I used to be able to focus on a single task for long stretches, sometimes I could read a book for 14 hours or more in a day if I was sufficiently interested in it. Now, every three paragraphs or so, I feel like I want to check my email.
I feel that way sometimes too, but I think it's partly because my standard for what's interesting is a lot higher than it was when I was younger. Consequently, (1) there's less stuff that seems worthy of that 12-hour focus marathon, and (2) it's likely that anything worthy is going to require more effort than the average worthy thing did when I was younger.
Considering that I don't think anything of paying $45 to go out for a nice dinner, and going to two movies per month costs me more than $15, I don't see how they're really busting my balls considering I get just as much entertainment out of playing WoW every month as I get from dinner and a movie. Hell, I spend at least five times the price of the WoW subscription just to have cable, movie channels, and high-speed internet available.
It just doesn't seem like it's worth griping about, to be honest.
It was TOO easy to progress to endgame, and everyone and their mother could epic themselves with little to no effort.
I'm sorry, but this reminds me of all the bitching and moaning that went on when they started letting people buy epic PvP gear with battleground honor....all the 1337 arena dudes were angry that their mighty e-peen wasn't guaranteed to be at least twice the size of everybody else's any more. For a couple of months it seemed like every time I set foot in a battleground, there was some wanker going on and on about "welfare epics" and how lame those of us were that were wearing them.
It also reminds me of the whinging about "ZOMG THEY BROKE TWINKING" recently, when all they've done is make twinks play other twinks. I guess it's no longer fun when you might have to win based on your skill and ability to work as a team instead of having the auto-win guarantee of twice the health, armor, and dps of your opponents.
For the raiding folks, I don't understand why this matters to you at all...so what if that other guild made up of stay-at-home-moms can gear up with little to no effort? Does that somehow diminish the fun you have playing the game?
Actually, most surface vessels are not (in the US Navy, anyway), and I don't know of any submersible ships that carry jets. They phased out all of the nuclear powered cruisers and destroyers in the late 90's, leaving the aircraft carriers as the only nuclear powered surface ships. Here's a list.
Plenty of energy - not so much to spare once you account for propulsion, hotel loads, steam for the catapults, etc...
Actually, most of the time the plant isn't loaded heavily at all--most of its capacity is there solely for moving at high speed. Since you don't do that very often (you get to wherever you're going and then putt around in little rectangles), there's plenty of power available for doing something like this.
Carriers are big, but they are stuffed full of what they need to fight - and fuel tanks are tucked into odd corners well below the water line. Not much spare room for the major industrial plant required to produce sufficient fuel in a reasonable amount of time.
For what it's worth, the one I was on had several not-too-small empty spaces, certainly enough to install small test plants. I'm sure if this turns out to be viable, newer ships could be designed with plenty of room for fuel generators.
Yikes...the last time I weighed 174lb (which would give me a BMI of 23) I was a skinny kid that didn't exercise. Just going to boot camp and doing morning PT for 6 months after that put me at something like 185.
(Also, I hear Seattle is a depressing city, but that could just be hearsay)
Some people do find it depressing during the winter months. Anecdote (not evidence): I know somebody in that area and they insist on at least a couple of vacations somewhere sunny during winter to help avoid that. They're not sure if it's the shorter days from being farther north, the difference in weather, or something else, but it does appear to have this effect on some people.
Python and ruby are for guys who have no social life and/or can't get laid.
You've got it all wrong; obviously those languages are used by porn stars that are so tired after getting laid all week that they'd rather code on the weekend.
Unfortunately, I don't think they'll really do much more than pay lip service until it's too late. Maybe the current push for renewable energy sources will help some, though.
Oh I agree we should be going to Mars, but having "won" the race with the Soviets doesn't count for anything at this point in my opinion. If we let other nations become much better at space exploration than we are, we're very likely to get left in the dust holding our "We Won the 60's Space Race" trophy.
You would think it performs pretty important functions (or did perform) for the 5 percent of short sleepers not to collect more food and proliferate more efficiently and more frequently than the other 95% 8 hour sleepers.
I suspect that our current sleep requirements are the product of balancing a lot of trade-offs, and it might not be wise to tamper with it (any more than we already do with coffee and alarm clocks) until we know what more of those trade-offs are. I'm sure there's some dystopian fiction waiting to be written about engineering ourselves into a state where the species wouldn't be viable in the natural world any more.
Of course, I rather like the idea that laziness and/or the desire to sleep in has some underlying real benefit, so I'm biased towards caution when changing such things.:)
Congress won't do anything serious until it's blatantly obvious--even to Joe SixPack--that there's a space race again and we're losing. It has to be portrayable as a crisis of epic proportions, so they can rush in to save American pride with some epic spending.
Malaysia aims to increase broadband penetration to half of all homes by 2010 as part of its drive to boost economic efficiency.
Yeah, I'm sure you'll see a lot of economic efficiency coming from the introduction of an "internet" that's so crippled that you can't find any criticism of the government on it.
We still have a lot of our DNA not yet "activated", from what little I know about genetics, every living organism share more or less the same DNA with less than 1% of differences, its which parts that are activated and which ones that are dormant that specify what the being will look like. This also means we're still babies in terms of our evolution.
Correct me if I am wrong.
1. I'm pretty sure there's a lot more than 1% difference between us and anything except (maybe) some of the great apes. 2. "Babies in terms of our evolution" seems to imply there's some kind of predefined ladder we're climbing as we evolve, which isn't how it works.
I for one can't wait for this to happen: "I dunno how much AIDS scares y'all, but I got a theory: the day they come out with a cure for AIDS, a guaranteed one-shot cure, on that day there's gonna be fucking in the streets, man." - Bill hicks
Yeah, I think Bill's pretty much right on that one--there's definitely going to be some partying going on out there if this is a sure cure.
On April 29, 2008, environmental journalist Richard Littlemore revealed that a list of "500 Scientists with Documented Doubts of Man-Made Global Warming Scares"[26] distributed by the Heartland Institute included at least 45 scientists who neither knew of their inclusion as "coauthors" of the article, nor agreed with its contents.[27] Many of the scientists asked the Heartland Institute to remove their names from the list.
Holy shit--I'd be doing a lot more than politely asking to have my name removed from the list. Isn't that actionable, in a "you libelous bastards!" kind of way?
I would contribute to some open source projects but the bar for the one's I'd like to work on (generally computer algebra systems and numerical computing) is so so high. I would go to grad school only I lack the courses (real analysis mainly) as my college did not provide any of the upper level coursework (at least not seriously [our numerical analysis was done by someone with their MA in math education and she had never touched matlab till two months prior and was technophobic, a complete joke]) necessary for that. I've learned that my degree is essentially worthless in almost every regard.
Well, you seem pretty aware of the limitations/holes in your knowledge, which is more than some people have when they finish a degree. You might be able to fill in some of those gaps with online courses or self-study. Make sure you look out of state for online courses--I found that it cost much less to go pay out-of-state rates elsewhere than to pay in-state tuition at my preferred school in my state. I took some courses at an out-of-state university and I think that made it easier to get into their graduate program (even then I had to spend several months of self-studying to catch up on my ODE and linear algebra knowledge to pass the qualifying exams; my undergrad program let me out without any real solid knowledge in those areas).
I'm not sure what's up with student loans nowadays; you might end up having to pay for a lot of grad school out of pocket, which is hard to do while unemployed (duh). I lucked out and got funding from the school just as my credit cards maxed and couldn't get any more loans, but I wouldn't suggest mortgaging decades of your life without a lot of thought up front.
In case you haven't stumbled across them, there are tons of decent paperbacks out there (like from Dover books) for ~$10 on math subjects. I've found some pretty easy to follow, others not so much; YMMV. There's also stuff like the MIT open courseware and forums/newsgroups that might help. I learned a lot of my hands-on programming knowledge out of newsgroups.
On the open-source topic, you probably know a lot more math than most programmers, and more programming stuff than most mathematicians (even those writing software as part of their work, which surprised me). Even if you aren't able to jump right in to the heavy math component of a project, you can probably help out with little things that other people are too busy to do. If you've got the time to spend learning, you could probably get into the meat of the math portion in a few months (depending on the project, of course).
Just keep learning; hopefully it will pay off at some point. Good luck!
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I used to be able to focus on a single task for long stretches, sometimes I could read a book for 14 hours or more in a day if I was sufficiently interested in it. Now, every three paragraphs or so, I feel like I want to check my email.
I feel that way sometimes too, but I think it's partly because my standard for what's interesting is a lot higher than it was when I was younger. Consequently, (1) there's less stuff that seems worthy of that 12-hour focus marathon, and (2) it's likely that anything worthy is going to require more effort than the average worthy thing did when I was younger.
Really, I was just joking all those times I said "LFG heroic Deadmines" in trade chat...
Considering that I don't think anything of paying $45 to go out for a nice dinner, and going to two movies per month costs me more than $15, I don't see how they're really busting my balls considering I get just as much entertainment out of playing WoW every month as I get from dinner and a movie. Hell, I spend at least five times the price of the WoW subscription just to have cable, movie channels, and high-speed internet available.
It just doesn't seem like it's worth griping about, to be honest.
It was TOO easy to progress to endgame, and everyone and their mother could epic themselves with little to no effort.
I'm sorry, but this reminds me of all the bitching and moaning that went on when they started letting people buy epic PvP gear with battleground honor....all the 1337 arena dudes were angry that their mighty e-peen wasn't guaranteed to be at least twice the size of everybody else's any more. For a couple of months it seemed like every time I set foot in a battleground, there was some wanker going on and on about "welfare epics" and how lame those of us were that were wearing them.
It also reminds me of the whinging about "ZOMG THEY BROKE TWINKING" recently, when all they've done is make twinks play other twinks. I guess it's no longer fun when you might have to win based on your skill and ability to work as a team instead of having the auto-win guarantee of twice the health, armor, and dps of your opponents.
For the raiding folks, I don't understand why this matters to you at all...so what if that other guild made up of stay-at-home-moms can gear up with little to no effort? Does that somehow diminish the fun you have playing the game?
Actually, most surface vessels are not (in the US Navy, anyway), and I don't know of any submersible ships that carry jets. They phased out all of the nuclear powered cruisers and destroyers in the late 90's, leaving the aircraft carriers as the only nuclear powered surface ships. Here's a list.
Plenty of energy - not so much to spare once you account for propulsion, hotel loads, steam for the catapults, etc...
Actually, most of the time the plant isn't loaded heavily at all--most of its capacity is there solely for moving at high speed. Since you don't do that very often (you get to wherever you're going and then putt around in little rectangles), there's plenty of power available for doing something like this.
Carriers are big, but they are stuffed full of what they need to fight - and fuel tanks are tucked into odd corners well below the water line. Not much spare room for the major industrial plant required to produce sufficient fuel in a reasonable amount of time.
For what it's worth, the one I was on had several not-too-small empty spaces, certainly enough to install small test plants. I'm sure if this turns out to be viable, newer ships could be designed with plenty of room for fuel generators.
Yikes...the last time I weighed 174lb (which would give me a BMI of 23) I was a skinny kid that didn't exercise. Just going to boot camp and doing morning PT for 6 months after that put me at something like 185.
I guess I'll just have to deal with being "fat."
I'd never heard of Andrews University, so thanks for mentioning it, as well as the possible ID connection.
"At night, PolygamousRanchKid goes to one bedroom, looks at what's in the bed, shakes his head, and then goes to the other bed."
(Also, I hear Seattle is a depressing city, but that could just be hearsay)
Some people do find it depressing during the winter months. Anecdote (not evidence): I know somebody in that area and they insist on at least a couple of vacations somewhere sunny during winter to help avoid that. They're not sure if it's the shorter days from being farther north, the difference in weather, or something else, but it does appear to have this effect on some people.
Sorry, but if you're 6'1", 190 lbs., and you post to Slashdot, you are overweight and should stop eating so many fucking cheeseburgers.
Er, no? 6'1", 189lb is the top of the normal range. Freaking out over that 1 extra pound is silly.
Ah yes, the horrors of Python. What are those, again? I mean apart from the standard "wtf significant whitespace" one.
Truly, you have a dizzying intellect.
Python and ruby are for guys who have no social life and/or can't get laid.
You've got it all wrong; obviously those languages are used by porn stars that are so tired after getting laid all week that they'd rather code on the weekend.
Unfortunately, I don't think they'll really do much more than pay lip service until it's too late. Maybe the current push for renewable energy sources will help some, though.
Oh I agree we should be going to Mars, but having "won" the race with the Soviets doesn't count for anything at this point in my opinion. If we let other nations become much better at space exploration than we are, we're very likely to get left in the dust holding our "We Won the 60's Space Race" trophy.
You would think it performs pretty important functions (or did perform) for the 5 percent of short sleepers not to collect more food and proliferate more efficiently and more frequently than the other 95% 8 hour sleepers.
I suspect that our current sleep requirements are the product of balancing a lot of trade-offs, and it might not be wise to tamper with it (any more than we already do with coffee and alarm clocks) until we know what more of those trade-offs are. I'm sure there's some dystopian fiction waiting to be written about engineering ourselves into a state where the species wouldn't be viable in the natural world any more.
Of course, I rather like the idea that laziness and/or the desire to sleep in has some underlying real benefit, so I'm biased towards caution when changing such things. :)
And in New Zealand.
Congress won't do anything serious until it's blatantly obvious--even to Joe SixPack--that there's a space race again and we're losing. It has to be portrayable as a crisis of epic proportions, so they can rush in to save American pride with some epic spending.
Malaysia aims to increase broadband penetration to half of all homes by 2010 as part of its drive to boost economic efficiency.
Yeah, I'm sure you'll see a lot of economic efficiency coming from the introduction of an "internet" that's so crippled that you can't find any criticism of the government on it.
Slashdot Rule #34: If you can poll it, there's a CowboyNeal option for it.
We still have a lot of our DNA not yet "activated", from what little I know about genetics, every living organism share more or less the same DNA with less than 1% of differences, its which parts that are activated and which ones that are dormant that specify what the being will look like. This also means we're still babies in terms of our evolution.
Correct me if I am wrong.
1. I'm pretty sure there's a lot more than 1% difference between us and anything except (maybe) some of the great apes.
2. "Babies in terms of our evolution" seems to imply there's some kind of predefined ladder we're climbing as we evolve, which isn't how it works.
I for one can't wait for this to happen:
"I dunno how much AIDS scares y'all, but I got a theory: the day they come out with a cure for AIDS, a guaranteed one-shot cure, on that day there's gonna be fucking in the streets, man." - Bill hicks
Yeah, I think Bill's pretty much right on that one--there's definitely going to be some partying going on out there if this is a sure cure.
On April 29, 2008, environmental journalist Richard Littlemore revealed that a list of "500 Scientists with Documented Doubts of Man-Made Global Warming Scares"[26] distributed by the Heartland Institute included at least 45 scientists who neither knew of their inclusion as "coauthors" of the article, nor agreed with its contents.[27] Many of the scientists asked the Heartland Institute to remove their names from the list.
Holy shit--I'd be doing a lot more than politely asking to have my name removed from the list. Isn't that actionable, in a "you libelous bastards!" kind of way?
I would contribute to some open source projects but the bar for the one's I'd like to work on (generally computer algebra systems and numerical computing) is so so high. I would go to grad school only I lack the courses (real analysis mainly) as my college did not provide any of the upper level coursework (at least not seriously [our numerical analysis was done by someone with their MA in math education and she had never touched matlab till two months prior and was technophobic, a complete joke]) necessary for that. I've learned that my degree is essentially worthless in almost every regard.
Well, you seem pretty aware of the limitations/holes in your knowledge, which is more than some people have when they finish a degree. You might be able to fill in some of those gaps with online courses or self-study. Make sure you look out of state for online courses--I found that it cost much less to go pay out-of-state rates elsewhere than to pay in-state tuition at my preferred school in my state. I took some courses at an out-of-state university and I think that made it easier to get into their graduate program (even then I had to spend several months of self-studying to catch up on my ODE and linear algebra knowledge to pass the qualifying exams; my undergrad program let me out without any real solid knowledge in those areas).
I'm not sure what's up with student loans nowadays; you might end up having to pay for a lot of grad school out of pocket, which is hard to do while unemployed (duh). I lucked out and got funding from the school just as my credit cards maxed and couldn't get any more loans, but I wouldn't suggest mortgaging decades of your life without a lot of thought up front.
In case you haven't stumbled across them, there are tons of decent paperbacks out there (like from Dover books) for ~$10 on math subjects. I've found some pretty easy to follow, others not so much; YMMV. There's also stuff like the MIT open courseware and forums/newsgroups that might help. I learned a lot of my hands-on programming knowledge out of newsgroups.
On the open-source topic, you probably know a lot more math than most programmers, and more programming stuff than most mathematicians (even those writing software as part of their work, which surprised me). Even if you aren't able to jump right in to the heavy math component of a project, you can probably help out with little things that other people are too busy to do. If you've got the time to spend learning, you could probably get into the meat of the math portion in a few months (depending on the project, of course).
Just keep learning; hopefully it will pay off at some point. Good luck!
Certainly. Now if you'll just step into this vacuum chamber over here...