Actually, yes. I remember distinctly watching a loop of the Tacoma Narrows bridge collapse. All the rest just blend into a continuum of the Discovery Channel and PBS background.
Then again, as the kind of person who decides to watch physics demos on the Discovery Channel and PBS, I may not be the best qualified to comment on the experience of teaching "casual" students of physics.:-)
So how does that make the pre-release "Longhorn" version any different from, say, Windows XP?
I generally hate to jump to Microsoft's defense, but have you actually used Windows XP? Just curious. I run XP Pro with a major mismash of hardware and have crashed it maybe twice in the two years since it shipped, fewer than the number of times I've crashed X on the RedHat 9 partition on the same machine. Admittedly, crashing the UI system shouldn't nuke the OS, which is what usually happens w/ Windows, but IMHO XP was an incredible improvement in stability over Windows 98 SE, which crashed a couple times a week and would never even shut down properly...
My concern is that basic science that is within reach and that can be demonstrated concretely with practical experimental evidence might be sacrificed for the razzle dazzle of big science demos. For example, I'm not so sure that watching an hours worth of videos of advanced experiments is a valuable exchange for simple inclined plane experiments that the students can touch and see for themselves.
I just keep thinking of the old quote "I Hear and I forget, I see and I remember, I do and I understand". I know that I saw videos in physics classes, but I couldn't tell you the subject of any of them. I can describe vividly my experience with the model piledrivers, prisms, and lasers though.
For me it was a few years back, but we also had rooms full of lab gear of which we made extensive use, so my views may be just a little elitist.
You seem to have misinterpreted the intent of my post, or else you use a strange tone for someone who's agreeing with its basic premise. I never claimed that demos weren't valid when they were the only option, as they are in most of the cases you enumerate. In fact, I tried to make that explicit. I merely meant to point out that video demos were no substitute for in person experience of scientific principles when it was available, and that I'd think long and hard about the relative merits of videos of inpractical experiments and hands-on equipment for conducting simple ones.
In my physics class last year we would use Laser Disc demo's for demonstrations that would require intensive amount of time, space, or equipment to recreate. This allowed us to see many different demonstrations in one day instead of having to set them up.
And now physics is indistinguishable from a Hollywood special effects extravaganza, and carries about as much reality to the student. Hate to be a luddite, but there's no substitute for running your own experiments and demos in situ. Obviously some are going to be out of reach, but multimedia is no subst for the real thing when it's at all possible.
That's Tin Foil you fool! Aluminium won't do any good against Alien Mind Control rays,
Hmmm. You know, I never thought of it before, but as tin foil has been replaced in the market by aluminum foil, there does seem to be a lot more people wandering around under the influence of Alien Mind Control rays.
Senators are part of congress, right? So he's a congressional representative. Instead of representing to the house of representatives he represents to the senate.
Yes, the Congress is composed of a Senate and a House, so that is technically correct. I think you may be stretching it a bit in context of conventional usage, though. Congressional Representative is generally understood to mean member of the House of Representatives and Senator member of the Senate. "Member of Congress" is ambiguous and rightfully describes the membership of both houses, but in every usage I've encountered, Congressional Representative has a clearly established meaning that does not include Senators.
Of course, both our Senators and Representatives have probably managed to pass some other kind of jerk-around law to sign away more of our rights while we've been debating this.:-)
For all we know he did, and it was expunged by his editors in order to wield political influence.:-)
My suspicion has always been that his warning was about things to come in the relatively near (from his perspective) future, and when you consider the way Christians were treated in reigns like Caligula's, that's not hard to believe.
Treating those prophecies as applying to potential future events from our perspective is informative in the same way as books like 1984, in the sense that they provide warnings about unchecked authoritarian governments. That message is, sadly, apparently timeless.
I agree with them on this one, not because it's the mark of the beast, but because I don't like the idea of something in my body being money.
Don't be so sure your motivations and theirs are all that different. Has it ever occured to you that the warnings of the MOTB might be rooted in the same concerns that you have? In other words, maybe St John the Divine was a prototype civil libertarian concerned about loss of privacy. For lack of better terms, a first century CE mystic described a vision of biometrics and implantation as a "mark of the beast". How else would he desribe it? Even if he had the full story, I can't imagine "RFID tags" would have been a particularly useful description to his audience at the time.
Try again. "Primary" and "secondary" do not mean the same thing as "master" and "slave". A scan of the dictionary (or the ATA bus specifications) should be sufficient proof.
Poor substitutions that decrease the clarity of our communications are not the solution, and are the thing that concerns me most about this campaign against language.
its going to be tough with all the world wide spam.
Not a problem. Mail server operators simply block the network ranges of countries that refuse to enact similar policies and if they want to have traffic with the US they will comply.
I already block.ru,.hk,.ch, and.tw, and others because a large fraction of my spam came from there and I received essentially 0 legitimate mail from those blocks. My rejection notice includes a link to a Web form that will allow innocents to bypass the filters.
You are suggesting that gestures are somehow confined to only replacing history navigation functions. That is patently untrue, as you well know. Why do you ask if you already answered it?
And why do you insist on condescending instead of answering the question?
Here are the gestures supported by the library provided with the original article.
# left : Go Back (last page in history) # right : forward (next page in history) # up : Page Up (scroll Window down) # down : Page Down (scroll Window down) # left->up : Go to homepage # up->down : Reload current page # up->right : Next Window # up->left : Previous Window # down->up : Maximize Window # down->right : Close Window # down->left : Close Other Window
Please point out how adding any of these inhibits accessability.
I have readily admitted that JavaScript can and is used in ways that thwart good usability (frequently ruining my browsing and I can see fine) and I wouldn't have gotten involved in this debate if I had realized it was just another "JAVASCRIPT BAD!!!" Luddite diatribe.
I did not read the source code of the gesture library, but because of what it does (forward, back, reload, etc) I assume it has to be built on the navigator history objects. Ergo, it will not function without the internal A HREF plumbing which you seem to be assuming it would replace. I can still use the back button (or my preferred ctrl-left arrow) to back up one page, but I can also use a gesture. Again I ask: how does adding an alternative inhibit functionality that is already there?
I suppose it would be possible (I certainly don't mean to underestimate the poor design tendencies of many Web jockeys) to add a bunch of nav crufties where gestures invoke specific actions, but the cited page just shows use of gestures to handle navigation that is already defined by conventional document hyperlinking. In other words, it just adds a technique that could be built into the browser but isn't always.
While I understand that scripts create accessability problems when they hide content in pop-ups, write statements, and the like, I'm still confused as to what your complaint is in this specific instance. Mouse guestures just add another technique of navigation that is still bound internally to the same page-hyperlink model of HTML. i.e. they just provide an alternative to the navigator buttons and scroll bars.
My initial question stands: how are mouse guestures any less accessable than other browser features that require you to locate and click a button or click and drag on a scrollbar? If anything, I would think they improve accessability because they don't require you to visually locate specific objects on the screen, just to click and "draw" within the window.
Not sure why I'm responding to this troll, but citing it as a billionth of a metre is appropriate since the metre, not the millimetre, is the accepted standard in physics. Hint: it doesn't have a prefix...
I assume that would be massive projects like Dysan spheres? I can't imagine that anything of a smaller scale would be detectable with a Hubble-sized scope.
The again, having already admitted ignorance of the theory behind the project...
Is it possible to plagiarise anonymously? Isn't there an element of appropriation that is missing, or does lack of attribution alone indicate plagiarism?
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, yes. I remember distinctly watching a loop of the Tacoma Narrows bridge collapse. All the rest just blend into a continuum of the Discovery Channel and PBS background.
:-)
Then again, as the kind of person who decides to watch physics demos on the Discovery Channel and PBS, I may not be the best qualified to comment on the experience of teaching "casual" students of physics.
I generally hate to jump to Microsoft's defense, but have you actually used Windows XP? Just curious. I run XP Pro with a major mismash of hardware and have crashed it maybe twice in the two years since it shipped, fewer than the number of times I've crashed X on the RedHat 9 partition on the same machine. Admittedly, crashing the UI system shouldn't nuke the OS, which is what usually happens w/ Windows, but IMHO XP was an incredible improvement in stability over Windows 98 SE, which crashed a couple times a week and would never even shut down properly...
My concern is that basic science that is within reach and that can be demonstrated concretely with practical experimental evidence might be sacrificed for the razzle dazzle of big science demos. For example, I'm not so sure that watching an hours worth of videos of advanced experiments is a valuable exchange for simple inclined plane experiments that the students can touch and see for themselves.
I just keep thinking of the old quote "I Hear and I forget, I see and I remember, I do and I understand". I know that I saw videos in physics classes, but I couldn't tell you the subject of any of them. I can describe vividly my experience with the model piledrivers, prisms, and lasers though.
For me it was a few years back, but we also had rooms full of lab gear of which we made extensive use, so my views may be just a little elitist.
You seem to have misinterpreted the intent of my post, or else you use a strange tone for someone who's agreeing with its basic premise. I never claimed that demos weren't valid when they were the only option, as they are in most of the cases you enumerate. In fact, I tried to make that explicit. I merely meant to point out that video demos were no substitute for in person experience of scientific principles when it was available, and that I'd think long and hard about the relative merits of videos of inpractical experiments and hands-on equipment for conducting simple ones.
And now physics is indistinguishable from a Hollywood special effects extravaganza, and carries about as much reality to the student. Hate to be a luddite, but there's no substitute for running your own experiments and demos in situ. Obviously some are going to be out of reach, but multimedia is no subst for the real thing when it's at all possible.
Yep. An alloy of tin + lead has been used:
o il
http://www.hyperdictionary.com/dictionary/tin+f
I once bought a bumper sticker that said "Question Reality". I haven't seen it since...
Hmmm. You know, I never thought of it before, but as tin foil has been replaced in the market by aluminum foil, there does seem to be a lot more people wandering around under the influence of Alien Mind Control rays.
Yes, the Congress is composed of a Senate and a House, so that is technically correct. I think you may be stretching it a bit in context of conventional usage, though. Congressional Representative is generally understood to mean member of the House of Representatives and Senator member of the Senate. "Member of Congress" is ambiguous and rightfully describes the membership of both houses, but in every usage I've encountered, Congressional Representative has a clearly established meaning that does not include Senators.
Of course, both our Senators and Representatives have probably managed to pass some other kind of jerk-around law to sign away more of our rights while we've been debating this.
Er... Isn't he a senator?
For all we know he did, and it was expunged by his editors in order to wield political influence. :-)
My suspicion has always been that his warning was about things to come in the relatively near (from his perspective) future, and when you consider the way Christians were treated in reigns like Caligula's, that's not hard to believe.
Treating those prophecies as applying to potential future events from our perspective is informative in the same way as books like 1984, in the sense that they provide warnings about unchecked authoritarian governments. That message is, sadly, apparently timeless.
Why is it that slashdot really brings out the flamebait?
Don't be so sure your motivations and theirs are all that different. Has it ever occured to you that the warnings of the MOTB might be rooted in the same concerns that you have? In other words, maybe St John the Divine was a prototype civil libertarian concerned about loss of privacy. For lack of better terms, a first century CE mystic described a vision of biometrics and implantation as a "mark of the beast". How else would he desribe it? Even if he had the full story, I can't imagine "RFID tags" would have been a particularly useful description to his audience at the time.
Just a thought...
Try again. "Primary" and "secondary" do not mean the same thing as "master" and "slave". A scan of the dictionary (or the ATA bus specifications) should be sufficient proof.
Poor substitutions that decrease the clarity of our communications are not the solution, and are the thing that concerns me most about this campaign against language.
Not a problem. Mail server operators simply block the network ranges of countries that refuse to enact similar policies and if they want to have traffic with the US they will comply.
I already block
And why do you insist on condescending instead of answering the question?
Here are the gestures supported by the library provided with the original article.
# left : Go Back (last page in history)
# right : forward (next page in history)
# up : Page Up (scroll Window down)
# down : Page Down (scroll Window down)
# left->up : Go to homepage
# up->down : Reload current page
# up->right : Next Window
# up->left : Previous Window
# down->up : Maximize Window
# down->right : Close Window
# down->left : Close Other Window
Please point out how adding any of these inhibits accessability.
I have readily admitted that JavaScript can and is used in ways that thwart good usability (frequently ruining my browsing and I can see fine) and I wouldn't have gotten involved in this debate if I had realized it was just another "JAVASCRIPT BAD!!!" Luddite diatribe.
I did not read the source code of the gesture library, but because of what it does (forward, back, reload, etc) I assume it has to be built on the navigator history objects. Ergo, it will not function without the internal A HREF plumbing which you seem to be assuming it would replace. I can still use the back button (or my preferred ctrl-left arrow) to back up one page, but I can also use a gesture. Again I ask: how does adding an alternative inhibit functionality that is already there?
I suppose it would be possible (I certainly don't mean to underestimate the poor design tendencies of many Web jockeys) to add a bunch of nav crufties where gestures invoke specific actions, but the cited page just shows use of gestures to handle navigation that is already defined by conventional document hyperlinking. In other words, it just adds a technique that could be built into the browser but isn't always.
Good point, and not a bit more nitpicky than mine. I was also thinking that they frequently use cm/g/s in chemistry.
While I understand that scripts create accessability problems when they hide content in pop-ups, write statements, and the like, I'm still confused as to what your complaint is in this specific instance. Mouse guestures just add another technique of navigation that is still bound internally to the same page-hyperlink model of HTML. i.e. they just provide an alternative to the navigator buttons and scroll bars.
My initial question stands: how are mouse guestures any less accessable than other browser features that require you to locate and click a button or click and drag on a scrollbar? If anything, I would think they improve accessability because they don't require you to visually locate specific objects on the screen, just to click and "draw" within the window.
How do people using screen readers navigate with the mouse anyway? Aren't "features" like back buttons and scroll bars similarly inaccessible?
Not sure why I'm responding to this troll, but citing it as a billionth of a metre is appropriate since the metre, not the millimetre, is the accepted standard in physics. Hint: it doesn't have a prefix...
Nope. I hadn't.
I assume that would be massive projects like Dysan spheres? I can't imagine that anything of a smaller scale would be detectable with a Hubble-sized scope.
The again, having already admitted ignorance of the theory behind the project...
Can you explain the opics behind that concept to me? Do you know something I don't, or are you just recasting the troll?
Kenny Blankenship? That was freakin' brilliant!
How is it you plan to use an optical range instrument for SETI work?
Is it possible to plagiarise anonymously? Isn't there an element of appropriation that is missing, or does lack of attribution alone indicate plagiarism?