenly have to wrap things up so he'd just spit out 15 minutes worth of verbs, popping them off his stack in the correct order, and all the students would frantically try to copy them all down in their notes, moving backwards from the bottom to the top of the pages, to fill in all the gaps in the notes.
I don't speak German so I don't have any evidence pro or con about this grammar structure. And I'm skeptical because it would take a genius to remember the last 30 minutes of your extemporaneous lecturing, let alone all those verbs you used in the correct order. But it wouldn't be completely implausible since the German physicists of that era were some of the greatest minds of all time. The story seemed to be told out of respect for his prodigious feat of eccentric speechmaking, as much as it was told as poking fun at the absentminded idiot-savant professor. So does this story sound like complete B.S.? Or is it vaguely plausible, if someone straightens out the errors I probably made due to it being about 25 years since I heard this? And if anyone else has heard this anecdote, would you happen to know just WHO it was?
No, that's precisely the topic. Systems based on degree/minutes are ideal for people who live on spherical planets, and don't like to use Radians because they can't divide by Pi in their head. What really gets me is the mixed systems, like kph. It's still not metric, since time is measured in nonmetric hours. Of course, it could always be worse, with some stupid decimal clock with metric seconds and 100 seconds per minute.
for those of us who don't use that artificial metric crap. I mean, really, if God wanted us to use the Metric system, he would have made the distance between the King's nose and his thumb to be exactly one meter.
Digicams suck for general input. I'm doing a ton of digitizing of old tabloid (11x17) magazines with my Canon Powershot s50 5MP camera. That gives me a 240DPI image at a bit under 8.5x11in. This would obviously be a stupid idea except that 11x17 scanners cost about $3000, so a $500 camera to do a quickie low rez scan is about the best I can afford. At least I can read the tiniest type at that rez, that was the deal-breaker. I really should be using the new Kodak 16Mp camera for this job, but I can't afford it.
Anyway.. there are huge problems with this process. I have a huge old photo enlarger, I removed the projection head and replaced it with a camera mount, as a quick and dirty copystand. It is exceptionally difficult to get the camera perfectly aligned and levelled so your scans are square instead of skewed. I use tungsten lights (I'm just doing B&W copywork) and they get really hot. But worst of all, in NO way can the process be described as speedy. It takes about 60 seconds to store a raw image file to disk over USB2. You really have to use a remote capture program, I use Canon Remote Capture on my Mac, it shows what the viewfinder is seeing, but remotely on my Mac display. This is critical for lining up your page so you don't get crooked scans. I tried just using the shutter release instead of the remote release, but it didn't save any time, the transmission time over USB2 is insignificant compared to the processing speed of the camera. It takes almost exactly the same time to store the image to a CF card as to the remote CPU via USB. For final storage, I convert everything to PDFs. They're easy to access on any platform, and image compression using Acrobat Pro is excellent (and configurable). I use the default compression, I just scanned a 72 page magazine, autoprocessed them in Photoshop, saved as greyscale 8 bit TIFFs at about 5Mb each, and imported into a PDF. The 72 page PDF is about 30Mb, the originals were about 360Mb, about a 90% reduction in file size. Nice. Anyway, I use a Mac and commercial software products, you could easily duplicate this workflow with other *nix or open source products.
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Uh, Einstein, did you actually READ what I said? Or did you just decide to rant about what the voices in your head told you what I was saying?
I never said you'd get 30FPS with a 56k modem, I just said that iChatAV will work with a 56k modem, without specifying anything else like frame rates. The other guy said broadband is REQUIRED. It is not.
No it doesn't, iChatAV works fine over dialup modems too. Sure you won't get the same frame rates, but consider that these sign-language users can set a very low bandwidth for the audio, they don't need it at all. They can use more of the available bandwidth for video.
I read an interesting report (SF Chron I think) that said deaf users discovered that Apple's iChat has a sufficiently high frame rate and resolution to use sign language over video, and no other products had a high enough frame rate to do the job adequately. But then, AFAIK iChat and the iSight does 30fps. I suspect this doesn't directly apply to you, but I though you might find it interesting as some sort of benchmark.
Yep, that's the one. Or I should say, that's PART of the one, I recall this being a LOT longer, including a lot of obscure physics specialties. Must have gotten truncated somehow over all the years it's been floating around. Or maybe it's just my bad memory, and this is all there was.
Thanks a lot, I googled all over for this but never found it.
Probably not, it most likely predates the list, I remember reading this in my High School physics calss, which means it dates to the early 1970s.
BTW, here's another good Weiner story I found on the web, while searching for confirmation, original text at:
http://www.anecdotage.com/index.php?aid=11198
Norbert Weiner was notoriously absent-minded. When his family moved from Cambridge to Newton, Massachusetts, his wife wisely packed him off to MIT to keep him out of trouble while she directed things. Moreover, because she expected him to forget their new address she wrote a reminder (with directions) on a slip of paper and gave it to him.
Naturally, later in the day, Norbert had a brainstorm. Fortunately, scrap paper was close at hand - in his pocket. After scribbing out some calculations, however, he decided that the idea was not what it had seemed, and promptly threw the paper away...
At the end of the day, he arrived in Cambridge, found no one home, and realized that they had moved - and that he had no idea where he now lived. Fortunately, he spotted a young girl on the street who appeared to recognize him. "Excuse me, perhaps you know me," he began. "I'm Norbert Weiner and we've just moved. Do you happen to know where we've moved to?"
"Yes daddy," the girl is said to have replied. "Mommy thought you would forget..."
I used to see an old Cold War-era flyer on the bulletin board in the linear accellerator building on my local campus, it eventually got taken down and I've been looking for a copy ever since. Maybe someone remembers this classic physics joke, someone HAS to have a copy posted on the web somewhere.
It was a list of "solutions to the submarine detection problem" or something like that. It purported to show how each scientific discipline would locate Russian submarines.
I only remember a couple of the solutions. Nuclear physicists would bombard the ocean with radiation to convert all the water to heavy water, changing the neutral density point and messing up the boyancy of subs, making them all rise to the surface. Mechanical engineers would build huge dams around the Atlantic, pump all the water into the Pacific, and then the submarines would be left sitting on the ocean bottom where they could be spotted by aircraft.
I think you get the basic idea, I remember it being totally hilarious, and I'm sure my two lame examples did not do it justice.
I heard this funny story which was said to be a true incident. I like the subtle frame-of-reference joke.
Norbert Weiner was driving along a country road, when he got involved in a one-car accident, he drove off the road head-on into a telephone pole. When the police arrived, they asked him what happened. He said,
"I was driving along, the telephone poles were passing me in a regular order, when suddenly they swerved!"
jebus fucking khrist, Atanasoff built on work that had been going on for several thousand years or more, starting with the Abacus. And this is relevant because....?
Thanks for the clarification that you're just mental. Go troll someone else.
What in the fuck would inspire you to spew insults at Atanasoff? Are you a descendent of Eckert or Mauchly? Or are you just mental?
What you have basically said is that the Wright Brothers were losers because Boeing and Lockheed commercialized flying. Are you beginning to see how ridiculous your statement was?
The fact remains that Atanasoff had a fully working digital computer long before E/M created ENIAC, and that E/M copied it and got caught. The fact that Atanasoff abandoned the project because he got caught up in WWII does not detract from his great achievement. Others preceded him and contributed to the great work, but Atanasoff was the first to put it all together and make it work.
This is a good place to once again mention the most widely held misconceptions in the history of computing, that the ENIAC was the first digital computer and Eckert/Mauchly invented electronic digital computers. It is not true.
/
The first electronic digital computer was the ABC, the "Atanasoff/Berry Computer," constructed at Iowa State University in 1937.
http://www.cs.iastate.edu/jva/jva-archive.shtml
ISU recently built a replica of the computer, you can see videos of it in operation here:
http://www.scl.ameslab.gov/ABC/
The story is a really interesting one, Sperry bought Eckert & Mauchly's patents on digital computing, Atanasoff sued for infringement and the court ruled that Atanasoff was the true inventor of digital computing and the Eckert/Mauchly/Sperry patents were invalid. It turned out that Mauchly visited Atanasoff, read his notes, and copied heavily from the ABC design when constructing ENIAC.
But my favorite part of the story is how Atanasoff came up with the idea in the first place. He told about how Iowa was a dry state at that time so everyone used to drive to Illinois for a drink. Atanasoff was notorious for his high speed driving, he said he liked to work out ideas in his head while zooming along backcountry roads. The idea came to him while driving, and he sketched it out on a napkin over a whiskey when he got to his favorite Illinois roadhouse bar.
Yes, that definitely helps, thanks for your detailed reply. With the other data from this thread, I'm convinced that the anecdote is possible, but improbable. Apparently it's an exaggeration but based on a real phenomenon.
Oops, you're right, the order is reversed, it's a FIFO not a stack. Good catch. But people understood what I meant anyway.
Well, Google knows, but what do these FAQ authors know? One of your citations is written (and I use that word loosely) by the notorious net.kook and former KotM nominee Tomoyuki Tanaka.
Yep, that's gotta be it, I read EGB when it first came out, and uses the push/pop stack concept just as I remembered. How the hell did you remember this was in EGB? Now I'll have to go find a copy because I gave mine away and there's obviously more context around that paragraph you quoted.
But still, I'd like to hear the original "droll tales" because I think Hofstadter is generally full of shit. And we still have no confirmation from native German speakers that this story is plausible.
I'll stack up my ancient Mac IIcx as a survivor, I still have it because nobody would ever want an old dog CPU like that. But in those days, it was state of the art. I had a RasterOps 364 video capture board, which at that time cost almost as much as the CPU. I did some amazing multimedia projects with this board, it was more valuable to me than the computer.
So one day I'm sitting in my apartment working on the IIcx when I hear the shriek of a table saw coming from next door and the lights start to go dim intermittently. The landlord decided to start that remodelling job on the vacant apartment. I decided I better save my work and shut down. Just as I finished the save, but before I shut down, I heard the landlord sawing, he pushed the board too fast and jammed the saw, causing the lights to go very dim, then the lights went out, he blew the circuit breaker. And I was on the very same breaker as the table saw. I heard a short BZZT sound coming from my Mac and smelled smoke. Oh shit.
So I open up the CPU, the RO364 board is toast, there are obvious signs of melting and smoke damage. It was either a huge power surge that overran my surge protector, or else the landlord was using a cheater plug and somehow managed to short 120v right through my computer when the saw motor bogged down (this was an old apartment with bad wiring).
But there were no obvious signs of damage to the Mac. I dug up my original 8 bit video card to replace the blown RO364 card, maybe the CPU will work. I waited for the landlord to quit for the day, then I fired up the Mac. It still worked!
As the landlord left, I told him that I wished he'd warned me before he started sawing because his saw blew out my $1500 video card, and I couldn't afford to replace it. I told him he should give me a free month's rent for compensation. You can guess how well that went.
But at least I managed to preserve my perfect Apple hardware record. I have never owned anything but Apple CPUs, and I have never EVER had a piece of Apple brand-name hardware break, or develop even a minor hardware defect. My Mac IIcx even survived an incident that destroyed an internal card! I thought that was astonishing because both the CPU and the video card ran off the same power supply, and were presumably subjected to the same electric charge.
Oh yeah. The Iomega reps once came to my shop with a little dog and pony show about how reliable the Bernoulli carts were. They had several amusing stories (with notarized affadavits!) but the one I remember best was one story about a fishing boat that went down with a laptop and a portable Bernoulli drive onboard. After a few weeks, they located the boat and raised it the bottom of the ocean. The laptop was hosed, but they drained the seawater out of the carts, fired them up in a new drive, and they ran just fine. Or so they said. Of course, it's not too hard to make a reliable storage medium when you're only storing 40 or 90 Mb. If only their Jaz carts were as reliable (I had TONS of problems with Jaz carts and drives).
Don't forget there are a lot of different types of "blind." Lately the proper euphemism seems to be "low vision" rather than "legally blind" (as opposed to "blind" which implies total blindness).
I've been researching this problem myself, since my little niece has detatched retinas due to a medical malpractice incident at birth, so she has no central vision, she can only see with her peripheral vision. She gets around pretty well in the real world, she doesn't need assistance like a cane or guide dog, but she has to use a CCTV magnifying system to read, so she hates to read. She's very intelligent so I feel very sad every time I hear that she hates to read.
Anyway, there are other central vision defects, like macular degeneration, etc. Then there are other completely different problems, like cataracts, which cause cloudy vision, other problems cause tunnel vision, etc etc. So you've got to know what type of "blindness" you're dealing with. The original question made no attempt to even guess at any specific type of vision problem before asking for a general solution. There IS no one solution for this problem, it's dozens of similar problems with different solutions. That's why people go to Medical School to learn this stuff. Consult with professionals for this sort of medical advice, not slashdot.
Why does it have to be a VIDEO telescope? You could just get an Emoscop, which is a "magnifying telescope." I used see art curators using Emoscops in a little rig clipped to their eyeglasses. It allows them to view an object at variable magnifications while still keeping their distance. This would seem to do most of what your video telescope does, but only costs about $50.o dload&na me=News&file=article&sid=1164
I've seen custom "bioptic" eyeglasses that seem to serve the same function, here's a photo:
http://underreported.com/modules.php?op=m
Hey, this seems like the perfect place to try to verify an old bit of physics lore that I only vaguely recall. Maybe a native German speaker (or physics lore collectors) can verify it, or shoot it full of holes.
The story as I recall it, describes a brilliant but eccentric German physics lecturer. It described an antiquated German grammar structure, now obsolete, but still used by this lecturer due to his advanced age. It was described as "pushing and popping the stack," each sentence was left incomplete, quickly shifting to a new sentence fragment, but omitting all the verbs. Each time you came to the place where the verb belonged, you just "pushed" it onto your mental stack, and moved on to the next sentence. Then when you got to the conclusion, you'd "pop" all those verbs off the stack and speak the sentence endings in order. So hypothetically it might go something like this:
Mary little lamb, fleece white as snow, everywhere Mary, the lamb; had, was, went, sure to go.
Now I never heard anything so preposterous in my life. That was, UNTIL I read the rest of the anecdote about this lecturer. Apparently he was prone to using run-on sentences that would last nearly half an hour, which he only realized as the allotted time for the lecture was coming to a close. As the story told it, students would listen to the first half-hour of the run-on sentence, baffled by most of what he was saying, and not taking many notes because none of the sentences were complete or even sensible. Then near the end of the lecture, he'd suddenly have to wrap things up so he'd just spit out 15 minutes worth of verbs, popping them off his stack in the correct order, and all the students would frantically try to copy them all down in their notes, moving backwards from the bottom to the top of the pages, to fill in all the gaps in the notes.
I don't speak German so I don't have any evidence pro or con about this grammar structure. And I'm skeptical because it would take a genius to remember the last 30 minutes of your extemporaneous lecturing, let alone all those verbs you used in the correct order. But it wouldn't be completely implausible since the German physicists of that era were some of the greatest minds of all time. The story seemed to be told out of respect for his prodigious feat of eccentric speechmaking, as much as it was told as poking fun at the absentminded idiot-savant professor.
So does this story sound like complete B.S.? Or is it vaguely plausible, if someone straightens out the errors I probably made due to it being about 25 years since I heard this? And if anyone else has heard this anecdote, would you happen to know just WHO it was?
I'm not impressed. I'd be really impressed if they did something really cool like build a modern pyrophone (a/k/a Flame Organ).
p ://www.deadmedia.org/notes/16/162-comment.html
http://www.deadmedia.org/notes/16/162.html
htt
Fuck this fake digital shit, sometimes analog is way cooler, especially when it involves exploding large amounts of flammable gases.
No, that's precisely the topic. Systems based on degree/minutes are ideal for people who live on spherical planets, and don't like to use Radians because they can't divide by Pi in their head.
What really gets me is the mixed systems, like kph. It's still not metric, since time is measured in nonmetric hours. Of course, it could always be worse, with some stupid decimal clock with metric seconds and 100 seconds per minute.
Yeah, well that was Bugsy Siegel's idea too, and he never got it off the ground either.
for those of us who don't use that artificial metric crap. I mean, really, if God wanted us to use the Metric system, he would have made the distance between the King's nose and his thumb to be exactly one meter.
Digicams suck for general input. I'm doing a ton of digitizing of old tabloid (11x17) magazines with my Canon Powershot s50 5MP camera. That gives me a 240DPI image at a bit under 8.5x11in. This would obviously be a stupid idea except that 11x17 scanners cost about $3000, so a $500 camera to do a quickie low rez scan is about the best I can afford. At least I can read the tiniest type at that rez, that was the deal-breaker. I really should be using the new Kodak 16Mp camera for this job, but I can't afford it.
Anyway.. there are huge problems with this process. I have a huge old photo enlarger, I removed the projection head and replaced it with a camera mount, as a quick and dirty copystand. It is exceptionally difficult to get the camera perfectly aligned and levelled so your scans are square instead of skewed. I use tungsten lights (I'm just doing B&W copywork) and they get really hot. But worst of all, in NO way can the process be described as speedy. It takes about 60 seconds to store a raw image file to disk over USB2. You really have to use a remote capture program, I use Canon Remote Capture on my Mac, it shows what the viewfinder is seeing, but remotely on my Mac display. This is critical for lining up your page so you don't get crooked scans. I tried just using the shutter release instead of the remote release, but it didn't save any time, the transmission time over USB2 is insignificant compared to the processing speed of the camera. It takes almost exactly the same time to store the image to a CF card as to the remote CPU via USB.
For final storage, I convert everything to PDFs. They're easy to access on any platform, and image compression using Acrobat Pro is excellent (and configurable). I use the default compression, I just scanned a 72 page magazine, autoprocessed them in Photoshop, saved as greyscale 8 bit TIFFs at about 5Mb each, and imported into a PDF. The 72 page PDF is about 30Mb, the originals were about 360Mb, about a 90% reduction in file size. Nice.
Anyway, I use a Mac and commercial software products, you could easily duplicate this workflow with other *nix or open source products.
Macwindows.com is tracking SAMBA interconnectivity issues.