Is anyone actually forced to memorize the periodic table these days? Talk about a pointless rote memorization task...
I thought "learning" like this went the way of the dinosaurs in the 80's (of course, I teach on the university level, so I'm a bit removed from elementary education). Can any education types confirm that this kind of thing still goes on?
I'm from India, and I can confirm that such pointless torture of students is the norm here:(
I was forced to memorize the periodic table when I was in high school.
Not only that, no calculators allowed until you are in university. Every time someone tries to change it, the luddites start screaming that use of calculators harms the students' powers of mental arithmetic and so on.
In the case of the periodic table, though, I'm actually not sure it is completely pointless: the properties of the elements are to a great extent dependent on their position in the table. If you involuntarily "see" an element in its position in the table whenever it is talked about, then you get to correlate its properties to its position much better, and you understand it better.
At least, that's the idea. The question is whether the purported gains are worth the effort.
I subscribe to the penguin theory of learning. After a certain point, your brain only holds so many recallable facts, just like an iceberg can hold only so many penguins. After that, for each new one you add, an old one must be shoved off (or at least relegated to subconscious long-term storage). I know memory is theoretically infinite, and that everything we learn is supposedly deep down in there somewhere, waiting for the right moment to be dredged up... but this kind of memorization is a waste of space on the iceberg.
I'm not sure about the waste of space part. Sure, brain space is finite. However, you remember a zillion important details about your everyday life. The more things you consciously memorize, the faster the useless things are going to get dumped out of your brain. And memorizing more actually makes you better at storing and recalling things. OTOH, this kind of memorization is a huge waste of time, and is hence unjustifiable.
BTW, some people might _want_ to memorize completely pointless things by rote for whatever reason. For instance, I memorized 1000 digits of pi:-)
Smell and pheromones play very important roles for many species. Though it is less in humans, it is still significant.
The study says there is no evidence for sexual arousal, but that this could be because the tests were done in a sterile enviroment. Biologically, however, the primary function of pheromones is sexual communication. Here is an article on pheromones in humans and animals. Relevant portion:
Smell has a dramatic effect on sexual desire for several reasons. Firstly, particular smells recall mental images that reduce anxiety, making a person more receptive to sex. Secondly, some odours stimulate a link in the brain.Scientists have ascertained that all animals produce pheromones (quite aptly translating from Greek as 'to transfer excitement') or scents in the form of a chemical substance, designed to stimulate behavioural responses usually some form of attraction or repulsion within the same species.
...
Pheromones are found naturally in minute amounts in the perspiration of all guys and we can recognise pheromone-power in cultural, historical trends and habits. Members of a tribe in New Guinea actually say good-bye by putting a hand in each other's armpit and rubbing themselves with it! In medieval England, lovers exchanged 'love apples' - peeled apples were kept in a woman's armpit until it absorbed her odour then given to her lover so he could inhale her fragrance while they were apart - supposedly the anticipated effect was that of an aphrodisiac confirming the true strength of pheromones (not forgetting that Medieval Europeans never washed, this was a sure test of love!). It is even reported that Napoleon sent a message to Josephine prior to his arrival home "Home in three days, don't wash"
I don't know if the Napoleon story is an urban legend and if it is related to the myth that Frenchwomen don't wash.
It's a start, but it doesn't solve the problem. For two reasons. First, the nature of the author's contract with the publisher/distributor would in many (most?) cases prevent the artist from PD'ing their work. Surely, we want the artist to get royalties for a limited time-period at least, don't we? Second, it is still work for the artist. We don't want the artist to get involved at all after the moment that they first release their work. That's what I was implying by "legal framework". Standardize the process, sell the idea to a few publisers and make it dead simple for artists; and it could be a revolution in the content industry. And about time, too: the sooner we realize that the internet demands some adjustments to our notions of selling information, the better.
I would expect that there are a good number of artists who understand that (essentially) infinite copyright is stupid. I mean, if I were an author, I would like to release my works after say 5-10 years into PD in the hope of increasing hits to my website and get free advertising using something I probably can't sell anyway. Given this, how can we get more authors to adopt this approach?
IANAL, but here's a suggestion. Consider what happened in the software world. Lot of people wanted to share their code, but for things really took off only due to the ease of adopting the GPL. In a similar vein, perhaps we should have a well-defined legal framework for artists to release their work into the PD after 5 years, and work towards getting it acceptance among publishers? (Essentially, the legal and technical details should be worked out and implemented by someone else instead of forcing the individual artists to deal with it). Sure the *AA can be counted out, but I can imagine several book publishers and smaller music groups being not averse to the idea. If disney wants to keep the mouse, let them, forget it. Let's do the best we can to ensure that content that is yet to be produced comes with a less draconian copyright.
Riders take the cards to vending machines and add as much money as they want.
I'm not sure this is such a good idea. It would be better to have a fixed maximum. That way, losing the card involves no more risk than losing paper money. I recall a similar initiative in France a while ago, where they had an upper limit. If there's a cap you're not putting all your eggs into one basket, and you get a pretty good idea of how much money you are carrying even when you are not near a card reading machine.
If somebody intent on breaking through the smart card's security has access to the smart card, then sooner or later the security WILL be broken.
Get a clue. The whole point of a smart card is to keep the data safe even in the event of physical tampering. For this purpose, the processor of a smart card is enclosed in a black box which will chemically self-destruct if you try to tamper with it. Much research on smart cards goes into ensuring that security can not be broken in spite of physical access.
"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it."
Apparently, the security of the JVM type system has been subject to machine-checked proofs. Yet, a single bit error in memory can be exploited with 70% probability.
Bill is getting into bed. Tracy is waiting for him.
Bill's wearable watch: Bill, you've got mail.
Bill: Damn! Couldn't you find a better time?
[Removes watch and flings it away.]
Bill: Ahhh, Traaaaaacyyyyyy......
Tracy's babel fish: No matches found. Did you mean: 1) Trace 2) Tracing 3) Racy
Tracy: Shit! [Removes babel fish]
Bill remembers just in the nick of time that his goggles are connected to the internet! And he's turned the firewall off, which means that anyone that connects to port 23484 on his goggles can see what he's seeing!!! [Takes goggles off]
Bill starts scratching Tracy's back. Immediately, her intellipen software kicks into action and tries to figure out what he's writing.
[2 hours later]
Bill and tracy are finally done spurning all the advances from their various bluetooth devices, at which point they realize they forgot to switch off the webcam...
Slightly OT: the major league baseball's website http://mlb.com redirects you to "http://mlb.mlb.com/NASApp/mlb/mlb/homepage/mlb_ho mepage.jsp" ! Can you beat that? I've seen this on a web design hall of shame;^)
share more proprietary information with its rivals
But that would only be a problem if they had any rivals...
Does anyone else get the feeling
on
Opencroquet
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
... that this guy's ideas are always way ahead of his time?
Like smalltalk. Early 70s, IIRC. The problem of managing increasing software complexity, which object orientation (partly) solved, became significant only much later.
I don't think 3d enviromnents are an idea whose time has come. Slowness is only part of the problem. We really don't have the software infrastructure to scale UI complexity to those levels. Maybe for special applications, but not as a general UI design paradigm.
There are no boundaries in the system. We are creating an environment where anything can be created; everything can be modified, all in the 3D world. There is no separate development environment, no user environment. It is all be the same thing. We can even change and author the worlds in collaboration with others inside them while they are operating .
Could somebody please enlighten me? I don't get the point at all.
... a number of advantages over the tried-and-true Red Hat and Debian package management systems.
With Stow, you can package applications in standard tar files
"A standard tar file" is just a bunch of files. The reason rpm and other packaging formats are used is to do dependency tracking and management. There is no way you can figure out the dependencies from just the tar file. So comparing stow with rpm is like comparing apples and oranges. Stow is not an alternative to rpm. (Of course I agree that if we had a single universal packaging format it would be great. But the answer is not to throw all the features overboard.)
... and keep application binaries logically arranged for easy access.
Wtf? What do you mean, access a binary? When is the last time you did "vim/bin/ls"? The only thing you do with binaries is to execute them, and putting them in/bin/ or/usr/bin/ etc. is perfectly adequate.
gives users the freedom to store or install the software package at any desired location
Excuse me, but "configure --prefix=dir" already does that?
Imagine installing an application that accidentally overwrites a file belonging to another application, and then you have to replace the file.
Has anyone ever encountered this? It seems somewhat contrived to me.
Or imagine, before uninstalling and deleting an application, trying to determine which files belong to that application.
Any half-decent package manager allows you to list all the files belonging to an application.
The UNIX way of putting applications is well thought out, matured and perfectly fine. Needlessly playing around with it is likely to cause more problems than it solves.
Yes, the package management scene on Linux sucks right now. But it is because of dependency management, and has nothing to do with all the files of an application in a nice folder.
The industry is
fucked. It's less imaginative, more risk averse, than the fucking music business. It makes Hollywood look happy to take a flyer on talent.
It often happens that the entry barrier in an industry becomes so high that the trend is towards bigger and bigger developing houses, less imagination, and swallowing up of the smaller players. When this happens the only thing that can change the situation is a radically new idea or development model. It happened with UNIX in the 80's. Two things overthrew that stagnating giant: Microsoft and RMS/Linus. It is happening with processors (though its not so bad). Maybe things like the Dragon from China and the Simputer from India can shake things up a bit. It's happening with the music industry. I have no idea what's going to happen. And yes, its happening with games. Can it lead to a revolution? Maybe, if gamers get sufficiently fed up with the current setup.
What do you mean, survive Safari? The author goes out of the way to make the point that safari and their way of doing things and their choosing khtml is not a bad thing. Examples:
What is clear is that both Camino and Safari are wicked fast browsers. This is excellent news. In addition, Safari uses code and ideas from Gecko, and high quality ideas from the KHTML/Safari world will make their way back into Gecko. This brings benefits to both layout engines. The big picture question is the performance of open alternatives compared to that of the dominant Internet Explorer browser, and the open source community can share satisfaction as the open alternatives continue to improve.
Further:
Current information suggests that Apple will work with the KDE project in connection with the KDE technologies Apple uses, while still developing Safari internally and making decisions about its development in line with Apple's business model and view of its situation. The Mozilla project actively supports this model of development, where open source and proprietary software is combined into a single product or project.
It think it is possible to move to a different protocol than SMTP by building a protocol over it, rather than throwing it out.
The article notes that one of the major problems is the filtering of genuine mail due to agressive spam filters necessitated by cleverer spammers. Consider this analogous to dropping some packets at the network layer. Just as the transport layer handles this problem, we can build a higher level protocol to handle filtered mail.
Note that having a mechanism to handle dropped mail allows us to employ agressive filtering: one that is sure to stop 100% of spam.
What I have in mind is as follows: when Bob receives a mail from Alice (i.e, it has passed through Bob's filter) the client software sends a confirmation mail back to the Alice. This is not a regular mail that the Alice will see in her inbox; it has a special header flag that marks it as a confirmation. Alice's client software keeps track of the confirmation messages; by looking at her "sent-mail" folder she can see which of her messages have not been confirmed (and are hence likely to have been mistaken for spam).
Finding that Bob has filtered her mail, Alice can either re-word it and send it again or do something like (assuming that Bob knows Alice): "Hi Bob, this is me, Alice. Your filter blocked this so I've rot13'd it to get past the filter. rot13 what follows to read my mail." Another option is to encrypt the mail with Bob's public key (assuming that spammers' scripts won't be clever enough to get your public key from your web page). Note that 99% of the time the mail is going to get through. You have to make that little effort to prove you are a human only once in a long while.
There is minor problem with requiring the receiver to send a confirmation message: Bob might check his mail only after a couple of days, during which time Alice may assume that her mail was blocked. There are 2 solutions: either Bob runs a script to filter his mail regularly, or else has his ISP implement his filter for him.
Note that this won't work if you have the receiver send a reply whenever the message did get blocked: the reply could itself get blocked etc. (This is called the red army - blue army problem in networking).
Freenet is an internet infrastructure for completely anonymous communication (its been mentioned on/. before). I imagine it would be an excellent tool for human rights workers. Note that freenet is not tailored for specific content or applications, and so anyone can benefit from it.
If most people (or atleast a majority of people) started using freenet, it would change the internet in a fundamental way: it would be no longer possible to outlaw freenet. I don't see this happening anytime soon, because most people still enjoy freedom of speech. But if there were to arise a global dictator, technology has given us a way to fight back.
On Thu, 6 Mar 2003, Ingo Molnar wrote: > > the whole compilation (gcc tasks) will be rated 'interactive' as well, > because an 'interactive' make process and/or shell process is waiting on > it.
No. The make that is waiting for it will be woken up _once_ - when the thing dies. Marking it interactive at that point is absolutely fine.
> I tried something like this before, and it didnt work.
You can't have tried it very hard.
In fact, you haven't apparently tried it hard enough to even bother giving my patch a look, much less apply it and try it out.
> the xine has been analyzed quite well (which is analogous to the XMMS > problem), it's not X that makes XMMS skip, it's the other CPU-bound tasks > on the desktops that cause it to skip occasionally. Increasing the > priority of xine to just -1 or -2 solves the skipping problem.
Are you _crazy_?
Normal users can't "just increase the priority". You have to be root to do so. And I already told you why it's only hiding the problem.
In short, you're taking a very NT'ish approach - make certain programs run in the "foreground", and give them a static boost because they are magically more important. And you're ignoring the fact that the heuristics we have now are clearly fundamentally broken in certain circumstances.
I've pointed out the circumstances, I've told you why it happens and when it happens, and you've not actually even answered that part. You've only gone "it's not a problem, you can fix it up by renicing every time you find a problem".
Get your head out of the sand, and stop this "nice" blathering.
Linus
OK, maybe not gone wild as in baring their breasts, but certainly gone wild as in no-holds-barred flamage:)
The procedure is experimental, and a lot more research needs to be done before the efficacy of the method can be reliably ascertained. The article lists a number of caveats (see page 2). However, chances are that Bush and his religious right cronies are going to use this to claim that embryonic stem cells are no longer necessary and use it to ban all cloning.
Slashdot Mirror
I was forced to memorize the periodic table when I was in high school.
Not only that, no calculators allowed until you are in university. Every time someone tries to change it, the luddites start screaming that use of calculators harms the students' powers of mental arithmetic and so on.
In the case of the periodic table, though, I'm actually not sure it is completely pointless: the properties of the elements are to a great extent dependent on their position in the table. If you involuntarily "see" an element in its position in the table whenever it is talked about, then you get to correlate its properties to its position much better, and you understand it better.
At least, that's the idea. The question is whether the purported gains are worth the effort.
I'm not sure about the waste of space part. Sure, brain space is finite. However, you remember a zillion important details about your everyday life. The more things you consciously memorize, the faster the useless things are going to get dumped out of your brain. And memorizing more actually makes you better at storing and recalling things. OTOH, this kind of memorization is a huge waste of time, and is hence unjustifiable.BTW, some people might _want_ to memorize completely pointless things by rote for whatever reason. For instance, I memorized 1000 digits of pi :-)
The study says there is no evidence for sexual arousal, but that this could be because the tests were done in a sterile enviroment. Biologically, however, the primary function of pheromones is sexual communication. Here is an article on pheromones in humans and animals. Relevant portion:
I don't know if the Napoleon story is an urban legend and if it is related to the myth that Frenchwomen don't wash.IANAL, but here's a suggestion. Consider what happened in the software world. Lot of people wanted to share their code, but for things really took off only due to the ease of adopting the GPL. In a similar vein, perhaps we should have a well-defined legal framework for artists to release their work into the PD after 5 years, and work towards getting it acceptance among publishers? (Essentially, the legal and technical details should be worked out and implemented by someone else instead of forcing the individual artists to deal with it). Sure the *AA can be counted out, but I can imagine several book publishers and smaller music groups being not averse to the idea. If disney wants to keep the mouse, let them, forget it. Let's do the best we can to ensure that content that is yet to be produced comes with a less draconian copyright.
Some pointers:
1. Piracy funds terrorism
2. Linux violates SCO's IP
3. Linux supports terrorism <---
4. Profit!
There is a lot of scope for MS for spreading FUD. Watch out.
Everybody is talking about IBM buying SCO. What are the chances of Microsoft buying SCO?
Bill's wearable watch: Bill, you've got mail.
Bill: Damn! Couldn't you find a better time?
[Removes watch and flings it away.]
Bill: Ahhh, Traaaaaacyyyyyy......
Tracy's babel fish: No matches found. Did you mean: 1) Trace 2) Tracing 3) Racy
Tracy: Shit!
[Removes babel fish]
Bill remembers just in the nick of time that his goggles are connected to the internet! And he's turned the firewall off, which means that anyone that connects to port 23484 on his goggles can see what he's seeing!!! [Takes goggles off]
Bill starts scratching Tracy's back. Immediately, her intellipen software kicks into action and tries to figure out what he's writing.
[2 hours later]
Bill and tracy are finally done spurning all the advances from their various bluetooth devices, at which point they realize they forgot to switch off the webcam...
Slightly OT: the major league baseball's website http://mlb.com redirects you to "http://mlb.mlb.com/NASApp/mlb/mlb/homepage/mlb_ho mepage.jsp" ! Can you beat that? I've seen this on a web design hall of shame ;^)
Like smalltalk. Early 70s, IIRC. The problem of managing increasing software complexity, which object orientation (partly) solved, became significant only much later.
I don't think 3d enviromnents are an idea whose time has come. Slowness is only part of the problem. We really don't have the software infrastructure to scale UI complexity to those levels. Maybe for special applications, but not as a general UI design paradigm.
Certainly futuristic.The UNIX way of putting applications is well thought out, matured and perfectly fine. Needlessly playing around with it is likely to cause more problems than it solves.
Yes, the package management scene on Linux sucks right now. But it is because of dependency management, and has nothing to do with all the files of an application in a nice folder.
The article notes that one of the major problems is the filtering of genuine mail due to agressive spam filters necessitated by cleverer spammers. Consider this analogous to dropping some packets at the network layer. Just as the transport layer handles this problem, we can build a higher level protocol to handle filtered mail.
Note that having a mechanism to handle dropped mail allows us to employ agressive filtering: one that is sure to stop 100% of spam.
What I have in mind is as follows: when Bob receives a mail from Alice (i.e, it has passed through Bob's filter) the client software sends a confirmation mail back to the Alice. This is not a regular mail that the Alice will see in her inbox; it has a special header flag that marks it as a confirmation. Alice's client software keeps track of the confirmation messages; by looking at her "sent-mail" folder she can see which of her messages have not been confirmed (and are hence likely to have been mistaken for spam).
Finding that Bob has filtered her mail, Alice can either re-word it and send it again or do something like (assuming that Bob knows Alice): "Hi Bob, this is me, Alice. Your filter blocked this so I've rot13'd it to get past the filter. rot13 what follows to read my mail." Another option is to encrypt the mail with Bob's public key (assuming that spammers' scripts won't be clever enough to get your public key from your web page). Note that 99% of the time the mail is going to get through. You have to make that little effort to prove you are a human only once in a long while.
There is minor problem with requiring the receiver to send a confirmation message: Bob might check his mail only after a couple of days, during which time Alice may assume that her mail was blocked. There are 2 solutions: either Bob runs a script to filter his mail regularly, or else has his ISP implement his filter for him.
Note that this won't work if you have the receiver send a reply whenever the message did get blocked: the reply could itself get blocked etc. (This is called the red army - blue army problem in networking).
If most people (or atleast a majority of people) started using freenet, it would change the internet in a fundamental way: it would be no longer possible to outlaw freenet. I don't see this happening anytime soon, because most people still enjoy freedom of speech. But if there were to arise a global dictator, technology has given us a way to fight back.
Don't tell me I'm making an impact on the world by posting on slashdot :)
Here you can see the google hackers at work.
Have you seen http://www.google.com/intl/xx-hacker/?
I understand its fun to think up words for all kinds of things, but "GooCooking"? Couldn't she come up with something in better er.. taste than that?
Well, here is Linus replying to Molnar's post:
OK, maybe not gone wild as in baring their breasts, but certainly gone wild as in no-holds-barred flamageThe procedure is experimental, and a lot more research needs to be done before the efficacy of the method can be reliably ascertained. The article lists a number of caveats (see page 2). However, chances are that Bush and his religious right cronies are going to use this to claim that embryonic stem cells are no longer necessary and use it to ban all cloning.