that's why I suggested they upgrade the engine. Rather than build an incompatible engine from scratch, which costs more, then charge an amount affordable only to a tiny percentage of interested parties.
Upgrading the engine is not easy. If it's not designed with this kind of thing in mind, it's more trouble than it's worth.
I was thinking about how to create a message that would survive until the end of the Earth. I decided on a thick steel plate with symbols of a different metal embedded in the plate, going through to the other side and then flanged so they can't fall out. Low data density, but short of subduction I dno't see it being destroyed any time soon.
Independence Day and Jurassic Park were over a decade ago. Teenagers don't remember the eightes. Kids born during Desert Storm are in high school now. Remember the Ninja Turtles? Well, you're part of a group that's beginning to shrink. And Molly Ringwald is closing on 40.
A use for hacking disposable cameras: They're disposable. That is, they're cheap enough that if you break them, you haven't lost much. That's useful for this kind of thing:
I was so confident of my engineering skill and my insistence on multiple safety measures that I sent my nice, $150 digital camera up the kite line. It worked for a few hours after the 70-foot fall, but hasn't since.
I was so confused, when the Firefly/Serenity stories started showing up on/., because the overwhelming response was along the lines of: "Oh, wow, they're finally listening to the will of the world and making this wonderful, wonderful show into a wonderful, wonderful movie. Oh my God. We all need to decide how to get together and celebrate. And of course it goes without saying that it will be a great movie." And then there would be twenty comments ALL vigorously agreeing.
And I've been a bit confused, because until the slashdot comments, I had never heard of Firefly. I'm still awful lost, but everyone seems to take it for granted, as if it were Star Trek or something. Did I miss something huge? Am I the only one who didn't know about this movie?
And most importantly, why is it so good? All I've been able to tell is that it's (a) a good story, and (b) set in space. I know I need to read plot summaries and all, but can anyone fill me in on why they like this show?
A lot of things change when you turn them upside down; I don't think it tells you much about the mechanism of the illusion; it's a wide-ranging and general visual processing hack.
For example, frightening movies totally lose their atmosphere if you tilt your head 90 degrees so the TV is sideways. You can see everything going on, but the images aren't alarming. At least, that's what I've found.
Read Mind Hacks for some interesting stuff on visual processing. The rotating-during-scary-movie thing I first noticed as a little kid watching Jurassic Park, but in Mind Hacks I learned things about how we recognize rotated shapes -- we have to do a lot of processing to flip them over, and the time this takes is proportional to the angle. So I think we get the images with too much lag for the brain to do a lot of the post-post processing it usually does -- i.e. being frightened, comparing sizes properly, etc.
The visual parts of the brain are surprisingly dependent on orientation.
The hell, it will be bigger? I predict you are wrong, but will try it out. Though I'll just measure the angle it makes in the sky using my arm and some object (a penny, my thumbnail) for reference.
Speaking of thumbnails, a really good trick for estimating distances if you can estimate object size:
Measure the width of your thumbnail. Measure the distance between your thumb and your eye (arm extended, hitchhiker). Divide the thumb-eye distance by the thumbnail width. You'll get a number around 30.
To estimate distances, stretch out your arm and estimate the height of your thumbnail against an object at that distance. If there's a person standing on a boat, and my thumb is slightly wider larger than their height, my thumb is about 2 meters high. Times 30 puts them at 60 meters away. Best distance estimation trick I know, and great for the compulsive quantiphiles among us.
Yeah; I've never used any of the BSDs other than occasional sitting-at-a-mac-console, but Solaris is what's running on the school machines I program on. But really, other than the desktop environment, it doesn't feel different from Linux. Of course, that's from the perspective of a dude on a student account making scripts and programs and browsing the web.
This reminds me: I recently got a shiny new hard drive and am going to put a bunch of partitions at the end. I was recently reminded of FreeBSD, and I'm gonna include that alongside Mandrake and Ubuntu (and whatever BeOS is left these days).
Are there any other major BSD distros, or is it just these guys? And what non-linux, non-BSD OSes are around now? (I hear OS X is due to be leaked for x86 any day now).
Are Linux and Free/OpenBSD the only real options now?
And check out A Portrait of Yo Mama as a Young Man; one of the authors is Kent Robterts, an Onion contributor and editor of this online magazine called Kent which I haven't checked out.
This is honestly the funniest book I've ever seen, and I love dry humor, clever humor, The Onion, Dan Hertzfeldt, and I grew up on Calvin and Hobbes. If you like all that stuff, check out this book. Seriously.
There's no way to describe the humor, but it's very Onion-like. Self-aware and never quite hitting where you expect (unlike, in many cases, the onion itself).
In one of the weirder perspective exercises I've ever conceived:
5 petabytes of storage is enough for a brief five-minute DVD-quality sex scene for each person of legal age in the US (two to a scene). 100 petabytes would be five minutes of porn of every pair of people in the world.
I actually wonder about this a little; how many women have posed nude on the internet? There seem to be an awful lot; I haven't been able to see them all (though I will continue to try). Where do they mostly come from, I wonder.
I wonder how well this kind of propulsion will work in interestellar space where there is no solar wind, let alone enough protons from one direction.
I think the theory is you get up to a pretty high speed by the time you leave the solar system, then coast. You'd better be sure you can stop at the right place, though.
I'm sure people have figured that out. Obviously you run the process in reverse to slow down when you approach the star. But what if you can only shed half your speed by the time you get to the planet? (that is, if the other star is smaller, the planet further out, etc)?
I have no idea how this shit works. I don't really understand how you put Linux on all these devices; do you rewrite it with a totally new machine language set? Or just create new libraries? What do you have to have, in the first place? How does all this work?
Is there some reason that Linux for NES is technically infeasabale?
Slashdot Mirror
I just stapled a ziploc bag full of microchips to my cat. Can I get a Slashdot article and some money now?
Thanks.
that's why I suggested they upgrade the engine. Rather than build an incompatible engine from scratch, which costs more, then charge an amount affordable only to a tiny percentage of interested parties.
Upgrading the engine is not easy. If it's not designed with this kind of thing in mind, it's more trouble than it's worth.
Furthermore, there are already lots and lots of engines for precisely this application.
I was thinking about how to create a message that would survive until the end of the Earth. I decided on a thick steel plate with symbols of a different metal embedded in the plate, going through to the other side and then flanged so they can't fall out. Low data density, but short of subduction I dno't see it being destroyed any time soon.
Here's a far more interesting puzzle: Precisely hat is this (circular region in NW DC) and why is it blotted out?
I think I've got it, but what do you think?
Water reservoirs, I'm told. Another post links them here:
3 &spn=0.132179,0.165825&t=k&hl=en
http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=26.668968,21.92270
Oh Lord, what is happening to . . . I don't even want to talk about it. I'm going to lie down.
at first I thought it was just going to be a huge ad for GE
At first I thought it was going to be a huge celebration of a failed Steve Jobs company.
I couldn't have said it better three times myself.
Independence Day and Jurassic Park were over a decade ago. Teenagers don't remember the eightes. Kids born during Desert Storm are in high school now. Remember the Ninja Turtles? Well, you're part of a group that's beginning to shrink. And Molly Ringwald is closing on 40.
Like this.
Any other examples of too-damaging-for-a-real-camera photography?
A use for hacking disposable cameras: They're disposable. That is, they're cheap enough that if you break them, you haven't lost much. That's useful for this kind of thing:
http://www.xkcd.com/kite/
I was so confident of my engineering skill and my insistence on multiple safety measures that I sent my nice, $150 digital camera up the kite line. It worked for a few hours after the 70-foot fall, but hasn't since.
I was so confused, when the Firefly/Serenity stories started showing up on /., because the overwhelming response was along the lines of: "Oh, wow, they're finally listening to the will of the world and making this wonderful, wonderful show into a wonderful, wonderful movie. Oh my God. We all need to decide how to get together and celebrate. And of course it goes without saying that it will be a great movie." And then there would be twenty comments ALL vigorously agreeing.
And I've been a bit confused, because until the slashdot comments, I had never heard of Firefly. I'm still awful lost, but everyone seems to take it for granted, as if it were Star Trek or something. Did I miss something huge? Am I the only one who didn't know about this movie?
And most importantly, why is it so good? All I've been able to tell is that it's (a) a good story, and (b) set in space. I know I need to read plot summaries and all, but can anyone fill me in on why they like this show?
Yeah, at first I was confused as to why he'd be modded "funny" when another poster said the same thing, basically.
A lot of things change when you turn them upside down; I don't think it tells you much about the mechanism of the illusion; it's a wide-ranging and general visual processing hack.
For example, frightening movies totally lose their atmosphere if you tilt your head 90 degrees so the TV is sideways. You can see everything going on, but the images aren't alarming. At least, that's what I've found.
Read Mind Hacks for some interesting stuff on visual processing. The rotating-during-scary-movie thing I first noticed as a little kid watching Jurassic Park, but in Mind Hacks I learned things about how we recognize rotated shapes -- we have to do a lot of processing to flip them over, and the time this takes is proportional to the angle. So I think we get the images with too much lag for the brain to do a lot of the post-post processing it usually does -- i.e. being frightened, comparing sizes properly, etc.
The visual parts of the brain are surprisingly dependent on orientation.
The hell, it will be bigger? I predict you are wrong, but will try it out. Though I'll just measure the angle it makes in the sky using my arm and some object (a penny, my thumbnail) for reference.
Speaking of thumbnails, a really good trick for estimating distances if you can estimate object size:
Measure the width of your thumbnail. Measure the distance between your thumb and your eye (arm extended, hitchhiker). Divide the thumb-eye distance by the thumbnail width. You'll get a number around 30.
To estimate distances, stretch out your arm and estimate the height of your thumbnail against an object at that distance. If there's a person standing on a boat, and my thumb is slightly wider larger than their height, my thumb is about 2 meters high. Times 30 puts them at 60 meters away. Best distance estimation trick I know, and great for the compulsive quantiphiles among us.
Thank god MU
Yeah; I've never used any of the BSDs other than occasional sitting-at-a-mac-console, but Solaris is what's running on the school machines I program on. But really, other than the desktop environment, it doesn't feel different from Linux. Of course, that's from the perspective of a dude on a student account making scripts and programs and browsing the web.
This reminds me: I recently got a shiny new hard drive and am going to put a bunch of partitions at the end. I was recently reminded of FreeBSD, and I'm gonna include that alongside Mandrake and Ubuntu (and whatever BeOS is left these days).
Are there any other major BSD distros, or is it just these guys? And what non-linux, non-BSD OSes are around now? (I hear OS X is due to be leaked for x86 any day now).
Are Linux and Free/OpenBSD the only real options now?
Better hack: remove the innards, place a live puppy inside.
Makes it far more realistic.
And check out A Portrait of Yo Mama as a Young Man; one of the authors is Kent Robterts, an Onion contributor and editor of this online magazine called Kent which I haven't checked out.
This is honestly the funniest book I've ever seen, and I love dry humor, clever humor, The Onion, Dan Hertzfeldt, and I grew up on Calvin and Hobbes. If you like all that stuff, check out this book. Seriously.
There's no way to describe the humor, but it's very Onion-like. Self-aware and never quite hitting where you expect (unlike, in many cases, the onion itself).
In one of the weirder perspective exercises I've ever conceived:
5 petabytes of storage is enough for a brief five-minute DVD-quality sex scene for each person of legal age in the US (two to a scene). 100 petabytes would be five minutes of porn of every pair of people in the world.
I actually wonder about this a little; how many women have posed nude on the internet? There seem to be an awful lot; I haven't been able to see them all (though I will continue to try). Where do they mostly come from, I wonder.
No, you don't. Do you realize how high interstellar speeds are?
I wonder how well this kind of propulsion will work in interestellar space where there is no solar wind, let alone enough protons from one direction.
I think the theory is you get up to a pretty high speed by the time you leave the solar system, then coast. You'd better be sure you can stop at the right place, though.
I'm sure people have figured that out. Obviously you run the process in reverse to slow down when you approach the star. But what if you can only shed half your speed by the time you get to the planet? (that is, if the other star is smaller, the planet further out, etc)?
Anyone?
Tell that to Yahoo and MSN Search.
Funny, or Interesting?
I have no idea how this shit works. I don't really understand how you put Linux on all these devices; do you rewrite it with a totally new machine language set? Or just create new libraries? What do you have to have, in the first place? How does all this work?
Is there some reason that Linux for NES is technically infeasabale?