Professor Frink vs. The Comic Book Guy
on
American Nerd
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· Score: 1
Ok, I can't resist throwing my own 2 cents into the "what exactly does 'nerd' or 'geek' mean".
When I was growing up in the eighties, nerd was a pretty specific thing. It referred to someone with a high IQ, who wore glasses (preferably repaired with tape), loved "Star Trek", knew how to use computers, etc. Basically the main 2 guys in "Revenge of the Nerds". See also Dilbert, Urkle, Professor Frink (from the Simpsons) and any character played by Rick Moranis.
Unlike today, these nerds were stereotyped as being severely underweight (90 pound weaklings with bony girl-arms) and generally overdressed, usually wearing button up shirts and slacks when most other kids wore t-shirts and jeans. It was also assumed that any one of them could build a nuclear bomb/cloning machine/intelligent robot and probably had one or more of these in their basement. It was always assumed that they would be mega rich when they grew up, from writing computer games or inventing something or hacking into banks or something brainy like that.
Geek just meant someone who was uncool, especially if they were so out of touch that they thought the uncool things they did would impress their peers. Granted, nerds often did geeky things (showing off how many digits of pi you had memorized, thinking it would impress people) but "geek" was more frequently reserved for the developmentally disabled kids who rode the short bus to school (a.k.a. retarded kids).
At some point around the time of the dot com era, geek seemed to somehow take over the meaning of nerd. But the stereotype also changed to a fat slob in a greasy Spider-Man t-shirt. This new "geek" wore a goatee while the old "nerd" was generally believed to be unable to grow facial hair. This geek was pretty smart and probably knew how to make a web page or such, but was hardly a genius and was expected to still live in his parents' basement. Nerd became Geek, but at the same time Professor Frink turned into The Comic Book Guy.
But a "generator" creates the field with electromagnets (generally using more coils driven by an external electrical source, a side-effect of the current in the output coils, or otherwise by pulling power from the input shaft) as opposed to a "magneto" which uses permanent magnets.
Err, what? I work in the power generation industry, specifically with generator excitation (i.e. making the field you describe with electromagnets) and the machines that use permanent magnets are referred to as PMGs, which stands for Permanent Magnet Generator. I frequently encounter them at work as they are used on smaller generators as the source of power for the electromagnets used to excite the main generator's field.
As far as I know Magneto is an X-Men villain, maybe there were times or regions where that term is used over PMG?
Oh man, I came up with basically the same theory as this, and dismissed it as impossible.
If there really is a conspiracy this vast to allow bankers to create money in a non-zero sum fashion then the government mind-reading rays should have detected my thoughts and the black helicopters should have already picked me up.
Still, it is getting harder not to believe that things really work like that, given that it explains so much about the economy (especial now with it melting down).
The only hole I see is if this theory is true, how is it possible to have a run on the bank (as we have seen recently) and why is FDIC insurance relevant? If banks are just creating counterfeit money when they make a loan and not actually removing money from deposits, then they should always have 100% to give back to the depositors; thereby making it impossible for a bank to be insolvent.
people cant tell the difference between a $8.00 bottle of spring water, and water from a garden hose.
You've got to be fucking kidding me. You can't taste the sharp bitter bite of chlorine in tap water? I once tested my tap water with a pool tester kit, it had exactly the right chlorine level for a swimming pool! You're telling me people can't taste the chlorine in swimming pools?
Sure, bottled water is the same stuff as tap water, except they've filtered out the chlorine. Which is the whole point.
Also, I have a real hard time believing people can't tell tap water from bottled water, when even different bottled waters taste so different (Dasani, for example, tastes awful unless you chill it all the way to ice cold, but then it's too cold to drink).
You're talking to a society of people that will spend $1.25 for a bottle of water out of a vending machine which is sitting right next to a water fountain.
I hate when people use this as some kind of statement of stupidity. Water from water fountains tastes gross, mainly because it is heavily chlorinated and chlorine has such a sharp, nasty taste to it. So if I'm not on the verge of dehydration and just want something cool and refreshing to enjoy I sure as hell am not going drink nasty tap water.
How much I'm willing to pay depends on how much I want a cool refreshing drink, and how long it will be till I can get back to my filtered water at home...
As for the Chinese complaining about whites taking away their girls, the last I recall the Chinese in China didn't want baby girls (abortions, artificial selection etc).
Chinese parents prefer to have a son rather than a daughter. Young single males have a different opinion. Some parts of China are already having serious problems with the male/female ratio leaving many men without any females even available to date. And then of course, we white guys go in and grab up what females they do have over there.
So as the supply "dries up" (which I don't think will happen in a sense that agrees with this article), the price should start to skyrocket. The production of LCDs with gallium will cost more, creating an incentive to find a way to produce LCDs without it. If not, people will simply buy fewer LCDs and switch to other display technologies.
Which is exactly what we fear, that LCDs will become too expensive for regular folks and we'll be forced to use inferior display technologies. So hurray for economics! The supply/demand curves will reach equilibrium!
I guess you've never seen a windmill before. They are quite loud.
People keep saying this, but I have to ask: how close do you have to stand to hear a modern wind turbine? Because I've stood at the fence of the Palm Springs wind farm (because my girlfriend insisted on taking photos of "the pretty windmills", so much for them being an eyesore too) and I couldn't hear a thing. And I wouldn't expect to hear much either, since they rotate about once every 3 seconds and have 3 blades. I don't hear very well in th 1Hz range.
this is why it is important to believe in god: not because there is an invisible skyman throwing thunderbolts at us because of stone tablets with 10 rules on it, but because it is important to believe in something greater more powerful more just and more intelligent than a monkey with an overclocked cranium: us, in our future. that is god: us, in the future
But that has always been my problem with Theism. It obfuscates things. We should be believing in ourselves, in our potential, in our possibilities, in the future. But instead people close themselves off from the possibilities and instead project that energy into an over-simplified invisible man in the sky. One who wants gays put to death or who tries to fool our senses to see if we're faithful enough to cling to the idea that earth is on 6000 years old.
Believing in a greater whole, a bigger picture, an endless potential, is wonderful and an essential part of humanity, one that I feel should be explored at great depth with a mind wide open to the possibilities. Religious faith is the opposite, it dumbs down the wonder of the universe into "some guy did it" and encourages, even demands, that you cling to one subset of possibilities (otherwise you're not being "faithful").
If you want to believe in something greater, in the possibilities, in humanity's future, great! Do that! Why put god in between you and that goal?
SCALIA: And you say he's punishing you? What's he punishing you for?... When he's hurting you in order to get information from you, you wouldn't say he's punishing you. What is he punishing you for?
Damn! I mean DAMN!
It should be blatantly obvious, he's punishing you for not giving him the information he wants!
Well, that's a flat out stupid definition of freedom. By that definition the monks in Tibet are free to form their own independent nation, they just have to accept the consequences that the Chinese military will come and beat the crap out of them.
We already have the words "physically possible" to describe things you can do but may (or may not) have governmental consequences. If you're going to use the word "freedom" it should mean something more.
A flying car is something that can take off from a driveway (or at least a residential street) and land in the parking lot at work. Flying cars are supposed to fill the same role as regular cars, mainly for commuting to work. There's no point to a flying car if you still have to drive to the airport (on both ends of the trip, no less, I guess you have to rent a car at the work end). Many people would end up driving further to reach an airport than go to work. And most would have the same airport as closest to both work and their home (maybe they would be one or two airports over, there are a surprising number of GA airports).
The dream of "flying cars" is no more traffic congestion (since you have so much more volume to work with). Anything not usable for commuting isn't a "flying car".
Honestly, it's not that hard to read the text and watch the action at the same time!
Yes, it is frakin' hard. I can only read at the same rate that I could listen to spoken words, because I have to translate the written words into spoken words and 'listen' to them in my head. So there's a hard limit on how fast one can read. Then, if the original language phase took less time to say than the English equivalent, there may not even be enough time to read it (I frequently have problems with this in subbed anime, the text flashes on the screen and goes away to be replaced by the next dialog far faster than I could possibly read that sentence out). And of course, if my eyes are focused on the text, they can't possibly be focused anywhere else on screen.
So watching subbed films is often an exercise of hitting the pause and rewind button a lot, so you can get all the info by watching each scene 2-3 times. I agree that dubs often suck, but the answer is to have better dubs done.
Heck, by the current definition of the term,/. is a blog.
The current definition? The first definition I heard for blog was "um, you know, like Slashdot."
A semi-regularly updated online journal was always called a "diary" since the earliest days of the web. It's the commenting ability that defined a blog, although as you say the definition seems to keep changing, much to my annoyance. What these candidates are supposed to have sound more like just an official webpage to me.
Ok so most human beings won't be allowed to drive. Some tiny fraction of the human population might be able to build up good enough reflexes if they spend 8 hour per day for 10 years gaining driving experience (under controlled conditions on a private course I assume, since they won't yet be competent to drive on public roads while gaining this experience). So >90% of the population can't drive and therefor probably won't be able to have a job (maybe if they're lucky there will be a dozen or so fastfood/retail employers within walking distance) so most of the population is unemployed or working crap jobs and the economy crashes.
Or we could make yellow lights a little longer to allow for normal imperfections in human judgment.
That's the port that computer makers keep trying to force into obsolescence, despite the fact that we still desperately need them to talk to all the tons of legacy industrial equipment installed all over the world in the last 20 years. Don't encourage them, I need my RS232 ports.
Why would you need to be allowed to retire. I'm going to retire as soon as I have enough money invested to live on the interest plus some extra to grow the principle enough to offset inflation each year. That's well before "official" retirement age, which is good considering how few of my male relatives even lived to their sixties.
It's not even really hard to save up that money, the key seems to be "don't have kids", which would be even more important in a world with immortality.
Agreed! I got a Hulu account and tried it out. When I looked around for something to watch, I found that Firefly show everyone here raves so much about. So I streamed the first couple episodes and I loved the show too. But the herky-jerky video (especially after each ad break) and waiting ridiculous amounts of time for ads to load (slowly displaying them a second or two at a time) along with no way to even buffer up material ahead of time by pausing pissed me off so much that I instead went over to iTunes and bought the series there instead.
Way to go Hulu, you generated more money for Apple!
Yeah that seems like bad faith negotiating to sign an agreement to license the name and appearance of your guitars to a video game company, for the purpose of creating a guitar video game, and accept a bunch of money in return, yet fail to mention "Oh by the way, you won't be allowed to actually make this video game (which we're accepting a bunch of money from you for), cause we own the patent."
In a game like DDR, the player is not in control of the playback at all and must simply react, but in GH the player can play notes at any time whether the game prompts him for it or not.
That isn't true at all. You can:
1)Hit the correct button and strum at the correct time and hear the prerecorded note.
2)Fail to strum at all when a note passes and hear nothing in the guitar track of the song.
3)Strum when there is no prompt, or strum at the prompt while holding the wrong buttons, and hear a prerecorded out of tune squeal noise.
Also note that the buttons don't correspond consistently to the same note. The lay it out mostly in a semi-logical fashion so that you hit a closer button on the control if the note your are "playing" is higher pitch than the previous note, but the yellow button (for example) does not play the same pitch every time you hit it, it varies throughout the song.
Am I missing something here? I see a link the the original questions article, a link to the Generals biography, a link to the Cyber Command website, some editorial comments, a thank you, and.... no responses to questions. Yet other posters are commenting on stuff, where are these responses? What am I missing here?
I guess the question is how did they qualify as "Thumpers" in your mind? Were they emphatically jabbing their finger at the Bible saying "You need to interpret and follow the allegorical stories of this book as the ethical basis of your life"? The "Thumper" part refers to the constant reference to the Bible as their sole point of reference when making an argument (either literally or figuratively jabbing their finger at it). I guess it's possible for non-literalists to constantly and exclusively refer to the Bible, it just doesn't seem very likely.
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Ok, I can't resist throwing my own 2 cents into the "what exactly does 'nerd' or 'geek' mean".
When I was growing up in the eighties, nerd was a pretty specific thing. It referred to someone with a high IQ, who wore glasses (preferably repaired with tape), loved "Star Trek", knew how to use computers, etc. Basically the main 2 guys in "Revenge of the Nerds". See also Dilbert, Urkle, Professor Frink (from the Simpsons) and any character played by Rick Moranis.
Unlike today, these nerds were stereotyped as being severely underweight (90 pound weaklings with bony girl-arms) and generally overdressed, usually wearing button up shirts and slacks when most other kids wore t-shirts and jeans. It was also assumed that any one of them could build a nuclear bomb/cloning machine/intelligent robot and probably had one or more of these in their basement. It was always assumed that they would be mega rich when they grew up, from writing computer games or inventing something or hacking into banks or something brainy like that.
Geek just meant someone who was uncool, especially if they were so out of touch that they thought the uncool things they did would impress their peers. Granted, nerds often did geeky things (showing off how many digits of pi you had memorized, thinking it would impress people) but "geek" was more frequently reserved for the developmentally disabled kids who rode the short bus to school (a.k.a. retarded kids).
At some point around the time of the dot com era, geek seemed to somehow take over the meaning of nerd. But the stereotype also changed to a fat slob in a greasy Spider-Man t-shirt. This new "geek" wore a goatee while the old "nerd" was generally believed to be unable to grow facial hair. This geek was pretty smart and probably knew how to make a web page or such, but was hardly a genius and was expected to still live in his parents' basement. Nerd became Geek, but at the same time Professor Frink turned into The Comic Book Guy.
Err, what? I work in the power generation industry, specifically with generator excitation (i.e. making the field you describe with electromagnets) and the machines that use permanent magnets are referred to as PMGs, which stands for Permanent Magnet Generator. I frequently encounter them at work as they are used on smaller generators as the source of power for the electromagnets used to excite the main generator's field.
As far as I know Magneto is an X-Men villain, maybe there were times or regions where that term is used over PMG?
Oh man, I came up with basically the same theory as this, and dismissed it as impossible.
If there really is a conspiracy this vast to allow bankers to create money in a non-zero sum fashion then the government mind-reading rays should have detected my thoughts and the black helicopters should have already picked me up.
Still, it is getting harder not to believe that things really work like that, given that it explains so much about the economy (especial now with it melting down).
The only hole I see is if this theory is true, how is it possible to have a run on the bank (as we have seen recently) and why is FDIC insurance relevant? If banks are just creating counterfeit money when they make a loan and not actually removing money from deposits, then they should always have 100% to give back to the depositors; thereby making it impossible for a bank to be insolvent.
You've got to be fucking kidding me. You can't taste the sharp bitter bite of chlorine in tap water? I once tested my tap water with a pool tester kit, it had exactly the right chlorine level for a swimming pool! You're telling me people can't taste the chlorine in swimming pools?
Sure, bottled water is the same stuff as tap water, except they've filtered out the chlorine. Which is the whole point.
Also, I have a real hard time believing people can't tell tap water from bottled water, when even different bottled waters taste so different (Dasani, for example, tastes awful unless you chill it all the way to ice cold, but then it's too cold to drink).
I hate when people use this as some kind of statement of stupidity. Water from water fountains tastes gross, mainly because it is heavily chlorinated and chlorine has such a sharp, nasty taste to it. So if I'm not on the verge of dehydration and just want something cool and refreshing to enjoy I sure as hell am not going drink nasty tap water.
How much I'm willing to pay depends on how much I want a cool refreshing drink, and how long it will be till I can get back to my filtered water at home...
Chinese parents prefer to have a son rather than a daughter. Young single males have a different opinion. Some parts of China are already having serious problems with the male/female ratio leaving many men without any females even available to date. And then of course, we white guys go in and grab up what females they do have over there.
A weapon designed to only wound is illegal according to the Geneva Conventions. I guess the middle settings are only used on "illegal combatants"?
Which is exactly what we fear, that LCDs will become too expensive for regular folks and we'll be forced to use inferior display technologies. So hurray for economics! The supply/demand curves will reach equilibrium!
But I'll still be stuck with no LCD screen.
People keep saying this, but I have to ask: how close do you have to stand to hear a modern wind turbine? Because I've stood at the fence of the Palm Springs wind farm (because my girlfriend insisted on taking photos of "the pretty windmills", so much for them being an eyesore too) and I couldn't hear a thing. And I wouldn't expect to hear much either, since they rotate about once every 3 seconds and have 3 blades. I don't hear very well in th 1Hz range.
But that has always been my problem with Theism. It obfuscates things. We should be believing in ourselves, in our potential, in our possibilities, in the future. But instead people close themselves off from the possibilities and instead project that energy into an over-simplified invisible man in the sky. One who wants gays put to death or who tries to fool our senses to see if we're faithful enough to cling to the idea that earth is on 6000 years old.
Believing in a greater whole, a bigger picture, an endless potential, is wonderful and an essential part of humanity, one that I feel should be explored at great depth with a mind wide open to the possibilities. Religious faith is the opposite, it dumbs down the wonder of the universe into "some guy did it" and encourages, even demands, that you cling to one subset of possibilities (otherwise you're not being "faithful").
If you want to believe in something greater, in the possibilities, in humanity's future, great! Do that! Why put god in between you and that goal?
SCALIA: And you say he's punishing you? What's he punishing you for? ... When he's hurting you in order to get information from you, you wouldn't say he's punishing you. What is he punishing you for?
Damn! I mean DAMN!
It should be blatantly obvious, he's punishing you for not giving him the information he wants!
Well, that's a flat out stupid definition of freedom. By that definition the monks in Tibet are free to form their own independent nation, they just have to accept the consequences that the Chinese military will come and beat the crap out of them.
We already have the words "physically possible" to describe things you can do but may (or may not) have governmental consequences. If you're going to use the word "freedom" it should mean something more.
Cessnas are not "flying cars".
A flying car is something that can take off from a driveway (or at least a residential street) and land in the parking lot at work. Flying cars are supposed to fill the same role as regular cars, mainly for commuting to work. There's no point to a flying car if you still have to drive to the airport (on both ends of the trip, no less, I guess you have to rent a car at the work end). Many people would end up driving further to reach an airport than go to work. And most would have the same airport as closest to both work and their home (maybe they would be one or two airports over, there are a surprising number of GA airports).
The dream of "flying cars" is no more traffic congestion (since you have so much more volume to work with). Anything not usable for commuting isn't a "flying car".
Yes, it is frakin' hard. I can only read at the same rate that I could listen to spoken words, because I have to translate the written words into spoken words and 'listen' to them in my head. So there's a hard limit on how fast one can read. Then, if the original language phase took less time to say than the English equivalent, there may not even be enough time to read it (I frequently have problems with this in subbed anime, the text flashes on the screen and goes away to be replaced by the next dialog far faster than I could possibly read that sentence out). And of course, if my eyes are focused on the text, they can't possibly be focused anywhere else on screen.
So watching subbed films is often an exercise of hitting the pause and rewind button a lot, so you can get all the info by watching each scene 2-3 times. I agree that dubs often suck, but the answer is to have better dubs done.
The current definition? The first definition I heard for blog was "um, you know, like Slashdot."
A semi-regularly updated online journal was always called a "diary" since the earliest days of the web. It's the commenting ability that defined a blog, although as you say the definition seems to keep changing, much to my annoyance. What these candidates are supposed to have sound more like just an official webpage to me.
Ok so most human beings won't be allowed to drive. Some tiny fraction of the human population might be able to build up good enough reflexes if they spend 8 hour per day for 10 years gaining driving experience (under controlled conditions on a private course I assume, since they won't yet be competent to drive on public roads while gaining this experience). So >90% of the population can't drive and therefor probably won't be able to have a job (maybe if they're lucky there will be a dozen or so fastfood/retail employers within walking distance) so most of the population is unemployed or working crap jobs and the economy crashes.
Or we could make yellow lights a little longer to allow for normal imperfections in human judgment.
That's the port that computer makers keep trying to force into obsolescence, despite the fact that we still desperately need them to talk to all the tons of legacy industrial equipment installed all over the world in the last 20 years. Don't encourage them, I need my RS232 ports.
Oh yeah, USB to RS232 works, sometimes.
Why would you need to be allowed to retire. I'm going to retire as soon as I have enough money invested to live on the interest plus some extra to grow the principle enough to offset inflation each year. That's well before "official" retirement age, which is good considering how few of my male relatives even lived to their sixties.
It's not even really hard to save up that money, the key seems to be "don't have kids", which would be even more important in a world with immortality.
Agreed! I got a Hulu account and tried it out. When I looked around for something to watch, I found that Firefly show everyone here raves so much about. So I streamed the first couple episodes and I loved the show too. But the herky-jerky video (especially after each ad break) and waiting ridiculous amounts of time for ads to load (slowly displaying them a second or two at a time) along with no way to even buffer up material ahead of time by pausing pissed me off so much that I instead went over to iTunes and bought the series there instead.
Way to go Hulu, you generated more money for Apple!
Sure, sure, now you pundits will point out that the thing that makes beef tasty is a diet of grass and corn.
Obviously, the next step needs to be cross-pollinating grass and corn with seaweed, so the whale cows can free range graze on the ocean prairies.
Well, nevermind. The answers magically appeared overnight.
Yeah that seems like bad faith negotiating to sign an agreement to license the name and appearance of your guitars to a video game company, for the purpose of creating a guitar video game, and accept a bunch of money in return, yet fail to mention "Oh by the way, you won't be allowed to actually make this video game (which we're accepting a bunch of money from you for), cause we own the patent."
That isn't true at all. You can:
1)Hit the correct button and strum at the correct time and hear the prerecorded note.
2)Fail to strum at all when a note passes and hear nothing in the guitar track of the song.
3)Strum when there is no prompt, or strum at the prompt while holding the wrong buttons, and hear a prerecorded out of tune squeal noise.
Also note that the buttons don't correspond consistently to the same note. The lay it out mostly in a semi-logical fashion so that you hit a closer button on the control if the note your are "playing" is higher pitch than the previous note, but the yellow button (for example) does not play the same pitch every time you hit it, it varies throughout the song.
Am I missing something here? I see a link the the original questions article, a link to the Generals biography, a link to the Cyber Command website, some editorial comments, a thank you, and .... no responses to questions. Yet other posters are commenting on stuff, where are these responses? What am I missing here?
I guess the question is how did they qualify as "Thumpers" in your mind? Were they emphatically jabbing their finger at the Bible saying "You need to interpret and follow the allegorical stories of this book as the ethical basis of your life"? The "Thumper" part refers to the constant reference to the Bible as their sole point of reference when making an argument (either literally or figuratively jabbing their finger at it). I guess it's possible for non-literalists to constantly and exclusively refer to the Bible, it just doesn't seem very likely.