I don't know any uncircumcised guys myself, but the girls I've talked to who've had sex with ones who are haven't said there was any significant difference other than the visual one.
Is there anyone on here who was circumcised as an adult that can provide some perspective?
during, and soon after stopping, treatment with Accutane
Instead of giving people a 2cm-thick booklet full of warnings when they're prescribed Accutane, it should just be a post-it that says "this will fuck you up in ways you never would have thought posssible. Deal with it, because if you mention any of them to your doctor your prescription will be revoked and you'll have that face covered in giant zits for the rest of your life. PS: try not to kill yourself, and don't get pregnant unless you're an HR Giger fan."
"The digital" is the domain that encompasses digitally-stored data.
Art and sociology theorists consider true "digital" storage to be random-access, which is a caveat that purely technical people disagree with, but it's as pointless now as the hacker/"cracker" debate, because it's been entrenched for many years.
What he's saying is that as soon as you have random-access, perfectly-reproducible, easily-accessible storage, people are going to use it to make collages (of which "remixes" are the most popular subset today).
Furthermore, those collages represent a kind of "collective consciousness" because all of us in Western society grew up exposed to some or all of the components of that collage, and since our memories are based on associations, collage is a powerful tool for an artist to use.
This is basic modern art theory that was covered in a first-year course required for all students at the university I went to. Of course, >= 95% of the class ignored it or didn't care to remember, but whatever.
Gibson is a really, really smart guy. He's seen a lot of large-scale things in his life, and he has a good grasp on human nature and culture. It's easy to dismiss him as flakey because he writes and talks like an artist instead of a scientist, but that would be a mistake.
Things left to themselves deteriorate (decrease in order)
Like how water crystallizes into an ordered shape when it freezes, or did I misunderstand your statement?
I think the GP is refering to the fact (correct me if i'm wrong) that no one has ever observed mutations that come up with new, useful information, though there have been sereval mutations that destroy information (even if they are benefitial, like the one that regulates the amount of anti-penicillin some bacteria produce).
I can think of one right off the top of my head: if women get the right combination of genetic information, they can have four types of cones in their eyes instead of three.
Also, remember that evolution is not a one-way street towards "progress." Skinks losing their legs and becoming snakes is not "de-evolution."
Given normal observed scientific principles, complex systems tend to break down to smaller simpler systems over time without some external organizing force making it otherwise.
This is only true of a closed system, and the Earth is not a closed system.
Evolution is different. We have not observed it happening and have not been able to perform an experiment to prove it.
Skinks are a transitional form between lizards and snakes. Some snake species still have visible vestigal legs from their skink-oid ancestors. All three types of species are still alive today.
Why do those who are trying so hard to eliminate animal meat try so hard to make the replacements look, feel, and taste like meat? I've never understood that.
Uh... because meat generally tastes good? There are a lot of recipes that require it, or at least a reasonable facsimile? Barbecuing things is fun, and soy/wheat mock burgers and hotdogs work a lot better for that than a chunk of tofu?
You cannot have a greater level of accuracy than the original input.
Right, but the rules I learned in chemistry to determine the numbers were fairly complicated. IIRC, for addition and subtraction (but not multiplication and division), if you ended up with 4.135, and you wanted to round that to two decimal places, you looked at the number before the 5 (3 in this case) and whether you rounded up or down depended on whether it was odd or even (but I can't remember which).
This was because if you use the regular "round up if it's five or greater" rule, you bias your result higher.
This is the most geeky concept I've ever seen for a game (in a good way). From the author's site:
"Your mission is to destroy each invading Frequons by moving the cursor on top of it. What could be easier? Except for one itty bitty detail: the Frequons are not displayed in the usual spatial domain, but in the Fourier Domain. Frequons look like colored waves. Your "self" is a wave too, with opposite polarity. Instead of manipulating some local point on the screen, you manipulate a global wave pattern. You destroy Frequons by achieving destructive interference with them."
I would happily shop from U.S. retailers, but continue to be amazed by the number of U.S. companies that cannot understand the value in selling to the 30+ million people north of the border.
For smaller businesses especially, it's probably not worth the hassle of dealing with Customs and the Canadian postal system.
I moved up to Canada for three years to go to SFU. A friend of mine there was from LA, and his dad mailed him some expensive music gear he'd picked up while visiting. Customs literally destroyed all of it, going so far as to open the cases, smash circuit boards, and stuff packing peanuts inside before putting the cases back together. There was literally nothing he could do to be compensated for this.
The Canadian postal system is awful. I can mail things to people on the opposite side of the US and they'll get them in 2-5 days. When my parents would send me letters (Seattle -> Vancouver), it would generally take 2-4 *weeks*.
Imagine trying to be the customer service department for a small business and deal with that kind of thing. Someone orders $5000 in parts, and Customs destroys it. Great, you just saw your profit for a week or two vanish. Everyone else complains because it takes three weeks for their shipments to arrive.
Here, seeing the scope output is useless, because the only important this is whether you like the resulting sound output.
The scope isn't just to ensure a flat response. It can also tell you if changing one capacitor, op-amp, etc. for another one had any effect at all, or if the difference is psychological.
Why are there critical periods for language learning?
My understanding is that this is a result of the human brain's natural progression, as it filters out things it considers "inconsequential," like phonemes that aren't used in the part of the world you grew up in.
It seems to me that the more recently-evolved parts of the brain, while extremely powerful, aren't capable of processing all the raw data from the older parts, like sensory, instinctual, and emotional information. Or maybe it could, but we'd be so busy swimming in that sea of experience that we wouldn't be able to actually *do* anything. Kind of like autism?
"A transparent material is one in which the charged particles can't permanently absorb any photons of visible light. While these charged particles all try to absorb the visible light photons, they find that there are no permanent quantum states available to them when they do. Instead, they play with the photons briefly and then let them continue on their way."
Physics processors came too late for this generation of consoles. This will really put PCs over the top.
According to a game developer I know (who I agree with), they're not going to catch on. Everything they do can be done either by the CPU or (with some work) the GPU.
It's a cool idea, but I can't imagine it being a night-and-day difference like the first Voodoo cards were. The PC games market is already tiny compared to consoles, and developers are already overworked. I have a hard time believing that they're going to spend time adding genuinely amazing features to a game when most of their customers won't have the accessory that enables it.
get two laser pointers and cross the beams. I mount one straight up and move the other beam up and down. You get a short visible streak of light. Move it up and down faster than 60 times a second and it looks like a glowing beam.
This is an interesting idea, but it's not a lightsaber. More like a laser cutting torch.
- Lightsabers have the ability to block each other when used in a sword fight, which a laser doesn't.
- If you use lasers powerful enough to be a weapon, you will have not only a very long effective "saber," but also a second beam extending out at a varying angle, which will make it even more dangerous.
- Unless you have a very tiny fusion or antimatter source, a weapon like this will probably last less than a second on battery power.
- The lightsabers in the movies have some sort of "gripping" effect around the blade. Watch Yoda throw his and impale a clonetrooper in Ep3. If it were a plasma or laser beam, gravity would pull the handle down and it would either swing around and bisect the trooper, or fall straight down and disembowel him.
IMO there's so much theatrical sword basis for the film weapons that it would be difficult or impossible to make an identical one in the real world.
Slashdot Mirror
I wasn't butchered as an "adult", but I was when I was in a period of my life where I discovered sex.
Would you mind elaborating as to why you had surgery? I'm genuinely curious, since I'm not aware of any reasons for adult circumcision.
I don't know any uncircumcised guys myself, but the girls I've talked to who've had sex with ones who are haven't said there was any significant difference other than the visual one.
Is there anyone on here who was circumcised as an adult that can provide some perspective?
Evidently, mod points don't go to people with an advanced knowledge of biology.
I've noticed an unfortunate trend that a lot of "technical" people don't have any interest in biology, as if it's an outdated science.
Or maybe it's because it's easier to look impressive coding than genetic engineering =P.
What they are saying is, "Unless we find a patentable and highly profitable way to secure this discovery, We won't bother."
They don't have a choice, unfortunately. Getting approval to release a drug is stupidly expensive in most industrialized countries.
during, and soon after stopping, treatment with Accutane
Instead of giving people a 2cm-thick booklet full of warnings when they're prescribed Accutane, it should just be a post-it that says "this will fuck you up in ways you never would have thought posssible. Deal with it, because if you mention any of them to your doctor your prescription will be revoked and you'll have that face covered in giant zits for the rest of your life. PS: try not to kill yourself, and don't get pregnant unless you're an HR Giger fan."
(80% of incidents of 'painful coitus' for the woman is because of her partner being circumcised)
How fortunate that a wide variety of cheap and readily available solutions to this potential problem exist.
For one thing, this "phenomenon" hardly new, writers and musicians have been borrowing from one another since writing and music started.
Maybe that's why he mentioned that very aspect of history.
How is any component of that sentence a buzzword?
He uses "remix" literally, so that's out.
"The digital" is the domain that encompasses digitally-stored data.
Art and sociology theorists consider true "digital" storage to be random-access, which is a caveat that purely technical people disagree with, but it's as pointless now as the hacker/"cracker" debate, because it's been entrenched for many years.
What he's saying is that as soon as you have random-access, perfectly-reproducible, easily-accessible storage, people are going to use it to make collages (of which "remixes" are the most popular subset today).
Furthermore, those collages represent a kind of "collective consciousness" because all of us in Western society grew up exposed to some or all of the components of that collage, and since our memories are based on associations, collage is a powerful tool for an artist to use.
This is basic modern art theory that was covered in a first-year course required for all students at the university I went to. Of course, >= 95% of the class ignored it or didn't care to remember, but whatever.
Gibson is a really, really smart guy. He's seen a lot of large-scale things in his life, and he has a good grasp on human nature and culture. It's easy to dismiss him as flakey because he writes and talks like an artist instead of a scientist, but that would be a mistake.
Things left to themselves deteriorate (decrease in order)
Like how water crystallizes into an ordered shape when it freezes, or did I misunderstand your statement?
I think the GP is refering to the fact (correct me if i'm wrong) that no one has ever observed mutations that come up with new, useful information, though there have been sereval mutations that destroy information (even if they are benefitial, like the one that regulates the amount of anti-penicillin some bacteria produce).
I can think of one right off the top of my head: if women get the right combination of genetic information, they can have four types of cones in their eyes instead of three.
Also, remember that evolution is not a one-way street towards "progress." Skinks losing their legs and becoming snakes is not "de-evolution."
Given normal observed scientific principles, complex systems tend to break down to smaller simpler systems over time without some external organizing force making it otherwise.
This is only true of a closed system, and the Earth is not a closed system.
Evolution is different. We have not observed it happening and have not been able to perform an experiment to prove it.
Skinks are a transitional form between lizards and snakes. Some snake species still have visible vestigal legs from their skink-oid ancestors. All three types of species are still alive today.
Please explain this other than evolution.
Why do those who are trying so hard to eliminate animal meat try so hard to make the replacements look, feel, and taste like meat? I've never understood that.
Uh... because meat generally tastes good? There are a lot of recipes that require it, or at least a reasonable facsimile? Barbecuing things is fun, and soy/wheat mock burgers and hotdogs work a lot better for that than a chunk of tofu?
You cannot have a greater level of accuracy than the original input.
Right, but the rules I learned in chemistry to determine the numbers were fairly complicated. IIRC, for addition and subtraction (but not multiplication and division), if you ended up with 4.135, and you wanted to round that to two decimal places, you looked at the number before the 5 (3 in this case) and whether you rounded up or down depended on whether it was odd or even (but I can't remember which).
This was because if you use the regular "round up if it's five or greater" rule, you bias your result higher.
Why so few models offer this feature, even as an optional mode, I do not understand.
Is there a universal standard for significant figures? The one I learned in chemistry was odd enough that I wonder.
Having an automatic feature that only worked for some people would be even more confusing.
Frequon Invaders
This is the most geeky concept I've ever seen for a game (in a good way). From the author's site:
"Your mission is to destroy each invading Frequons by moving the cursor on top of it. What could be easier? Except for one itty bitty detail: the Frequons are not displayed in the usual spatial domain, but in the Fourier Domain. Frequons look like colored waves. Your "self" is a wave too, with opposite polarity. Instead of manipulating some local point on the screen, you manipulate a global wave pattern. You destroy Frequons by achieving destructive interference with them."
I would happily shop from U.S. retailers, but continue to be amazed by the number of U.S. companies that cannot understand the value in selling to the 30+ million people north of the border.
For smaller businesses especially, it's probably not worth the hassle of dealing with Customs and the Canadian postal system.
I moved up to Canada for three years to go to SFU. A friend of mine there was from LA, and his dad mailed him some expensive music gear he'd picked up while visiting. Customs literally destroyed all of it, going so far as to open the cases, smash circuit boards, and stuff packing peanuts inside before putting the cases back together. There was literally nothing he could do to be compensated for this.
The Canadian postal system is awful. I can mail things to people on the opposite side of the US and they'll get them in 2-5 days. When my parents would send me letters (Seattle -> Vancouver), it would generally take 2-4 *weeks*.
Imagine trying to be the customer service department for a small business and deal with that kind of thing. Someone orders $5000 in parts, and Customs destroys it. Great, you just saw your profit for a week or two vanish. Everyone else complains because it takes three weeks for their shipments to arrive.
Refusing to look at, deliberately misunderstanding, or ignoring evidence will get you labelled as a crackpot
Exactly.
I wasn't familiar with "Autodynamics," so I checked out a website on it. It's got all the hallmarks of pseudo-science:
- Lengthy explanations as to why you've never heard of it due to entrenched scientific belief.
- Use of the "theory" to explain just about everything.
- Ridiculous claims like red-shift being caused by gravitational effects on photons rather than the expansion of the universe.
Here, seeing the scope output is useless, because the only important this is whether you like the resulting sound output.
The scope isn't just to ensure a flat response. It can also tell you if changing one capacitor, op-amp, etc. for another one had any effect at all, or if the difference is psychological.
Gold does not corrode, but the problem is, if it is underlaid with nickel metal for plating purposes, well, there's a junction right there. Bad idea.
You may find this page and this page in particular, and the rest of the site in general, enlightening.
Why are there critical periods for language learning?
My understanding is that this is a result of the human brain's natural progression, as it filters out things it considers "inconsequential," like phonemes that aren't used in the part of the world you grew up in.
It seems to me that the more recently-evolved parts of the brain, while extremely powerful, aren't capable of processing all the raw data from the older parts, like sensory, instinctual, and emotional information. Or maybe it could, but we'd be so busy swimming in that sea of experience that we wouldn't be able to actually *do* anything. Kind of like autism?
Here's a snippet from a better explanation than I was going to write:
"A transparent material is one in which the charged particles can't permanently absorb any photons of visible light. While these charged particles all try to absorb the visible light photons, they find that there are no permanent quantum states available to them when they do. Instead, they play with the photons briefly and then let them continue on their way."
"will improve viewing quality on PS1 Cds" etc.
Um. It does. Turn on the PS2. Go into the options menu. Enable texture smoothing and fast disc access.
Physics processors came too late for this generation of consoles. This will really put PCs over the top.
According to a game developer I know (who I agree with), they're not going to catch on. Everything they do can be done either by the CPU or (with some work) the GPU.
It's a cool idea, but I can't imagine it being a night-and-day difference like the first Voodoo cards were. The PC games market is already tiny compared to consoles, and developers are already overworked. I have a hard time believing that they're going to spend time adding genuinely amazing features to a game when most of their customers won't have the accessory that enables it.
We force children to wear helmets to do anthting from sports to riding a bike
Yeah, because nothing builds character like a good skull fracture, and everyone knows helmets are only for people who want to look stupid.
Don't give in to the tyranny of helmets! No more lies from the helmet industry conspiracy!
get two laser pointers and cross the beams. I mount one straight up and move the other beam up and down. You get a short visible streak of light. Move it up and down faster than 60 times a second and it looks like a glowing beam.
This is an interesting idea, but it's not a lightsaber. More like a laser cutting torch.
- Lightsabers have the ability to block each other when used in a sword fight, which a laser doesn't.
- If you use lasers powerful enough to be a weapon, you will have not only a very long effective "saber," but also a second beam extending out at a varying angle, which will make it even more dangerous.
- Unless you have a very tiny fusion or antimatter source, a weapon like this will probably last less than a second on battery power.
- The lightsabers in the movies have some sort of "gripping" effect around the blade. Watch Yoda throw his and impale a clonetrooper in Ep3. If it were a plasma or laser beam, gravity would pull the handle down and it would either swing around and bisect the trooper, or fall straight down and disembowel him.
IMO there's so much theatrical sword basis for the film weapons that it would be difficult or impossible to make an identical one in the real world.