Nerves work by a feedback loop, and as you say, the tolerance rises. Frogs don't have the bit that says "wait a minute, its been getting hotter for quite a while now" - while we realise that if something gets hotter for an extended period of time, at the end its going to be considerably warmer than at the start.
Frogs are cold-blooded, and so they don't have a measuring stick to compare temperature. We can tell water is boiling by comparing it to out core temperature - forgs can't - as the water increases in temperature, the frogs core temperature does too. Frogs can't detect specific temperatures (nor can we, but we're certainly better at it), only changes in temperature.
Oh and your cricket thing. Water is never hotter than 100C. Fat can get to much higher temperatures. I don't think it would be true to say boiling water, because the frog would likely be dead from sitting in water at 50C, let alone 100 - hot water would be good enough.
If base 16 or 8 is more efficient, prove it. If you cannot just shut up and switch
Feet and inches are certainly better suited to efficient everyday use.
See here for an Australian account of why imperial units are better for day-today use. See here for a Dutch one.
The Imperial system is reproduceable.
The metric systems premise is to be based on the length of the arc from the north pole to the equator (1 metre = 10^-7 of the length of the arc) Only trouble is that the arc isn't uniform OR constant. And their measurements were off by 30 metres. Try and reproduce the metric system, and you might have some trouble.
How would you feel if I insisted that you speak English, under pain of a fine or a prison sentence for non-compliance?
Oh, and while you're thinking about that, try and measure out 1/3 of a metre.
security boar... - Is that like a guard dog? £100 fine. evoluting - Now at least the last one was amusing, but this isn't even a word : £500 fine.
Referring back to the guy who was prosecuted for selling bananas by the pound, he was prosecuted on the idea that the 1972 European Communities act overrules the 1985 Weights and measures act. How can a law be overruled by one 13 years its predecessor? Surely then the 1972 EC act is countermanded by the 1963 weights and measures act?
Metrication has been forced on the UK population without any consent - the metric system has in this way set itself up as the enemy of democracy. The only argument for exclusive metrication is a unified international system. When I go to a metric pub, I could ask for a half-litre/500ml of beer. Or I could ask for a pint, and get less than a pint. Or I could come up with a word which means "half-litre". But that wouldn't fit in with the standardized system, would it?
If efficiency is your goal, and you'll never reach it worshipping the metric system, then why not make language more efficient. Get rid of unnecessary verbs - you only ever need to say "more" or "less" "something". We'll use plus and minus, shall we? So "very stupid" becomes plusstupid, "extremely stupid" becomes double-plus-stupid etc. Now we can rid ourselves of the those nasty, inefficient antonyms, through negation. So double-plus-clever becomes double-plus-un-stupid. And we can get rid of synonyms too - how many different ways do you need to say the same thing? "Stupid" has in excess of a dozen (hehe) synonyms - out they go - we don't need them. Likewise "clever".
So the word-phrase "double-plus-un-stupid" covers what normal English could have an inefficient 144+ phrases for ("extremely" has ~12 synonyms, as does "clever") Remove the "un" and you've covered the same number of opposite phrases. We can take out unnecessary and inefficient qualifiers such as pronouns and conjunctions too. I'm going to go with my mate Orwell here and call this Double-talk. Why not take it further? "double" is such an inefficient way of saying "double" after all - why not replace it with a particular syllable - say "oo". We can leave "un" as it is - its quite efficient. "Stupid" has two syllables - we'll make that "stoo" to make it more efficient. So we've managed to get "extremely clever" to the syllables "oounstoo".
Thought apes stupid - plusunright. Apetalk doublepluseffective.
I blame metrication for falling mathematics ability in young 'uns. Anybody can count on their fingers...but it takes thought to count in 16's,20's,8's, etc.etc.
Metrication led to the removal of base math from the curriculum, and therefore led to dumbing down. The problem is that once the kids stop thinking, they lose interest, so ability falls even further, which leads to the government lowering standards to try and make the results look better, which leads to even more kids losing interest.
Then you have the ridiculous case of the english greengrocer who was fined for selling bananas by the pound. OK, fair enough, the Europeans who visit England might not want to have to learn Imperial units for when they holiday in the UK, but what about the aging population IN BRITAIN who have used Imperial uinits all their life and end up buying too much/too little of something because they aren't used to the system? Yes they can learn metric units, but why the hell should they have to?
Then you gave the companies who are making money by making their pound tins of food weigh 400g for the same price, cheating everyone out of 2oz of produce. Might not sound like much, but every 8 cans that are sold at 400 grams makes another can to be sold. You have to buy 8 cans to get what you used to get in 7.
Heh, and you would have missed out on all the gold that subsequent expeditions returned. We thought riding our little dot com bubble was fun... Spain had a dot com bubble that lasted 100 years, of course, it too burst
Yes, but his logic still stands - Columbus predicted that he would be able to sail to India by travelling west. He was wrong. He found the Americas (which are on maps predating Columbus) and then all the gold started flowing. He was lucky. If the Americas hadn't been there, he would have starved to death befre he reached India, and there would have been no (monetary) return.
Why is holding onto one set of units or another isolationist? Is it not just that others want to impress there systems onto others?
No I'm not American, I just don't see why everybody should be forced to use metric measurements.
D2O has the same chemical properties as H2O, excepting mass, so he should survive quite well - although if shrimp are 70% water, as we are (I think it'd probably be higher) they'd gain weight pretty rapidly.
I don't think its a UK phenomenon either. UGC cinemas tend to have 12-20 medium sized screens, with maybe one large one (I'm talking in general here, not the London West End UGCs). Whereas UCI's, when they were in their hey-day in the 80's would have at most 10-12 screens the size of the large one in most UGCs. This follows exactly the trend described in the other post.
Plus it makes for a better viewing experience. If you're near the edge of the cinema, you aren't deafened by the sound that is at a ludicrous volume so that thos at the middle can hear, and if you're near the front you can still see the whole of the screen, rather than the 1/3 - 1/2 you used to be able to see.
I was about to offer point 2 myself - I would imagine that they are going to automate the process of renaming the various identifiers in the code, and I would have no problem with calling that compiling, and therefore the result would not be source (source == where you start from, not a checkpoitn on the way). Trying to argue that automatically changing code outputs source is like trying to say that compiler outputs source, and would lead to the logical conclusion that if I rename a binary, I can claim it as my own.
Re:Seems to me the bytecode is not the "source cod
on
Abusing the GPL?
·
· Score: 1
They're not going to release bytecode, but a garbage source that produces the same bytecode.
But you have a good point - proving to a judge with no programming experience that the obviously obfuscated code is in fact code might be a hurdle. I wonder if compiling it and running it would be proof enough?
Re:Obfuscated source code is not GPLable.....
on
Abusing the GPL?
·
· Score: 1
In that case the table becomes part of the preferred form of the source.
I don't mean to be pedantic, but Farnsworth didn't invent TV - he invented a non-mechanical method of scanning. Television had been around before Farnsworth was born.
I don't think so (although I'd like to) - I don't think there's sufficient deuterium content in seawater. (Of course, the shrimp could have a mechanism for harvesting heavy water, but that is getting a bit fantastic.)
but it's hard to dismiss the historical animus towards homosexuality in almost every culture (I'm sure there are exceptions to this)
How about ancient Greece, where Plato, one of the fathers of all that we hold to be good philosophy, had entire dialogues on why it was a good thing?
You claim that morality has no place here, yet you use the word defect - which in itself means falling short of perfection. Who defines perfection? As the saying goes, nobody's perfect, so I guess we're going to be selecting out 100% of the embryos. That seems to me to be more detrimental to the continuance of the species than homosexuality.
PS - Was your use of the word animus a play on words or was it not that clever?
"First, isn't it just easier to use an electric heater to melt ice?"
Using the electric heater, you end up getting water running down the windscreen, and it takes an age - plus as soon as you stop heating the windscreen, all that water that still exists as a film on the screen will re-freeze. Using this method, the ice just jumps off the screen almost instantaneously, without melting, and leaving your windscreen (relatively) dry, and so it will not refreeze.
"Also, when the H2 and O2 ignite, wont the explosion send shards of ice flying?"
Since the layer of gas is very thin, it should only be enough to "pop" the ice off the glass due to the expansion of the ignited gas. I don't think there would be any explosion - the shedding effect would be due to the gas expanding, not igniting. Watching it happen would be like the ice just falling off the screen, as the bonds between the two surfaces are broken.
Nobody can know what will happen, because we don't know all the facts. They can't know what affect wiping out tsetse will have, because they haven't done it yet, and any predictions can only be based on parts of the truth. Remember the catch-phrase "The tiniest change in initial conditions can lead to massively significant changes outcome"? Well, population dynamics, like a lot of other things, is covered by this. Do you honestly think that the parties involved have considered every possible scenario? They can't because they don't know the exact details, and even if they did, the existence of emergent phenomena in population dynamics means that they would have to run a perfect simulation in order to see the result. Guess what, perfect simulations don't exist, and a best guess is of absolutely no use either.
Returning to smallpox, saying that no cases have been reported does not mean that the virus no longer exists in nature, or indeed, that there have been no cases. Also, the vaccination program that led to the decline of smallpox caused debilitating illness and death in and of itself. The scientists didn't predict that.
Don't get me wrong, I think that anything that can alleviate suffering and poverty in the third world is worth considering, but forcing the extinction of an organism can not be considered a viable option.
Secondly, comparing flies to virii is ridiculous - nothing depends on a virus as its foodsource. Removing the entire popultaion of tsetse flies not only might result in an affect on populations of other insects, their foodsources, and species that feed on them, but it will. You can't expect to remove a huge population from an ecosystem, and then expect the ecosystem to carry on as if nothing has happened. Remove the tsetse and something will immmediately expand to take its place - and that something may be the mosquito, causing a rise in malaria, or it may be something unforeseen.
The fact is that we just don't know what will happen if we do this, and applying half-knowledge to a problem can only make it worse. On the one hand, you have the eradication of the species. On another, you have a failure, where the flies that are left will just breed and repopulate - note that these will be the flies that have a natural resistance to pesticide, and so the entire population will now have a resistance to pesticide, removing that option for the future.
This action would be wholly irresponsible - saving human lives is a noble and laudable goal, but the end does not justify the means.
I'm not sure I believe you - high CO2 levels could just mean your car ventilation is set to recirc. You could give a defence that you had been breathing into a paper bag just before tested.
According to this site, alcohol is used by all the devices used (in the state of Arizona anyway).
I have reservations about the first device listed (breathalyzer), because the use of acidified dichromate can also show a positive result for ketones present in the breath of diabetics, which is why, I assume, blood tests are required (in the UK) for use in court.
I saw an article not so long ago (can't remember where, sorry) about a plastic that could be used to generate electricity through bending - put a layer in the sole of your shoe, and the normal bending force that goes to heating the sole actually does something useful. The article also suggested using a form of it as underlay, so every time you walk across a room, you're generating electricity.
Slashdot Mirror
Frogs are cold-blooded, and so they don't have a measuring stick to compare temperature. We can tell water is boiling by comparing it to out core temperature - forgs can't - as the water increases in temperature, the frogs core temperature does too. Frogs can't detect specific temperatures (nor can we, but we're certainly better at it), only changes in temperature.
Oh and your cricket thing. Water is never hotter than 100C. Fat can get to much higher temperatures. I don't think it would be true to say boiling water, because the frog would likely be dead from sitting in water at 50C, let alone 100 - hot water would be good enough.
Feet and inches are certainly better suited to efficient everyday use.
See here for an Australian account of why imperial units are better for day-today use.
See here for a Dutch one.
The Imperial system is reproduceable.
The metric systems premise is to be based on the length of the arc from the north pole to the equator (1 metre = 10^-7 of the length of the arc) Only trouble is that the arc isn't uniform OR constant. And their measurements were off by 30 metres. Try and reproduce the metric system, and you might have some trouble.
How would you feel if I insisted that you speak English, under pain of a fine or a prison sentence for non-compliance?
Oh, and while you're thinking about that, try and measure out 1/3 of a metre.
security boar... - Is that like a guard dog? £100 fine.
evoluting - Now at least the last one was amusing, but this isn't even a word : £500 fine.
Referring back to the guy who was prosecuted for selling bananas by the pound, he was prosecuted on the idea that the 1972 European Communities act overrules the 1985 Weights and measures act. How can a law be overruled by one 13 years its predecessor? Surely then the 1972 EC act is countermanded by the 1963 weights and measures act?
Metrication has been forced on the UK population without any consent - the metric system has in this way set itself up as the enemy of democracy.
The only argument for exclusive metrication is a unified international system. When I go to a metric pub, I could ask for a half-litre/500ml of beer. Or I could ask for a pint, and get less than a pint. Or I could come up with a word which means "half-litre". But that wouldn't fit in with the standardized system, would it?
If efficiency is your goal, and you'll never reach it worshipping the metric system, then why not make language more efficient. Get rid of unnecessary verbs - you only ever need to say "more" or "less" "something". We'll use plus and minus, shall we? So "very stupid" becomes plusstupid, "extremely stupid" becomes double-plus-stupid etc. Now we can rid ourselves of the those nasty, inefficient antonyms, through negation. So double-plus-clever becomes double-plus-un-stupid. And we can get rid of synonyms too - how many different ways do you need to say the same thing? "Stupid" has in excess of a dozen (hehe) synonyms - out they go - we don't need them. Likewise "clever".
So the word-phrase "double-plus-un-stupid" covers what normal English could have an inefficient 144+ phrases for ("extremely" has ~12 synonyms, as does "clever") Remove the "un" and you've covered the same number of opposite phrases. We can take out unnecessary and inefficient qualifiers such as pronouns and conjunctions too. I'm going to go with my mate Orwell here and call this Double-talk. Why not take it further? "double" is such an inefficient way of saying "double" after all - why not replace it with a particular syllable - say "oo". We can leave "un" as it is - its quite efficient. "Stupid" has two syllables - we'll make that "stoo" to make it more efficient. So we've managed to get "extremely clever" to the syllables "oounstoo".
Thought apes stupid - plusunright. Apetalk doublepluseffective.
Metrication led to the removal of base math from the curriculum, and therefore led to dumbing down. The problem is that once the kids stop thinking, they lose interest, so ability falls even further, which leads to the government lowering standards to try and make the results look better, which leads to even more kids losing interest.
Then you have the ridiculous case of the english greengrocer who was fined for selling bananas by the pound. OK, fair enough, the Europeans who visit England might not want to have to learn Imperial units for when they holiday in the UK, but what about the aging population IN BRITAIN who have used Imperial uinits all their life and end up buying too much/too little of something because they aren't used to the system? Yes they can learn metric units, but why the hell should they have to?
Then you gave the companies who are making money by making their pound tins of food weigh 400g for the same price, cheating everyone out of 2oz of produce. Might not sound like much, but every 8 cans that are sold at 400 grams makes another can to be sold. You have to buy 8 cans to get what you used to get in 7.
Heh, and you would have missed out on all the gold that subsequent expeditions returned. We thought riding our little dot com bubble was fun... Spain had a dot com bubble that lasted 100 years, of course, it too burst Yes, but his logic still stands - Columbus predicted that he would be able to sail to India by travelling west. He was wrong. He found the Americas (which are on maps predating Columbus) and then all the gold started flowing. He was lucky. If the Americas hadn't been there, he would have starved to death befre he reached India, and there would have been no (monetary) return.
It always confused me that, given his fear of water, and his bad experience with that damned shark, he would captain a DSV....
Why is holding onto one set of units or another isolationist? Is it not just that others want to impress there systems onto others? No I'm not American, I just don't see why everybody should be forced to use metric measurements.
D2O has the same chemical properties as H2O, excepting mass, so he should survive quite well - although if shrimp are 70% water, as we are (I think it'd probably be higher) they'd gain weight pretty rapidly.
I don't think its a UK phenomenon either. UGC cinemas tend to have 12-20 medium sized screens, with maybe one large one (I'm talking in general here, not the London West End UGCs). Whereas UCI's, when they were in their hey-day in the 80's would have at most 10-12 screens the size of the large one in most UGCs. This follows exactly the trend described in the other post. Plus it makes for a better viewing experience. If you're near the edge of the cinema, you aren't deafened by the sound that is at a ludicrous volume so that thos at the middle can hear, and if you're near the front you can still see the whole of the screen, rather than the 1/3 - 1/2 you used to be able to see.
I was about to offer point 2 myself - I would imagine that they are going to automate the process of renaming the various identifiers in the code, and I would have no problem with calling that compiling, and therefore the result would not be source (source == where you start from, not a checkpoitn on the way). Trying to argue that automatically changing code outputs source is like trying to say that compiler outputs source, and would lead to the logical conclusion that if I rename a binary, I can claim it as my own.
But you have a good point - proving to a judge with no programming experience that the obviously obfuscated code is in fact code might be a hurdle. I wonder if compiling it and running it would be proof enough?
I don't mean to be pedantic, but Farnsworth didn't invent TV - he invented a non-mechanical method of scanning. Television had been around before Farnsworth was born.
I don't think so (although I'd like to) - I don't think there's sufficient deuterium content in seawater. (Of course, the shrimp could have a mechanism for harvesting heavy water, but that is getting a bit fantastic.)
Diamond? Why not good old bucky-tubes?
You claim that morality has no place here, yet you use the word defect - which in itself means falling short of perfection. Who defines perfection? As the saying goes, nobody's perfect, so I guess we're going to be selecting out 100% of the embryos. That seems to me to be more detrimental to the continuance of the species than homosexuality.
PS - Was your use of the word animus a play on words or was it not that clever?
Using the electric heater, you end up getting water running down the windscreen, and it takes an age - plus as soon as you stop heating the windscreen, all that water that still exists as a film on the screen will re-freeze. Using this method, the ice just jumps off the screen almost instantaneously, without melting, and leaving your windscreen (relatively) dry, and so it will not refreeze.
"Also, when the H2 and O2 ignite, wont the explosion send shards of ice flying?"
Since the layer of gas is very thin, it should only be enough to "pop" the ice off the glass due to the expansion of the ignited gas. I don't think there would be any explosion - the shedding effect would be due to the gas expanding, not igniting. Watching it happen would be like the ice just falling off the screen, as the bonds between the two surfaces are broken.
BTW, my Lord, are you giving me the eye?
H+ = a proton
Only the H+ ion has to move, not an entire atom.
Returning to smallpox, saying that no cases have been reported does not mean that the virus no longer exists in nature, or indeed, that there have been no cases. Also, the vaccination program that led to the decline of smallpox caused debilitating illness and death in and of itself. The scientists didn't predict that.
Don't get me wrong, I think that anything that can alleviate suffering and poverty in the third world is worth considering, but forcing the extinction of an organism can not be considered a viable option.
Secondly, comparing flies to virii is ridiculous - nothing depends on a virus as its foodsource. Removing the entire popultaion of tsetse flies not only might result in an affect on populations of other insects, their foodsources, and species that feed on them, but it will. You can't expect to remove a huge population from an ecosystem, and then expect the ecosystem to carry on as if nothing has happened. Remove the tsetse and something will immmediately expand to take its place - and that something may be the mosquito, causing a rise in malaria, or it may be something unforeseen.
The fact is that we just don't know what will happen if we do this, and applying half-knowledge to a problem can only make it worse. On the one hand, you have the eradication of the species. On another, you have a failure, where the flies that are left will just breed and repopulate - note that these will be the flies that have a natural resistance to pesticide, and so the entire population will now have a resistance to pesticide, removing that option for the future.
This action would be wholly irresponsible - saving human lives is a noble and laudable goal, but the end does not justify the means.
According to this site, alcohol is used by all the devices used (in the state of Arizona anyway).
I have reservations about the first device listed (breathalyzer), because the use of acidified dichromate can also show a positive result for ketones present in the breath of diabetics, which is why, I assume, blood tests are required (in the UK) for use in court.
Reduces the risk of DVT, too.
I saw an article not so long ago (can't remember where, sorry) about a plastic that could be used to generate electricity through bending - put a layer in the sole of your shoe, and the normal bending force that goes to heating the sole actually does something useful. The article also suggested using a form of it as underlay, so every time you walk across a room, you're generating electricity.
More importantly, hows it going to affect a breathaliser test?