I've been getting into blacksmithing in the last few years, and these are interesting. I wish the had some more picture available online.
There are all sorts of old metal goods that are really neat looking. I tend to make roughly finished stuff, but I really like the look of olf highly-finished stuff like tools, knives, and medical equipment.
If anyone is interested, here's a good site for the medical stuff:
Google is the new Panopticon? I think there are far more serious things to worry about. Databases that hold huge amounts of data about you, surveillance cameras, over-reaching government.
I think that the erosion of privacy/anonymity is a real issue, I just don't think Google is the thing to get worked up about.
> I had started affixing those labels to myself because of repeatedly failing to do things > I knew I was perfectly capable of that I actually wanted very badly to do. I know just what you mean. I have sleep apnea, and, even though I have good insurance, I have had trouble getting the kind of treatment I need. There are times, up to three or four months, where i get very poor quality sleep and it just kills me. I just stop functioning like a normal adult. I loose the ability to think clearly, remember obvious, important things. I know I'm capable of dealing with life far better than I have, and if I get enough sleep over a long enough period I start functioning normally again. But there doesn't seem to be any guarantees how long it will last. It's really sucked and has cost me a lot of money...
Holy crap, why were you putting user names and passwords on the url? I wouldn't say this was Alexa's fault -- it was whoever put sensitive data on the url like that.
Unless someone has some actual facts on UFOs it's at least plausible for the UFO to have been shot down.
Maybe the UFO can go a bajillion miles an hour in space, but in earth's atmosphere it has to go much slower... It's like saying that the Shuttle can go a million miles an hour, so it's better than any fighter on the planet. It may go faster and higher than any fighter, but I wouldn't want to be in the Shuttle in a dog fight.
Now, that doesn't mean the Roswell thing is true or false, just that the "mustang shooting down a spacecraft" argument doesn't really work.
The whole concept of Buddhism is that suffering comes from wanting things...
Sorry if I'm putting too fine a point on this, but I don't think that's a fair way to summarize Buddhism. And there isn't really a problem with *wanting* things, the problem comes from being *driven* by want, by taking your wants too seriously.
Buddhism has a lot of subtleties that take a good teacher to explain. I'm not a great teacher or anything, and this is hardly the place to get into a deep discussion about Buddhism. For those who are interested I've found Shinzen Young (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinzen_Young) to be a wonderful teacher. He puts a lot of esoteric eastern concepts into a very easily understood western framework. They play his talks on KPFK (http://www.kpfk.org), on Roy of Hollywood's show Something's Happening (http://www.somethingshappening.com/). They play them on Thursday night/Friday morning, along with Alan Watts and a bunch of other great teachers. You can get talks from his website, too.
I think underwater exploration is really interesting, but know almost nothing about it. I'm curious what you mean by "forming an image of what is going on under water from sound (not sonar... I'm talking about real imaging)". Do you mean a full-on photographic quality image? Something like side-scan radar? Would you mind posting more? I'm not sure what you mean and I'd like to learn a little about this.
I don't think manufacturing will be threatened. There's still too many high-precision parts that would be very difficult to build with one of these. When they start printing out good-quality gears or high-speed bearings that last for a while, then I'd start to worry.
How about this as a measure of capability: a decent wood screw. It's a very basic item, yet one that is quite useful. Once you can print out a decent, usable wood screw then it's time to worry.
I bet someone will figure out a way to make some sort of game first... or a way to print out a robot girlfriend, just like the Futurama episode where Fry gets a Lucy Liu of his very own.
"The debate I am hearing is how we better turn power over to the activists and pretend that the economy is unimportant."
First, it misleading to characterize the debate as whether or not everyone "will turn power over to the activists" and that "the economy is unimportant". That's not what I've heard at all. A better way to characterize the debate is that "people saying that it looks like we have a very big problem heading our way", and "we need to start looking at ways to minimize it's impact".
Second, I haven't personally heard anyone claim to know the field of climatology completely. I've seen people (who know a lot more than me about the topic) make claims that there is a problem with global warming. Scientists have run simulations and done studies of all kinds, and most of them support human-caused warming.
Third, and this is in regard to the solar influence question, science works as a set mutually-reinforcing theories about how things work. CO2, with regard to heating the earth, has a well-understood mechanism. It simply traps more heat. It's well-understood at this level. (If you want to know exactly how much hotter, or why certain areas get hotter than others, then it becomes difficult to explain because the atmosphere is complex and non-linear.)
Look, I don't know anything about Solar activity and how it affects the planets temperature, so I'm talking out of my ass here. It still seems to me that solar activity heating the earth 100 years into the future is speculative, at best. It would be like a few hours of shining a heat lamp on a billiard ball and it stays cool, until the next day when it heats up. Don't get me wrong, it could be that solar activity is even the main cause of global warming. It certainly seems unlikely at this point. And honestly, I just don't see how there could ever be absolute proof unless we had a couple of earths to experiment on.
With regard to the asteriod, when you say that "the probability of impact keeps going up and up until that one observation that changes it to a probability of zero". There is another alternative -- after impact the probability is 100%, no matter what.
Well, raw code performance is less and less important. Computers are getting faster and memory is cheap. I'm not saying that a language can be a complete *slug*, but raw performance isn't so important compared to time-to-market, overall design and long-term maintenance.
I'd argue that Perl/Python/Ruby are only *potentially* elegant. You can write crap in any language. Perl just make it easier.
The O'Reilly book "UNIX Power Tools" is probably the most useful, but not super well-known unix book I own... I'd say it's a good candidate for a "first three" book. Anyone who does much with Linux/Unix should own it.
SQL for Smarties
on
SQL Cookbook
·
· Score: 3, Informative
SQL for smarties is the best advanced SQL book I've seen. Highly recommended for developers, and should be on the bookshelf of any DBA.
I have to say, Lisp has the same problem. It's the snobs that screw it up. Lisp is a truely great language, but try lurking on comp.lang.lisp for a little while. For real freak-show entertainment value, look up "naggum-mine" in comp.lang.lisp on google groups.
I don't think Naggum hangs out there any more, so it might not be quite as bad any more. Still, for a language that's been around as long as Lisp, you'd think the group would be a little more tolerant of newcommers.
Well, I think computers and good algorithms can help, but who chooses the algorithms?
Instead of trying to fully analyze the economy, let's try a relatively simple example: how do you determine who is in poverty in the USA? Do you go by a set income (i.e. anyone who makes less than 18,000/year). If so, what if someone lives in an expensive city vs. an inexpensive rural area? Is it going to be the same amount in each state?
Or is poverty determined by lifestyle? If you can't afford health insurance are you in poverty? If you can't afford heating for your home in the winter, then are you in poverty? Is the decision process for determining who's in poverty to be decided by Republicans or Democrats? You're going to get very different results depending on who's calling the shots. I could go on, but I think you get the idea.
There are about 5,000 blacksmiths who have joined ABANA (the Artist-Blacksmith Association of North America, http://www.abana.org/). I'm guessing that there are about twice as many blacksmiths in the USA. As an aside, blacksmithing is a whole lot of fun -- if you're looking for something to do that's more physical than coding blacksmithing makes a great hobby!
As far as your statement that "a man can only possess that which he can successfully defend" I don't think that society will degrade so far as to become some sort of Snake Pliskin/Mad Max apocalypse. People have made it through horrible wars and the Great Depression without turning to looting and raping. I'm not saying that you shouldn't own a gun or anything, just that the society I think you're implying in "only possessing what you can successfully defend" doesn't seem too likely to me. We've had laws and a stable government for a long time... I think we'll have police, too.
Also, I don't think we'd get to a feudal society level any time soon. We've had our government since before the industrial revolution. Things might change quite a bit, but I think we'd still have the same type of representative democracy.
We might be at the start of "peak oil". Then again, we might not. But I do think it will be a big issue before I die, and I think it's worth doing something about now. My plan is to buy ten or twenty acres somewhere I can live off of. The ideal spot would be far enough away from a big city so I could grow some food and maybe raise some goats or chickens to supplement my diet, but close enough to a city that I could take advantage of the opportunities there. (In general, During the Depression, the people that did best were those in the cities, because they could take advantage of different programs, etc... The rural areas mostly got screwed). The tough part is finding some land I can actually afford...
Any ways, I think there will be some big disruptions in the way we live, but I don't think we're going to hit apocalypse levels. There is lots of coal left for power. We might not be driving as much as we are now (or we might just switch to go-cart sized cars that get 80 miles to the gallon. It seems to have worked for Europe).
This reminds me of one of the "big lessons" I've learned in my life... If someone treats others poorly, it's only a matter of time until it's your turn. Sooner or later, they'll turn on you, whenever it's convienient or profitable for them.
I'm not saying this is a law like gravity, but it's true often enough that I pay a lot of attention to how people treat others.
While I don't agree with the tone, I have to say that I agree with the content... Usenet is Hella' useful.
I spend far more time than I should reading rec.crafts.metalworking, alt.crafts.blacksmithing, sci.engr.welding, and many others. WHen I have a difficult programming question, I can almost always find the answer on Usenet.
The new google groups pretty much sucks. It can be made a little more friendly by chosing "view titles only" and "view as tree".
A single fertalized human egg? Or maybe that's too much as the species has evolved for quite a while, so the human species isn't really a beginner... maybe a book with tasks that could be understood by cyanobacteria?
My 16 month old baby couldn't do it either, but that doesn't mean the title is misleading.
Wow, I've only read the first couple of sections, but it looks like a great tutorial. I've been meaning to do some OCaml programming and I'll be using your tutorial to get up to speed.
You know, I had the same idea about newsletters as your friend... I wish I would have done something with it, but I bought a house and that cleaned me out of most of my disposable income and savings until recently.
The house, as an investment, has done well-- the equity has increased about 50% increased 50%/year over the last two years. I don't expect it to keep doing that well, though, and I have a little more "extra" money to do something with.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been getting into blacksmithing in the last few years, and these are interesting. I wish the had some more picture available online.
There are all sorts of old metal goods that are really neat looking. I tend to make roughly finished stuff, but I really like the look of olf highly-finished stuff like tools, knives, and medical equipment.
If anyone is interested, here's a good site for the medical stuff:
http://medicalantiques.com/medical/Medical_Antiques_Index.htm
Google is the new Panopticon? I think there are far more serious things to worry about. Databases that hold huge amounts of data about you, surveillance cameras, over-reaching government.
I think that the erosion of privacy/anonymity is a real issue, I just don't think Google is the thing to get worked up about.
> I had started affixing those labels to myself because of repeatedly failing to do things
> I knew I was perfectly capable of that I actually wanted very badly to do.
I know just what you mean. I have sleep apnea, and, even though I have good insurance, I have had trouble getting the kind of treatment I need. There are times, up to three or four months, where i get very poor quality sleep and it just kills me. I
just stop functioning like a normal adult. I loose the ability to think clearly, remember obvious, important things. I know I'm capable of dealing with life far better than I have, and if I get enough sleep over a long enough period I start functioning normally again. But there doesn't seem to be any guarantees how long it will last. It's really sucked and has cost me a lot of money...
Holy crap, why were you putting user names and passwords on the url? I wouldn't say this was Alexa's fault -- it was whoever put sensitive data on the url like that.
Unless someone has some actual facts on UFOs it's at least plausible for the UFO to have been shot down.
Maybe the UFO can go a bajillion miles an hour in space, but in earth's atmosphere it has to go much slower... It's like saying that the Shuttle can go a million miles an hour, so it's better than any fighter on the planet. It may go faster and higher than any fighter, but I wouldn't want to be in the Shuttle in a dog fight.
Now, that doesn't mean the Roswell thing is true or false, just that the "mustang shooting down a spacecraft" argument doesn't really work.
Sorry if I'm putting too fine a point on this, but I don't think that's a fair way to summarize Buddhism. And there isn't really a problem with *wanting* things, the problem comes from being *driven* by want, by taking your wants too seriously.
Buddhism has a lot of subtleties that take a good teacher to explain. I'm not a great teacher or anything, and this is hardly the place to get into a deep discussion about Buddhism. For those who are interested I've found Shinzen Young (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinzen_Young) to be a wonderful teacher. He puts a lot of esoteric eastern concepts into a very easily understood western framework. They play his talks on KPFK (http://www.kpfk.org), on Roy of Hollywood's show Something's Happening (http://www.somethingshappening.com/). They play them on Thursday night/Friday morning, along with Alan Watts and a bunch of other great teachers. You can get talks from his website, too.
My people call it corn.
(anyone remember that commercial?)
I think underwater exploration is really interesting, but know almost nothing about it. I'm curious what you mean by "forming an image of what is going on under water from sound (not sonar... I'm talking about real imaging)". Do you mean a full-on photographic quality image? Something like side-scan radar? Would you mind posting more? I'm not sure what you mean and I'd like to learn a little about this.
I don't think manufacturing will be threatened. There's still too many high-precision parts that would be very difficult to build with one of these. When they start printing out good-quality gears or high-speed bearings that last for a while, then I'd start to worry.
How about this as a measure of capability: a decent wood screw. It's a very basic item, yet one that is quite useful. Once you can print out a decent, usable wood screw then it's time to worry.
I bet someone will figure out a way to make some sort of game first... or a way to print out a robot girlfriend, just like the Futurama episode where Fry gets a Lucy Liu of his very own.
"The debate I am hearing is how we better turn power over to the activists and pretend that the economy is unimportant."
First, it misleading to characterize the debate as whether or not everyone "will turn power over to the activists" and that "the economy is unimportant". That's not what I've heard at all. A better way to characterize the debate is that "people saying that it looks like we have a very big problem heading our way", and "we need to start looking at ways to minimize it's impact".
Second, I haven't personally heard anyone claim to know the field of climatology completely. I've seen people (who know a lot more than me about the topic) make claims that there is a problem with global warming. Scientists have run simulations and done studies of all kinds, and most of them support human-caused warming.
Third, and this is in regard to the solar influence question, science works as a set mutually-reinforcing theories about how things work. CO2, with regard to heating the earth, has a well-understood mechanism. It simply traps more heat. It's well-understood at this level. (If you want to know exactly how much hotter, or why certain areas get hotter than others, then it becomes difficult to explain because the atmosphere is complex and non-linear.)
Look, I don't know anything about Solar activity and how it affects the planets temperature, so I'm talking out of my ass here. It still seems to me that solar activity heating the earth 100 years into the future is speculative, at best. It would be like a few hours of shining a heat lamp on a billiard ball and it stays cool, until the next day when it heats up. Don't get me wrong, it could be that solar activity is even the main cause of global warming. It certainly seems unlikely at this point. And honestly, I just don't see how there could ever be absolute proof unless we had a couple of earths to experiment on.
With regard to the asteriod, when you say that "the probability of impact keeps going up and up until that one observation that changes it to a probability of zero". There is another alternative -- after impact the probability is 100%, no matter what.
I guess "The Moon is a Bulgy Mistress" just wasn't a good enough title for Heinlien.
Did you try the gopher, Everett?
Well, raw code performance is less and less important. Computers are getting faster and memory is cheap. I'm not saying that a language can be a complete *slug*, but raw performance isn't so important compared to time-to-market, overall design and long-term maintenance.
I'd argue that Perl/Python/Ruby are only *potentially* elegant. You can write crap in any language. Perl just make it easier.
Jeff P.
The O'Reilly book "UNIX Power Tools" is probably the most useful, but not super well-known unix book I own... I'd say it's a good candidate for a "first three" book. Anyone who does much with Linux/Unix should own it.
SQL for smarties is the best advanced SQL book I've seen. Highly recommended for developers, and should be on the bookshelf of any DBA.
I have to say, Lisp has the same problem. It's the snobs that screw it up. Lisp is a truely great language, but try lurking on comp.lang.lisp for a little while. For real freak-show entertainment value, look up "naggum-mine" in comp.lang.lisp on google groups.
I don't think Naggum hangs out there any more, so it might not be quite as bad any more. Still, for a language that's been around as long as Lisp, you'd think the group would be a little more tolerant of newcommers.
Well, I think computers and good algorithms can help, but who chooses the algorithms?
Instead of trying to fully analyze the economy, let's try a relatively simple example: how do you determine who is in poverty in the USA? Do you go by a set income (i.e. anyone who makes less than 18,000/year). If so, what if someone lives in an expensive city vs. an inexpensive rural area? Is it going to be the same amount in each state?
Or is poverty determined by lifestyle? If you can't afford health insurance are you in poverty? If you can't afford heating for your home in the winter, then are you in poverty? Is the decision process for determining who's in poverty to be decided by Republicans or Democrats? You're going to get very different results depending on who's calling the shots. I could go on, but I think you get the idea.
Now that's unpleasant!
Just a couple of comments:
There are about 5,000 blacksmiths who have joined ABANA (the Artist-Blacksmith Association of North America, http://www.abana.org/). I'm guessing that there are about twice as many blacksmiths in the USA. As an aside, blacksmithing is a whole lot of fun -- if you're looking for something to do that's more physical than coding blacksmithing makes a great hobby!
As far as your statement that "a man can only possess that which he can successfully defend" I don't think that society will degrade so far as to become some sort of Snake Pliskin/Mad Max apocalypse. People have made it through horrible wars and the Great Depression without turning to looting and raping. I'm not saying that you shouldn't own a gun or anything, just that the society I think you're implying in "only possessing what you can successfully defend" doesn't seem too likely to me. We've had laws and a stable government for a long time... I think we'll have police, too.
Also, I don't think we'd get to a feudal society level any time soon. We've had our government since before the industrial revolution. Things might change quite a bit, but I think we'd still have the same type of representative democracy.
We might be at the start of "peak oil". Then again, we might not. But I do think it will be a big issue before I die, and I think it's worth doing something about now. My plan is to buy ten or twenty acres somewhere I can live off of. The ideal spot would be far enough away from a big city so I could grow some food and maybe raise some goats or chickens to supplement my diet, but close enough to a city that I could take advantage of the opportunities there. (In general, During the Depression, the people that did best were those in the cities, because they could take advantage of different programs, etc... The rural areas mostly got screwed). The tough part is finding some land I can actually afford...
Any ways, I think there will be some big disruptions in the way we live, but I don't think we're going to hit apocalypse levels. There is lots of coal left for power. We might not be driving as much as we are now (or we might just switch to go-cart sized cars that get 80 miles to the gallon. It seems to have worked for Europe).
It's sort of like thinking that just because you know how to use Word, you should be able to write like Shakespear...
This reminds me of one of the "big lessons" I've learned in my life... If someone treats others poorly, it's only a matter of time until it's your turn. Sooner or later, they'll turn on you, whenever it's convienient or profitable for them.
I'm not saying this is a law like gravity, but it's true often enough that I pay a lot of attention to how people treat others.
While I don't agree with the tone, I have to say that I agree with the content... Usenet is Hella' useful.
I spend far more time than I should reading rec.crafts.metalworking, alt.crafts.blacksmithing, sci.engr.welding, and many others. WHen I have a difficult programming question, I can almost always find the answer on Usenet.
The new google groups pretty much sucks. It can be made a little more friendly by chosing "view titles only" and "view as tree".
A single fertalized human egg? Or maybe that's too much as the species has evolved for quite a while, so the human species isn't really a beginner... maybe a book with tasks that could be understood by cyanobacteria?
My 16 month old baby couldn't do it either, but that doesn't mean the title is misleading.
Wow, I've only read the first couple of sections, but it looks like a great tutorial. I've been meaning to do some OCaml programming and I'll be using your tutorial to get up to speed.
Thanks for the feedback!
You know, I had the same idea about newsletters as your friend... I wish I would have done something with it, but I bought a house and that cleaned me out of most of my disposable income and savings until recently.
The house, as an investment, has done well-- the equity has increased about 50% increased 50%/year over the last two years. I don't expect it to keep doing that well, though, and I have a little more "extra" money to do something with.
Again, thanks for the post.