The sharp price curve on cell data holds me back. AFAIK, there are two unlimited cell data services for less than $50/month.
One is Sprint. Although Sprint usually looks the other way, their user policy prohibits use with computers and PDAs. Phone connectivity to computers and PDAs is terrible with Sprint anyway. Everything requires a special expensive cable. Their phones tend to be primitive compared to GSM. Bluetooth is supposed to appear from Sony-Ericsson, but it has not yet. Sony-Ericsson announced their abandonment of North American CDMA development yesterday.
T-Mobile is the other. Their new unlimited plan is appealing. With a Nokia 3650, the customer has a powerful device in itself and the potential to connect more through Bluetooth. AFAIK, the do not prohibit using their phones as gateways for PDAs and computers. The downside is T-Mobile coverage. IMO, they have always been a small-time, sorry coverage cell provider offering big deals in attempt to compensate. If you live and travel solely in their coverage areas, it could be a great deal. I don't.
Data plans with AT&T, Cingular and Verizon are expensive for significant monthly usage. I have had my fingers crossed for a year or two that one of them would crack. I think my fingers are stuck now.
A striking aspect of this analogy is how poorly functional units are separated from one another in organisms. The largely distinct functions of storage and computation appear to overlap at molecular and cellular levels. I feel that a coming big revolution in computers is a blurring of these distinctions, but that idea is vague futurism by me.
Stuff I wish I had read & some I have
on
A Good Summer Read?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I find my ignorance slapping me around too often. I wish I had a better background in literature so I could understand Western culture, the one I live in. More accurately, I'd just like to catch the gist; I know the culture is beyond anyone. I'd like to know more about the rest of the world's cultures, too.
Don Quixote by Cervantes The Divine Comedy by Dante Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky War and Peace by Tolstoy Various Mark Twain works The Bible so much more. Curse me for my laziness.
Stuff I have read and recommend highly...
Kurt Vonnegut books, particulary Slaughterhouse Five It is hilarious. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller It, too, is hilarious and biting. J. D. Sallinger books and stories Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
During Galileo's day, longitude was hard to determine. Ships at sea had no sufficiently good clocks to determine position. Galileo proposed a system using the moons of Jupiter, but it never worked well enough. John Harrison ultimately solved the problem, but I guess "Harrison" does not sound as good as "Galileo." Nova had a good program on the longitude problem. There was also a bestselling book about Harrison and his feat, but I have not read it.
A receiver compatible with both systems could provide increased accuracy over either alone. Even though current GPS is accurate enough for my practical demands, I want more for nerd reasons. I remember speculation on using both GLONASS and GPS signals several years ago with the idea of improving both reliability and accuracy.
More leads would make this project more useful. Besides rate and rhythm, a real ECG machine is used to measure axis. Axis refers to the direction in which the heart depolarizes and repolarizes. Current ECG machines do rate, rhythm and axis computations automatically, but doctors are often suspicious of their findings. I think there is significant work left to make a more accurate and intelligent ECG.
I cannot remember the specific school, but there are accounts of the Buddha Siddhartha Gautama appearing in multiple places at the same time. To me, that's magic. Tantra, in line with your statements about the Tibetans, is all about magic.
To make a point rather than rambling more, Buddhism is a particularly diverse system without an enduring central authority to judge heresy. Instead, it adopted elements of the culture everywhere it spread. Generalities are hard to handle, Buddhist generalities especially so.
As I recall from a college course several years ago, the attitudes toward the Buddha are very different between the broad, general schools of Theravada Buddhism and Mahayana Buddhism. Theravada Buddhists believe as you describe. Siddharta Gautama, the first Buddha, was a man who had a great insight into living. Mahayana Buddhism, in contrast, contains a diversity of mystical, magical beliefs that vary across its many divisions including ones that Siddhartha lived as a demonstration or revelation of what he knew before his human birth rather than as a regular human life that included a great insight. Pure Land Buddhism, in my understanding, does involve worship.
These generalizations are general, vague and not true for every Buddhist, but the original post, to me, glossed over the diversity of beliefs regarding the Buddha and the mystical nature, including worship, contained in many of them.
When are the Sony-Ericsson phones arriving? I read Q2 not too long ago, but never exactly when. The T608 might lead me to switch if it delivers. A 3/2.5G phone that can also serve as a gateway for a laptop or PDA via Bluetooth has great promise.
Have you looked at the T-Mobile coverage map? It is pitiful. Away from major highways and cities, coverage is absent. TDMA and CDMA coverage is much better. Some of the TDMA providers, Cingular and AT&T, gradually are rolling out GSM/GPRS, but their old networks are several times bigger and will be for years to come. T-Mobile provides cheap voice service to make up for their small network, but they still have expensive data plans except when pushing the Hiptop. Can a normal person afford GPRS, even if lucky enough to live in an area served by it?
How much sooner than the United States will Iraq get a GSM/GPRS network? AT&T, T-Mobile and Cingular are taking their time. Maybe the Iraqi people will get affordable data plans, too.
He has a page at UCSD. He has managed to synthesize other important biological bricks such as purines, pyrimidines and sugars. He parlayed his initial success into a career of exploring mechanisms for life origins.
As others have mentioned, there is a use for this product for talk and feature programs. I enjoy Car Talk and This American Life, among others, but their timing does not fit my schedule. I would get the device, but only if it were very cheap and easy.
The problem appears to be the lack of radio program guides. Judging from the article, these devices are more akin to an old VCR than to TiVo. TiVo's scheduling service provides one of its draws. I can search for episodes of the Simpsons without knowing ahead of time the channel and time. Radio schedules are not so widely published, however. There is no Radio Guide counterpart to TV Guide, nor do these products appear to have guides similar to TiVo's. Unless/until they add powerful scheduling features, I predict that their niche will remain quite small.
Considering the money the shuttle has brought to Texas, I am surprised that one of their representatives made those statements. He must be far from the Houston area, but the lack of solidarity is remarkable.
We can hope that neuroethics is as successful as medical ethics and bioethics. More people can get jobs for having opinions in exchange for elucidation of emerging quandries ande guidance for the future. Just look at the triumphs. For instance, er... uh... More people have jobs for having opinions.
In primary motor cortex, the hand area is located next to the face area. They are not right next to each other, however. Areas for the other parts of the face lie between. Do their faces move, too? See this picture of the motor homunculus for fun.
The cortical areas for the different senses are significantly further apart. Vision is in the back. Touch runs coronally in the middle. Audition is on the sides. At least, the simplified primary processing follows these patterns.
"Viruses" is the plural of "virus." "Virii" is a h4x0r term that does not follow any English or Latin declension.
As for evolutionary advantage, there must be some since this virus exists, but there are also tiny viruses. I think it's better to consider ecological niches. More DNA allows for more functions, but it is also burdensome. It takes more energy to reproduce that DNA, and there are more chances that for maladaptive mistakes. Different organisms end up with different adaptations, including genome size.
I'd like to expand on your comment. You're right on for some viruses, but there are others that work differently.
Some viruses are lytic; others not. It is possible for an infected cell to become virus factory that continues to live. There are some viruses that become latent. They infect a cell and become dormant, sometimes even for years. Shingles is a localized outbreak of latent chickenpox that can occur in old age.
Some viruses have RNA in them instead of DNA. West Nile, HIV and influenza are examples.
Human Nature is a hilarious Charlie Kaufman movie that fell short of Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, but it is good in its own right. Beware that many people don't care for it. Some of them might try to take it too seriously and miss all the fun. Rather than seeing it as a movie that falls short of its philosophical pretenses, I saw as a satire of philosophy and anthropology. Kaufman rubs people the wrong way because too many elements of his movies seem designed to look too clever. Imo, it's more goofiness that really does manage to be shrewd than empty intellectual pretentiousness, but I can see why others disagree. I did not laugh harder at a movie until I saw Adaptation. Others, however, might get it and simply not care for it. Ymmv.
It came before any other post on the same subject. It was brief. It included a reference. Considering the other post on the subject, I am surprised that mine caught such a reaction for redundancy and condescension, not that it really matters.
I've been waiting on the T608, too. It looks like a great phone. How much will they cost? Is Sprint keeping the current rate plans for them? A Bluetooth, unmetered connection would be a jump forward.
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The sharp price curve on cell data holds me back. AFAIK, there are two unlimited cell data services for less than $50/month.
One is Sprint. Although Sprint usually looks the other way, their user policy prohibits use with computers and PDAs. Phone connectivity to computers and PDAs is terrible with Sprint anyway. Everything requires a special expensive cable. Their phones tend to be primitive compared to GSM. Bluetooth is supposed to appear from Sony-Ericsson, but it has not yet. Sony-Ericsson announced their abandonment of North American CDMA development yesterday.
T-Mobile is the other. Their new unlimited plan is appealing. With a Nokia 3650, the customer has a powerful device in itself and the potential to connect more through Bluetooth. AFAIK, the do not prohibit using their phones as gateways for PDAs and computers. The downside is T-Mobile coverage. IMO, they have always been a small-time, sorry coverage cell provider offering big deals in attempt to compensate. If you live and travel solely in their coverage areas, it could be a great deal. I don't.
Data plans with AT&T, Cingular and Verizon are expensive for significant monthly usage. I have had my fingers crossed for a year or two that one of them would crack. I think my fingers are stuck now.
A striking aspect of this analogy is how poorly functional units are separated from one another in organisms. The largely distinct functions of storage and computation appear to overlap at molecular and cellular levels. I feel that a coming big revolution in computers is a blurring of these distinctions, but that idea is vague futurism by me.
I find my ignorance slapping me around too often. I wish I had a better background in literature so I could understand Western culture, the one I live in. More accurately, I'd just like to catch the gist; I know the culture is beyond anyone. I'd like to know more about the rest of the world's cultures, too.
Don Quixote by Cervantes
The Divine Comedy by Dante
Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky
War and Peace by Tolstoy
Various Mark Twain works
The Bible
so much more. Curse me for my laziness.
Stuff I have read and recommend highly...
Kurt Vonnegut books, particulary Slaughterhouse Five It is hilarious.
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller It, too, is hilarious and biting.
J. D. Sallinger books and stories
Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
During Galileo's day, longitude was hard to determine. Ships at sea had no sufficiently good clocks to determine position. Galileo proposed a system using the moons of Jupiter, but it never worked well enough. John Harrison ultimately solved the problem, but I guess "Harrison" does not sound as good as "Galileo." Nova had a good program on the longitude problem. There was also a bestselling book about Harrison and his feat, but I have not read it.
A receiver compatible with both systems could provide increased accuracy over either alone. Even though current GPS is accurate enough for my practical demands, I want more for nerd reasons. I remember speculation on using both GLONASS and GPS signals several years ago with the idea of improving both reliability and accuracy.
More leads would make this project more useful. Besides rate and rhythm, a real ECG machine is used to measure axis. Axis refers to the direction in which the heart depolarizes and repolarizes. Current ECG machines do rate, rhythm and axis computations automatically, but doctors are often suspicious of their findings. I think there is significant work left to make a more accurate and intelligent ECG.
Hysteria would be a bad side effect of this device. Most women will not be willing to use this device for safety if it makes their uteri wander away.
I cannot remember the specific school, but there are accounts of the Buddha Siddhartha Gautama appearing in multiple places at the same time. To me, that's magic. Tantra, in line with your statements about the Tibetans, is all about magic.
To make a point rather than rambling more, Buddhism is a particularly diverse system without an enduring central authority to judge heresy. Instead, it adopted elements of the culture everywhere it spread. Generalities are hard to handle, Buddhist generalities especially so.
As I recall from a college course several years ago, the attitudes toward the Buddha are very different between the broad, general schools of Theravada Buddhism and Mahayana Buddhism. Theravada Buddhists believe as you describe. Siddharta Gautama, the first Buddha, was a man who had a great insight into living. Mahayana Buddhism, in contrast, contains a diversity of mystical, magical beliefs that vary across its many divisions including ones that Siddhartha lived as a demonstration or revelation of what he knew before his human birth rather than as a regular human life that included a great insight. Pure Land Buddhism, in my understanding, does involve worship.
These generalizations are general, vague and not true for every Buddhist, but the original post, to me, glossed over the diversity of beliefs regarding the Buddha and the mystical nature, including worship, contained in many of them.
I'm glad you brought up Sprint.
When are the Sony-Ericsson phones arriving? I read Q2 not too long ago, but never exactly when. The T608 might lead me to switch if it delivers. A 3/2.5G phone that can also serve as a gateway for a laptop or PDA via Bluetooth has great promise.
Have you looked at the T-Mobile coverage map? It is pitiful. Away from major highways and cities, coverage is absent. TDMA and CDMA coverage is much better. Some of the TDMA providers, Cingular and AT&T, gradually are rolling out GSM/GPRS, but their old networks are several times bigger and will be for years to come. T-Mobile provides cheap voice service to make up for their small network, but they still have expensive data plans except when pushing the Hiptop. Can a normal person afford GPRS, even if lucky enough to live in an area served by it?
How much sooner than the United States will Iraq get a GSM/GPRS network? AT&T, T-Mobile and Cingular are taking their time. Maybe the Iraqi people will get affordable data plans, too.
He has a page at UCSD. He has managed to synthesize other important biological bricks such as purines, pyrimidines and sugars. He parlayed his initial success into a career of exploring mechanisms for life origins.
As others have mentioned, there is a use for this product for talk and feature programs. I enjoy Car Talk and This American Life, among others, but their timing does not fit my schedule. I would get the device, but only if it were very cheap and easy.
The problem appears to be the lack of radio program guides. Judging from the article, these devices are more akin to an old VCR than to TiVo. TiVo's scheduling service provides one of its draws. I can search for episodes of the Simpsons without knowing ahead of time the channel and time. Radio schedules are not so widely published, however. There is no Radio Guide counterpart to TV Guide, nor do these products appear to have guides similar to TiVo's. Unless/until they add powerful scheduling features, I predict that their niche will remain quite small.
Considering the money the shuttle has brought to Texas, I am surprised that one of their representatives made those statements. He must be far from the Houston area, but the lack of solidarity is remarkable.
We can hope that neuroethics is as successful as medical ethics and bioethics. More people can get jobs for having opinions in exchange for elucidation of emerging quandries ande guidance for the future. Just look at the triumphs. For instance, er... uh... More people have jobs for having opinions.
In primary motor cortex, the hand area is located next to the face area. They are not right next to each other, however. Areas for the other parts of the face lie between. Do their faces move, too? See this picture of the motor homunculus for fun.
The cortical areas for the different senses are significantly further apart. Vision is in the back. Touch runs coronally in the middle. Audition is on the sides. At least, the simplified primary processing follows these patterns.
I'm not half the man I used to be.
Maybe you were not quoting Paul, though.
There's a fungus among us, and it's humungous.
"Viruses" is the plural of "virus." "Virii" is a h4x0r term that does not follow any English or Latin declension.
As for evolutionary advantage, there must be some since this virus exists, but there are also tiny viruses. I think it's better to consider ecological niches. More DNA allows for more functions, but it is also burdensome. It takes more energy to reproduce that DNA, and there are more chances that for maladaptive mistakes. Different organisms end up with different adaptations, including genome size.
I'd like to expand on your comment. You're right on for some viruses, but there are others that work differently.
Some viruses are lytic; others not. It is possible for an infected cell to become virus factory that continues to live. There are some viruses that become latent. They infect a cell and become dormant, sometimes even for years. Shingles is a localized outbreak of latent chickenpox that can occur in old age.
Some viruses have RNA in them instead of DNA. West Nile, HIV and influenza are examples.
Human Nature is a hilarious Charlie Kaufman movie that fell short of Being John Malkovich and Adaptation , but it is good in its own right. Beware that many people don't care for it. Some of them might try to take it too seriously and miss all the fun. Rather than seeing it as a movie that falls short of its philosophical pretenses, I saw as a satire of philosophy and anthropology. Kaufman rubs people the wrong way because too many elements of his movies seem designed to look too clever. Imo, it's more goofiness that really does manage to be shrewd than empty intellectual pretentiousness, but I can see why others disagree. I did not laugh harder at a movie until I saw Adaptation . Others, however, might get it and simply not care for it. Ymmv.
It came before any other post on the same subject. It was brief. It included a reference. Considering the other post on the subject, I am surprised that mine caught such a reaction for redundancy and condescension, not that it really matters.
Did something bad happen? Did I earn something? Are you serious?
I've been waiting on the T608, too. It looks like a great phone. How much will they cost? Is Sprint keeping the current rate plans for them? A Bluetooth, unmetered connection would be a jump forward.