The Supreme Court has held for a very long time now that the right to free speech means the right to anonymous speech, especially political speech.
Yes.. for people. But not necessarily for organizations.
Of course, making such a distinction will require reversing a very old (and recently reinforced) precedent in US law, where organizations have personhood. Probably requiring an amendment. So it won't happen.
Agg Seriously? Keep your notes in a book or some other time-ordered form. Pretty fast to flip through, find things before and after the stuff in question. Basic indexing (putting a two-letter abbreviation at the top of each page by topic) makes it even easier.
The human eye is remarkably good at picking out visual subject material. If I've read a pure-text book, I can usually flip to a section I remember faster than using the index. Pure computer-based searches are useful mainly in contexts where you _haven't_ read the source material before, but that's not the application we're discussing here.
I'm sorry, but is the submitter fscking insane? I rely heavily on handwritten notes all the time. So does every college student and scientist that I know. Note that I'm talking about extremely tech-savvy people here, who often DO own an iPhone... but they are fundamentally useless for taking notes.
Taking notes, of course, is not the only writing one does, but it's a pretty important thing. Writing serves a a communication medium to others, but equally serves as expansion of short- and long-term memory for ourselves. I have yet to meet any GUI interface that has the flexibility of a pad of paper:
- Effortless data entry. - Figures, mathematics or other non-ASCII input are faster than any other technique (and likely to remain so) - No learning curve (for people past 6th grade) - Bookmarking, fast page finding. - No limit to page-space viewable at one time
-Needs no recharging, syncing - Not a target for theft - Light and comfortable in the hand - Cheap, reliable components - Easily backed up by photocopier or scanner
The only downside, for me, is it's a little slow for pure-text entry, and it's sometimes hard to read by own sloppy writing. But that's just user skill, not the fault of the technology.
And don't give me the 'language is evolving' line. This isn't about language evolving, it's about the users of the language devolving.
It's perfectly acceptable to say that it 'raises the question 'or 'asks the question' or 'slams its fists on the table demanding an answer to the question' but begging the question means to simply re-ask the question. You never want to beg the question. The question will tell you to go get a job, hippie.
---Nathaniel, shouldn't drink beer before posting.
Lessee.. google up 'binomial distribution' with n=16 and m=5 and...
Yup, if we take the null hypothesis that no one could tell the difference, there's a 6% chance of null hypothesis giving this result. This isn't a study, it's some gossip. No meaningful statement can be made, other than 'it's pretty clear that the lower bitrate isn't likely to be PREFERABLE' which is not much of a conclusion.
Marijuana decriminalization is not simply a "stoner" issue. It's actually a very important one.
The US has disproportionately crowded jails, filled disproportionately with African-Americans, and a very large fraction of which are there on drug charges. The US "War on Drugs" has led to many many convictions over marijuana and we are paying the social and monetary cost of imprisoning lots of people.
This is not a Cheech and Chong movie - these are people in jail for doing something that is widely regarded as harmless in of itself.
So, I don't think it's any surprise when you have a very vocal segment of the population calling for decriminalization... particularly in this forum! Establishment media and other outlets for vox populi are likely to steer away from this issue due to editorial concerns - no one wants to look "pro drugs", so the issue will be touched very carefully in a newspaper.
Do _I_ think it's the most important issue? No. But then my brother isn't in jail for dealing.
I've got a case like this: an Apple powerbook with a blown video chip. I can't afford to repair it, but it might be useful (as I can always boot it up with remote desktop software).
So: no hooking it to a TV or a monitor, unless you can do that through USB or firewire.
The tasering, that is. If your email had read "and then the police proceeded to beat him until he screamed" then it wouldn't have been as funny, would it?
Pain is pain, whether it leaves lasting damage or not.
There are two main types of software physicists have to deal with: hardware interface, and data analysis.
Hardware interface is often the the tougher one: slow controls, data aquistion, environmental monitoring - these all need to interface to hardware through various drivers. LabView is an obvious candidate for table-top experiments, since it is possible to set up working control and readout systems more or less out of the box. There is really no good open-source solution for this for the same reason that open-source drivers took a long time coming to Linux: the user base is just too small to write the code.
My own experience is that it's far better to write your own code, using whatever drivers you can scrounge - it's far more efficient at getting what YOU want done as quickly as possible once it's running. However, the time to write and debug this code is extensive. It's particularly bad since often students will write this code and then disappear, leaving you with badly-documented half-working code.
However, this is basically true of many LabView installations as well.
On the data analysis side, there are many good packages that serve as starting points. ROOT (http://root.cern.ch) is an excellent package for doing event-based data analysis in nuclear and high-energy physics, including efficient ntuple storage and histogramming. It's really a toolkit, not a program, so it allows you to do your own analysis by writing your own code.
I'm not familiar with other big packages, but I know that I frequently use raw C, C++, gnuplot, perl, and python to do little jobs.
There are other tasks as well. Blogging software can be good for logbooks. Wikis are good for in-house documentation.
It really depends on specifics. But basically it depends on where your project falls on the quick-and-dirty vs long-life vs high-performance judgements.
Moreover, said productivity is entirely unrewarded. Per-working productivity in the US has gone up dramatically in the last 10 years or so, but wages (in real dollars) have actually gone down.
In other words, we're working harder for less money. But we have to - we've given up unions.
Even granted the premise that a neutral net works better, this does not mean that ISPs will tend toward neutrality - people do NOT act rationally, which is one of the many problems with libertarianism.
Much more likely the owners of networks will feel that there is a profit to be made by throttling services and then charging.. even though everything works more poorly and even though they might even make less money in the long run. That's irrelevant: what business leaders, like anyone, act upon is their PERCEPTION of what makes money. Worse, people (read: ISPs) will try to stop other people (read: Google) from "taking advantage" of them, even when it doesn't hurt their business and in fact helps it.
Ditto the parent. When was the last time you got out pencil and paper to complete a game? Even something simple like solving a simple letter-substitution cipher (without the game assisting you or providing partial keys)?
I admit that my attention span for patiently playing and re-playing a game so that I can win it is diminished, but it's still there. And the sense of accomplishment is much greater.
Send your boss exactly one unsolicited, 'promotional' email for something you know he's interested in. Ask him the next day if he noticed it, or whether it pissed him off.
This could backfire, of course: he could be that one guy who likes his spam, in which case you should simply try to distract him my signing him up for as many viagra-related websites as possible.
This is the fundamental problem, NOT noise sources, as earlier posts suggest. Although the sun produces large numbers, they are all low energy, less than 10 MeV. Supernovae aren't much bigger. As you go up in energy, astrophysical neutrinos both become more rare and easier to detect.
But 'easier' doesn't mean 'easy'. Even at high energies, you can only detect one in 10^20 or 10^30 neutrinos, even with detectors of order 1 kiloton. Detectors of order 1 megaton are feasable by current technology, but getting into the 10-100 megaton range means that you have to start instrumenting huge volumes of heavy matter, like the Great Lakes.
If you imagine aliens attempting to communicate over galactic distances, with resources such that they can turn a small moon into a 3D array of particle detectors, well, then maybe. A good science fiction story. But don't expect IceCube to be listening to alien Viagra commertials any day soon.
Remember that she was not attempting to board a flight, and was only picking someone up at the airport.
She was "pretty stupid to try it"? Try what?
I'm not crazy; I accept that human expression and behaviour has to be limited for public safety. But I fail to understand what reasonable threat to public safety is assumed here. Simply being unusual is NOT sufficient ground for detainment - go down that path and we'll all have to wear identical orange jumpsuits to board the plane.
Basically, this is saying that that having something out that looks 'electric-y' is tantamount to terrorism. One can only assume that if the same shirt had the same breadboard but if it were wrapped in a matte plastic case, no such suspicion would have been brought. So, message to terrorists: don't put LEDs on your bombs, and don't show exposed wiring. Put it in a backpack, and you'll be fine.
I'm no medic, or medical technician, but I'm willing to bet that most EEG machines in the US were not purchased in the last five years, and at least a quarter of them are more than 10 years old.
Even assuming that the cell-phone-hardened variety were no more expensive than the more straightforward type, and assuming that the hardened variety had no drawbacks or problems, it would STILL be prohibitively expensive to replace all the existing machines with the hardened variety.
I'm sorry, but you're being unrealistic. Good engineering can give a solution to many problems, but not all.
Don't forget the cancer you're likely to get within 10 years due to not being shielded from cosmic rays. Unless you live deep underground all the time, which is just oodles of fun, I can tell you.
Vacuum is cheap on the moon, but not very good. There are a fair number of trace gasses and dust (when disturbed) which makes it not very clean. We can fairly easily get vacuum in the lab that beats low Earth orbit. Yes, it's expensive; it costs hundreds or thousands of dollars... about a millionth of a moon shot.
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The Supreme Court has held for a very long time now that the right to free speech means the right to anonymous speech, especially political speech.
Yes.. for people. But not necessarily for organizations.
Of course, making such a distinction will require reversing a very old (and recently reinforced) precedent in US law, where organizations have personhood. Probably requiring an amendment. So it won't happen.
Agg
Seriously? Keep your notes in a book or some other time-ordered form. Pretty fast to flip through, find things before and after the stuff in question. Basic indexing (putting a two-letter abbreviation at the top of each page by topic) makes it even easier.
The human eye is remarkably good at picking out visual subject material. If I've read a pure-text book, I can usually flip to a section I remember faster than using the index. Pure computer-based searches are useful mainly in contexts where you _haven't_ read the source material before, but that's not the application we're discussing here.
I'm sorry, but is the submitter fscking insane? I rely heavily on handwritten notes all the time. So does every college student and scientist that I know. Note that I'm talking about extremely tech-savvy people here, who often DO own an iPhone... but they are fundamentally useless for taking notes.
Taking notes, of course, is not the only writing one does, but it's a pretty important thing. Writing serves a a communication medium to others, but equally serves as expansion of short- and long-term memory for ourselves. I have yet to meet any GUI interface that has the flexibility of a pad of paper:
- Effortless data entry.
- Figures, mathematics or other non-ASCII input are faster than any other technique (and likely to remain so)
- No learning curve (for people past 6th grade)
- Bookmarking, fast page finding.
- No limit to page-space viewable at one time
-Needs no recharging, syncing
- Not a target for theft
- Light and comfortable in the hand
- Cheap, reliable components
- Easily backed up by photocopier or scanner
The only downside, for me, is it's a little slow for pure-text entry, and it's sometimes hard to read by own sloppy writing. But that's just user skill, not the fault of the technology.
This is my own personal pet peeve.
And don't give me the 'language is evolving' line. This isn't about language evolving, it's about the users of the language devolving.
It's perfectly acceptable to say that it 'raises the question 'or 'asks the question' or 'slams its fists on the table demanding an answer to the question' but begging the question means to simply re-ask the question. You never want to beg the question. The question will tell you to go get a job, hippie.
---Nathaniel, shouldn't drink beer before posting.
Always a classic screw-up.
Lessee.. google up 'binomial distribution' with n=16 and m=5 and...
Yup, if we take the null hypothesis that no one could tell the difference, there's a 6% chance of null hypothesis giving this result. This isn't a study, it's some gossip. No meaningful statement can be made, other than 'it's pretty clear that the lower bitrate isn't likely to be PREFERABLE' which is not much of a conclusion.
"Home version of the lottery!" Take a five dollar bill out of your pocket. Wad it up and throw it away. Ta-dah!
Marijuana decriminalization is not simply a "stoner" issue. It's actually a very important one.
The US has disproportionately crowded jails, filled disproportionately with African-Americans, and a very large fraction of which are there on drug charges. The US "War on Drugs" has led to many many convictions over marijuana and we are paying the social and monetary cost of imprisoning lots of people.
This is not a Cheech and Chong movie - these are people in jail for doing something that is widely regarded as harmless in of itself.
So, I don't think it's any surprise when you have a very vocal segment of the population calling for decriminalization... particularly in this forum! Establishment media and other outlets for vox populi are likely to steer away from this issue due to editorial concerns - no one wants to look "pro drugs", so the issue will be touched very carefully in a newspaper.
Do _I_ think it's the most important issue? No. But then my brother isn't in jail for dealing.
I've got a case like this: an Apple powerbook with a blown video chip. I can't afford to repair it, but it might be useful (as I can always boot it up with remote desktop software).
So: no hooking it to a TV or a monitor, unless you can do that through USB or firewire.
Suggestions?
The tasering, that is. If your email had read "and then the police proceeded to beat him until he screamed" then it wouldn't have been as funny, would it?
Pain is pain, whether it leaves lasting damage or not.
Professional experimental physicist here.
There are two main types of software physicists have to deal with: hardware interface, and data analysis.
Hardware interface is often the the tougher one: slow controls, data aquistion, environmental monitoring - these all need to interface to hardware through various drivers. LabView is an obvious candidate for table-top experiments, since it is possible to set up working control and readout systems more or less out of the box. There is really no good open-source solution for this for the same reason that open-source drivers took a long time coming to Linux: the user base is just too small to write the code.
My own experience is that it's far better to write your own code, using whatever drivers you can scrounge - it's far more efficient at getting what YOU want done as quickly as possible once it's running. However, the time to write and debug this code is extensive. It's particularly bad since often students will write this code and then disappear, leaving you with badly-documented half-working code.
However, this is basically true of many LabView installations as well.
On the data analysis side, there are many good packages that serve as starting points. ROOT (http://root.cern.ch) is an excellent package for doing event-based data analysis in nuclear and high-energy physics, including efficient ntuple storage and histogramming. It's really a toolkit, not a program, so it allows you to do your own analysis by writing your own code.
I'm not familiar with other big packages, but I know that I frequently use raw C, C++, gnuplot, perl, and python to do little jobs.
There are other tasks as well. Blogging software can be good for logbooks. Wikis are good for in-house documentation.
It really depends on specifics. But basically it depends on where your project falls on the quick-and-dirty vs long-life vs high-performance judgements.
Moreover, said productivity is entirely unrewarded. Per-working productivity in the US has gone up dramatically in the last 10 years or so, but wages (in real dollars) have actually gone down.
In other words, we're working harder for less money. But we have to - we've given up unions.
I know exactly what you mean.
By the way, send NuMI more protons!
Even granted the premise that a neutral net works better, this does not mean that ISPs will tend toward neutrality - people do NOT act rationally, which is one of the many problems with libertarianism.
Much more likely the owners of networks will feel that there is a profit to be made by throttling services and then charging.. even though everything works more poorly and even though they might even make less money in the long run. That's irrelevant: what business leaders, like anyone, act upon is their PERCEPTION of what makes money. Worse, people (read: ISPs) will try to stop other people (read: Google) from "taking advantage" of them, even when it doesn't hurt their business and in fact helps it.
Ditto the parent. When was the last time you got out pencil and paper to complete a game? Even something simple like solving a simple letter-substitution cipher (without the game assisting you or providing partial keys)?
I admit that my attention span for patiently playing and re-playing a game so that I can win it is diminished, but it's still there. And the sense of accomplishment is much greater.
---nathaniel
Name a single puzzle in BioShock. I mean, something you actually had to THINK about.
I didn't see that part of the game....
DARPA develops, amongst other things, weapons - lethal, nonlethal, economic, social, etc.
Einstein was a pacifist, more or less. He wound up deeply regretting his tangential involvement in the Manhattan project.
I work in nuclear physics and related fields, but I would never consider working to build weapons.
I would have written the program to send all the emails to the bosses.
Send your boss exactly one unsolicited, 'promotional' email for something you know he's interested in. Ask him the next day if he noticed it, or whether it pissed him off.
This could backfire, of course: he could be that one guy who likes his spam, in which case you should simply try to distract him my signing him up for as many viagra-related websites as possible.
This is the fundamental problem, NOT noise sources, as earlier posts suggest. Although the sun produces large numbers, they are all low energy, less than 10 MeV. Supernovae aren't much bigger. As you go up in energy, astrophysical neutrinos both become more rare and easier to detect.
But 'easier' doesn't mean 'easy'. Even at high energies, you can only detect one in 10^20 or 10^30 neutrinos, even with detectors of order 1 kiloton. Detectors of order 1 megaton are feasable by current technology, but getting into the 10-100 megaton range means that you have to start instrumenting huge volumes of heavy matter, like the Great Lakes.
If you imagine aliens attempting to communicate over galactic distances, with resources such that they can turn a small moon into a 3D array of particle detectors, well, then maybe. A good science fiction story. But don't expect IceCube to be listening to alien Viagra commertials any day soon.
--Nathaniel, Experimental Neutrino Physicist
Remember that she was not attempting to board a flight, and was only picking someone up at the airport.
She was "pretty stupid to try it"? Try what?
I'm not crazy; I accept that human expression and behaviour has to be limited for public safety. But I fail to understand what reasonable threat to public safety is assumed here. Simply being unusual is NOT sufficient ground for detainment - go down that path and we'll all have to wear identical orange jumpsuits to board the plane.
Basically, this is saying that that having something out that looks 'electric-y' is tantamount to terrorism. One can only assume that if the same shirt had the same breadboard but if it were wrapped in a matte plastic case, no such suspicion would have been brought. So, message to terrorists: don't put LEDs on your bombs, and don't show exposed wiring. Put it in a backpack, and you'll be fine.
Boy, I feel so much safer.
I'm no medic, or medical technician, but I'm willing to bet that most EEG machines in the US were not purchased in the last five years, and at least a quarter of them are more than 10 years old.
Even assuming that the cell-phone-hardened variety were no more expensive than the more straightforward type, and assuming that the hardened variety had no drawbacks or problems, it would STILL be prohibitively expensive to replace all the existing machines with the hardened variety.
I'm sorry, but you're being unrealistic. Good engineering can give a solution to many problems, but not all.
Ditto that. Misuse of "Beg the question" is one of my pet peeves.
Short version: if you are "begging the question," you are simply restating the question in a new form - giving a non-answer.
Example:
Q: "What are lightbulbs for?"
A: "They are for putting in lightbulb sockets."
Q: "But that just begs the question: what are the sockets for?"
Don't forget the cancer you're likely to get within 10 years due to not being shielded from cosmic rays. Unless you live deep underground all the time, which is just oodles of fun, I can tell you.
--Nathaniel (neutrino physicist in a mine shaft)
Vacuum is cheap on the moon, but not very good. There are a fair number of trace gasses and dust (when disturbed) which makes it not very clean. We can fairly easily get vacuum in the lab that beats low Earth orbit. Yes, it's expensive; it costs hundreds or thousands of dollars... about a millionth of a moon shot.
---Nathaniel