Re:Swimming, hiking, biking, weight-lifting
on
Exercise for Geeks?
·
· Score: 1
Well, this isn't perfect, but for the "stink" problem I've sometimes worn casual clothes that can be scrunched into a bag and when I get to work I go to the Men's room, go into a stall, strip down, and do a sort of sponge bath with paper towels and rubbing alchohol. It only takes about five minutes once you've got the hang of it. Then change into corporate stuff. (Luckily I can usually get away with khakis and button-downs, which pack just fine.)
The keys to this are 1.) finding the right bag, 2.) learning to pack clothes very fast, 3.) doing the needed contortions in a toilet stall, and 4.) finding shoes that will work for both modes (I'm partial to New Balance and Rockport suedes.)
For a while I was the only person in the building with keys and codes to one of the server rooms, which made this all *much* easier, but that's not usually an option.
Ooh boy. A spelling bee! Back when I was in school (almost entirely in highly selective schools) spelling bees were the turf of the poorly socialized shallow thinkers who thought that rote memorization was the same as analysis. Mmmm-mm. Yep, that's the kind of skills students need these days.
Thanks for so effectively making the case that home schooling has socialization problems. Oh, I forgot. you don't need to actually think. You leave that up to Jeebus.
CS is based on a really cheesy one (Adobe whatever) and the big other player (Id) won't commit their best tech.
Script kiddies will mess everything up.
Previous attempts, from C64 days to now have always failed.
Navigation sucks.
Boy, if I didn't know better, I'ld say you're mostly a bunch of losers more interested in off the cuff remarks then in substantive responses. Naw. Couldn't be.
So, from the top, let's go back to Snow Crash and see what it actually says made the Metaverse succeed. Hmmm.....
-Close linking with sophisticated and micropayment-friendly commerce engine. Nope.
-Ability to seamlessly exchange data (such as the virtual business card containing the Snow Crash virus) without breaking the metaphor. Nope.
-Navigation and motion precisely correlated to actual full body physical motion (think how Hiro practices). Nope.
-Detailed and nuanced renderings of facial expressions. Nope.
-Stripped out, bare universe in the beginning, allowing early "settlers" to make their mistakes *years* before newbies are let in. Nope.
-HUGE telecom company with billions of dollars worth of computers and the power to overthrow governments backing the project (remember who owns the black cube in the desert, folks). Nope.
Yeah, you're all of you right. This is *exactly* like the metaverse and so proves that such a project will never work. Oh dear; I'm going to go home and cry now.
How about a "metaverse" system that drives X-10 devices in areas viewed by webcams? Then you can use your computer
. to log onto another computer
. . to telnet back into your other computer (or process)
. . . to drive a device(machine tool, mower, etc.) in the room next door.
And somebody will probably even find a way to charge for it.
There's plenty of good stuff out there, but you'll have to do some editing. As somebody who grew up around teachers and has worked in textbook publishing I can assure you that teachers all have to do it too. Their stuff sucks far worse than anything referenced here.
While Project Gutenberg is great, you should also check out on-line encyclopedias like NuPedia, and Everything2
which are all open source, as is The Open Directory Project . A great source of fiction, which can be a wonderful learning tool, is Baen Books who have put hundreds of book online and are eager to have them downloaded and spread around.
For science materials, there are lots of great sites for kids
done by educators pursuing whever they're into. All of which you'll want to use to spice up access to sites like Science Daily that are handy but a bit too serious some days for young minds.
Which brings me to Make Stuff which should fill in quite nicely for the "arts and crafts" part of most school curricula.
For biography I'ld check out American National Biography and for history a good start can be made with pages like Anyday which can be amazing or useless, all based on where *you* go from the starting point that they provide. Places like Colonial America are designed just for this but again, check out more than one.
For reference material you should check out Theodora which, while not meant to be open source, is very handy, Geographic.Org, which is open source and student-oriented, should do the rest. I've found that the CIA sourcebook is terrible, as folk should have long since figured out. Biased, misinformed, and sometimes just wierd; leave it behind. However if you hunt you'll find that within various.gov sites there's tons of great stuff, from manuals on camping to stuff on solar panels.
The space science community is very kid friendly, from NASA down to the local Mars Society chapter, having plenty of materials on quite a range of topics that you're free to reproduce and spread around. If you can handle it, the neopagan community is reliably eager to provide information and links on ancient indo-european history, from the government of Sumeria, to Celtic ironwork. (You might be surprised at how many neopagans have advanced degrees in history and/or literature.)
Speaking of limits, you'll always have to be careful that your kids aren't ending up places they shouldn't be but again, every teacher and librarian faces that one.
Lastly, the reason that I've got all this ready to hand is that I took it from my source database, more of which can be found on my web site, which is primarily oriented towards adults and older kids but does have plenty of other links like the ones here.
Best of luck to you and be sure to post back to slashdot in a few years about how it's going.
Rustin H. Wright - Information Geek
"It's all about the information, Marty. Little ones and zeros!"
Well, I see your point, but if we're going to go into reading lists then, come on! There are much more crucial books then those.
Lessee, first of all, there's Ecotopia The manifesto of the tech-green world (Ecotopia Emerging isn't bad either), then there's Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey, the book that started the eco-radical movement. Then we move on to early cyberpunk, which was actually very eco-oriented. Check out Shockwave Rider by John Brunner or for a more recent approach, anything by the revered Neal Stephenson (other than the vast wanking Cryptonomicon), who years before he did books like Snow Crash and Diamond Age actually made his living as an environmental activist.
Lastly, read Walden Two by, of all people, B.F. Skinner, that, while describing how to build a society from scratch, lays out very neatly most of the consumption and socialization issues behind much of the environmental movement.
Of course I could recommend Silent Spring but I consider it overrated.
That should get you started.
Rustin
I agree. There are plenty of good ways to spend money directly to help advance green issues. As someone who's researched this sort of thing I'ld say put your money into (smallest expense to largest)
use plastic lumber or simply buy it and donate it to local community gardens or others who can use it.
A serious solar charger for batteries and use rechargable batteries wherever possible (I know that this has shortcomings, but still helpful for now).
buy LED light bulbs (especially for hallways and other areas you use briefly)
a wind turbine based-system rather than a PV one (more bang for the buck, generally longer lifespan)
an on-demand water heating system, ideally one able to be run on methane
buy a diesel car and convert it to biodiesel, or even better, offer to help others who already have diesel (like local school buses) convert.
The last one is the biggest and the most effective. If you want to spend serious cash then funding a biodeisel support program that buys kits, pays engineering students or auto mechanics to install and support them, and then funds the processing of waste oil (local fast food outlets will have plenty) would make a huge difference. These folks have solid conversion kits and these folks can get you up and running. I figure an effective program would cost about $20K to set up and about $3K to $5K a year to maintain.
Good luck,
"Economics or legal issues, at least we agree that this wouldn't be easily feasable just now." I think NOT! On what grounds other than flat out defeatism? Show me numbers, dammit! Exactly what aspect of this is too expensive? I've been pretty appalled at the innummeracy of the statements in this discussion. If most of the posters were this fuzzy-headed when they're coding they'ld describe running an app on a JVM on WinCE versus a Beowolf cluster as "pretty much the same thing, right?" Do the math, folks, do the math. Passive orbiting, atmosphere dropping, laser blasting, more trouble creating, regulation encumbering. . . . ..*&^^$#){!| mutter, mutter, grumble, grumble, Feh!
I weep for the future.
Nice article. Kinda scary though to see that we've already got a magazine (Debris Quarterly) devoted to this. What do they do, run a special Spring Cleaning Issue?
WAIT! That's it! Convict Martha Stewart of insider trading and tell her that her public service sentence requirement is to clean up earth orbit! "Are messy crumbs from old launches cluttering up your favorite orbits? Clean them today; we show you how."
The problem that I have with these proposals is that, like they say in the Burmashave ad, Space is big. Really Big. Really, really big. Remember that volume increases as the *square* of the distance so we're talking, conservatively, about an area hundreds of thousands the size of our atmosphere.
This is why I'm backing the lots-of-robots, go-to-them approach. You say that you're a fisherman. Well, you're suggesting putting a net down with no regard to whether or not the fish are there. Certain areas are bound to be more encumbered than others. Also, how fine a mesh are we talking here and built of what? Diamond thread? Nanotubes? Keep in mind that one "drifting" bit of insulation can tear through plate steel if the relative velocities are high enough.
So, I say again-(-) lots of small guided devices actively seeking debris, (-) others that transfer debris to higher orbit, (-) process the stuff back down to raw materials, (-)then sell it for use in space construction since already being out of the gravity well *anything* is worth at least $50,000 per kg.
Yeah. . . and exactly how much have the Russians made from selling "space pencils"? NASA has always been pretty clear that they were eager for excuses to create spinoff technologies and the Fischer Space Pens have been selling well for decades. looks to me like points for the defense. Oops. Your bad. Oh, by the way, NASA also uses grease pencils in space where appropriate. Alway have.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, this isn't perfect, but for the "stink" problem I've sometimes worn casual clothes that can be scrunched into a bag and when I get to work I go to the Men's room, go into a stall, strip down, and do a sort of sponge bath with paper towels and rubbing alchohol. It only takes about five minutes once you've got the hang of it. Then change into corporate stuff. (Luckily I can usually get away with khakis and button-downs, which pack just fine.)
The keys to this are 1.) finding the right bag, 2.) learning to pack clothes very fast, 3.) doing the needed contortions in a toilet stall, and 4.) finding shoes that will work for both modes (I'm partial to New Balance and Rockport suedes.)
For a while I was the only person in the building with keys and codes to one of the server rooms, which made this all *much* easier, but that's not usually an option.
Ooh boy. A spelling bee! Back when I was in school (almost entirely in highly selective schools) spelling bees were the turf of the poorly socialized shallow thinkers who thought that rote memorization was the same as analysis.
Mmmm-mm. Yep, that's the kind of skills students need these days.
Thanks for so effectively making the case that home schooling has socialization problems. Oh, I forgot. you don't need to actually think. You leave that up to Jeebus.
Tons of other engines exist.
CS is based on a really cheesy one (Adobe whatever) and the big other player (Id) won't commit their best tech.
Script kiddies will mess everything up.
Previous attempts, from C64 days to now have always failed.
Navigation sucks.
Boy, if I didn't know better, I'ld say you're mostly a bunch of losers more interested in off the cuff remarks then in substantive responses. Naw. Couldn't be.
So, from the top, let's go back to Snow Crash and see what it actually says made the Metaverse succeed. Hmmm.....
-Close linking with sophisticated and micropayment-friendly commerce engine. Nope.
-Ability to seamlessly exchange data (such as the virtual business card containing the Snow Crash virus) without breaking the metaphor. Nope.
-Navigation and motion precisely correlated to actual full body physical motion (think how Hiro practices). Nope.
-Detailed and nuanced renderings of facial expressions. Nope.
-Stripped out, bare universe in the beginning, allowing early "settlers" to make their mistakes *years* before newbies are let in. Nope.
-HUGE telecom company with billions of dollars worth of computers and the power to overthrow governments backing the project (remember who owns the black cube in the desert, folks). Nope.
Yeah, you're all of you right. This is *exactly* like the metaverse and so proves that such a project will never work. Oh dear; I'm going to go home and cry now.
Maybe not.
Doggone, pathetic, defeatist, ignorant, shallow, grumble, mumble, bitch, moan . . . . .
How about a "metaverse" system that drives X-10 devices in areas viewed by webcams? Then you can use your computer
. to log onto another computer
. . to telnet back into your other computer (or process)
. . . to drive a device(machine tool, mower, etc.) in the room next door.
And somebody will probably even find a way to charge for it.
Yep. It's the future and I LIKE IT!
Well, Cliff,
There's plenty of good stuff out there, but you'll have to do some editing. As somebody who grew up around teachers and has worked in textbook publishing I can assure you that teachers all have to do it too. Their stuff sucks far worse than anything referenced here.
While Project Gutenberg is great, you should also check out on-line encyclopedias like NuPedia, and Everything2 which are all open source, as is The Open Directory Project . A great source of fiction, which can be a wonderful learning tool, is Baen Books who have put hundreds of book online and are eager to have them downloaded and spread around.
For science materials, there are lots of great sites for kids done by educators pursuing whever they're into. All of which you'll want to use to spice up access to sites like Science Daily that are handy but a bit too serious some days for young minds.
Which brings me to Make Stuff which should fill in quite nicely for the "arts and crafts" part of most school curricula.
For biography I'ld check out American National Biography and for history a good start can be made with pages like Anyday which can be amazing or useless, all based on where *you* go from the starting point that they provide. Places like Colonial America are designed just for this but again, check out more than one.
For reference material you should check out Theodora which, while not meant to be open source, is very handy, Geographic.Org, which is open source and student-oriented, should do the rest. I've found that the CIA sourcebook is terrible, as folk should have long since figured out. Biased, misinformed, and sometimes just wierd; leave it behind. However if you hunt you'll find that within various.gov sites there's tons of great stuff, from manuals on camping to stuff on solar panels.
The space science community is very kid friendly, from NASA down to the local Mars Society chapter, having plenty of materials on quite a range of topics that you're free to reproduce and spread around. If you can handle it, the neopagan community is reliably eager to provide information and links on ancient indo-european history, from the government of Sumeria, to Celtic ironwork. (You might be surprised at how many neopagans have advanced degrees in history and/or literature.)
Speaking of limits, you'll always have to be careful that your kids aren't ending up places they shouldn't be but again, every teacher and librarian faces that one.
Lastly, the reason that I've got all this ready to hand is that I took it from my source database, more of which can be found on my web site, which is primarily oriented towards adults and older kids but does have plenty of other links like the ones here.
Best of luck to you and be sure to post back to slashdot in a few years about how it's going.
Rustin H. Wright - Information Geek
"It's all about the information, Marty. Little ones and zeros!"
Well, I see your point, but if we're going to go into reading lists then, come on! There are much more crucial books then those.
Lessee, first of all, there's Ecotopia The manifesto of the tech-green world (Ecotopia Emerging isn't bad either), then there's Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey, the book that started the eco-radical movement. Then we move on to early cyberpunk, which was actually very eco-oriented. Check out Shockwave Rider by John Brunner or for a more recent approach, anything by the revered Neal Stephenson (other than the vast wanking Cryptonomicon), who years before he did books like Snow Crash and Diamond Age actually made his living as an environmental activist.
Lastly, read Walden Two by, of all people, B.F. Skinner, that, while describing how to build a society from scratch, lays out very neatly most of the consumption and socialization issues behind much of the environmental movement.
Of course I could recommend Silent Spring but I consider it overrated.
That should get you started.
Rustin
use plastic lumber or simply buy it and donate it to local community gardens or others who can use it.
A serious solar charger for batteries and use rechargable batteries wherever possible (I know that this has shortcomings, but still helpful for now).
buy LED light bulbs (especially for hallways and other areas you use briefly)
a wind turbine based-system rather than a PV one (more bang for the buck, generally longer lifespan)
an on-demand water heating system, ideally one able to be run on methane
buy a diesel car and convert it to biodiesel, or even better, offer to help others who already have diesel (like local school buses) convert.
The last one is the biggest and the most effective. If you want to spend serious cash then funding a biodeisel support program that buys kits, pays engineering students or auto mechanics to install and support them, and then funds the processing of waste oil (local fast food outlets will have plenty) would make a huge difference. These folks have solid conversion kits and these folks can get you up and running. I figure an effective program would cost about $20K to set up and about $3K to $5K a year to maintain.
Good luck,
Rustin
"Economics or legal issues, at least we agree that this wouldn't be easily feasable just now." .*&^^$#){!|
I think NOT! On what grounds other than flat out defeatism? Show me numbers, dammit! Exactly what aspect of this is too expensive? I've been pretty appalled at the innummeracy of the statements in this discussion. If most of the posters were this fuzzy-headed when they're coding they'ld describe running an app on a JVM on WinCE versus a Beowolf cluster as "pretty much the same thing, right?"
Do the math, folks, do the math.
Passive orbiting, atmosphere dropping, laser blasting, more trouble creating, regulation encumbering. . . . .
mutter, mutter, grumble, grumble, Feh! I weep for the future.
Amen!
Though personally I think that if the ISS crew wants the raw materials they can line up and pay for them just like anybody else.
Nice article. Kinda scary though to see that we've already got a magazine (Debris Quarterly) devoted to this. What do they do, run a special Spring Cleaning Issue?
WAIT! That's it! Convict Martha Stewart of insider trading and tell her that her public service sentence requirement is to clean up earth orbit!
"Are messy crumbs from old launches cluttering up your favorite orbits? Clean them today; we show you how."
The problem that I have with these proposals is that, like they say in the Burmashave ad, Space is big. Really Big. Really, really big. Remember that volume increases as the *square* of the distance so we're talking, conservatively, about an area hundreds of thousands the size of our atmosphere.
This is why I'm backing the lots-of-robots, go-to-them approach. You say that you're a fisherman. Well, you're suggesting putting a net down with no regard to whether or not the fish are there. Certain areas are bound to be more encumbered than others.
Also, how fine a mesh are we talking here and built of what? Diamond thread? Nanotubes? Keep in mind that one "drifting" bit of insulation can tear through plate steel if the relative velocities are high enough.
So, I say again-(-) lots of small guided devices actively seeking debris, (-) others that transfer debris to higher orbit, (-) process the stuff back down to raw materials, (-)then sell it for use in space construction since already being out of the gravity well *anything* is worth at least $50,000 per kg.
Yeah. . .
and exactly how much have the Russians made from selling "space pencils"?
NASA has always been pretty clear that they were eager for excuses to create spinoff technologies and the Fischer Space Pens have been selling well for decades. looks to me like points for the defense.
Oops. Your bad.
Oh, by the way, NASA also uses grease pencils in space where appropriate. Alway have.