4) 120,000 terrorists in the US? C'mon! Has ANYONE on/. ever met a "terrorist"?
A very active member of the Society of Creative Anachronism was telling me that their organization is on an FBI watch list because of a misspelling on an application, where they were listed as the "Society of Creative Anarchism." They have over 30,000 members, so that leaves another 90,000.:) Incidentally, the Society of Creative Anarchism does actually exist... as a quiz bowl team from Minnesota.
The problem with percents is that they state one number and leave unstated the base for that number. Very little trickery is required to minimize or diminish importance without actually commiting falsehoods.
How to Lie with Statistics by Darrell Huff. My computer architecture professor suggested that we read it, and I can honestly say that this is important to anyone who deals with statistics. It dives into lots of common tricks that people will use to sway your opinion, such as graph scalings, use of mean versus median, etc.
Have you ever played the NCAA Football series? Really played it? I've been in on it since 1998. In-depth recruiting. Hot route audibles. Real fight songs for the majority of universities. Brad Nessler, Lee Corso, and Kirk Herbstreit with enough dialogue that I'm still hearing some things for the first time after a year. I can honestly say that NCAA Football 2004 is the best sports game that I've ever played.
I'll admit, EA has a history of making worthless sequels (read: The Sims ______) and not being adventurous when starting new franchises. However, to contend that they always have their thumbs up their butts by making rubber-stamp sequels with updated graphics and rosters, licensed pop music and no creative additions to gameplay since 1999 is inaccurate. All of the above changes have been included since 2001.
While you might argue that the fight songs and announcers don't contribute to gameplay, maybe you should experience the college football atmosphere. Corso and Herbstreit hold icon status across campuses everywhere for ESPN College GameDay (along with host Chris Fowler). It's not uncommon for them to have over 10,000 fans surrounding the GameDay show before the game, and everyone looks to see who they pick to win. Seriously. The insane atmosphere of college football makes adding these guys a huge bonus that can't really be quantified.
Actually, two guys I went to school with made something like this for their senior design project. They used a Texas Instruments DSP with a beat detection algorithm to determine the beat of any CD you played. They were crazy DDR fanatics and (I think) mapped the dance moves to the patterns you commonly see in-game rather than dealing with it beat by beat. The only downside was that they needed the DSP and a 10 second latency while the CD was buffering to handle future beat changes.
it just seems as though there is a huge influx of...just well, morons. Graduating too many highschoolers thinking they are headed for 13th grade.
Not to sound cold-hearted or anything, but I'm glad they come. I'm even happier if they don't finish. Why, you ask? If you think that college education is expensive now, think of what it would be if those freshmen weren't supporting the higher level labs with lab fees for courses they aren't taking.
At my undergraduate institution (University of Arkansas), the individual departments of the College of Engineering charge every student registered in their department about $250 a semester in lab fees, regardless of whether or not they are in a lab section. While many students cry that it is unfair to charge them for classes they are not taking, the sheer number of freshmen keep the 10-15 seniors who are signed up for highly expensive labs from paying $1000-$2000 for the experience of using state-of-the-art equipment.
As long as they don't pass these "morons" through and devalue my degree, I'm happy that they're in Calculus I (47% pass ratio as of 2001) and University Chemistry (no stats here, sorry).
It is just that certain operations have a large amount of parallelism. Check out the spec for DES encryption, for example. Many of the steps require a matrix transformation, where various characters are swapped around but no computations are actually performed on the individual numbers. A reconfigurable architecture could simply wire the bits into the next stage in the proper order, rather than using 64 individual lookups. Effectively, we have converted 64 cycles into 0 cycles. Another example you may want to consider is an FIR filter. Each term is multiplied by a scaling factor and added together to produce a result. With a reconfigurable architecture, you can perform all multiplications in parallel and add them as a tree structure in lg(n) cycles (where n is the number of additions).
While software may be able to optimize the execution of loops or computations for a given processor, the execution is inevitably sequential in nature, as instructions must be fetched sequentially. A reconfigurable architecture fetches a single instruction and performs many operations at the same time, some of which are more intensive than those available with single-instruction multiple-data (SIMD) processors.
In short, reconfigurable architectures are useful for doing operations that can be parallelized, which is something that your generic CPU or DSP may not be very good at.
The last place I worked had a history of practical jokes. It all started when Andy put a pull-tab firecracker in David's desk drawer. David saw the firecracker before discharging it, attached it to Andy's telephone, and called him. By the time I left, Andy had decided that he had enough of it. Here's some of the things that led up to the peace accord:
Fake words of the day from dictionary.com, which were later used in conversation with management.
Wimp of the year email poll
Switching the microphone and receiver in the telephone.
Holding desk trinkets hostage, complete with ransom notes and 'terrorist-esque' videos.
Putting index cards randomly throughout the other's books and files (still finding them to this day).
Replacing the background on the computer with a fat man in a thong and deleting the feature for changing backgrounds.
Setting the background to a remote file and slowly reducing brightness over a few weeks.
Cleverly renaming humorous audio files so that fart noises are sent to one's wife and mother.
Stealing a trailer hitch cover, encasing it in scotch tape, wire, and expanda-foam, and hiding it in the plant with a series of clues strewn about the building.
In the end, David pulled a prank that questioned Andy's personal character, which led to the end of the prank wars. Although we were all having fun, it is paramount that you don't make the pranks personal. The fun stops there. Period.
...but a big name publisher wanting to create a sequel to an amazingly popular game without the original developers? How many times have we heard this before? I believe that the Fallout SPECIAL system is one of the better ones out there, but Fallout 1 and 2 were so great because of the details: the dry humor, the cartoons, the subtle pokes at famous people, etc. Interplay is going to have a hard time replacing the developers' attention to said detail.
Because of the previous Fallouts, I will probably buy this one, but I'm going to wait a few weeks to see what corners get cut in the sake of budget and schedule (because we all know where quality rates with big companies), as opposed to getting on the waiting list 3 months in advance.
Note: This is all under the assumption that Interplay didn't fire everyone at Black Isle just to contract them out.
How would you like it if you were playing D&D, and you're friend insisted on being Lotar - the rich, dashing, heroic Warrior/Wizard/Fighter/Cleric/Archer/Shaman/Priest/Barbarian/Healer/Paladin/Thief, son of three or more assorted Gods and their unholy union with the Queen of someplace-or-other who seems to suddenly know the exact skills he needs suddenly every time he gets into a new situation?
...or the 1st level mage with a magical sword that only he can equip that does damage in multiples of his level and the ability to double the number of first level spells he can memorize. Yeah, that was the last time I played in that group. Before I left, I used all my money to stock up on "love potions" and lock this guy in a room with a half-orc looking for some lovin'.
Prove that Dell can make money selling desktops loaded with Linux and they will do it.
But who uses Linux right now? Mostly us geeks. Do us geeks buy computers from Dell? Most of the geeks I know (in r/l and on the net) build their own systems and wouldn't be caught dead with an oem box -- laptops usually excluded of course.
Here at Purdue, we have an agreement with Dell for discounts on ALL machines we order from them. We've got labs chock full of Dell workstations running Red Hat. Apparently, they find it profitable enough to offer them at a discount.
I've been wanting this for so long. I hate paying for things I don't need.
Agreed. I have primitive cable here in Lafayette, IN: 2 CBS, ABC, NBC, FOX, 2 public access, 2 C-SPAN, 3 home shopping, the channel channel, PBS, 2 religious channels, the international channel, WGN, and USA. I would gladly drop all but four of these (the networks) and pick up 2 channels: ESPN (for me) and HG-TV (for my wife). I'm not willing to pay the extra $30 to upgrade to the next plan to get these two channels.
I'd also be happy if they offered cable modem without having to get basic cable.
The future of the current gaming industry is online gaming and LAN parties. No AI is more fun than playing a human.
LAN parties: yes. Online gaming: some people. I've never met a gamer who hasn't enjoyed a LAN party. However, I detest playing online games in general for all the 13-16 year olds who haven't learned how to STFA. I don't have the time to game like I used to, so I would rather play a Final Fantasy, Neverwinter Nights, or GTA over dealing with the "noise" that has become of online gaming. I guess that the gaming world will just have to pass me by.:)
Actually, it can be way more than a hobbyist's tool. The University of Illinois has made a supercomputer out of a cluster of them! Laboratory website and press release. 1 GFLOP during matrix multiplication.
Someone has already made a cluster out of mini-ITX machines. While it may not be the fastest cluster in the world, I bet my university would rather throw a bundle of these into a small closet, rather than dedicate a huge lab to a bunch of ATX cases... especially given our space problems.
Brenda Myers, quoted in the CNN article that the slashdot link in the parent links to, said, "Every time you go these places [national electronics retail stores], they think women don't know anything, and they don't you the same features as they would when my husbands goes with me."
It's more than just electronics stores. My wife and I were visiting campuses before starting graduate school and stopped at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. I met a professor in his lab for a tour, and his first question was, "Is she here to take notes for you?"
Was he joking? Neither my wife nor I could tell, so we decided right there that the University of Illinois was not for us. It didn't help their case that they didn't even bother to respond to her requests for appointments. We found our way up the road to Purdue University where she and I are working on our doctoral degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering, respectively.
The moral of this story: Don't be surprised if this happens to you at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Really, the reason the old games simply ramped difficulty up to the point of impossibility was they had *nothing else to offer*. With in game movies with semi-coherent plots, lots of variety in gameplay, cool levels and a bit of humor, why would I want to beat my head against the same level for hours on end?
I agree completely. The question I would pose to the Slashdot audience is how many of those old-school games they've played lately. Some games still hold up really well (Metroid comes to mind), but some of those classic games are really annoying to the point I wonder what I ever saw in them. Final Fantasy I was complete trash by today's standards, and I say that as a huge FF fanboy.
The gap is amazing. Go back and play some retro games like Chrono Trigger or Final Fantasy VII. Then, go back and try some older stuff like Final Fantasy I. I don't want the old game again. Two steps. Fight. Miss repeatedly due to targeting a dead creature. Two steps. Fight. Miss repeatedly due to not having Masamune or Xcaliber. Repeat as necessary. The story wasn't really all that good either. I played through the game again a couple of years ago and slugged it out for pride's sake. I may just be getting older, but now that I've seen the new stuff, the only reason I would play the really old ones is for nostalgic purposes.
Those of us that have been playing games for 10+ years have for the most part become very adept at playing the games we play. However the newcomers don't have our vast vaults of knowledge with which to rely on and find them very difficult.
Case in point... my younger brother was playing Ratchet and Clank 2 and was hopelessly stuck. He spent the better part of Christmas morning trying to get through some part of the game. I sat down with my lifetime (literally, I was playing Pac-Man on Atari well around 2 yrs) of experience with gaming and cleared the whole level on my second try. The first was ruined because I didn't know what button jumped.
He tried Final Fantasy X and was having a hard time with the whole process of character development. Incidentally, this was the same problem that I had with Final Fantasy I and Dragon Warrior when they were released. I agree with the parent. It just takes time to learn the game types.
Want hard games? They still exist. Try playing online multiplayer games where the skill level is entirely dependent on your competition. It is amazing how badly I can get raped in Starcraft or UT: 2003 despite lots of practice.
I realize this is a rhetorical question, but... Me.:) I seriously thought about getting an Apple. I wound up with an IBM Thinkpad R40 because of the clearance special (-$250) and my mountain of old games for PC. From my experience, engineering students fall into three categories: iBooks, Thinkpads, and Dells. The Dells typically complain about the weight but love the cost for friggin huge screens. The Thinkpads are close to bulletproof, physically (the default OS is another matter), and only moderately expensive. The Apples (they have a small cult here) show off really cool OS features and a native BSD-style shell but pay the premium. Just depends on your cup o' tea.:)
P.S. Red Hat 9 actually installed better on my IBM than Windows XP Professional. RH worked out of the box. I had to use Linux to download my WinXP driver updates because Windows couldn't recognize my ethernet, modem, video, or sound.
I think that the most obvious reason to believe that they don't work is the fact that you don't see them in every store in the USA. Let's face it... if they worked, they'd probably be selling better than crack.
People do these "predictions" for all major sporting events, it seems. My personal favorite was a college football playoff system at Fox Sports. Texas beating LSU in the quarterfinals? Puh-lease . Texas got bitchslapped by Arkansas in its own backyard, bowed down to Big XII South heir-supreme Oklahoma, and got "snubbed" from the BCS by a K-State win only to lose to Wazzu. Why did they beat LSU in a computerized setting? Games tend to avoid coaching trends and other external forces in sports and focus entirely upon individuals' skills. Texas cannot win a big game despite having an elite talent pool. If they did, the Earth would cease to exist.:)
The point? There is no way that a game released at the beginning of the season can compensate for the Patriots' winning streak or their superior coaching. Everything hinges upon how the players were rated at the start of the season in the eyes of a set of programmers.
It gets even less meaningful when someone picks up the controller and starts playing. I can whip the computer 255-0 in six minute quarters in NCAA Football 2004 with my dynasty season and violate other players with a massively inferior team in multiplayer. Does that mean that Memphis is a better team than Oklahoma? No. It means I'm better than the person sitting next to me at this particular game. He can slap me silly in one of the other football flavors. Who is the better player, then? No one.
That said, Patriots by two TDs from their previous Super Bowl experience and pedigree from a much stronger conference.
I'm all for it. The typical slashdotter probably wouldn't be though. But bear in mind that many of the slashdot crowd are IT professionals, a single occupation within a greater sphere that has seen significant job losses.
I agree with the parent post that you would certainly bring a specialized contribution to CS/ECE. That said, I had a professor who did exactly what you are talking about. She had her M.D. and went back to get a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering. Because of her M.D., she behaved as if she were superior to the others in the department, including the department head. She treated even her best students as being worthless vermin. Subsequently, she became reviled by everyone who came into professional contact with her, and many students began a personal mission to get her fired.
The moral of this story: if you want to get the CS degree, you can make a wonderful contribution, but don't act that way to everyone else, if you want to stick around.
So the happy few, highly paid architects, 30 years-experience in the industry, hundred-published scientific papers at Intel decide that the next gen chip will have more stages and they have to be called morons ? How do you know better?... Let the pros do the work and go back playing Quake.
w00t.
For those of l33t h4x0r5 out there who are IEEE members, check out "Increasing Processor Performance by Implementing Deeper Pipelines" by Eric Sprangle and Doug Carmean of Intel's Pentium Processor Architecture Group in 2002. (Sorry about not having a link. I'm not at a location with IEEE Xplore access.)
In short, the paper describes how creating a deeper pipeline and increasing L2 cache can improve performance by 35-90% over a 2-GHz P4. This improvement is not dependent on process, so one may anticipate a similar improvement based upon the new process, although hard data is not available to me at this time.
The paper acknowledges branch misprediction as the leading cause of performance degradation and includes the penalty in the above mentioned statistics.
If there's anything I've learned about computer architecture, it's that there are always more factors than you know what to do with. Got a problem with branch penalty? Make a more accurate predictor. In the meantime, you increase throughput with a longer pipeline. Why? Because everything else gets the boost. The golden rule of architecture: MAKE COMMON CASES FASTER!!!
One of my friends and I saw this on the Wal-Mart special rack about 4-5 years ago for $4.95. He was a paintball ref and I was l33t at Quake, so we got it. The graphics suck, even for then. My stool samples could make better AI, as every one of the computer players were perfect shots. The computer controlled drones would walk into a wall because the nearest enemy was on the other side (shooting at them, mind you) and turn around just long enough to shoot you in the head before continuing to walk into the wall.
Every marker was the same. The only reason to make more money was to buy the copious amounts of ammo that you would have to use to have a prayer of hitting the enemy before getting tagged yourself, which you couldn't do unless the enemy had completely run out of ammo, first.
Exactly. As soon as the game manufacturer decides to offer a replacement disc free of charge (because we are 'licensing,' after all), I'll complain about copying software. I won't forget when they sold me a broken disc of Riven and refused to give me a replacement because it took too long for me to get to the broken disc and realize the problem.
Buzz Aldrin came to the University of Arkansas last year to give a talk about his view of the space program's future. One of my friends actually had the guts to ask him about the conspiracy theories associated with the Apollo moon landing.
"The Russians had a whole lot better equipment than those who claim conspiracy, and they didn't say a word," Buzz replied. I have to say that for a cold war atmosphere of 1969, he makes a brilliant point. For anyone who gets the chance, he is a really good speaker. Unlike a lot of people out there who insist upon being heard, he is incredibly well educated (Ph.D. from MIT), experienced (how many of us have been to the moon, anyway?), and a very entertaining guy.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll admit, EA has a history of making worthless sequels (read: The Sims ______) and not being adventurous when starting new franchises. However, to contend that they always have their thumbs up their butts by making rubber-stamp sequels with updated graphics and rosters, licensed pop music and no creative additions to gameplay since 1999 is inaccurate. All of the above changes have been included since 2001.
While you might argue that the fight songs and announcers don't contribute to gameplay, maybe you should experience the college football atmosphere. Corso and Herbstreit hold icon status across campuses everywhere for ESPN College GameDay (along with host Chris Fowler). It's not uncommon for them to have over 10,000 fans surrounding the GameDay show before the game, and everyone looks to see who they pick to win. Seriously. The insane atmosphere of college football makes adding these guys a huge bonus that can't really be quantified.
Actually, two guys I went to school with made something like this for their senior design project. They used a Texas Instruments DSP with a beat detection algorithm to determine the beat of any CD you played. They were crazy DDR fanatics and (I think) mapped the dance moves to the patterns you commonly see in-game rather than dealing with it beat by beat. The only downside was that they needed the DSP and a 10 second latency while the CD was buffering to handle future beat changes.
At my undergraduate institution (University of Arkansas), the individual departments of the College of Engineering charge every student registered in their department about $250 a semester in lab fees, regardless of whether or not they are in a lab section. While many students cry that it is unfair to charge them for classes they are not taking, the sheer number of freshmen keep the 10-15 seniors who are signed up for highly expensive labs from paying $1000-$2000 for the experience of using state-of-the-art equipment.
As long as they don't pass these "morons" through and devalue my degree, I'm happy that they're in Calculus I (47% pass ratio as of 2001) and University Chemistry (no stats here, sorry).
While software may be able to optimize the execution of loops or computations for a given processor, the execution is inevitably sequential in nature, as instructions must be fetched sequentially. A reconfigurable architecture fetches a single instruction and performs many operations at the same time, some of which are more intensive than those available with single-instruction multiple-data (SIMD) processors.
In short, reconfigurable architectures are useful for doing operations that can be parallelized, which is something that your generic CPU or DSP may not be very good at.
- Fake words of the day from dictionary.com, which were later used in conversation with management.
- Wimp of the year email poll
- Switching the microphone and receiver in the telephone.
- Holding desk trinkets hostage, complete with ransom notes and 'terrorist-esque' videos.
- Putting index cards randomly throughout the other's books and files (still finding them to this day).
- Replacing the background on the computer with a fat man in a thong and deleting the feature for changing backgrounds.
- Setting the background to a remote file and slowly reducing brightness over a few weeks.
- Cleverly renaming humorous audio files so that fart noises are sent to one's wife and mother.
- Stealing a trailer hitch cover, encasing it in scotch tape, wire, and expanda-foam, and hiding it in the plant with a series of clues strewn about the building.
In the end, David pulled a prank that questioned Andy's personal character, which led to the end of the prank wars. Although we were all having fun, it is paramount that you don't make the pranks personal. The fun stops there. Period.Because of the previous Fallouts, I will probably buy this one, but I'm going to wait a few weeks to see what corners get cut in the sake of budget and schedule (because we all know where quality rates with big companies), as opposed to getting on the waiting list 3 months in advance.
Note: This is all under the assumption that Interplay didn't fire everyone at Black Isle just to contract them out.
I'd also be happy if they offered cable modem without having to get basic cable.
Actually, it can be way more than a hobbyist's tool. The University of Illinois has made a supercomputer out of a cluster of them! Laboratory website and press release. 1 GFLOP during matrix multiplication.
Someone has already made a cluster out of mini-ITX machines. While it may not be the fastest cluster in the world, I bet my university would rather throw a bundle of these into a small closet, rather than dedicate a huge lab to a bunch of ATX cases... especially given our space problems.
Was he joking? Neither my wife nor I could tell, so we decided right there that the University of Illinois was not for us. It didn't help their case that they didn't even bother to respond to her requests for appointments. We found our way up the road to Purdue University where she and I are working on our doctoral degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering, respectively.
The moral of this story: Don't be surprised if this happens to you at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
The gap is amazing. Go back and play some retro games like Chrono Trigger or Final Fantasy VII. Then, go back and try some older stuff like Final Fantasy I. I don't want the old game again. Two steps. Fight. Miss repeatedly due to targeting a dead creature. Two steps. Fight. Miss repeatedly due to not having Masamune or Xcaliber. Repeat as necessary. The story wasn't really all that good either. I played through the game again a couple of years ago and slugged it out for pride's sake. I may just be getting older, but now that I've seen the new stuff, the only reason I would play the really old ones is for nostalgic purposes.
He tried Final Fantasy X and was having a hard time with the whole process of character development. Incidentally, this was the same problem that I had with Final Fantasy I and Dragon Warrior when they were released. I agree with the parent. It just takes time to learn the game types.
Want hard games? They still exist. Try playing online multiplayer games where the skill level is entirely dependent on your competition. It is amazing how badly I can get raped in Starcraft or UT: 2003 despite lots of practice.
P.S. Red Hat 9 actually installed better on my IBM than Windows XP Professional. RH worked out of the box. I had to use Linux to download my WinXP driver updates because Windows couldn't recognize my ethernet, modem, video, or sound.
I think that the most obvious reason to believe that they don't work is the fact that you don't see them in every store in the USA. Let's face it... if they worked, they'd probably be selling better than crack.
The point? There is no way that a game released at the beginning of the season can compensate for the Patriots' winning streak or their superior coaching. Everything hinges upon how the players were rated at the start of the season in the eyes of a set of programmers.
It gets even less meaningful when someone picks up the controller and starts playing. I can whip the computer 255-0 in six minute quarters in NCAA Football 2004 with my dynasty season and violate other players with a massively inferior team in multiplayer. Does that mean that Memphis is a better team than Oklahoma? No. It means I'm better than the person sitting next to me at this particular game. He can slap me silly in one of the other football flavors. Who is the better player, then? No one.
That said, Patriots by two TDs from their previous Super Bowl experience and pedigree from a much stronger conference.
The moral of this story: if you want to get the CS degree, you can make a wonderful contribution, but don't act that way to everyone else, if you want to stick around.
For those of l33t h4x0r5 out there who are IEEE members, check out "Increasing Processor Performance by Implementing Deeper Pipelines" by Eric Sprangle and Doug Carmean of Intel's Pentium Processor Architecture Group in 2002. (Sorry about not having a link. I'm not at a location with IEEE Xplore access.)
In short, the paper describes how creating a deeper pipeline and increasing L2 cache can improve performance by 35-90% over a 2-GHz P4. This improvement is not dependent on process, so one may anticipate a similar improvement based upon the new process, although hard data is not available to me at this time.
The paper acknowledges branch misprediction as the leading cause of performance degradation and includes the penalty in the above mentioned statistics.
If there's anything I've learned about computer architecture, it's that there are always more factors than you know what to do with. Got a problem with branch penalty? Make a more accurate predictor. In the meantime, you increase throughput with a longer pipeline. Why? Because everything else gets the boost. The golden rule of architecture: MAKE COMMON CASES FASTER!!!
One of my friends and I saw this on the Wal-Mart special rack about 4-5 years ago for $4.95. He was a paintball ref and I was l33t at Quake, so we got it. The graphics suck, even for then. My stool samples could make better AI, as every one of the computer players were perfect shots. The computer controlled drones would walk into a wall because the nearest enemy was on the other side (shooting at them, mind you) and turn around just long enough to shoot you in the head before continuing to walk into the wall.
Every marker was the same. The only reason to make more money was to buy the copious amounts of ammo that you would have to use to have a prayer of hitting the enemy before getting tagged yourself, which you couldn't do unless the enemy had completely run out of ammo, first.
In short, this game was no fun.
Exactly. As soon as the game manufacturer decides to offer a replacement disc free of charge (because we are 'licensing,' after all), I'll complain about copying software. I won't forget when they sold me a broken disc of Riven and refused to give me a replacement because it took too long for me to get to the broken disc and realize the problem.
"The Russians had a whole lot better equipment than those who claim conspiracy, and they didn't say a word," Buzz replied. I have to say that for a cold war atmosphere of 1969, he makes a brilliant point. For anyone who gets the chance, he is a really good speaker. Unlike a lot of people out there who insist upon being heard, he is incredibly well educated (Ph.D. from MIT), experienced (how many of us have been to the moon, anyway?), and a very entertaining guy.