Don't say another goddamn word. Up until now, I've been polite. If you say anything else - word one - I will kill myself. And when my tainted spirit finds its destination, I will topple the master of that dark place. From my black throne, I will lash together a machine made of blood and bone, and fueled by my hatred for you this fear engine will bore a hole beween this world and that one. When it begins you will hear the sound of children screaming - as though from a great distance. A smoking orb of nothing will grow above your bed, and from it will emerge a thousand starving crows. As I slip through the widening maw in my new form, you will catch only a glimpse of my radiance before you are incinerated. Then, as tears of bubbling pitch stream down my face, my dark work will begin. I will open one of my six mouths, and I will sing the song that ends the Earth.
Pearls are small lumps of grit surrounded by thick coagulated oyster snot.
And pythons aren't poisonous; they just wrap around and crush you to death instead. Then swallow you whole.
It will be in court. The fact that he didn't cough up the pass phrase is going to go against him as well.
That he exercises his right to remain silent will go against him? Where do you think this is happening? England? I thought Americans still had at least some rights.
Stating that the sun is overhead at noon is a fact.
Here's where an expert witness will contradict what you think is common sense. The Sun is on the meridian at local noon by definition, but that isn't always, or even usually, the same thing as 12:00 on the clock. And it's not necessarily overhead; in fact outside the tropics it is never overhead. Within the tropics it is overhead twice a year (once a year if you're exactly on the tropic line).
I'm struggling to think of any circumstances in which this would matter in a criminal trial, but the point stands; there are things that Everybody Knows and which are Common Sense but are still plain wrong. Don't convict people on the basis of Common Sense against an expert witness to the contrary.
And I do know quite a bit about building databases and the things you mention, but I usually need the flexibility of Excel to actually achieve my end goal. I'm sure these things could be done in access, but I don't know enough about performing actual calculations in access, let alone formulae, and the general techniques of turning dataset A into dataset B. The other thing I've found is that most Excel "power users" have a particular "style" to do things. Myself, I seem to use alot of Vlookups, IF statements and text manipulation formulae
Your every post makes it clearer: you need a database solution. You're dealing with data sets in the hundreds of thousands of rows, correlating them together with VLOOKUP references and using IF logic to return results. The VLOOKUP is a very, very inefficient poor relation to what in a database is a JOIN, and when you see an awful lot of them in a spreadsheet it's a sure sign that someone's trying to build a database but hasn't realised it yet.
You should definitely look into Access; open source is all very well but Access is what is installed on your desktop right now, you've already dipped your toe into that water, and it's a shame to waste it. If you're experienced with building Excel solutions using a lot of VLOOKUP, you'll pick up query design quickly; you match a database primary key column in the same way as you specify a column to VLOOKUP against. Once you have a decent relational model set up you'll find you can complete your data processing tasks far more quickly.
Such as connecting to a REAL database, rather than a toy one?
I'm pretty sure that Office apps can connect to any ODBC database back end. ODBC drivers are available for Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL... You're not actually restricted to Access you know.
I don't want to learn how to write scripts, or databases or anything else for that matter.
Often its easier to build a simple database to hold my 250k lines of data than it is to work across 4 tabs in an excel book.
If you're dealing with 250,000 lines of data on a regular basis you shouldn't be using Excel at all, except perhaps as somewhere to export reports to when you're finished. You should definitely learn how to build databases - and not just flat-file ones where you dump a CSV into Access because you've got more than 65,000 rows, but proper ones with multiple tables and primary keys and indexes and relationships. It's a bit of a learning curve but you'll save yourself no end of trouble.
Incidentally, I've no problem whatever with Access for this task, it's exactly what it was designed for. Splitting data across multiple tabs because there are too many rows to fit on just one, that's a sure sign you're doing it wrong.
And the ability to link up with access to do some of the larger processing tasks is so useful, not all of us are codemonkeys, and I don't want to learn how to write scripts, or databases or anything else for that matter.
Wait. You're doing something with Excel that's complex enough that you're linking up to Access to 'do some of the larger processing tasks' - I mean, not just to retrieve data, but to process it?
And you say you don't want to learn how to write scripts or databases?
Then I look forward to seeing your work on thedailywtf in the very near future.
Imagine a world where current higher education materials are available to ALL OF HUMANITY instead of a select few rich enough to go to college and pay these "rich people only please" prices.
the Bible is the perfect open source text book. The science section is a little outdated, but it works great whenever I need to calculate how many sheckles a cubit of grains cost.
'A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny; and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine.' -- Rev 6:6
This being an extremely dangerous military payload, details of Polyus were kept secret by the Soviets. Various details leaked over the years, and Astronautix as usual has the best writeup of what can be said with confidence.
Further rumours and conspiracy theories about this technological terror; Google will reveal more fantastical speculation than you can possibly imagine:-)
It's also easy to say you're going to do X when you're running for President. Once you become President and see all the stuff going on behind the scenes it's not always quite that easy.
Ah yes, the grey men in the smoke-filled room, the video clip dated 1963 from an angle you've never seen it before... 'Any questions?' '... Uh, just what my agenda is.'
Regardless about why we are in Iraq, we have accept that we are there and just bringing all the troops home may leave Iraq in a worse situation than it was when we started.
Iraq is in a worse situation than it was when we started, no 'may' about it. In economics there is a concept called a 'sunk cost', and it's not usually well understood. A man at a poker table who finds himself with less money than when he began, might decide to continue playing and try at least to get his money back, though the rational decision would be to leave the table. This is how gamblers are ruined. People always throw good money after bad, try at great cost to recover hopeless positions, come up with excuses like 'pride' and 'honour' to explain their irrationality.
Unless you've got a really good reason to think you can leave Iraq better than you found it, or even no worse than it was in 2003 - and the last five years haven't exactly filled us with confidence of that - then you might as well get out and save yourself the trouble.
Vostok and Voskhod were quick-and-dirty solutions, put together in order to achieve spectacular space firsts and get propaganda over the Americans. Soyuz was the first time the Soviets built spacecraft for serious work, with a view to Salyut space station projects and a Moon landing. They did a good job - Soyuz itself was only slightly inferior to Apollo, it was the N1 rocket that crippled their Moon project - and they've produced a series of upgraded versions over the intervening decades. The contemporary Soyuz looks a lot like its 1960s ancestor, but most of the guts have been reworked.
Had the Americans kept Apollo spacecraft in production, then they could easily have done the same. Instead they built the Shuttle, with an eye to frequent manned launches, cheaper and safer flights with reusable components, and a Space Station to be completed in the late 1980s. Yeah.
But we can't fully cheer the Russians for their wisdom in sticking with a capsule over building a spaceplane. They built a shuttle, Buran, and a large launcher to carry it. Buran flew only once, unmanned, completing a perfect flight, and was then cancelled for lack of funding along with the rest of the Soviet Union. The Energia rocket flew once more, carrying the Polyus battle station. Yes, battle station. It would have formed the nucleus of a Mir 2, but with anti-satellite weapons, and (so rumour has it) an arsenal of nuclear mines... but it seems some crucial navigational component was installed upside-down, and the last great secret weapon of the Cold War ended its brief career at the bottom of the sea.
Iraq invasion and occupation: originally budgeted in 2003 at $74 billion, reached some $600 billion in 2008, and will probably pass a trillion by the time the US gets out even if everyone starts running for the exits right now. And since it's all been done on credit, factor in interest on the repayments. Then the medical costs of all the crippled soldiers. Then the knock-on effects of destabilising the Middle East, inflating the price of oil, and devaluing the dollar... you're looking at ridiculous money.
It's not collecting heat, it's collecting photons in the infra-red range.
Same thing. A photovoltaic can be viewed as a heat engine with the source at about 5780 Kelvin and the sink at maybe 300, which makes for an efficient conversion. But it's still subject to the laws of thermodynamics. Suppose I put an infrared-spectrum photovoltaic inside a black box at an ambient 300K. The inside of that box is now full of infrared photons with a thermal spectrum corresponding to the temperature. The photovoltaic is linked to a wire running to a standard incandescent lightbulb outside the box. Will the lamp shine? If it does then we have an engine that produces an energy output from zero temperature difference, and violates the second law of thermodynamics. That black box is a perpetual motion machine.
Then again, in the case of a solar array it might be possible. In the day the sun is hotter than the array; at night, the sky is colder than the array. It's quite conceivable that some clever engineering might be able to exploit that temperature difference to produce a little extra energy.
A similar question arises in UK politics. Why would any politician ever voluntarily appear on the news quiz Have I Got News For You? There's no way they'll be able to get through it without being viciously mocked by the regulars.
Yet Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson did so many times, and every time he crashed and burned horribly, establishing beyond any doubt his public image as a monumentally absent-minded posh Wodehousian buffoon. Now he's the Mayor of London.
Johnson's continued appearances on that show, long after it became clear that he himself would be the source of all the comedy, at least left him perceived as a good sport. Thoroughly bloody nice bloke. Not like the rest of those awful Tories. Certainly not up to anything nefarious or corrupt because he'd forget his own master plan five minutes into it. A harmless idiot who will probably sit in his office blithering, delegate pretty much everything, and not actually do very much. In other words, the perfect man to run the global economic hub.
Perhaps the Republicans hope for the same. Their party is perceived as a bunch of godbothering warmongering fascists; turning up on comedy shows and laughing along when the jokes are at your own expense tends to soften that image. It makes you appear more human.
Although he makes fun of both sides, it is much easier to make fun of the republicans - since their politics (under introspection) aren't very good.
That, and the Republicans are in power. Being in power normally provides a lot more comedy material than being in opposition. William Hague, Ian and Duncan Smith, and Michael Howard, and anything involving Boris Johnson notwithstanding.
How different is this different than the old Roman gladiators? Will most people be able to enjoy sports if watching them reminds them of a terrible price the athletes are paying in health and longevity?
Given how enormously popular Roman gladiator fights were, and for how many centuries they continued, I'd say the answer to that is a big 'yes'.
Mod parent up! Given that Labour are supposed to be left-wing and for the people while the Conservatives (Tories) are supposed to be the right-wing, it's rather worrying that the right-wing is the one standing up for civil liberties and common sense.
Right-wing needn't mean Fascist. There's a long-standing tradition of Conservatism in which the Government does as little as it can get away with: less taxation, less expenditure, less interference with the public of any kind. We haven't seen too much of that tradition in a long while - Thatcher was the embodiment of the right-wing authoritarian - but with a reaction on against Labour's ever-more-intrusive nanny state, a Conservative Party running on a libertarian platform could do well.
Slashdot Mirror
... but broken link. It looks like some helpful filter somewhere replaced a double hyphen with a dash. Article here.
Don't say another goddamn word. Up until now, I've been polite. If you say anything else - word one - I will kill myself. And when my tainted spirit finds its destination, I will topple the master of that dark place. From my black throne, I will lash together a machine made of blood and bone, and fueled by my hatred for you this fear engine will bore a hole beween this world and that one. When it begins you will hear the sound of children screaming - as though from a great distance. A smoking orb of nothing will grow above your bed, and from it will emerge a thousand starving crows. As I slip through the widening maw in my new form, you will catch only a glimpse of my radiance before you are incinerated. Then, as tears of bubbling pitch stream down my face, my dark work will begin. I will open one of my six mouths, and I will sing the song that ends the Earth.
The analogy I liked better was 'Atheism is a religion just like bald is a hair colour.'
Pearls are small lumps of grit surrounded by thick coagulated oyster snot.
And pythons aren't poisonous; they just wrap around and crush you to death instead. Then swallow you whole.
That he exercises his right to remain silent will go against him? Where do you think this is happening? England? I thought Americans still had at least some rights.
Here's where an expert witness will contradict what you think is common sense. The Sun is on the meridian at local noon by definition, but that isn't always, or even usually, the same thing as 12:00 on the clock. And it's not necessarily overhead; in fact outside the tropics it is never overhead. Within the tropics it is overhead twice a year (once a year if you're exactly on the tropic line).
I'm struggling to think of any circumstances in which this would matter in a criminal trial, but the point stands; there are things that Everybody Knows and which are Common Sense but are still plain wrong. Don't convict people on the basis of Common Sense against an expert witness to the contrary.
Your every post makes it clearer: you need a database solution. You're dealing with data sets in the hundreds of thousands of rows, correlating them together with VLOOKUP references and using IF logic to return results. The VLOOKUP is a very, very inefficient poor relation to what in a database is a JOIN, and when you see an awful lot of them in a spreadsheet it's a sure sign that someone's trying to build a database but hasn't realised it yet.
You should definitely look into Access; open source is all very well but Access is what is installed on your desktop right now, you've already dipped your toe into that water, and it's a shame to waste it. If you're experienced with building Excel solutions using a lot of VLOOKUP, you'll pick up query design quickly; you match a database primary key column in the same way as you specify a column to VLOOKUP against. Once you have a decent relational model set up you'll find you can complete your data processing tasks far more quickly.
I'm pretty sure that Office apps can connect to any ODBC database back end. ODBC drivers are available for Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL... You're not actually restricted to Access you know.
Often its easier to build a simple database to hold my 250k lines of data than it is to work across 4 tabs in an excel book.
If you're dealing with 250,000 lines of data on a regular basis you shouldn't be using Excel at all, except perhaps as somewhere to export reports to when you're finished. You should definitely learn how to build databases - and not just flat-file ones where you dump a CSV into Access because you've got more than 65,000 rows, but proper ones with multiple tables and primary keys and indexes and relationships. It's a bit of a learning curve but you'll save yourself no end of trouble.
Incidentally, I've no problem whatever with Access for this task, it's exactly what it was designed for. Splitting data across multiple tabs because there are too many rows to fit on just one, that's a sure sign you're doing it wrong.
Wait. You're doing something with Excel that's complex enough that you're linking up to Access to 'do some of the larger processing tasks' - I mean, not just to retrieve data, but to process it?
And you say you don't want to learn how to write scripts or databases?
Then I look forward to seeing your work on thedailywtf in the very near future.
Yes, just imagine it.
'A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny; and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine.' -- Rev 6:6
Further rumours and conspiracy theories about this technological terror; Google will reveal more fantastical speculation than you can possibly imagine :-)
Ah yes, the grey men in the smoke-filled room, the video clip dated 1963 from an angle you've never seen it before... 'Any questions?' '... Uh, just what my agenda is.'
Regardless about why we are in Iraq, we have accept that we are there and just bringing all the troops home may leave Iraq in a worse situation than it was when we started.
Iraq is in a worse situation than it was when we started, no 'may' about it. In economics there is a concept called a 'sunk cost', and it's not usually well understood. A man at a poker table who finds himself with less money than when he began, might decide to continue playing and try at least to get his money back, though the rational decision would be to leave the table. This is how gamblers are ruined. People always throw good money after bad, try at great cost to recover hopeless positions, come up with excuses like 'pride' and 'honour' to explain their irrationality.
Unless you've got a really good reason to think you can leave Iraq better than you found it, or even no worse than it was in 2003 - and the last five years haven't exactly filled us with confidence of that - then you might as well get out and save yourself the trouble.
Had the Americans kept Apollo spacecraft in production, then they could easily have done the same. Instead they built the Shuttle, with an eye to frequent manned launches, cheaper and safer flights with reusable components, and a Space Station to be completed in the late 1980s. Yeah.
But we can't fully cheer the Russians for their wisdom in sticking with a capsule over building a spaceplane. They built a shuttle, Buran, and a large launcher to carry it. Buran flew only once, unmanned, completing a perfect flight, and was then cancelled for lack of funding along with the rest of the Soviet Union. The Energia rocket flew once more, carrying the Polyus battle station. Yes, battle station. It would have formed the nucleus of a Mir 2, but with anti-satellite weapons, and (so rumour has it) an arsenal of nuclear mines... but it seems some crucial navigational component was installed upside-down, and the last great secret weapon of the Cold War ended its brief career at the bottom of the sea.
Kill Spider Jerusalem?
Apollo total cost: $135 billion (2005 dollars).
Iraq invasion and occupation: originally budgeted in 2003 at $74 billion, reached some $600 billion in 2008, and will probably pass a trillion by the time the US gets out even if everyone starts running for the exits right now. And since it's all been done on credit, factor in interest on the repayments. Then the medical costs of all the crippled soldiers. Then the knock-on effects of destabilising the Middle East, inflating the price of oil, and devaluing the dollar... you're looking at ridiculous money.
Same thing. A photovoltaic can be viewed as a heat engine with the source at about 5780 Kelvin and the sink at maybe 300, which makes for an efficient conversion. But it's still subject to the laws of thermodynamics. Suppose I put an infrared-spectrum photovoltaic inside a black box at an ambient 300K. The inside of that box is now full of infrared photons with a thermal spectrum corresponding to the temperature. The photovoltaic is linked to a wire running to a standard incandescent lightbulb outside the box. Will the lamp shine? If it does then we have an engine that produces an energy output from zero temperature difference, and violates the second law of thermodynamics. That black box is a perpetual motion machine.
Then again, in the case of a solar array it might be possible. In the day the sun is hotter than the array; at night, the sky is colder than the array. It's quite conceivable that some clever engineering might be able to exploit that temperature difference to produce a little extra energy.
The Big Bang made hydrogen and helium. The rest is the work of supernovae.
These would be climatologists.
are the same people that won't allow the only reasonable alternative (nuclear)
These would be Greenpeace.
is all anyone should need to realize global warming is a hoax.
These would be idiots.
Yet Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson did so many times, and every time he crashed and burned horribly, establishing beyond any doubt his public image as a monumentally absent-minded posh Wodehousian buffoon. Now he's the Mayor of London.
Johnson's continued appearances on that show, long after it became clear that he himself would be the source of all the comedy, at least left him perceived as a good sport. Thoroughly bloody nice bloke. Not like the rest of those awful Tories. Certainly not up to anything nefarious or corrupt because he'd forget his own master plan five minutes into it. A harmless idiot who will probably sit in his office blithering, delegate pretty much everything, and not actually do very much. In other words, the perfect man to run the global economic hub.
Perhaps the Republicans hope for the same. Their party is perceived as a bunch of godbothering warmongering fascists; turning up on comedy shows and laughing along when the jokes are at your own expense tends to soften that image. It makes you appear more human.
That, and the Republicans are in power. Being in power normally provides a lot more comedy material than being in opposition. William Hague, Ian and Duncan Smith, and Michael Howard, and anything involving Boris Johnson notwithstanding.
New Orleans has its charms, but in Europe we have the rich regional cultures of Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Troy. Ruins get better with age.
Given how enormously popular Roman gladiator fights were, and for how many centuries they continued, I'd say the answer to that is a big 'yes'.
Right-wing needn't mean Fascist. There's a long-standing tradition of Conservatism in which the Government does as little as it can get away with: less taxation, less expenditure, less interference with the public of any kind. We haven't seen too much of that tradition in a long while - Thatcher was the embodiment of the right-wing authoritarian - but with a reaction on against Labour's ever-more-intrusive nanny state, a Conservative Party running on a libertarian platform could do well.