eldavojohn has pretty much nailed it.
A long time ago I signed up for a three-year CS programme at Uni as an ancillary field of study (not a 'major'). Ten months later, the department (in their superior wisdom) issued a fiat that all the non-four-year CS track students would study IT instead. Since I needed to stay at that Uni for my primary field of study, leaving in a huff was not an option. Nonetheless, for me the change was excruciatingly frustrating and I have yet to forgive the fleshy-headed mutants who decided they knew what I wanted better than I.
There were others in my undergrad CS^H^HIT track who really enjoyed the change. A substantive subset of the shitty coders suddenly shone because they didn't have to think like machines, or spend hours hunting down some logical flaw in a data structure or an algorithm. Their intuitive/natural ability to solve NP-complete problems with blinding flashes of insight came to the fore; they got good grades, and they enjoyed the programme, and they graduated with skills they were likely to use because
They didn't care that most of them were shitty coders. It was enough that by the end of the programme they could usually tell the difference between good and bad coders. Meanwhile, those of us who had signed up so we could learn to code realised that if we chose to instruct machines for a living we would always work for these newly-discovered betters. By then, as you might be able to imagine, we despised them. Not one of us took a job programming computers.
The most interesting thing about this rambling story is that many of the shitty coders were also bad at IT, and some of the really good coders wound up being good at IT too (although admittedly none of the good coders enjoyed IT studies or were happy with the change). Bottom line seems to be that experimentation in your first year is a good thing.
Also, make sure you aren't locking yourself into something longer than a semester that can change after you register for it.
The vapour in fluorescent tubes is mercury (Hg). Very bad to breathe, and perilous to touch too (unless you wash hard, and even potent cleansers aren't designed to remove heavy metal contamination).
That's why they need phosphorescent coating in the first place: the excited Hg vapour emits UV, and it's actually the phosphors that 'fluoresce' visible EM.
Competent safety procedures include vacating the area of a fluorescent bulb break for at least ten minutes, followed by thorough cleanup and HAZMAT disposal of the materials used.
If you look carefully enough at the pictures you'll see a little 'T72S' along the dorsal crest. Does this little guy suffer from delusions of grandeur?
Everything written up to this point has assumed you are a US citizen. If that's true, read on.
If you simply want to travel and do good in a tangibly fruitful way, join the US Peace Corps. My cousin did this and actually speaks well of it *after* getting so sick she had to leave early. You get a really solid lifeline in case you suddenly require medical attention or quick evacuation. Almost everyone will respect what you did, regardless of their national, political, and/or philosophical background. And the experience lasts a lifetime, usually in a positive way.
If you want to do good and (also) find out lots about who/what you are, join the US Army. I guarantee this experience too will last a lifetime; but it might not be so sweet. You'll find out things about yourself, and about people in general, that don't surface during the medi[c]ated experience most of us accept as everyday life.
Now that I've exposed some of my own biases, let's explore a bit of reasoned counterpoint to some of Ian Bicking's writings:
----------------
> by the end of the Vietnam War pilots were [sic]
> refused en masse to run bombing missions over
> North Vietnam
Surprising this assertion is. I've reviewed a fair number of the primary documents without coming across anything to support this observation. I'm aware of at least two US Navy fliers who got courtmartialed for not following orders whilst in the aeroplane; but their crime was deviation from course and an unauthorized weapons release, not a mission refusal. Can you recall which historian made this claim/when/where/to whom/citing what?
> having destroyed all plausible military targets
The question of what makes a target 'military' is the subject of numerous thick books. A restrictive definition would have precluded, for instance, turning out the lights in Ho Chi Minh City. But Operation LINEBACKER doing that, and things like that, brought the North to the negotiating table at a time when they were already correctly confident that they would win the war. Whether or not you accept that US intervention was morally right, it's hard to argue that bloodshed is presumptively preferable to negotiation. (The same argument applies, more recently, to Kosovo/Belgrade/Yugoslavia.)
> the people who used chemical warfare in Vietnam
> (Agent Orange)
Orange was used *as* a defoliant. There were technicians who knew how toxic it was, but it's not clear that the decisionmakers in Vietnam did. MAC-V also dropped Orange on its own troops -- difficult to reconcile with a desire for victory, if the release authority meant to employ it as a chemical weapon.
> Because the military is killing a lot of
> children and mothers these days
Really? Where? Are you referring to the human shields whom Saddam voluntold they'd go stand next to the air defence systems that were about to start shooting at US and British pilots?
> It's one thing to bet your own life on a cause,
> but the military gave up that a while ago --
> American soldiers die in accidents, not battle.
US soldiers do die in battle. The US Army has had some success in reducing the numbers, but a dispassionate review of US military history over the last, say, twenty years reveals that US soldiers died in battle in Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Somalia, and Afghanistan. The US Army's deployment to Albania in 'support' of the Kosovo Air Campaign killed US soldiers only in accidents. It also killed zero persons of any other nation, since it never executed a combat mission.
> Now they're betting other people's lives on it.
No, they're betting *their* lives on their Army's ability to protect them. And they know an uncomfortable lot about how finite that ability is. Soldiers in battle generally do not fight for causes. They fight for survival, frequently for the survival of their buddies, occasionally for a charismatic leader. Citizens who enlist might do so for a specific cause, but more often than not they do so for a complex combination of reasons. Patriotism is usually one of these.
> The moral weight of killing is far heavier than
> the moral weight of dying.
Yeah. True. If you aren't comfortable with the fact that you'll remember the nameless people you killed for the rest of your life, stay away from the US Army. There are nations that win wars, but no soldier ever won a war. All the soldiers in a war lose something. But until a universal substitute for war comes along, the US will need something that can fight one and win. Leave that job to those who have reflected on their willingness to do that specific thing. If you want to die for a cause, just write a lucid note and cut your throat. The US Army is a lot harder and more effective than suicide.
> I think we all know on which side of the bomb
> [Jesus Christ woul]d be on [sic] when it falls
> from the plane, and I think we'd all know which
> person would receive his blessings
Oh yeah, the guy who beat the temple moneychangers with a stick hard enough to drive them all away? Yeah, that was definitely a guy who would shrink from employing force in a righteous cause. The teachings of Christ emphasize personal responsibility and explicitly de-emphasize the manner of one's death. Do you really mean to claim that an 'ethnic cleanser' killed whilst shelling civilians would be preferentially blessed by Christ *because* he died from a US munition? Although Christ's blessings are denied to no repentant sinner, there's no basis in scripture for such an exceptional claim.
----------
Please take to heart bugnuts' advice to get IN WRITING the recruiter's promise about where you'll be assigned and what you'll do.
Finally, regarding kasparov's comment in this thread:
> I can attest that taking the "ultimate step" and
> disobeying orders can be a very unpleasant
> experience. One's rights under the UCMJ are
> significantly less than one's rights under the
> US Constitution.
He's right. The entire US DoD reflexively punishes defiance. Paradoxically, those US citizens who pledge themselves to defend the freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution are less free than those they defend.
Orders are fundamentally about trust. The soldier issuing them believes they'll get done. The soldier receiving them believes they're right. When this breaks down, so does the US Army. If trust is at issue, then *before* it breaks down, the issuer and the receiver owe a frank discussion to each other and to the Constitution they pledged they'd defend. If you're not ready to have that discussion, face to face, with a guy who can put you in jail, don't join the US Army. Sometimes it really *can* feel like an Army of One.
There are easy answers in the US Army, just as there are in 'everyday' US life. You can keep your head down, learn exactly what is required, do it as well as you can, and ignore/forget the inconvenient remainder. But if you are a geek, your predilections will force you along a harder, more rigorous, and ultimately more illuminating path. This is no more a fact of the US Army than of US 'everyday' life; but in the US Army both the situations and the outcomes will matter more to you. The answers you find might not be comfortable, or even unambiguous; but they will be
true.
My father is a Yamaha Concert Artist and owns two Yahaha pianos (neither Disklavier-equipped), on one of which I completed most of my piano studies before the age of 14. I also own a non-Disklavier Yamaha piano, and I like it. I sang professionally for eight years and have significant experience with the playback capability of the Yamaha Disklavier system.
I have yet to hear a Disklavier performance that I was able to distinguish from the original performance. The critical difference from most other forms of reproduced music is that an actual piano is reproducing the performance, not a system of amplified loudspeakers. Although no one has produced evidence for this instance in support or detraction, I imagine it would be very much in Yamaha's interests to ensure the performing and judging pianos were quite close to one another in timbric character. I know from personal experience that Yamaha have the resources and dedication to match the pianos to below human interpretive tolerance, if they believed doing so were to their corporate benefit.
That said, I prefer live performances myself, and no, I don't know exactly why. I like seeing the performer, breathing the same air, hearing the notes ring out at the same instant the performer is hearing them.
An objective, professional judge with years more education and years more experience than I might have a different opinion. Evidently this judge in question has. I defer to his/er professionalism, and I further have the temerity to suggest many of us would do well to follow suit.
You claim, if not sympathy with Eric Weisstein, at least a share in the community judgment, to wit:
1. CRC is behaving despicably.
2. CRC's behaviour is perfectly legal.
With your own expertise in these matters, could you not propose an amendment to existing US legislation that would bring 'legal' and 'just' closer together in cases like this one?
I'm sure some hard-working US Senate staffer would love to find a practical fix available for perusal.
That's not a joke.
{bait}Or perhaps you'd rather leave things as they are, and cluck sympathetically at the victims whilst their fees line your pockets.{/bait}
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eldavojohn has pretty much nailed it. A long time ago I signed up for a three-year CS programme at Uni as an ancillary field of study (not a 'major'). Ten months later, the department (in their superior wisdom) issued a fiat that all the non-four-year CS track students would study IT instead. Since I needed to stay at that Uni for my primary field of study, leaving in a huff was not an option. Nonetheless, for me the change was excruciatingly frustrating and I have yet to forgive the fleshy-headed mutants who decided they knew what I wanted better than I. There were others in my undergrad CS^H^HIT track who really enjoyed the change. A substantive subset of the shitty coders suddenly shone because they didn't have to think like machines, or spend hours hunting down some logical flaw in a data structure or an algorithm. Their intuitive/natural ability to solve NP-complete problems with blinding flashes of insight came to the fore; they got good grades, and they enjoyed the programme, and they graduated with skills they were likely to use because They didn't care that most of them were shitty coders. It was enough that by the end of the programme they could usually tell the difference between good and bad coders. Meanwhile, those of us who had signed up so we could learn to code realised that if we chose to instruct machines for a living we would always work for these newly-discovered betters. By then, as you might be able to imagine, we despised them. Not one of us took a job programming computers. The most interesting thing about this rambling story is that many of the shitty coders were also bad at IT, and some of the really good coders wound up being good at IT too (although admittedly none of the good coders enjoyed IT studies or were happy with the change). Bottom line seems to be that experimentation in your first year is a good thing. Also, make sure you aren't locking yourself into something longer than a semester that can change after you register for it.
The vapour in fluorescent tubes is mercury (Hg). Very bad to breathe, and perilous to touch too (unless you wash hard, and even potent cleansers aren't designed to remove heavy metal contamination).
That's why they need phosphorescent coating in the first place: the excited Hg vapour emits UV, and it's actually the phosphors that 'fluoresce' visible EM.
Competent safety procedures include vacating the area of a fluorescent bulb break for at least ten minutes, followed by thorough cleanup and HAZMAT disposal of the materials used.
Yeah, my Mom still uses the //e she and Dad bought for my sister and me more than twenty years ago.
Contact / Christmas card list mostly, but she's competent with spreadsheets and word processing as well.
Incidentally they also own a (vintage 2001) WinDell. She knows more information about the newer machine, but she's more productive on the Apple.
Really. I've watched.
If you look carefully enough at the pictures you'll see a little 'T72S' along the dorsal crest. Does this little guy suffer from delusions of grandeur?
If you simply want to travel and do good in a tangibly fruitful way, join the US Peace Corps. My cousin did this and actually speaks well of it *after* getting so sick she had to leave early. You get a really solid lifeline in case you suddenly require medical attention or quick evacuation. Almost everyone will respect what you did, regardless of their national, political, and/or philosophical background. And the experience lasts a lifetime, usually in a positive way.
If you want to do good and (also) find out lots about who/what you are, join the US Army. I guarantee this experience too will last a lifetime; but it might not be so sweet. You'll find out things about yourself, and about people in general, that don't surface during the medi[c]ated experience most of us accept as everyday life.
Now that I've exposed some of my own biases, let's explore a bit of reasoned counterpoint to some of Ian Bicking's writings:
----------------
Surprising this assertion is. I've reviewed a fair number of the primary documents without coming across anything to support this observation. I'm aware of at least two US Navy fliers who got courtmartialed for not following orders whilst in the aeroplane; but their crime was deviation from course and an unauthorized weapons release, not a mission refusal. Can you recall which historian made this claim/when/where/to whom/citing what? The question of what makes a target 'military' is the subject of numerous thick books. A restrictive definition would have precluded, for instance, turning out the lights in Ho Chi Minh City. But Operation LINEBACKER doing that, and things like that, brought the North to the negotiating table at a time when they were already correctly confident that they would win the war. Whether or not you accept that US intervention was morally right, it's hard to argue that bloodshed is presumptively preferable to negotiation. (The same argument applies, more recently, to Kosovo/Belgrade/Yugoslavia.) Orange was used *as* a defoliant. There were technicians who knew how toxic it was, but it's not clear that the decisionmakers in Vietnam did. MAC-V also dropped Orange on its own troops -- difficult to reconcile with a desire for victory, if the release authority meant to employ it as a chemical weapon. Really? Where? Are you referring to the human shields whom Saddam voluntold they'd go stand next to the air defence systems that were about to start shooting at US and British pilots? US soldiers do die in battle. The US Army has had some success in reducing the numbers, but a dispassionate review of US military history over the last, say, twenty years reveals that US soldiers died in battle in Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Somalia, and Afghanistan. The US Army's deployment to Albania in 'support' of the Kosovo Air Campaign killed US soldiers only in accidents. It also killed zero persons of any other nation, since it never executed a combat mission. No, they're betting *their* lives on their Army's ability to protect them. And they know an uncomfortable lot about how finite that ability is. Soldiers in battle generally do not fight for causes. They fight for survival, frequently for the survival of their buddies, occasionally for a charismatic leader. Citizens who enlist might do so for a specific cause, but more often than not they do so for a complex combination of reasons. Patriotism is usually one of these. Yeah. True. If you aren't comfortable with the fact that you'll remember the nameless people you killed for the rest of your life, stay away from the US Army. There are nations that win wars, but no soldier ever won a war. All the soldiers in a war lose something. But until a universal substitute for war comes along, the US will need something that can fight one and win. Leave that job to those who have reflected on their willingness to do that specific thing. If you want to die for a cause, just write a lucid note and cut your throat. The US Army is a lot harder and more effective than suicide. Oh yeah, the guy who beat the temple moneychangers with a stick hard enough to drive them all away? Yeah, that was definitely a guy who would shrink from employing force in a righteous cause. The teachings of Christ emphasize personal responsibility and explicitly de-emphasize the manner of one's death. Do you really mean to claim that an 'ethnic cleanser' killed whilst shelling civilians would be preferentially blessed by Christ *because* he died from a US munition? Although Christ's blessings are denied to no repentant sinner, there's no basis in scripture for such an exceptional claim.----------
Please take to heart bugnuts' advice to get IN WRITING the recruiter's promise about where you'll be assigned and what you'll do.
Finally, regarding kasparov's comment in this thread:
He's right. The entire US DoD reflexively punishes defiance. Paradoxically, those US citizens who pledge themselves to defend the freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution are less free than those they defend.Orders are fundamentally about trust. The soldier issuing them believes they'll get done. The soldier receiving them believes they're right. When this breaks down, so does the US Army. If trust is at issue, then *before* it breaks down, the issuer and the receiver owe a frank discussion to each other and to the Constitution they pledged they'd defend. If you're not ready to have that discussion, face to face, with a guy who can put you in jail, don't join the US Army. Sometimes it really *can* feel like an Army of One.
There are easy answers in the US Army, just as there are in 'everyday' US life. You can keep your head down, learn exactly what is required, do it as well as you can, and ignore/forget the inconvenient remainder. But if you are a geek, your predilections will force you along a harder, more rigorous, and ultimately more illuminating path. This is no more a fact of the US Army than of US 'everyday' life; but in the US Army both the situations and the outcomes will matter more to you. The answers you find might not be comfortable, or even unambiguous; but they will be true.
Also you'll have lots less bandwidth :-)
For quick, digestible physics snacks, check out Lew Epstein's masterpiece, "Gedanken Physics".
My father is a Yamaha Concert Artist and owns two Yahaha pianos (neither Disklavier-equipped), on one of which I completed most of my piano studies before the age of 14. I also own a non-Disklavier Yamaha piano, and I like it. I sang professionally for eight years and have significant experience with the playback capability of the Yamaha Disklavier system.
I have yet to hear a Disklavier performance that I was able to distinguish from the original performance. The critical difference from most other forms of reproduced music is that an actual piano is reproducing the performance, not a system of amplified loudspeakers. Although no one has produced evidence for this instance in support or detraction, I imagine it would be very much in Yamaha's interests to ensure the performing and judging pianos were quite close to one another in timbric character. I know from personal experience that Yamaha have the resources and dedication to match the pianos to below human interpretive tolerance, if they believed doing so were to their corporate benefit.
That said, I prefer live performances myself, and no, I don't know exactly why. I like seeing the performer, breathing the same air, hearing the notes ring out at the same instant the performer is hearing them.
An objective, professional judge with years more education and years more experience than I might have a different opinion. Evidently this judge in question has. I defer to his/er professionalism, and I further have the temerity to suggest many of us would do well to follow suit.
So there.
raresilk,
You claim, if not sympathy with Eric Weisstein, at least a share in the community judgment, to wit:
1. CRC is behaving despicably.
2. CRC's behaviour is perfectly legal.
With your own expertise in these matters, could you not propose an amendment to existing US legislation that would bring 'legal' and 'just' closer together in cases like this one?
I'm sure some hard-working US Senate staffer would love to find a practical fix available for perusal.
That's not a joke.
{bait}Or perhaps you'd rather leave things as they are, and cluck sympathetically at the victims whilst their fees line your pockets.{/bait}