For what it's worth, there's a very decent Plex client that is under active development (check the plex forum). This app is why I went with smart tv. All the perks of plex/xbmc without another bloody roku/htpc box to drive it.
With only 47 participants this study has, in my eyes, about the same validity as the average undergrad study.
I'd love to know what kind of experimental psychology you do that typically runs so many hundreds of participants that you see 47 subjects as equivalent to an undergrad project.
I recently bought a used Droid 1 on ebay for cheap. Switched from Verizon to Page Plus (prepaid and no data plan) and am saving buckets of money compared to my dumbphone plan and since I'm always in WiFi for 90% of the time I get to have all the perks of a smartphone. Easy e-mail checks in meetings, apps for scouring forums,web browsing on the go to check movie times or what have you, etc.
My droid has replaced my GPS (maps downloaded to SD, don't need data plan for this) and my expensive MP3 playing alarm clock (Droid in a media dock = success). Smartphones don't have to be expensive, the Droid 1 is plenty fast. Faster if rooted and overclocked. If you got good wifi coverage then you don't need an expensive data plan. After flipping the dumbphone, GPS and alarm clock on ebay, I made money on the switch.
I liked that morrowind wasn't nerfed. The game created some basic rules and if you were smart to mix and match (i.e. potion quality scales with int, and int potions are additive, so boost your int like crazy and then make amazing potions) you could overpower the game. But that was the fun part. Compared to morrowind, oblivion was on rails.
I still remember the sheer awesome of going into a cave way beyond my level. Realizing it and then using a cheap levitation potion to get our of harms way and rain down arrows and getting mad drops. Or using some seriously overpowered spell tricks to sneak into the underground vaults beneath vivec. And never did the game give me a "sorry this puny wooden door needs a key. Unlock 100 no workies!"
You've misunderstood the use of the term guilty knowledge. In this context it doesn't mean the participant feels guilty. Guilty knowledge could have been showing you a picture of an apple that you'd previously seen.
This would have been obvious if you had read the article. No guilty knowledge for you!
That's a little disingenuous. Given the console is 5 years old and this is the first significant and, dare we say, optional upgrade. It's really not so bad. Particularly given that people spend upwards of 300-500$ for video cards (double that for SLI) and they do this much more often that 5 years. Let's not get into the motherboards that have to house these puppies. Hell, people's PC cases are more expensive and upgraded more often than their consoles. I've upgraded my computer twice since the xbox launch. I'm sure I'm not a minority there.
The PS3 is the biggest energy suck of the lot! I'm amazed, I thought for sure the 360 would outrank it with its nuclear power pack. I just bought a PS3 a few weeks ago, and noticed my last power bill went up by 10$ in a time of the year when it usually goes down. So much for leaving it on to play mp3s all the time. Anyone else notice that the CRT used much less power than the plasma.
I'm a Canadian currently doing a PhD at an US university 90 minutes south of the border and I can tell you that not only do we pay taxes, we pay more taxes than US citizens (1040-NR doesn't allow us to make all the deductions that a regular us citizen gets to put on their tax form. Namely there's a big ~5K that we can't deduct, so while my american buddy paid 80$ income tax, I paid 840$). To make matters worse the US-Canada tax treaty only kicks in if you make less than 10k. So, in other words, we pay taxes to both the US, the state we live in and Canada... And if I was a previously a Quebec resident, I'd have to pay Canadian federal and Quebec provincial tax.
I don't know about other grad students, but I don't come to the US for the funding, I came because my department is the best in the world for my area of research, and I'm willing to take the tax shaft as a result. Still you'd think Canada and the US would have a more productive tax treaty. Many other countries do.
So, after finally getting around to watching "Tooth and Claw" (Doctor Who 28x2), I am reminded of Gregg Easterbrook's discussion of (someone's, I forget whose) theory of the sci-fi "idiot plot," a plot which can only carry on forward motion if everyone involved is an idiot. BSG has been full of them, especially of late, with fantastic "should we ask him if he still has that bomb we know was ours yet is the only one unaccounted for? Naaaaaah."-related activities.
While I agree that BSG has moments that strain suspension of disbelief, you're not seriously suggesting that the new Doctor Who has stories of higher caliber? Tooth and Claw had what? 35 deux ex machina moments? The Doctor doesn't use his brains anymore, he just runs faster!
Still loads of fun though but not a good foundation for critiquing BSG.
I keep seeing Civ 4 getting excellent reviews and I just can't fathom why. I find it a huge step back compared to Civ 3 (plus expansions). The civlopedia is a mess and near impossible to navigate (what happened to the links?). The technology advances now have no supporting historical text, which IMHO reduces tech advances to a mere pesky requirement for upgrading or building infrastructure. Since Civ 1, the great thing about Civ is that you can actually learn a few things about the inter-relationship between technology and cvilizations. Without any description of the technology (except for a quick sentence by Leanord Nimoy) you no longer have a sense of why it was so important to aquire it in the first place.
The 3D graphics add nothing to the game and actually make it more difficult to play (zooming out to a comfortable vantage makes the text blurry, and I'm playing at top res with a geforce 6800 ultra). All in all, I think it's a big step back from Civ 3, and certainly underserving of all the 90+ ratings it's getting. The game feels rushed and dumbed down. I think the only reason it's getting such great reviews, is there's nothing out like Civ (well... except for the other Civs).
I full on agree, the camera work really helps sell the idea that this is in space and space isn't a cubby hole.
People might be too well trained by star trek. I'll never forget an episode of TNG where Data announced that the enemy ship is 700km away. But the external shot shows enterprise and the enemy ship nearly touching.
Bitches couldn't get their space right. BSG does it perfectly.
Given the fact that Halo 2 is no where near the immersive experience that you get with Half-Life 2, I can forgive the load times. I'm sure the texture, lighting and physics data being loaded is much larger than anything halo 2 loads
So far I'm not finding the physics in half life all that impressive. In Halo 2, enemies, vehicles and rubble would get tossed around realistically when blown up with a grenade or hit with the jeep. It's not as fancy as HL2, but it's ample.
Still I'll give HL2 the better graphics,and Halo 2's ending was terrible.
But I'll reiterate, thus far in HL2 I feel like I'm on the designer's leash. There's not a thing I can do unless they let me. Halo 2, and moreso Far Cry, felt completely open. If I want to bring a ghost inside a building and wreack havoc, as long as there's one nearby, I can. In HL2, if you decide to be really hardcore and walk the jetboat section, forget it. You're screwed by the first door puzzle. It feels utterly contrived.
Valve needs to walk over to Bungie with a presents one day, and beg them for education on how this load/save/death thing should work. Pausing for 3-20seconds in the middle of an action sequence while the game loads the next zone doesn't make any sense and just works to break up the game play. Death also requires a reload of the previous checkpoint. This is all stuff that Bungie figgured out for Halo 2, if only Valve could watch and learn.
I second that, the load times on Half Life 2 are absurdly long and poorly placed. After playing through Halo 2, I was amazed at the level of immersion you can get from simply having no load times whatsoever. I couldn't stop playing.
Also I have to say Halo 2 got the illusion of freedom down far better than half life 2. Half life 2 is so linear and one-dimensional it's absurd. Halo 2 was no far cry either, but at least you felt like you could do what you want. Want to take the jeep into building? Go for it! You'll spend half an hour maneuvering it in, but the game doesn't force you to drop the vehicle.
Having said all that, I'm loving half life 2. I'm dissapointed, but it's still a lot of fun.
From an engineering point of view, it's totally retarted. But evolved organisms have this kind of kludge all the time, because once you have a structure locked in, it's really hard to get away from it by mutation.
This has been a favorite example of imperfect evolution over intelligent design for ages. Dawkins made a big to do about it in 1986 and everyone pretty much took him to his word. The fact is that it's false. The cephalopod retina doesn't have the same cellular constraints on it as ours do. It is true that the vertebrate retina, unlike that of cephalopods, places the photoreceptors at the back of the retina underneath nerve fibers and blood vessels which can cast shadows on the photoreceptors below. Furthermore the photoreceptors themselves are inverted, such that the photosensitive end is pointed away from incoming light.
An intelligent retina design, it is said, would place the photoreceptors at the very top of the retina with blood vessels and nerves below. With limited facts such an arrangement makes intuitive sense, after al the eye's prime function is the capture and transduction of light. However this argument ignores the basic cellular biology of vertebrate photoreceptors.
Transduction of light into a neural signal depends upon disc shaped structures in the outer end of the photoreceptor cell. These discs contain the photopigment whose breakdown by incoming light is at the very root of the transduction process (ie: light to nerve impulse). As the photopigment in these discs is broken down by incoming light to generate the neural signal, the discs themselves must be quickly shed and renewed. This function is accomplished by the retinal pigment epithelium which holds the photoreceptors in place and recycles their shed discs while supplying them with the necessary nutrients to regenerate more discs.
A cephalopod retina organization would restrict photoreceptor's ability to quickly regenerate discs of photopigment, causing frequent photoreceptor bleaching and ultimately reducing visual acuity under strong light (ie: daylight). Furthermore shed opaque photopigment discs would float above photoreceptors and impede light much more than the mostly transparent nerve fibers and occasional blood vessel that currently sit above the photoreceptors.
Such an organization does leave vertebrate with a blind spot were the optic nerve is collected and projected back into the CNS. This spot lies away from the fovea and as such it's effect on vision is negligible. Particularly in vertebrates whose visual fields overlap (ie: eyes at the front, not sides of our heads).
So our retinal design is in fact the best design given that our photoreceptors have to remain embedded in the retinal epithelium.
Many of these posts are clearly extrapolating way beyond the original poster's intent. He's enthused about the possibility of listening to the radio shows that interest him when he desires to do so. He's not looking to have a T1 line jacked into the back of his head.
I for one sympathize and think way too much to do is being made about the putative benefits of "do-nothing" time. I used to listen to music during my 30 minute walk to work. Then I discovered NPR's the Connection radio archive. Along with the CBC's Ideas and much of the BBC. Now my morning and evening walks are a bit more edifying. Pop the real media or mp3 files onto my PDA and go (or if you hate real media, convert them to mp3). Same goes for the original poster. Why listen to morning radio pablum, aweful music and advertising when you can pop in
a decent NPR show?
This doesn't mark the end of introspection nor the demise of the patient appreciation of art. It's simply replacing a more convinient, but often less desired media, with one from a different timeslot. So the poster listens to novels instead of music while doing excercise or having breakfast. I hardly think this is sign of an impending heart attack to say nothing of the demise of human civilization.
I'm on a voice of dissent warpath. The original series used a vocoder for the cylons. A simple explanation is that a vocoder uses one sound to modulate (or excite) certain frequencies in another. So you use the human voice to modulate a synthetic tone, hence robot sound. Same device that was used in a lot of early disco, some new wave then industrial music and now just about any electronica but electroclash is pimping the vocoder like mad lately.
I can't remember the sound of the robot cylons in the new series, but I wouldn't be suprised if at the heart it's just a more sophisticated application of the vocoder.
Not a big fan of the tele but I watched the mini-series and was quite impressed. Furthermore I disagree that everyone is a stereotype, or at least no more so than any other piece of fiction. The tough as nails always in trouble ace pilot is a girl, relitively new, though reeking of Aliens.
Essentially you could swap all the characters around and people would still complain of stereotypes. The sensitive but stern Commander. The holier than though Scientist with a god complex. The wet behind the ears pilot. The father and son who are best of buddies. What would the creators have to do for the characters to not in some way echoe something we've seen before? And I stress echoe because none of them struck me as an exact carbon copy of previous sci-fi.
I suppose if every character was bland and spoke in monotone then people would call it fresh and new. Oh wait, no that would be just like the Matrix wouldn't it?
A bit of a quibble, it's not frontal lobe epilepsy but temporal lobe epilepsy.
Frontal lobe epilepsy is quite rare. Furthermore given that the limbic system and quite a bit of sensory integration takes place in the temporal lobes it makes oodles more sense that disrupting these pathways would cause dysphoric and/or euphoric sensations.
True that and I have both. But sitting on the metro with a laptop is a pain. Notwithstanding that everyone reads over your back. Even if you're sporting a tiny wee mac lappy, you still need the infrastructure to carry it (read:bag). And battery life on a laptop is nothing like that on a pda.
As for the PC, the minute you slap a desktop on your back and have it suck power from your arse I'll jump ship and get rid of my pda. But it has to have lazers too alright?
Here's one very good need for a PDA
PDFs.
Anyone doing research in any sort of scientific domain should get one of these puppies. I download all my articles from the journal websites as PDFs. When it comes time for a lit search I can either print out hundreds of pages, or pop them on my Dell Axim (64mb w/48mb flash rom, 26 of which are available to the user. Beats Zaurus and it's a year old) with a 256mb sd card let me tell you that's hundreds of articles.
And as most of my raw data is in excell spreadsheets, with pocket excell I can go through my studies on my pda... Damn I sound like an advert now...
I have to agree with a previous post, the news report is covering an article in a peer reviewed journal. Now given that the journal posted a news release writ big on their website royal society proceedings bio you can perhaps accuse them of causing a bit of hype. Unfortunatly the article isn't in print yet, or at least not online. But, and keep in mind I've only read the press releases, they might run afoul of a few people given their choice of neuropsychological tests.
It isn't exactly elegant to use the Raven matrix reasoning task. With a sample of 45, you should have time to run a full test of IQ. The short form of the WASI doesn't take that long (30 mins tops). The other issue is their measure of digit span. In my experience most people use a very simplistic measure of digit span that involves 2 trials per level (ie: give a subject 2 trials at 6 digits, 2 trials at 7 etc.) Where I work at the MNI , we've developed our own test that involves 8 trials per digit level, allowing the subject time to try out new strategies and reducing the effect of chance errors and/or successes.
But again, until the paper is published I can't really say if it's a bad study. I've faith enough in peer-review even if it does let in some bad studies now and again.
Reasonable is stretching it. The thing about some p2p apps, and soulseek in particular, is they're community and occasionally genre orientated. And for someone into any kind of non commercial music -in my case minimal techno and IDM but the argument could be made for indie punk, shoegazer, all female banjoe and kazoo bands, whatever; Apple music or any of it's soon to crop up brethren are not going to stock the kinds of music I want to listen to. Ever. It's extended top 40's for the college crowd with oodles of nostalgia rock. I'd be willing to pay, but the labels I enjoy don't have the infrastructure, the funds and let's face it, they don't have the market share to make it worth their while. Still I wouldn't be suprised if smaller labels set something similar up on their own, perphaps a distributor like Distribution Fusion in Canada or Force in Europe will do it for all the small labels. But certainly not Apple Music, MSN Muzak nor Warner's Musical Shiznitzes.
Haha the pundit just put his own foot in his mouth and sucked hard. Cage is Glass with Brains? Cage was nearly 6 feet under by the time Glass burst onto the international scene.
I've never quite understood America's reverence for Cage. The man basically free jazzed modern music. I can see how it was influential as Cage was the only major figure to go against the leading modern music movements of the time, which were all atonal and aweful sounding. And that certainly gave the ensuing generation (Glass, Reich, Monk et al) the freedom to break away from Academic status quo, but still his music on his own is pretty wank. One can write a program in 3 minutes that could generate hours of Cage's Music for Chance.
Albeit I must admit, sonatas and interludes for prepared piano is wonderful. Hell! prepared piano in general sounds amazing.
Another poster here is quite right, do a bit more film scoring mate! I score for contemporary Dance and some short video and a big faux pas is to constantly synch music to movement in a 1:1 fashion. We're not making a video game here folks, there need not be a modulation or new movement everytime a scene changes.
But then that's just what the MTV generation expects. Weened on the teet of shitty music videos.
As for Glass and minimalism in general, hate to bust up your post, but take a contemporary music history class. Irrespective of one's like or dislike for minimalism, the movement and the composers who started it are equally as important if not more so than Cage.
Without minimalism we'd still be forced to compose in the serialist idiom pushed by Boulez and his gang of serialist wankers. I challenge anyone to try and enjoy Un Marteau sans maitre.
Aweful atonal, arhythmic, intellectual stochastic wankery!!!
And very lastly, anyone who thinks that a contemporary american composer is making serious money is severely in need of a reality check. There's programmers here who rake in far more than Glass or Reich does in a year.
Slashdot Mirror
For what it's worth, there's a very decent Plex client that is under active development (check the plex forum). This app is why I went with smart tv. All the perks of plex/xbmc without another bloody roku/htpc box to drive it.
With only 47 participants this study has, in my eyes, about the same validity as the average undergrad study.
I'd love to know what kind of experimental psychology you do that typically runs so many hundreds of participants that you see 47 subjects as equivalent to an undergrad project.
I recently bought a used Droid 1 on ebay for cheap. Switched from Verizon to Page Plus (prepaid and no data plan) and am saving buckets of money compared to my dumbphone plan and since I'm always in WiFi for 90% of the time I get to have all the perks of a smartphone. Easy e-mail checks in meetings, apps for scouring forums,web browsing on the go to check movie times or what have you, etc.
My droid has replaced my GPS (maps downloaded to SD, don't need data plan for this) and my expensive MP3 playing alarm clock (Droid in a media dock = success). Smartphones don't have to be expensive, the Droid 1 is plenty fast. Faster if rooted and overclocked. If you got good wifi coverage then you don't need an expensive data plan. After flipping the dumbphone, GPS and alarm clock on ebay, I made money on the switch.
I liked that morrowind wasn't nerfed. The game created some basic rules and if you were smart to mix and match (i.e. potion quality scales with int, and int potions are additive, so boost your int like crazy and then make amazing potions) you could overpower the game. But that was the fun part. Compared to morrowind, oblivion was on rails. I still remember the sheer awesome of going into a cave way beyond my level. Realizing it and then using a cheap levitation potion to get our of harms way and rain down arrows and getting mad drops. Or using some seriously overpowered spell tricks to sneak into the underground vaults beneath vivec. And never did the game give me a "sorry this puny wooden door needs a key. Unlock 100 no workies!"
This would have been obvious if you had read the article. No guilty knowledge for you!
That's a little disingenuous. Given the console is 5 years old and this is the first significant and, dare we say, optional upgrade. It's really not so bad. Particularly given that people spend upwards of 300-500$ for video cards (double that for SLI) and they do this much more often that 5 years. Let's not get into the motherboards that have to house these puppies. Hell, people's PC cases are more expensive and upgraded more often than their consoles. I've upgraded my computer twice since the xbox launch. I'm sure I'm not a minority there.
The PS3 is the biggest energy suck of the lot! I'm amazed, I thought for sure the 360 would outrank it with its nuclear power pack. I just bought a PS3 a few weeks ago, and noticed my last power bill went up by 10$ in a time of the year when it usually goes down. So much for leaving it on to play mp3s all the time. Anyone else notice that the CRT used much less power than the plasma.
I'm a Canadian currently doing a PhD at an US university 90 minutes south of the border and I can tell you that not only do we pay taxes, we pay more taxes than US citizens (1040-NR doesn't allow us to make all the deductions that a regular us citizen gets to put on their tax form. Namely there's a big ~5K that we can't deduct, so while my american buddy paid 80$ income tax, I paid 840$). To make matters worse the US-Canada tax treaty only kicks in if you make less than 10k. So, in other words, we pay taxes to both the US, the state we live in and Canada... And if I was a previously a Quebec resident, I'd have to pay Canadian federal and Quebec provincial tax.
I don't know about other grad students, but I don't come to the US for the funding, I came because my department is the best in the world for my area of research, and I'm willing to take the tax shaft as a result. Still you'd think Canada and the US would have a more productive tax treaty. Many other countries do.
So, after finally getting around to watching "Tooth and Claw" (Doctor Who 28x2), I am reminded of Gregg Easterbrook's discussion of (someone's, I forget whose) theory of the sci-fi "idiot plot," a plot which can only carry on forward motion if everyone involved is an idiot. BSG has been full of them, especially of late, with fantastic "should we ask him if he still has that bomb we know was ours yet is the only one unaccounted for? Naaaaaah."-related activities.
While I agree that BSG has moments that strain suspension of disbelief, you're not seriously suggesting that the new Doctor Who has stories of higher caliber? Tooth and Claw had what? 35 deux ex machina moments? The Doctor doesn't use his brains anymore, he just runs faster!
Still loads of fun though but not a good foundation for critiquing BSG.
I keep seeing Civ 4 getting excellent reviews and I just can't fathom why. I find it a huge step back compared to Civ 3 (plus expansions). The civlopedia is a mess and near impossible to navigate (what happened to the links?). The technology advances now have no supporting historical text, which IMHO reduces tech advances to a mere pesky requirement for upgrading or building infrastructure. Since Civ 1, the great thing about Civ is that you can actually learn a few things about the inter-relationship between technology and cvilizations. Without any description of the technology (except for a quick sentence by Leanord Nimoy) you no longer have a sense of why it was so important to aquire it in the first place.
The 3D graphics add nothing to the game and actually make it more difficult to play (zooming out to a comfortable vantage makes the text blurry, and I'm playing at top res with a geforce 6800 ultra). All in all, I think it's a big step back from Civ 3, and certainly underserving of all the 90+ ratings it's getting. The game feels rushed and dumbed down. I think the only reason it's getting such great reviews, is there's nothing out like Civ (well... except for the other Civs).
I full on agree, the camera work really helps sell the idea that this is in space and space isn't a cubby hole. People might be too well trained by star trek. I'll never forget an episode of TNG where Data announced that the enemy ship is 700km away. But the external shot shows enterprise and the enemy ship nearly touching. Bitches couldn't get their space right. BSG does it perfectly.
So far I'm not finding the physics in half life all that impressive. In Halo 2, enemies, vehicles and rubble would get tossed around realistically when blown up with a grenade or hit with the jeep. It's not as fancy as HL2, but it's ample.
Still I'll give HL2 the better graphics,and Halo 2's ending was terrible.
But I'll reiterate, thus far in HL2 I feel like I'm on the designer's leash. There's not a thing I can do unless they let me. Halo 2, and moreso Far Cry, felt completely open. If I want to bring a ghost inside a building and wreack havoc, as long as there's one nearby, I can. In HL2, if you decide to be really hardcore and walk the jetboat section, forget it. You're screwed by the first door puzzle. It feels utterly contrived.
I second that, the load times on Half Life 2 are absurdly long and poorly placed. After playing through Halo 2, I was amazed at the level of immersion you can get from simply having no load times whatsoever. I couldn't stop playing.
Also I have to say Halo 2 got the illusion of freedom down far better than half life 2. Half life 2 is so linear and one-dimensional it's absurd. Halo 2 was no far cry either, but at least you felt like you could do what you want. Want to take the jeep into building? Go for it! You'll spend half an hour maneuvering it in, but the game doesn't force you to drop the vehicle.
Having said all that, I'm loving half life 2. I'm dissapointed, but it's still a lot of fun.
I don't understand all the moaning about a drawn out election. Is it really the end of the world?
By just giving Bush the election Kerry is doing a greater disservice to the country than one week of uncertainty.
From an engineering point of view, it's totally retarted. But evolved organisms have this kind of kludge all the time, because once you have a structure locked in, it's really hard to get away from it by mutation.
This has been a favorite example of imperfect evolution over intelligent design for ages. Dawkins made a big to do about it in 1986 and everyone pretty much took him to his word. The fact is that it's false. The cephalopod retina doesn't have the same cellular constraints on it as ours do. It is true that the vertebrate retina, unlike that of cephalopods, places the photoreceptors at the back of the retina underneath nerve fibers and blood vessels which can cast shadows on the photoreceptors below. Furthermore the photoreceptors themselves are inverted, such that the photosensitive end is pointed away from incoming light.
An intelligent retina design, it is said, would place the photoreceptors at the very top of the retina with blood vessels and nerves below. With limited facts such an arrangement makes intuitive sense, after al the eye's prime function is the capture and transduction of light. However this argument ignores the basic cellular biology of vertebrate photoreceptors.
Transduction of light into a neural signal depends upon disc shaped structures in the outer end of the photoreceptor cell. These discs contain the photopigment whose breakdown by incoming light is at the very root of the transduction process (ie: light to nerve impulse). As the photopigment in these discs is broken down by incoming light to generate the neural signal, the discs themselves must be quickly shed and renewed. This function is accomplished by the retinal pigment epithelium which holds the photoreceptors in place and recycles their shed discs while supplying them with the necessary nutrients to regenerate more discs.
A cephalopod retina organization would restrict photoreceptor's ability to quickly regenerate discs of photopigment, causing frequent photoreceptor bleaching and ultimately reducing visual acuity under strong light (ie: daylight). Furthermore shed opaque photopigment discs would float above photoreceptors and impede light much more than the mostly transparent nerve fibers and occasional blood vessel that currently sit above the photoreceptors.
Such an organization does leave vertebrate with a blind spot were the optic nerve is collected and projected back into the CNS. This spot lies away from the fovea and as such it's effect on vision is negligible. Particularly in vertebrates whose visual fields overlap (ie: eyes at the front, not sides of our heads).
So our retinal design is in fact the best design given that our photoreceptors have to remain embedded in the retinal epithelium.
Many of these posts are clearly extrapolating way beyond the original poster's intent. He's enthused about the possibility of listening to the radio shows that interest him when he desires to do so. He's not looking to have a T1 line jacked into the back of his head.
I for one sympathize and think way too much to do is being made about the putative benefits of "do-nothing" time. I used to listen to music during my 30 minute walk to work. Then I discovered NPR's the Connection radio archive. Along with the CBC's Ideas and much of the BBC. Now my morning and evening walks are a bit more edifying. Pop the real media or mp3 files onto my PDA and go (or if you hate real media, convert them to mp3). Same goes for the original poster. Why listen to morning radio pablum, aweful music and advertising when you can pop in a decent NPR show?
This doesn't mark the end of introspection nor the demise of the patient appreciation of art. It's simply replacing a more convinient, but often less desired media, with one from a different timeslot. So the poster listens to novels instead of music while doing excercise or having breakfast. I hardly think this is sign of an impending heart attack to say nothing of the demise of human civilization.
I'm on a voice of dissent warpath. The original series used a vocoder for the cylons. A simple explanation is that a vocoder uses one sound to modulate (or excite) certain frequencies in another. So you use the human voice to modulate a synthetic tone, hence robot sound. Same device that was used in a lot of early disco, some new wave then industrial music and now just about any electronica but electroclash is pimping the vocoder like mad lately.
I can't remember the sound of the robot cylons in the new series, but I wouldn't be suprised if at the heart it's just a more sophisticated application of the vocoder.
Not a big fan of the tele but I watched the mini-series and was quite impressed. Furthermore I disagree that everyone is a stereotype, or at least no more so than any other piece of fiction. The tough as nails always in trouble ace pilot is a girl, relitively new, though reeking of Aliens.
Essentially you could swap all the characters around and people would still complain of stereotypes. The sensitive but stern Commander. The holier than though Scientist with a god complex. The wet behind the ears pilot. The father and son who are best of buddies. What would the creators have to do for the characters to not in some way echoe something we've seen before? And I stress echoe because none of them struck me as an exact carbon copy of previous sci-fi.
I suppose if every character was bland and spoke in monotone then people would call it fresh and new. Oh wait, no that would be just like the Matrix wouldn't it?
A bit of a quibble, it's not frontal lobe epilepsy but temporal lobe epilepsy.
Frontal lobe epilepsy is quite rare. Furthermore given that the limbic system and quite a bit of sensory integration takes place in the temporal lobes it makes oodles more sense that disrupting these pathways would cause dysphoric and/or euphoric sensations.
True that and I have both. But sitting on the metro with a laptop is a pain. Notwithstanding that everyone reads over your back. Even if you're sporting a tiny wee mac lappy, you still need the infrastructure to carry it (read:bag). And battery life on a laptop is nothing like that on a pda.
As for the PC, the minute you slap a desktop on your back and have it suck power from your arse I'll jump ship and get rid of my pda. But it has to have lazers too alright?
Here's one very good need for a PDA
PDFs.
Anyone doing research in any sort of scientific domain should get one of these puppies. I download all my articles from the journal websites as PDFs. When it comes time for a lit search I can either print out hundreds of pages, or pop them on my Dell Axim (64mb w/48mb flash rom, 26 of which are available to the user. Beats Zaurus and it's a year old) with a 256mb sd card let me tell you that's hundreds of articles.
And as most of my raw data is in excell spreadsheets, with pocket excell I can go through my studies on my pda... Damn I sound like an advert now...
I have to agree with a previous post, the news report is covering an article in a peer reviewed journal. Now given that the journal posted a news release writ big on their website royal society proceedings bio you can perhaps accuse them of causing a bit of hype. Unfortunatly the article isn't in print yet, or at least not online. But, and keep in mind I've only read the press releases, they might run afoul of a few people given their choice of neuropsychological tests.
It isn't exactly elegant to use the Raven matrix reasoning task. With a sample of 45, you should have time to run a full test of IQ. The short form of the WASI doesn't take that long (30 mins tops). The other issue is their measure of digit span. In my experience most people use a very simplistic measure of digit span that involves 2 trials per level (ie: give a subject 2 trials at 6 digits, 2 trials at 7 etc.) Where I work at the MNI , we've developed our own test that involves 8 trials per digit level, allowing the subject time to try out new strategies and reducing the effect of chance errors and/or successes.
But again, until the paper is published I can't really say if it's a bad study. I've faith enough in peer-review even if it does let in some bad studies now and again.
Reasonable is stretching it. The thing about some p2p apps, and soulseek in particular, is they're community and occasionally genre orientated. And for someone into any kind of non commercial music -in my case minimal techno and IDM but the argument could be made for indie punk, shoegazer, all female banjoe and kazoo bands, whatever; Apple music or any of it's soon to crop up brethren are not going to stock the kinds of music I want to listen to. Ever. It's extended top 40's for the college crowd with oodles of nostalgia rock. I'd be willing to pay, but the labels I enjoy don't have the infrastructure, the funds and let's face it, they don't have the market share to make it worth their while. Still I wouldn't be suprised if smaller labels set something similar up on their own, perphaps a distributor like Distribution Fusion in Canada or Force in Europe will do it for all the small labels. But certainly not Apple Music, MSN Muzak nor Warner's Musical Shiznitzes.
Haha the pundit just put his own foot in his mouth and sucked hard. Cage is Glass with Brains? Cage was nearly 6 feet under by the time Glass burst onto the international scene.
I've never quite understood America's reverence for Cage. The man basically free jazzed modern music. I can see how it was influential as Cage was the only major figure to go against the leading modern music movements of the time, which were all atonal and aweful sounding. And that certainly gave the ensuing generation (Glass, Reich, Monk et al) the freedom to break away from Academic status quo, but still his music on his own is pretty wank. One can write a program in 3 minutes that could generate hours of Cage's Music for Chance.
Albeit I must admit, sonatas and interludes for prepared piano is wonderful. Hell! prepared piano in general sounds amazing.
Another poster here is quite right, do a bit more film scoring mate! I score for contemporary Dance and some short video and a big faux pas is to constantly synch music to movement in a 1:1 fashion. We're not making a video game here folks, there need not be a modulation or new movement everytime a scene changes. But then that's just what the MTV generation expects. Weened on the teet of shitty music videos. As for Glass and minimalism in general, hate to bust up your post, but take a contemporary music history class. Irrespective of one's like or dislike for minimalism, the movement and the composers who started it are equally as important if not more so than Cage. Without minimalism we'd still be forced to compose in the serialist idiom pushed by Boulez and his gang of serialist wankers. I challenge anyone to try and enjoy Un Marteau sans maitre. Aweful atonal, arhythmic, intellectual stochastic wankery!!! And very lastly, anyone who thinks that a contemporary american composer is making serious money is severely in need of a reality check. There's programmers here who rake in far more than Glass or Reich does in a year.