Re:Correlation between memory and intelligence?
on
The Memory Masters
·
· Score: 1
Ok, I read thru the blurbs on that. I'm going to see if I can find a copy, it looks interesting.
But it's still - from what I read of the reviews - speculation. As nearly everything about the human mind is. Including my post.:) But - and I am in opposition with most current psychological "science" nowadays - I still think that the ability to invent is not a function of memory, but an evolution of it; a top process, if you will. There are many reasons I see it so, including, but not limited to, Newton, Einstein, most (if not all) music (where did the memory associations come from?)....
Anyway, thanks for the thoughtfood. Dropping this to see if I can request it from the library system.
I'll agree with the sentiment about immortal. But not about dosimeters. If she really thought she was, she wouldn't have carried one.
Remember that the real damage from radiation exposure is accumulative, not instantaneous. I don't doubt that she probably took more dosage than was healthy for her, tho. But then that's life. Everyone in any modern society gets exposed to crap that's not good for you. There's no way to avoid it, no way to predict it, and no way to determine how much damage it will do to you, especially when you don't know it's even there.
Still.... brave kid. Nobody has ever said that bravery needed intelligence or (especially) wisdom. That's why the military likes youngsters.
You just do what you feel you have to (or want to). Sigh....ah, well.
Perhaps she felt it was worth the risk. She hasn't said, so who knows.
I'd *love* to visit it. One can gather a real feeling for history in places like that. It's one reason I like to hike, visit old farms, old mines, old places. It's about as close to being field that I can get anymore:(
Wouldn't the lord's prayer be a better example than the Gettysburg Address? I'm not trolling, seriously - how many Americans really remember the G. address vs. the other (for that matter, we could use the pledge of allegiance)
I find it better to use obfuscated random acronym combinations of personal data, for one to make it easier to memorize, but on the security side you can't easily brute force it, it's not a dictionary forceable method); of course, I don't need NSA level protection for my machines, either:)
If I understand your post correctly, 'Simon':) then I agree completely. Often when trying to remember something, it's a related but, um, 'offtopic' piece of knowledge that actually triggers the memory (and sometimes that memory can be completely unconsciously triggered - I'm sure many people have had the experience of having something they were trying to remember surface hours or days later thru a seemingly unrelated association)
Some of the times I've had that happen to me, I've had the leisure to think about where that piece of memory came from, and sometimes I've actually been able to trace back a long string of associations to the original one (like for example a piece of music one knows is familiar, but can't immediately trace back; but then days later you 'remember' that it was similar to another piece you heard years ago but haven't remembered in a long time - similar to deja vu (possibly related?))
It *is* a lot like meta-data - just that the associations to the particular piece of data itself have a long path, so to speak. But in the case you were talking about, there are other associations that lead to other links to data which allow you to rethink the original idea in the first place. I wonder what that says about the efficiency of the human mind.
What you say about deriving the data, or knowing where to find it (ie, how to search for it) is spot on. I don't know, but I'd suspect that it's how many people deal with these days of data overload. I know I often do it that way. "meta linked data" - it makes sense. How many times does one hear "I don't know the answer, but I know who/where/what to find it (ask/at/in).
An example would be someone asking you for a particular piece of equipment, but using a slang term for it you're not familiar with. Pretty common in my line of work. Since you're not familiar with it, you ask them what it's used for, and *bing* you know what they're asking for, or at least where to search for it.
Now this kind of thing probably happens to everyone, but it's usually subconscious. The interesting thing about it is what it says about how the human mind stores info, as you noted. It's almost definitely not a linear process, it's more like a multidimensionally linked search tree.
The most interesting thing about it is observing the process and reverse engineering it:)
That's probably totally obfuscated, and I apologize:) but it made sense to me when I wrote it, and I can't think of a better way to put it *grin*
Meanwhile, the lawyers are ecstatic. No job security there, nossirree bob...
SB
Re:Correlation between memory and intelligence?
on
The Memory Masters
·
· Score: 1
However, if intelligence is memory, then how does one explain invention? If there's no memory of the invention, where does it come from? What is creativity, then? An invention, be it scientific (Galileo), musical (Bach), etc, can be built on previous work (memory) but has a distinctiveness all it's own. Remember that everything we live with today wasn't already defined in the memory of those who first thought it up, it was an entirely new idea (in one person's mind, as Yanni puts it).
It's a tricky definition, and especially as it's commonly used. I prefer to think of intelligence as the ability to think outside the box (reality) and to define new ways of thinking, or to translate old ways into new ways of thinking.
SB
Re:NO, YOU ARE NOT SPECIAL
on
The Memory Masters
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
This is a typical anonymous slashdot troll. The poster is trying to put down someone else's post where that person discovers that his abilities are not unique, as he'd long suspected, but rather are a deep and complex portion of the human experience. I know that the AC was expecting some kind of epiphany to result from this, but basically, he's just putting someone else down because he had no intelligent comment whatsoever to make and nothing to add to the discussion.
Sorry. Mod me flamebait for responding to an Anonymous Coward.
What part of "design, training, and crew quality" did you not understand? What does "foolproof" have to do with it?
Don't lecture me about training. One of my best friends is a plant operator on a missile sub, and we've had many discussions about the training he receives. Some years ago I also knew a couple operators at the Prairie Island plant in Minnesota, and they were cool, dedicated customers who knew what they were doing. You're comparing apples and oranges here.
They are all *very* aware of what kinds of mistakes they could make.
As I've said, in the original post and the responses, I consider the training that the Chernobyl people had to be sub-par - not necessarily because they panicked, but because they allowed the situation to develop in the first place - which, in combination with the bad design, and other factors, caused the whole situation. You might want to read this where it says To prevent the automatic safety systems from interfering with the experiment, the technicians disconnected them, opening the way for a chain of fatal mishaps..
Well trained? So well trained that you disconnect *all* the safety systems to test the design parameters of the turbines?. Yeah, right. Also the very fact that the design of the plant allowed this to lead to the explosion is very well documented.
So tell me, where, in your 'experience', has this occurred in the US? 3MI? Not hardly. At 3MI the safety systems worked as they were designed to. THE MAIN DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CHERNOBYL AND 3MI WAS THAT THE OPERATORS HADN'T DISCONNECTED THEM. At 3MI, the emergency cooling system was even disconnected, yet the other safety systems kept a major catastrophe from happening.
More modern reactor systems *are* failsafe by design. Yes, there are ways to build them so, that bypass operator error. You need to go do some research.
Whoa, dude. The Fonda comment was a joke (yeah, I agree she is/was a nut, but back in the 70s, she was pretty good looking - tho I doubt you're old enough to remember).
MANY documentarys on that acident
Then say "documentaries" instead of "movies".
Did you know that the operators were actually trained to...
Well, some of that is hyperbole, and some isn't. See my other posts to this thread for my opinion about their training, anyway.
This was just a BAD freeking design.
Yes.
MY whole point was that when you factor in all the costs and risks, it's a damned sight better than what we have now, and that the only reason that nuclear power plant construction has been sidelined is because of (mostly) ungrounded fears - in the US! - about their safety. Do some research on how many people have died in conventional plants here vs. how many have died in nuclear plant accidents, and look particularly at the statistics involving civilians who weren't employed at the plant.
Sure, people should be concerned. That's why we have the training and safety regulations involving nuclear power - which, here in the US (and other countries such as France) have worked precisely as they were intended to. That's why I made my first point in the original post about the fuckups that happened at Chernobyl. Bear in mind that the US military has operated many, many reactors for many decades without a single serious accident. Design, training, people quality. It makes a difference.
Waste disposal is a solvable problem, if we could subtract NIMBY, which, as I pointed out, is a much worse problem when it's spread all over the place rather than being in one place where it can be dealt with using less money and fewer resources such as trained people. I'll grant that transportation is a problem, but it's a solvable one nonetheless, being an engineering problem.
Cancer: How many people die of cancer from conventional power plants emissions (smog, etc - why do you think there are EPA emissions regulations anyway?) vs. cancer from radiation? Go do some research. I think the results will surprise you.
As to power bills, I've lived in areas that had conventional plants, and areas that had nuclear plants. The bills in the nuclear plant supplied areas were consistently lower (and considering that my electricity use was mostly higher in those areas - more computers - they were *considerably* lower; there were also fewer blackouts - which I ascribe to better personnel and components in the system).
In your "cost analysis" you're not including the cost of fuel and fuel transport for conventional plants - which is much greater than that of nuclear plants - plus it takes more people on the average to run a conventional plant; they may not be as highly paid as 'nuke' employees, but there are a lot more of them.
I think you need to go do some serious research. Bear in mind that I've been reading and thinking on these issues since before 3MI. I could refute you with a lot more facts, and links, but this isn't the forum to do it in; and in any case, what I've already done is a waste of my time, because you are approaching this issue from an emotional standpoint, and will probably not change your mind anyway.
Oh, and yes, I've seen people die of cancer. Most of my relatives on both sides have died of cancer. Not a single one of them, save maybe one (who was a army grunt and witnessed several nuclear tests in the 50s) was ever exposed to high levels of radiation. Two of them died of cancer induced from coal mining. Think about that. Here's another hint - power plants are *NOT* an enclosed system (you seem to apply that to nuclear plants but not to conventional plants, which have a much higher overall environmental and social cost)
On another note, there's a reason I put "/rant" at the end of my post....but that seems to have been lost on you, and others (including the idiot moderator (singular) who modded my post.
SB
Re:7 is the number, and the number is 7, not 8 nor
on
The Memory Masters
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Fascinating.
How does that relate to visually counting items? I'm not a savant, but where I work I've had/developed an ability to count large numbers of items by what I could call the "two sets of five" method; if I'm doing inventory I can count items, without actually sorting them, by the ten - I 'see' two sets of five, the next two sets of five, etc - brain processes 10 10 10 10 5 1 = 46 - enter it in the Telzon and next batch (yes, I do inventory control, but it pays well:) especially if you have methods that allow speed and accuracy and you grok computers.) It's not a conscious process - more like a overlaid visual on my sight field that mentally 'marks' the objects as they're counted. Hard to describe but very real to me.
As long as I can remember I've tended to mentally sort numbers, objects, etc that way. It's different with counting letters in a sentence (there I do it in groups of four, almost like a chanted cadence in my head); numbers I tend to do like you describe but in groups of five. Now as I sit here and type this I see the process of sorting my sentences out in groups the same way before they're typed.
Wow. I've wondered about this for years but never did any actual research on it. For me I find that the way I'm memorizing depends on what I'm memorizing - like I said above, it's different for different applications, but they all share the same core process.
Neat to see that I'm not insane:) Heh. My circulation manager when I was a paperboy a bazillion years ago always thought I was weird because I could count the rolled papers in the bundle in just a few seconds... well, he can bite me:)
Does this qualify as reverse engineering of the brain, and can I be sued by God under the DMCA for it? *grin*
I'd read bits and pieces of this theory over the last couple decades, but never saw any kind of coherent whole.
It's fascinating, and quite plausible, especially when you consider how rapidly the hugely widespread fires took place. I live in an area that experiences annual forest fires, and it's just not plausible that a simple localized fire could have started the whole Chicago area conflagaration. Not even California fires spread that fast.
(from article)
it also would explain the cause of the fires blazing north of Chicago, which wiped out 2,000 people and burned 4 million acres of farm and prairie lands.
and
In all, over a 24-hour period, an area of land the size of Connecticut was burned
His explanation makes a lot of sense to me. Hats off to Mr. Wood, this is brilliant. (danged puns!:)
I'd love to see his orbital analysis. Anyone know if it's available on the web? A search didn't reveal anything (probably just me not knowing what to ask)
SB PS- Didn't Astronomy magazine do an article on this once? Or was it S&T?
Oh, I don't know. I don't think that our people here in the US are perfect, yet we've had no serious accidents on our submarines/surface ships/power plants. It has to be combination of design, training, and crew quality, wouldn't you think? I don't think we can ascribe it to an act of god, or to luck.
It's also fairly well-known that Russian reactors tended to be pretty shoddy designs. Please note that Chernobyl was not the first reactor accident the Russians ever had (tho by far the worst); and tell me again how many lives have been lost in the US to reactor accidents?
I'm not saying it isn't impossible here; there isn't such a word. But I think it's pretty damned unlikely we'll ever have an accident like Chernobyl.
I don't recall claiming anywhere that I was better.
But I have to doubt the efficacy of the training of a nuclear power plant crew who deliberately disable *all* of the emergency cooling. I, too, have heard that they were highly trained. Well, perhaps it was a fault in their training, then? Because what they did was just plain stupid (and they paid for it with their lives, too). So how else would you explain it? Human error? That's about as much human error as me deliberately pouring gasoline on the floor of my garage and setting a lit candle in it, then watching.
Yup, people make mistakes, in the US and everywhere else, too. But Chernobyl sounds almost like they set out to deliberately make the disaster worse right from the beginning. If that was good training, I'd shudder to think of what *poor* plant operations training in the USSR was like.
But I should have gone to bed. Damn working weekends...now I'm awake again. Sigh. Ah, well 6AM comes soon...and like always, one pays for one's slashdot habit.
I won't even discuss idiot moderations. OT, you know.:)
If you feel about it so strongly as to mod me flamebait (I never use that mod option) than reply to my post, and refute me. Otherwise save your mod points and mod someone else up.
The vernacular is/was (snirk) "leathers" and yeah, it's really smart to wear them - if you lay your bike down, a good set of leathers will keep you from losing skin (to a point, eh:)
That said, it's part of the risk you take, not wearing them. Hell, riding a bike is what most, ehem, "sane" people would call a huge risk. It is. It's also a skill demo, to coin a phrase.
For a lot of us, we call it just riding. It's not the kick of defying death, it's not the thrill of risking spending time in the hospital regenerating tissue (been there)...it's just knowing, like mountain climbers and many others, that there's a thin skin between you and death (or serious injury).
It's for the freedom of doing what you want to do. It is what it is. One can't adequately describe it unless you've been there.
I'm 37, yet I still take risks. It makes me feel alive. I climb vertical rock faces with no other equipment than my feet and hands. It's not the rush, it's the satisfaction of knowing you can do it - meeting the challenge.
There is simply no way to explain that to people who haven't dreamed of or done it. It's like trying to talk to a different species. Not flaming you - it's just what it is.
Ditto. There are a number of great books describing exactly what happened. (It's amazing how much info never made the mainstream press even in the years following, even here in the West)
IMHO, they should be required reading in any engineering classes ( or, perhaps, in any and all high school classes) but the latter is not likely to happen..
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, I read thru the blurbs on that. I'm going to see if I can find a copy, it looks interesting.
But it's still - from what I read of the reviews - speculation. As nearly everything about the human mind is. Including my post.
Anyway, thanks for the thoughtfood. Dropping this to see if I can request it from the library system.
Cheers, thx
SB
Yeah :) I remember, vaguely, 25 - 13 yrs ago now.
:(
I'll agree with the sentiment about immortal. But not about dosimeters. If she really thought she was, she wouldn't have carried one.
Remember that the real damage from radiation exposure is accumulative, not instantaneous. I don't doubt that she probably took more dosage than was healthy for her, tho. But then that's life. Everyone in any modern society gets exposed to crap that's not good for you. There's no way to avoid it, no way to predict it, and no way to determine how much damage it will do to you, especially when you don't know it's even there.
Still.... brave kid. Nobody has ever said that bravery needed intelligence or (especially) wisdom. That's why the military likes youngsters.
You just do what you feel you have to (or want to). Sigh....ah, well.
Perhaps she felt it was worth the risk. She hasn't said, so who knows.
I'd *love* to visit it. One can gather a real feeling for history in places like that. It's one reason I like to hike, visit old farms, old mines, old places. It's about as close to being field that I can get anymore
Cheers, instarx
SB
I find it better to use obfuscated random acronym combinations of personal data, for one to make it easier to memorize, but on the security side you can't easily brute force it, it's not a dictionary forceable method); of course, I don't need NSA level protection for my machines, either
SB
Johnny? :)
SB
If I understand your post correctly, 'Simon' :) then I agree completely. Often when trying to remember something, it's a related but, um, 'offtopic' piece of knowledge that actually triggers the memory (and sometimes that memory can be completely unconsciously triggered - I'm sure many people have had the experience of having something they were trying to remember surface hours or days later thru a seemingly unrelated association)
:)
:) but it made sense to me when I wrote it, and I can't think of a better way to put it *grin*
Some of the times I've had that happen to me, I've had the leisure to think about where that piece of memory came from, and sometimes I've actually been able to trace back a long string of associations to the original one (like for example a piece of music one knows is familiar, but can't immediately trace back; but then days later you 'remember' that it was similar to another piece you heard years ago but haven't remembered in a long time - similar to deja vu (possibly related?))
It *is* a lot like meta-data - just that the associations to the particular piece of data itself have a long path, so to speak. But in the case you were talking about, there are other associations that lead to other links to data which allow you to rethink the original idea in the first place. I wonder what that says about the efficiency of the human mind.
What you say about deriving the data, or knowing where to find it (ie, how to search for it) is spot on. I don't know, but I'd suspect that it's how many people deal with these days of data overload. I know I often do it that way. "meta linked data" - it makes sense. How many times does one hear "I don't know the answer, but I know who/where/what to find it (ask/at/in).
An example would be someone asking you for a particular piece of equipment, but using a slang term for it you're not familiar with. Pretty common in my line of work. Since you're not familiar with it, you ask them what it's used for, and *bing* you know what they're asking for, or at least where to search for it.
Now this kind of thing probably happens to everyone, but it's usually subconscious. The interesting thing about it is what it says about how the human mind stores info, as you noted. It's almost definitely not a linear process, it's more like a multidimensionally linked search tree.
The most interesting thing about it is observing the process and reverse engineering it
That's probably totally obfuscated, and I apologize
SB
Mod parent up. That's how it happened in the book.
Also, technically the 'cave troll' was not of the same species as the trolls in the hobbit. Distant (modified?) cousin, maybe.
Yeah, it's a technical point, but such is my understanding of the story. Maybe we should have a seance and as JR
SB
Well, one would have nice toilet doilies, and the other would have a working toilet. Which one would *you* rather be in? :)
sorry, I hadda do it
SB
Argh.
Meanwhile, the lawyers are ecstatic. No job security there, nossirree bob...
SB
However, if intelligence is memory, then how does one explain invention? If there's no memory of the invention, where does it come from? What is creativity, then? An invention, be it scientific (Galileo), musical (Bach), etc, can be built on previous work (memory) but has a distinctiveness all it's own. Remember that everything we live with today wasn't already defined in the memory of those who first thought it up, it was an entirely new idea (in one person's mind, as Yanni puts it).
It's a tricky definition, and especially as it's commonly used. I prefer to think of intelligence as the ability to think outside the box (reality) and to define new ways of thinking, or to translate old ways into new ways of thinking.
SB
This is a typical anonymous slashdot troll. The poster is trying to put down someone else's post where that person discovers that his abilities are not unique, as he'd long suspected, but rather are a deep and complex portion of the human experience. I know that the AC was expecting some kind of epiphany to result from this, but basically, he's just putting someone else down because he had no intelligent comment whatsoever to make and nothing to add to the discussion.
Sorry. Mod me flamebait for responding to an Anonymous Coward.
SB
What part of "design, training, and crew quality" did you not understand? What does "foolproof" have to do with it?
Don't lecture me about training. One of my best friends is a plant operator on a missile sub, and we've had many discussions about the training he receives. Some years ago I also knew a couple operators at the Prairie Island plant in Minnesota, and they were cool, dedicated customers who knew what they were doing. You're comparing apples and oranges here.
They are all *very* aware of what kinds of mistakes they could make.
As I've said, in the original post and the responses, I consider the training that the Chernobyl people had to be sub-par - not necessarily because they panicked, but because they allowed the situation to develop in the first place - which, in combination with the bad design, and other factors, caused the whole situation. You might want to read this where it says To prevent the automatic safety systems from interfering with the experiment, the technicians disconnected them, opening the way for a chain of fatal mishaps..
Well trained? So well trained that you disconnect *all* the safety systems to test the design parameters of the turbines?. Yeah, right. Also the very fact that the design of the plant allowed this to lead to the explosion is very well documented.
So tell me, where, in your 'experience', has this occurred in the US? 3MI? Not hardly. At 3MI the safety systems worked as they were designed to. THE MAIN DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CHERNOBYL AND 3MI WAS THAT THE OPERATORS HADN'T DISCONNECTED THEM. At 3MI, the emergency cooling system was even disconnected, yet the other safety systems kept a major catastrophe from happening.
More modern reactor systems *are* failsafe by design. Yes, there are ways to build them so, that bypass operator error. You need to go do some research.
Ignorant asshole.
I'm done with this conversation.
SB
Whoa, dude. The Fonda comment was a joke (yeah, I agree she is/was a nut, but back in the 70s, she was pretty good looking - tho I doubt you're old enough to remember).
MANY documentarys on that acident
Then say "documentaries" instead of "movies".
Did you know that the operators were actually trained to...
Well, some of that is hyperbole, and some isn't. See my other posts to this thread for my opinion about their training, anyway.
This was just a BAD freeking design.
Yes.
MY whole point was that when you factor in all the costs and risks, it's a damned sight better than what we have now, and that the only reason that nuclear power plant construction has been sidelined is because of (mostly) ungrounded fears - in the US! - about their safety. Do some research on how many people have died in conventional plants here vs. how many have died in nuclear plant accidents, and look particularly at the statistics involving civilians who weren't employed at the plant.
Sure, people should be concerned. That's why we have the training and safety regulations involving nuclear power - which, here in the US (and other countries such as France) have worked precisely as they were intended to. That's why I made my first point in the original post about the fuckups that happened at Chernobyl. Bear in mind that the US military has operated many, many reactors for many decades without a single serious accident. Design, training, people quality. It makes a difference.
Waste disposal is a solvable problem, if we could subtract NIMBY, which, as I pointed out, is a much worse problem when it's spread all over the place rather than being in one place where it can be dealt with using less money and fewer resources such as trained people. I'll grant that transportation is a problem, but it's a solvable one nonetheless, being an engineering problem.
Cancer: How many people die of cancer from conventional power plants emissions (smog, etc - why do you think there are EPA emissions regulations anyway?) vs. cancer from radiation? Go do some research. I think the results will surprise you.
As to power bills, I've lived in areas that had conventional plants, and areas that had nuclear plants. The bills in the nuclear plant supplied areas were consistently lower (and considering that my electricity use was mostly higher in those areas - more computers - they were *considerably* lower; there were also fewer blackouts - which I ascribe to better personnel and components in the system).
In your "cost analysis" you're not including the cost of fuel and fuel transport for conventional plants - which is much greater than that of nuclear plants - plus it takes more people on the average to run a conventional plant; they may not be as highly paid as 'nuke' employees, but there are a lot more of them.
I think you need to go do some serious research. Bear in mind that I've been reading and thinking on these issues since before 3MI. I could refute you with a lot more facts, and links, but this isn't the forum to do it in; and in any case, what I've already done is a waste of my time, because you are approaching this issue from an emotional standpoint, and will probably not change your mind anyway.
Oh, and yes, I've seen people die of cancer. Most of my relatives on both sides have died of cancer. Not a single one of them, save maybe one (who was a army grunt and witnessed several nuclear tests in the 50s) was ever exposed to high levels of radiation. Two of them died of cancer induced from coal mining. Think about that. Here's another hint - power plants are *NOT* an enclosed system (you seem to apply that to nuclear plants but not to conventional plants, which have a much higher overall environmental and social cost)
On another note, there's a reason I put "/rant" at the end of my post....but that seems to have been lost on you, and others (including the idiot moderator (singular) who modded my post.
SB
Fascinating.
:) especially if you have methods that allow speed and accuracy and you grok computers.) It's not a conscious process - more like a overlaid visual on my sight field that mentally 'marks' the objects as they're counted. Hard to describe but very real to me.
:) Heh. My circulation manager when I was a paperboy a bazillion years ago always thought I was weird because I could count the rolled papers in the bundle in just a few seconds... well, he can bite me :)
How does that relate to visually counting items? I'm not a savant, but where I work I've had/developed an ability to count large numbers of items by what I could call the "two sets of five" method; if I'm doing inventory I can count items, without actually sorting them, by the ten - I 'see' two sets of five, the next two sets of five, etc - brain processes 10 10 10 10 5 1 = 46 - enter it in the Telzon and next batch (yes, I do inventory control, but it pays well
As long as I can remember I've tended to mentally sort numbers, objects, etc that way. It's different with counting letters in a sentence (there I do it in groups of four, almost like a chanted cadence in my head); numbers I tend to do like you describe but in groups of five. Now as I sit here and type this I see the process of sorting my sentences out in groups the same way before they're typed.
Wow. I've wondered about this for years but never did any actual research on it. For me I find that the way I'm memorizing depends on what I'm memorizing - like I said above, it's different for different applications, but they all share the same core process.
Neat to see that I'm not insane
Does this qualify as reverse engineering of the brain, and can I be sued by God under the DMCA for it? *grin*
SB
I'd read bits and pieces of this theory over the last couple decades, but never saw any kind of coherent whole.
:)
It's fascinating, and quite plausible, especially when you consider how rapidly the hugely widespread fires took place. I live in an area that experiences annual forest fires, and it's just not plausible that a simple localized fire could have started the whole Chicago area conflagaration. Not even California fires spread that fast.
(from article)
it also would explain the cause of the fires blazing north of Chicago, which wiped out 2,000 people and burned 4 million acres of farm and prairie lands.
and
In all, over a 24-hour period, an area of land the size of Connecticut was burned
His explanation makes a lot of sense to me. Hats off to Mr. Wood, this is brilliant. (danged puns!
I'd love to see his orbital analysis. Anyone know if it's available on the web? A search didn't reveal anything (probably just me not knowing what to ask)
SB
PS- Didn't Astronomy magazine do an article on this once? Or was it S&T?
More likely that they never learned to hate, therefore did not require a word that meant the opposite; love simply 'was'.
Too bad JRR isn't around to ask about that
SB
Oh, I don't know. I don't think that our people here in the US are perfect, yet we've had no serious accidents on our submarines/surface ships/power plants. It has to be combination of design, training, and crew quality, wouldn't you think? I don't think we can ascribe it to an act of god, or to luck.
It's also fairly well-known that Russian reactors tended to be pretty shoddy designs. Please note that Chernobyl was not the first reactor accident the Russians ever had (tho by far the worst); and tell me again how many lives have been lost in the US to reactor accidents?
I'm not saying it isn't impossible here; there isn't such a word. But I think it's pretty damned unlikely we'll ever have an accident like Chernobyl.
I'm off to work...
SB
I don't recall claiming anywhere that I was better.
But I have to doubt the efficacy of the training of a nuclear power plant crew who deliberately disable *all* of the emergency cooling. I, too, have heard that they were highly trained. Well, perhaps it was a fault in their training, then? Because what they did was just plain stupid (and they paid for it with their lives, too). So how else would you explain it? Human error? That's about as much human error as me deliberately pouring gasoline on the floor of my garage and setting a lit candle in it, then watching.
Yup, people make mistakes, in the US and everywhere else, too. But Chernobyl sounds almost like they set out to deliberately make the disaster worse right from the beginning. If that was good training, I'd shudder to think of what *poor* plant operations training in the USSR was like.
SB
Have watched MANY shows on it.
Yeah, Jane Fonda was kind of cute. Cast iron bitch, and stupid enough to be controlled by the latest media blitz, but cute.
She was also a halfway decent actress, but I don't see what that has to do with anything.
SB
Ow.
When I was in junior high, 3MI was news
Not that it had anything to do with touch typing, we did boring exercise lessons jklfdsamnbvcxzqwertoiy for example
SB
Some are, some aren't. If you need to check, carry a gom jabbar
:)
:)
;)
:)
Heh.
You made my friends list for that one. That's at least a double pun, on 2-3 levels of truth, even if it's not a physical gom jabbar
Proces verbal....
Hell, I'm just a hardware monkey, amateur astro...but it's pretty clear
Danke!
SB
It doesn't bother me now, either :)
:)
But I should have gone to bed. Damn working weekends...now I'm awake again. Sigh. Ah, well 6AM comes soon...and like always, one pays for one's slashdot habit.
I won't even discuss idiot moderations. OT, you know.
SB
To the moderator who modded me flamebait:
Bite my corroded metal ass, kiddo.
If you feel about it so strongly as to mod me flamebait (I never use that mod option) than reply to my post, and refute me. Otherwise save your mod points and mod someone else up.
*disgusted*
SB
SuperBanana;
:)
:)
The vernacular is/was (snirk) "leathers" and yeah, it's really smart to wear them - if you lay your bike down, a good set of leathers will keep you from losing skin (to a point, eh
That said, it's part of the risk you take, not wearing them. Hell, riding a bike is what most, ehem, "sane" people would call a huge risk. It is. It's also a skill demo, to coin a phrase.
For a lot of us, we call it just riding. It's not the kick of defying death, it's not the thrill of risking spending time in the hospital regenerating tissue (been there)...it's just knowing, like mountain climbers and many others, that there's a thin skin between you and death (or serious injury).
It's for the freedom of doing what you want to do. It is what it is. One can't adequately describe it unless you've been there.
I'm 37, yet I still take risks. It makes me feel alive. I climb vertical rock faces with no other equipment than my feet and hands. It's not the rush, it's the satisfaction of knowing you can do it - meeting the challenge.
There is simply no way to explain that to people who haven't dreamed of or done it. It's like trying to talk to a different species. Not flaming you - it's just what it is.
Argh!
SB
Yeah, amen.
That is one brave girl. Smart, too, to have a dosimeter along.
SB
Ditto. There are a number of great books describing exactly what happened. (It's amazing how much info never made the mainstream press even in the years following, even here in the West)
IMHO, they should be required reading in any engineering classes ( or, perhaps, in any and all high school classes) but the latter is not likely to happen..
SB