Oh, okay. Got it - thanks. Although it's a pretty cartoony sort of face.. (= Faces are pretty easy to infer into things, though, really. All you need is three dots in a reasonably triangular configuration, with one dot larger than the other two. eg:o Incidentally, by my reckoning, that face is several thousand kms high....
Carl Sagan argues that faces in particular are hardwired into our recognition centres. How do you explain that about half of the population sees tits when faced with chaotic input?
Sagan's argument was that facial recognition is evolutionarily advantageous to a newborn baby. By that reasoning, tits are just as valid... (=
One of my favourites...
on
Science Askew
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Seen on the Physics Dept. notice board...
WANTED: Schroedinger's Cat. DEAD OR ALIVE.
(This whole discussion is going to degenerate into our favourite sci/geek jokes, isn't it? Not that I'm complaining, mind...)
If you scroll... you can see a nearly perfect image of a face.
It's a phenomenon known as pareidolia, and is quite a fascinating subject in its own right. Briefly, the human mind tends to seek patterns that it recognizes. When faced with a chaotic input, the mind creates patterns where none exist. Carl Sagan argues that faces in particular are hardwired into our recognition centres.
Incidentally, I can't see the face you're talking about there. (I'm probably not tired enough, as I find I'm very prone to seeing faces everywhere after an all-nighter.) I did find a yin/yang symbol, though...
I second that vote. As well as being a cool mythological bird (like a cross between a phoenix and a roc), it's got a nice phonetic equivalence with "anchor" (as in <a href=etc>).
So what was on/. yesterday, anyway? Nothing that interesting that I remember it, obviously... <wanders off to check the "Yesterday's headlines" box...>
Just adding my own vote of confidence. I used a free older version of Abby from PC Plus (uk mag) coverdisc to scan in a bunch of stuff on my gf's PC for her literature review, and it was pretty damn good. I'll normally go for OSS solutions if I can, but there wasn't anything I could find in the realm of OCR that compared in terms of ease of use and accuracy. If I ever need to do lots of scanning, I'll be investing in a copy of Abby...
And why is it such a security risk that us subversive Canadians must be kept from it
Well, I can't tell you what it is, 'coz I've not really read much yet, but I can tell you that Google is your friend (you want to be clicking on those cached links if, like me, you're outside the US =). Oh, and here's a fewmorelinks about it...
On the other hand, Rosen doubts that artists or audiences will soon want to give up the unique sensory qualities of film... "film will give you a different organic look. It's like oil paint and acrylic. Digital has a different texture."
Actually, although Rosen's right about the different look of digital and standard films, it's a moot point. I recently read an article about a technique to overlay a unique grain onto each frame of a digital film, thereby almost exactly duplicating the look of standard film...
So, basically, we get our higher definition, longer lasting digital films with the organic look Rosen praises included (if that's what you prefer, of course).
Why not bring back a species that was extinct due to the actions of mankind like the Dodo bird, rather than something that nature or God extincted, probably for some "valid" reason ?
There's reasonable evidence to suggest that the mammoth was driven to extinction by our distant ancestors hunting them for meat (herding them over cliffs and the like). Then again, some people would consider "extinct due to mankind" as equally valid or even equivalent to "extinct due to God or Nature".
Incidentally, the dodo was pushed out by the introduction of pigs to its native habitat, not because they were hunted. They were apparently pretty poor eating, oily and tough.
This is a Five Minute Theory (ie, the result of no more than five minutes of thought), so it probably won't hold up to rigourous inspection. However, consider:
Ease of use for a given consumer technology follows a Bell-like curve, which is (obviously) the inverse of the amount of understanding required to make use of the tech. Take two ubiquitious examples, the car and the television; each began as a quite arcane invention that required dedication and money to use, and a fair amount of knowledge to maintain. As they progressed, each became much easier to use to the point of total simplicity for the most basic consumer models, requiring very little knowledge to operate. At this point, featurization set in, and stuff that was previously only available in high-end, specialist models began to be included in the lower priced bracket. The most basic models continued to be usable with minimal knowledge, but increasingly included (often uneccessary) features that required some knowledge and study to use. As these features became more mainstream, knowledge of them was assumed, and became necessary for operation of the technology. Maintainence of the technology also radically increased in difficulty as it progressed.
Heck, that's enough for a start. Feel free to take this and run with it, or ignore it completely, but it seems to work for most C20 tech...
Best book I've read in the recent months: 'The Stars My Destination' by Alfred Bester.
Ah, yes. The proto-cyberpunk novel, written decades before the term cyberpunk was coined. I'd consider it one of the all time greats of fiction, science or otherwise. Bester is a fantastic writer, and it's well worth chasing up more of his work (although, as a caveat, 'The Stars...' was originally released under the title 'Tiger, Tiger' - I've got one of each =). His short stories are equally compelling.
As for your rant about the "best-sellers", I couldn't agree more. Fortunately, my impecunious status forces me to buy almost all my books second-hand, which means that I'm building up a very nice collection of the better pre-1960 sf. On the downside, it's very difficult to find any good recent sf 2nd hand - for eg, I've only once found a 2nd hand Lois McMaster Bujold, and Iain M Banks is almost as scarce.
You might also enjoy 'Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand' by Samuel R Delaney. It's somewhat lengthier than Bester's work, but equally rewarding. It also contains what I'd consider to be the way the internet would work in a semi-ideal future.
This type of "Humor" predates the BBS or on-line comunity.
In the publishing/authoring world often mistakes would be over typed with X and the correct word typed after or in the linespace.
This was later used to make quips and replace them with more politicaly correct text, while letting the reader still read the more apropriate word.
Of course, in HTML we have the good ol' strikethrough tag <del> (it used to be <strike> and its variant <s>, but they're deprecated in HTML 4.0). Not that it matters, since slashdot doesn't allow any of them in posts. Thus the use of ^H.
The strike tag was incorporated into the HTML spec very early on - specifically, it seems, for this purpose.
the first season is available on DVD (althought the second never will be)
Looks like I'll be waiting a while...
Then again, don't you just love the internet?
There's an English TV series of The Tripods, and according to this [demon.co.uk] the first season is available on DVD (althought the second never will be).
Hell - that sucks. We got this series here in.au for a while when I was younger. From memory, it was occasionally uneven, but generally really well done. I do remember being impressed by how well they'd translated the post-apocalypse medieval feel of the books to film, and wanting to catch more of it than I did. Looks like I'll be waiting a while... )=
Oh well. Off to the bookshelf to drag out the Tripods trilogy again...
Apparently, compared to Adelaide, it's a positive hive of excitement and fun:
337. Adelaide, Australia (2 members)
. That would be a lot cooler if it were 1000 places down, though... (=
(Note for the non-Aussies: Adelaide and Perth are State capitals with quite a lot of similarities, including population sizes. Adelaide, however, is renowned for being the most boring place in au.)
If someone can tell me how to make an acutal link I'd appreciate it.
You have to use html tags in your post, like so: <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/sections/science/Daily News/mammoths000313.html">Text you want to be a link goes here</a>
For eg, your link would look like this.
Look under the submit & preview buttons for a list of what you can use.
HTH.
Plus, as mentioned on the linked page, the initial letter was very polite, and reasonably clued into the fanbase. Please don't go smacking them with a billion nasty emails - wait until they get unreasonable, then hit the flame-on button.
They do/not/ have a right to search you just because you are in their store and their obviously-flawed security gates went off.
Just a quick FYI for any Aussies out there who think this might work for them, it won't. The laws are different here. A very brief summary is at the ACLU's website.
Okay, so it wasn't the greatest film. But I thought their explanation for the missing eighteen minutes and the whole Deep Throat thing was pretty damned amusing. The dream sequence between Michelle Williams and Dan Hedaya was hilarilous. Incidentally, Hedaya is one of the better Nixons I've seen.
And wouldn't it be a crack up if the missing minutes really were the confessions of a lovesick teenager?
Thanks for that. Very interesting, indeed. If I read it right, it suggests that the Africanized bees are a significant factor over the less aggressive native bees, but possibly any equally social bee would have the same effect.
A little more informative than the news sources, anyway, although I probably wouldn't have been able to wade thru' the actual article... Much appreciated.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, okay. Got it - thanks. Although it's a pretty cartoony sort of face.. (= :o
Faces are pretty easy to infer into things, though, really. All you need is three dots in a reasonably triangular configuration, with one dot larger than the other two. eg
Incidentally, by my reckoning, that face is several thousand kms high....
Carl Sagan argues that faces in particular are hardwired into our recognition centres.
How do you explain that about half of the population sees tits when faced with chaotic input?
Sagan's argument was that facial recognition is evolutionarily advantageous to a newborn baby.
By that reasoning, tits are just as valid... (=
(This whole discussion is going to degenerate into our favourite sci/geek jokes, isn't it? Not that I'm complaining, mind...)
If you scroll ... you can see a nearly perfect image of a face.
It's a phenomenon known as pareidolia , and is quite a fascinating subject in its own right. Briefly, the human mind tends to seek patterns that it recognizes. When faced with a chaotic input, the mind creates patterns where none exist. Carl Sagan argues that faces in particular are hardwired into our recognition centres.
Incidentally, I can't see the face you're talking about there. (I'm probably not tired enough, as I find I'm very prone to seeing faces everywhere after an all-nighter.)
I did find a yin/yang symbol, though...
I vote for "Anka".
I second that vote. As well as being a cool mythological bird (like a cross between a phoenix and a roc), it's got a nice phonetic equivalence with "anchor" (as in <a href=etc>).
So what was on /. yesterday, anyway? Nothing that interesting that I remember it, obviously...
<wanders off to check the "Yesterday's headlines" box...>
Just adding my own vote of confidence. I used a free older version of Abby from PC Plus (uk mag) coverdisc to scan in a bunch of stuff on my gf's PC for her literature review, and it was pretty damn good.
I'll normally go for OSS solutions if I can, but there wasn't anything I could find in the realm of OCR that compared in terms of ease of use and accuracy. If I ever need to do lots of scanning, I'll be investing in a copy of Abby...
Hm. Having now read more about it, it sounds quite decent. Which pretty much guarantees we won't get it in .au... )=
What exactly is Odessey 5?
And why is it such a security risk that us subversive Canadians must be kept from it
Well, I can't tell you what it is, 'coz I've not really read much yet, but I can tell you that Google is your friend (you want to be clicking on those cached links if, like me, you're outside the US =).
Oh, and here's a few more links about it...
HTH, etc... (=
Fish.
Barrel.
Howitzer.
(Yes, it's gone already. Poor little thing...)
The other difference is that Hollywood has a bigger budget than Adobe for making sure stupid laws are upheld...
On the other hand, Rosen doubts that artists or audiences will soon want to give up the unique sensory qualities of film... "film will give you a different organic look. It's like oil paint and acrylic. Digital has a different texture."
Actually, although Rosen's right about the different look of digital and standard films, it's a moot point. I recently read an article about a technique to overlay a unique grain onto each frame of a digital film, thereby almost exactly duplicating the look of standard film...
So, basically, we get our higher definition, longer lasting digital films with the organic look Rosen praises included (if that's what you prefer, of course).
Rosen loses both ways...
Like blossoms need bees
We need a moderation -
"Elegant Haiku"
Why not bring back a species that was extinct due to the actions of mankind like the Dodo bird, rather than something that nature or God extincted, probably for some "valid" reason ?
There's reasonable evidence to suggest that the mammoth was driven to extinction by our distant ancestors hunting them for meat (herding them over cliffs and the like). Then again, some people would consider "extinct due to mankind" as equally valid or even equivalent to "extinct due to God or Nature".
Incidentally, the dodo was pushed out by the introduction of pigs to its native habitat, not because they were hunted. They were apparently pretty poor eating, oily and tough.
(Yes, I've been watching lots of BBC series.)
This is a Five Minute Theory (ie, the result of no more than five minutes of thought), so it probably won't hold up to rigourous inspection. However, consider:
Ease of use for a given consumer technology follows a Bell-like curve, which is (obviously) the inverse of the amount of understanding required to make use of the tech. Take two ubiquitious examples, the car and the television; each began as a quite arcane invention that required dedication and money to use, and a fair amount of knowledge to maintain. As they progressed, each became much easier to use to the point of total simplicity for the most basic consumer models, requiring very little knowledge to operate.
At this point, featurization set in, and stuff that was previously only available in high-end, specialist models began to be included in the lower priced bracket. The most basic models continued to be usable with minimal knowledge, but increasingly included (often uneccessary) features that required some knowledge and study to use. As these features became more mainstream, knowledge of them was assumed, and became necessary for operation of the technology.
Maintainence of the technology also radically increased in difficulty as it progressed.
Heck, that's enough for a start. Feel free to take this and run with it, or ignore it completely, but it seems to work for most C20 tech...
Best book I've read in the recent months: 'The Stars My Destination' by Alfred Bester.
Ah, yes. The proto-cyberpunk novel, written decades before the term cyberpunk was coined. I'd consider it one of the all time greats of fiction, science or otherwise. Bester is a fantastic writer, and it's well worth chasing up more of his work (although, as a caveat, 'The Stars...' was originally released under the title 'Tiger, Tiger' - I've got one of each =). His short stories are equally compelling.
As for your rant about the "best-sellers", I couldn't agree more. Fortunately, my impecunious status forces me to buy almost all my books second-hand, which means that I'm building up a very nice collection of the better pre-1960 sf. On the downside, it's very difficult to find any good recent sf 2nd hand - for eg, I've only once found a 2nd hand Lois McMaster Bujold, and Iain M Banks is almost as scarce.
You might also enjoy 'Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand' by Samuel R Delaney. It's somewhat lengthier than Bester's work, but equally rewarding. It also contains what I'd consider to be the way the internet would work in a semi-ideal future.
This type of "Humor" predates the BBS or on-line comunity.
In the publishing/authoring world often mistakes would be over typed with X and the correct word typed after or in the linespace.
This was later used to make quips and replace them with more politicaly correct text, while letting the reader still read the more apropriate word.
Of course, in HTML we have the good ol' strikethrough tag <del> (it used to be <strike> and its variant <s>, but they're deprecated in HTML 4.0). Not that it matters, since slashdot doesn't allow any of them in posts. Thus the use of ^H.
The strike tag was incorporated into the HTML spec very early on - specifically, it seems, for this purpose.
the first season is available on DVD (althought the second never will be)
Looks like I'll be waiting a while...
Then again, don't you just love the internet?
There's an English TV series of The Tripods, and according to this [demon.co.uk] the first season is available on DVD (althought the second never will be). .au for a while when I was younger. From memory, it was occasionally uneven, but generally really well done. I do remember being impressed by how well they'd translated the post-apocalypse medieval feel of the books to film, and wanting to catch more of it than I did. Looks like I'll be waiting a while... )=
Hell - that sucks. We got this series here in
Oh well. Off to the bookshelf to drag out the Tripods trilogy again...
Apparently, compared to Adelaide, it's a positive hive of excitement and fun:
That would be a lot cooler if it were 1000 places down, though... (=
(Note for the non-Aussies: Adelaide and Perth are State capitals with quite a lot of similarities, including population sizes. Adelaide, however, is renowned for being the most boring place in au.)
If someone can tell me how to make an acutal link I'd appreciate it.y News/mammoths000313.html">Text you want to be a link goes here</a>
You have to use html tags in your post, like so:
<a href="http://abcnews.go.com/sections/science/Dail
For eg, your link would look like this.
Look under the submit & preview buttons for a list of what you can use.
HTH.
Plus, as mentioned on the linked page, the initial letter was very polite, and reasonably clued into the fanbase. Please don't go smacking them with a billion nasty emails - wait until they get unreasonable, then hit the flame-on button.
They do /not/ have a right to search you just because you are in their store and their obviously-flawed security gates went off.
Just a quick FYI for any Aussies out there who think this might work for them, it won't. The laws are different here. A very brief summary is at the ACLU's website.
Okay, so it wasn't the greatest film. But I thought their explanation for the missing eighteen minutes and the whole Deep Throat thing was pretty damned amusing. The dream sequence between Michelle Williams and Dan Hedaya was hilarilous. Incidentally, Hedaya is one of the better Nixons I've seen.
And wouldn't it be a crack up if the missing minutes really were the confessions of a lovesick teenager?
Thanks for that. Very interesting, indeed. If I read it right, it suggests that the Africanized bees are a significant factor over the less aggressive native bees, but possibly any equally social bee would have the same effect.
A little more informative than the news sources, anyway, although I probably wouldn't have been able to wade thru' the actual article... Much appreciated.