I spend no time "memorizing" anything. If I see something I have not seen before, I find and/or figure out what it is, and after that I know, and will recognize it in the future. Knowing a vehicle by the sound of it is just a fun personal challenge. I like to guess who pulled into the driveway by the sounds. No biggy.
The only vehicle that has cost me any time to learn to recognize in recent memory was this little red roadster that passed by me on my way to work early last spring: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HondaS600.JPG . The license plate that read '1966' was a big help in figuring out what it was, and I knew it was an old Honda when it went past, from the sound of the engine. There were only 111 of them built that year, and they are a few years older than I am, so that explains why I don't ever remember seeing one. Interestingly, it has chain drive to both rear wheels, rather than a driveshaft. The one I saw looked as good or better than the one in the photo, and was the more rare left-hand drive, rather than the right-hand drive pictured there.
I could. Easily. I can tell them apart by the sound of the engine, sight unseen, by the shape and spacing of their headlights in my mirrors at night, or by a raft of stylistic details from several blocks away. But, then, *I* like automobiles. These lawyers probably don't care at all about technology. Hold up a $50 and a $5 at 10 feet and I bet they have no trouble at all distinguishing the two.
Actually, no, MFN status for China had to be renewed annually, and was renewed annually for China by Carter (on his way out), Reagan, Bush Sr., and Clinton. Clinton campaigned that he was going to let MFN status lapse as leverage against China's human rights abuses. He ended up knuckling under to pressure from agricultural interests who did not want to suffer taking a hit to grain exports (estimated at about $3B in losses, and another $2B in retaliatory tariffs). He also became convinced (as Bush had argued) that China was more likely to make progress on the issue if the subject were treated separately from the subject of trade, and would respond poorly under threat of sanctions. Bush (Sr.) was a former ambassador to China and recognized widely as an expert on the Chinese, so he was probably right. He had the hardest time of any of the above Presidents in getting MFN status pushed through Congress, mostly due to the Tienanmen Square massacre. That's probably the only reason the topic was in the air when Clinton was campaigning, and he took heat from his own party (Pelosi, in particular) when he followed Bush's lead on the matter. Late in Clinton's second term, Congress granted PNTR (Permanent Normalized Trade Relations) status to China, and he signed it into law. This was somehow a prerequisite for China joining the World Trade Organization. At any rate, all members of WTO are supposed to grant MFN status to all other members. At the time, our exports to China had tripled during the previous decade, so it seemed to be in our best interest. Perhaps this latter move was what you are thinking of? If so, examine news articles from the time period and you will find that Newt Gingrich was instrumental in getting this through Congress. There's enough "blame" to butter both sides with, in this case.
I was a roommate for a week with an HIV researcher during a medical seminar, in the late 1980's or early 1990's. We were both working for the seminar (I was doing A/V, I don't remember what he was doing). I asked him if it was possible to contract the disease from a mosquito that had bitten an infected person. He said it would be unlikely but it was certainly possible. He said it was unlikely because the virus likes to be kept warm, and blood in a mosquito cools down rapidly. But if you were in a crowd with mosquitoes zipping about quickly from person to person, certainly possible. Since then, I have always wondered what effect induced, controlled hypothermia might have on the virus in HIV patients (assuming that cold means it dies rather than going dormant).
Eh, Sorry. I've used tons of interfaces over the last 32 years; I am quite capable of dealing with change. So far, the only way I have found to deal comfortably with the 'ribbon' is to eliminate its use. I hide it completely, and learn the keyboard equivalents for even the most obscure commands, in software I rarely use (like Word and Excel). It just takes too damned long to "discover" where they've hidden the feature I need, even though I know it exists. It is faster to Google for the keyboard equivalent than to find it in the ribbon. I also cannot stand how much space it takes up. I'm a certified toolbar-hater because of the space they consume, I turn them off and do not use them; I do not like having this toolbar/menu mashup forced on me as my only option. It is pretty bad when 'Ctrl+Shift+5' has more meaning than anything I can quickly find on my screen.
I would beg to differ. I spent a couple of hours last week setting up a regression test environment to run a patched version of our FTP connection layer through its paces with (the errors were actually in SFTP error handling, but we re-test everything). Some of the equipment our customers must collect data from supports no other method of retrieving it. Generally, the network is itself *very* secure, and our box is sitting inside of it. I guess the customers don't see it to be much of an issue, and will most likely not be replacing much of this equipment until POTS is simply phased out. There are also pieces of new equipment still being sold that get their firmware and boot configuration via TFTP, only.
Not only do they have more rights, but they have more money, are held to lower moral standards (if any), and can achieve far greater longevity than other "corporeal" beings if managed correctly (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies) .
Actually, typewriters are very interesting devices. I used to work on IBM Selectrics for the fun of it. I recently pitched my electric typewriters (had to move, and downsized my collection), but kept two old mechanical typewriters. One of the two is a mathematics typewriter, complete with a number of calculus symbols and other nifty glyphs. I had seen that before on the electrics with the daisy wheel or the type ball, but this is the only one I have seen with the symbols actually molded onto the keys and cast onto the type bars. It still works, too, though I had to re-ink the ribbon myself.
U.S. Bank has the loan for my truck. I have no other dealings with them. Just got an email about the Epsilon information being stolen, supposedly only our email address (my wife's, actually). They apparently contract with Epsilon for their email services. This outsourcing of customer management always bothers me. It seems you are never dealing with a single company anymore; any commerce involves spreading your information out to a collective of "responsible" parties, regardless of appearances otherwise. Then, when problems arise, they have a 3rd party to point fingers at. If this had not happened, I probably never would have heard of "Epsilon".
Perhaps they are not meaningful to you. Personally, I pay to keep my telephone number *out* of the white pages, and divulge none of the other information to anyone other than my employer, my bank, some creditors, and a few real-life friends. I don't want *anyone* else to have it. I'm inclined to send nasty-grams to HR when they voluntarily give away my work email address to 'corporate perks' programs and 'employee health' organizations. I get almost zero personal spam but average five a day for my work address.
Facebook still manages to piss me off. I moved a couple of years ago, and made the mistake of giving my real email address to the realtor who was supposed to sell my old house. He ended up sending me an invite to friend him on Facebook. I do not have (or want) a Facebook account, but they now have my email address because of this dufus. Worse, I then started getting spam from Facebook, with these little icons of photos of people I 'might know'. Actually, I did know about 4 out of 5 of them. This indicates two things to me: 1) These people have poked around on Facebook to see if I am there; and 2) Facebook maintains these searches in a damned database. So, whether you 'opt in' to this or not, your associations are tracked and cataloged for their future use. I no longer have that email address. I terminated it last year because it is now useless to me.
For what it is worth, I spent a couple of years where part of my job was doing merges of various targeted mailing lists to make even more targeted mailing lists. At one point, we had a doctor paying us to identify unwed mothers. Most people would be amazed at the information that falls out when you start tying different mailing lists together -- everything from magazine subscription lists, to stores you have purchased things from, to club and organization membership lists. All for sale. All very useful. Want to make a statistically valid guess at someone's gender preference? It isn't difficult, and I expect you will be able to purchase such information on line in the near future (you can probably do so already, but I haven't looked into it).
In summary, it is true that what Facebook is doing is not unique, it is just a new dimension (web of associations between persons) added to already available information (web of associations to organizations). On that point I would agree. I disagree that this is not meaningful. It all depends on how creative you are at cross-referencing. An email-address, in particular, is *very* valuable in this regard -- better than a physical address for some things.
I had originally started reading this article and started to comment, then had to leave for several hours. Came back and finished my comment, which was regarding our decision for "No Baby Talk" with our daughters. Now I see that many others here have made similar choices, so we are not alone, even if it seems that way to us.
I would like to reassure others that I so far see no sign that what Lemmy here says is true. Daughter one is 15 years old now, ahead of her peers in school with respect to her age, well adjusted, in all honors classes in a tough school system. She is a successful artist, with some of her artwork on display currently in Washington, D.C., and a talented musician, playing seven instruments and currently a member of three orchestras, one of them at the national level. She isn't currently taking an art class so that she can fit in three years of Japanese and double up on sciences, intending to double up on art classes next year -- this arrangement being the only way to fit things into her schedule. She intends to take C++ programming classes next year if she will be allowed to drop her study hall. She isn't "cognitively engineered" at all. We keep her engaged, and we support her in whatever way we can, but she motivates herself. Her biggest problem is that there isn't enough time to do everything she would like. She has played soccer for ten years, but dropped off the team at her high school this year because it consumed too much time. Many of her friends are just like her.
Daughter two (7 now) shows every sign that she's heading along the same route.
I agree with the observation that reinforcing behaviors are deliberate. My wife and I discussed exactly how to handle these issues on an ongoing basis. It was also my habit to spend a lot of time with both daughters, walking around and observing things, pointing out, explaining, and reading every street sign or anything else that presented an opportunity. Language is incredibly important. Beyond this is the part where I disagree -- "short sentences" are *not* obvious. I actually have clear memories of learning to speak and read, and I *hated* it when people spoke down to me. So I did not do that with my daughters. No baby talk. Use complete sentences. Use the correct word, even if it is not common vocabulary, etc. Of course, if my kids had not been capable of learning from this I am sure I would have reverted to tradition, but that did not happen. Both began speaking very early, and learned rapidly.
I don't recall specifics around 18 months, but I do know that my older daughter was reading well before she turned 3, because we read together every night and I would write the date that she first read a book on her own inside the front cover. I remember the exact book that convinced me that this wasn't just a good memory: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0679832696/?tag=googhydr-20&hvadid=3878470371&ref=pd_sl_17n0twlwjr_e#reader_0679832696 (P.J. FunnyBunny Camps Out). She read that out loud to me about 3 months before her third birthday, without any help from me, and without anyone having read it to her first. After a year of preschool at age 3, we were convinced that a second year of it would be a waste of time, especially when she would recognize misspellings on paperwork the administrator was sending home to parents. We found a private kindergarten that would take her if she passed an interview and made it through a class (this while she was still 3, in order to register for the fall classes that would start a few weeks before she turned 4). During her class time, she took to walking around the class to help the other kids with their work, including writing names for those kids that did not know how to write their own yet. I remember the kindergarten teacher being shocked that she had correctly spelled "Christopher" for one of those kids.
Daughter two has always been a little more difficult to assess. I can't tell you when she learned to read. Before she was 3, she confirmed with me that she had read the phrases on two signs in a parking lot correctly, after we took her to get glasses to correct for her "lazy eye". This was in the parking lot of the optometrist, when I was putting her into the car seat while her mother was still inside paying the bill. I believe she was just validating that her glasses were working properly. After that, she refused to perform -- would not even read the same signs to her mother. I would read to her every night just like I had with her sister, but she refused to ever read for me. I was convinced that she understood how to do it, she just did not want to. When she went to preschool, we would hear gushing reports from her teachers about how well she read, but never got any demonstration of it at home. Likewise it went, on up through the other grades. She is in second grade now, and I am still reading to her every night and she still refuses to read out loud for me, except when it is a homework assignment. My wife helps out with the school, doing math and reading assessments, and daughter two is in the "advanced readers" group. My wife says she is so far ahead of the other "advanced readers" that it is like night and day. She does read voraciously on her own now, having just completed several of the Harry Potter novels. I had recently read a few of the "Illustrated Classics" versions of some of Jack London's books to her, including White Fang and Call of the Wild. Tonight she told me she doesn't like the simplified
I've encountered a few really annoying newsgroup trolls over the years, people that only showed up in order to stir up crap for no good reason. Those types invariably seem to think that they're anonymous because they use an assumed name and some Yahoo/AOL/Google address they acquired for that particular purpose. Although it cost me dearly in hours and eyestrain, I've hunted a couple of those people down, identified them, then posted all of the steps necessary to connect the dots back to the newsgroups they were making asses of themselves on, with information detailed enough to derive their home telephone numbers, names, place of employment, and even more sensitive personal information (in one case, if someone chose to read between the lines). In both cases, that was the end of it -- no more troll. I did this the first time after having had a discussion with a friend, who suggested that this was the best way he had found to deal with astroturfers. I believe he was right (thanks Alex). For casual trolls, I still think it is advisable to simply ignore them -- for people that are seriously asinine, a little vigilantism can be effective.
Unlike some, I have no appreciation for "the Art of Trolling". Appreciating a skillful trolling is no more worthwhile than appreciating fine sewage-making. They add essentially the same benefit to society -- in fact, the sewage might be the greater contribution: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pecunia_non_olet
Meh. Someone my Dad was friends with when I was growing up had memory that was near enough to photographic to convince me. He could watch a train go by and then recite off the colors of each car and read off the signage of everything from his memory, dictating it back to you. My brother is a train geek, and tested this a few times by picking a train car at random, then asking the guy to describe, say, "the 37th car" after the train had gone by. You could also hand him a book, and let him flip through the pages, then have him 'read' a particular page from memory. This guy did not consider his ability to be an asset -- quite the opposite. He insisted that his head was constantly full of "noise" from random rememberings, and that he could not forget things that he really would much rather not remember. He wasn't especially successful, either. IIRC, he was a coal miner.
It isn't difficult to learn, or to teach, at least to the younger generation. Even my 7-year-old knows the difference between, 'To:', 'CC:', and 'BCC:'. She even complained to her second-grade teacher about putting everyone in the 'To:' field, because now everyone has her address, which she was told to keep private. He's learned his lesson. My 15-year-old's soccer coach is another story, though. The concept seems too difficult for him. He's at least learned to distribute those nasty.docx files with a PDF as well, though.
I taught my wife and daughters: Use the 'To:' field for the primary people you are corresponding with, and might expect a response from. Use 'CC:' for those that might also need the information but probably don't need to act on it in any way. Use 'BCC:' for large distributions or any email where not all of the parties will know each other and you don't have permission to share their contact information with other people (a good example is sharing a joke with a bunch of people in your address book). My oldest daughter also uses it to keep me informed when her online conversations wander into the territory of "stuff Dad had better know about."
I have copies of many of my favorite anime either as fan subs or Korean-made English dubs, and some just in the original Japanese with no English at all, but bought the U.S. releases as soon as they were available. Sometimes that was ten years after my initial purchase. But I do currently own a "legitimate" copy of everything. I actually like some of the subs better -- they sometimes dumb down the English dialog to fit the mouth movements better. A (good) sub gives you the audio cues for emotion from the original actors, along with a more accurate representation of the meaning.
I've only seen one of the episodes in which they attempted to set a boat on fire with a solar reflector. They did manage to make a lot of smoke, but no flame. There were a few obvious things that might have worked against the effort simply because they were *not* made from "ancient materials". The boat itself was wooden, but painted. Ancient boats would almost certainly have been coated entirely in pitch. They didn't nail things together then, they actually drilled holes through the planks and tied them together with cords, then coated the entire works in pitch to seal out water and to prevent rot (we use paint mostly for the latter purpose). If you've ever played with a lens and asphalt as a kid, you know it is relatively easy to set it on fire, compared to other materials. I used to take a dab of hot tar and put it on the side of an empty soda can, which made it then easy to heat that spot enough to punch a hole in the can and/or set the paint on fire.
In other words, I don't think it is unreasonable to propose that they are missing some important variable.
...that is probably full of examples. I don't have it close at hand, but I remember such strange things in there, such as using a bowstring to separate and sort beaver fur into different lengths for making beaver felt hats. It is truly an interesting old book. I have another, an old machinist's handbook, that tells the precise mixtures of old and new bone to burn in your forge for producing various grades of carbon steel, and how to drop-test locomotive axles to verify the strength of a weld.
I would have a horrible time even defining a single 'geek culture'. Most of the list in the summary I have nothing to do with and no interest in. I don't fit many of the other generalities either (I bathe every day, have sex with my wife often, and have never lived in my parent's basement, and I don't like asian food). But I have no doubt that the label 'geek' fits me. I do my own thing and don't care about fitting into any particular niche -- geek, pop, or otherwise. Honestly, I think this defines a geek more than most anything else -- an individualist. If that is so, it should follow that the culture of individualists will never become 'popular culture', almost by definition.
I dropped my original iPhone in the tub. I was taking a soak and reading/answering emails -- one of those hell weeks where I was working around the clock and getting 45 minutes of sleep a day, if I was that lucky. I dozed off for a minute and startled back awake, and had let the bottom of the phone drop into the water. It was dead, dead, dead. I tried drying it out with desiccant, but no luck. It had *not* triggered the sensor (it was still pure white). I was honest though, took it to the store and told them what I had done. They replaced it with the 3Gs for $100 and a re-up on my AT&T contract.
They completely replaced the innards on my uni-body MacBook Pro, gratis, when it started having power management issues. It would just shut down at random. This, despite the fact that I had previously taken the thing completely apart to clean the keyboard out after my daughter dumped a full can of Diet Sprite into it. It had been six months since that had happened, so I was confident the new issue was unrelated, and they had evidently seen enough of the same symptom to agree with me.
I imagine the experience varies from Apple Store to Apple Store, but the one here certainly treats me well. I have no complaints. I can say that for very, very few other vendors.
Slashdot Mirror
I spend no time "memorizing" anything. If I see something I have not seen before, I find and/or figure out what it is, and after that I know, and will recognize it in the future. Knowing a vehicle by the sound of it is just a fun personal challenge. I like to guess who pulled into the driveway by the sounds. No biggy.
The only vehicle that has cost me any time to learn to recognize in recent memory was this little red roadster that passed by me on my way to work early last spring: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HondaS600.JPG . The license plate that read '1966' was a big help in figuring out what it was, and I knew it was an old Honda when it went past, from the sound of the engine. There were only 111 of them built that year, and they are a few years older than I am, so that explains why I don't ever remember seeing one. Interestingly, it has chain drive to both rear wheels, rather than a driveshaft. The one I saw looked as good or better than the one in the photo, and was the more rare left-hand drive, rather than the right-hand drive pictured there.
I could. Easily. I can tell them apart by the sound of the engine, sight unseen, by the shape and spacing of their headlights in my mirrors at night, or by a raft of stylistic details from several blocks away. But, then, *I* like automobiles. These lawyers probably don't care at all about technology. Hold up a $50 and a $5 at 10 feet and I bet they have no trouble at all distinguishing the two.
Actually, no, MFN status for China had to be renewed annually, and was renewed annually for China by Carter (on his way out), Reagan, Bush Sr., and Clinton. Clinton campaigned that he was going to let MFN status lapse as leverage against China's human rights abuses. He ended up knuckling under to pressure from agricultural interests who did not want to suffer taking a hit to grain exports (estimated at about $3B in losses, and another $2B in retaliatory tariffs). He also became convinced (as Bush had argued) that China was more likely to make progress on the issue if the subject were treated separately from the subject of trade, and would respond poorly under threat of sanctions. Bush (Sr.) was a former ambassador to China and recognized widely as an expert on the Chinese, so he was probably right. He had the hardest time of any of the above Presidents in getting MFN status pushed through Congress, mostly due to the Tienanmen Square massacre. That's probably the only reason the topic was in the air when Clinton was campaigning, and he took heat from his own party (Pelosi, in particular) when he followed Bush's lead on the matter. Late in Clinton's second term, Congress granted PNTR (Permanent Normalized Trade Relations) status to China, and he signed it into law. This was somehow a prerequisite for China joining the World Trade Organization. At any rate, all members of WTO are supposed to grant MFN status to all other members. At the time, our exports to China had tripled during the previous decade, so it seemed to be in our best interest. Perhaps this latter move was what you are thinking of? If so, examine news articles from the time period and you will find that Newt Gingrich was instrumental in getting this through Congress. There's enough "blame" to butter both sides with, in this case.
I was a roommate for a week with an HIV researcher during a medical seminar, in the late 1980's or early 1990's. We were both working for the seminar (I was doing A/V, I don't remember what he was doing). I asked him if it was possible to contract the disease from a mosquito that had bitten an infected person. He said it would be unlikely but it was certainly possible. He said it was unlikely because the virus likes to be kept warm, and blood in a mosquito cools down rapidly. But if you were in a crowd with mosquitoes zipping about quickly from person to person, certainly possible. Since then, I have always wondered what effect induced, controlled hypothermia might have on the virus in HIV patients (assuming that cold means it dies rather than going dormant).
Eh, Sorry. I've used tons of interfaces over the last 32 years; I am quite capable of dealing with change. So far, the only way I have found to deal comfortably with the 'ribbon' is to eliminate its use. I hide it completely, and learn the keyboard equivalents for even the most obscure commands, in software I rarely use (like Word and Excel). It just takes too damned long to "discover" where they've hidden the feature I need, even though I know it exists. It is faster to Google for the keyboard equivalent than to find it in the ribbon. I also cannot stand how much space it takes up. I'm a certified toolbar-hater because of the space they consume, I turn them off and do not use them; I do not like having this toolbar/menu mashup forced on me as my only option. It is pretty bad when 'Ctrl+Shift+5' has more meaning than anything I can quickly find on my screen.
I would beg to differ. I spent a couple of hours last week setting up a regression test environment to run a patched version of our FTP connection layer through its paces with (the errors were actually in SFTP error handling, but we re-test everything). Some of the equipment our customers must collect data from supports no other method of retrieving it. Generally, the network is itself *very* secure, and our box is sitting inside of it. I guess the customers don't see it to be much of an issue, and will most likely not be replacing much of this equipment until POTS is simply phased out. There are also pieces of new equipment still being sold that get their firmware and boot configuration via TFTP, only.
Not only do they have more rights, but they have more money, are held to lower moral standards (if any), and can achieve far greater longevity than other "corporeal" beings if managed correctly (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies) .
Actually, typewriters are very interesting devices. I used to work on IBM Selectrics for the fun of it. I recently pitched my electric typewriters (had to move, and downsized my collection), but kept two old mechanical typewriters. One of the two is a mathematics typewriter, complete with a number of calculus symbols and other nifty glyphs. I had seen that before on the electrics with the daisy wheel or the type ball, but this is the only one I have seen with the symbols actually molded onto the keys and cast onto the type bars. It still works, too, though I had to re-ink the ribbon myself.
U.S. Bank has the loan for my truck. I have no other dealings with them. Just got an email about the Epsilon information being stolen, supposedly only our email address (my wife's, actually). They apparently contract with Epsilon for their email services. This outsourcing of customer management always bothers me. It seems you are never dealing with a single company anymore; any commerce involves spreading your information out to a collective of "responsible" parties, regardless of appearances otherwise. Then, when problems arise, they have a 3rd party to point fingers at. If this had not happened, I probably never would have heard of "Epsilon".
Perhaps they are not meaningful to you. Personally, I pay to keep my telephone number *out* of the white pages, and divulge none of the other information to anyone other than my employer, my bank, some creditors, and a few real-life friends. I don't want *anyone* else to have it. I'm inclined to send nasty-grams to HR when they voluntarily give away my work email address to 'corporate perks' programs and 'employee health' organizations. I get almost zero personal spam but average five a day for my work address.
Facebook still manages to piss me off. I moved a couple of years ago, and made the mistake of giving my real email address to the realtor who was supposed to sell my old house. He ended up sending me an invite to friend him on Facebook. I do not have (or want) a Facebook account, but they now have my email address because of this dufus. Worse, I then started getting spam from Facebook, with these little icons of photos of people I 'might know'. Actually, I did know about 4 out of 5 of them. This indicates two things to me: 1) These people have poked around on Facebook to see if I am there; and 2) Facebook maintains these searches in a damned database. So, whether you 'opt in' to this or not, your associations are tracked and cataloged for their future use. I no longer have that email address. I terminated it last year because it is now useless to me.
For what it is worth, I spent a couple of years where part of my job was doing merges of various targeted mailing lists to make even more targeted mailing lists. At one point, we had a doctor paying us to identify unwed mothers. Most people would be amazed at the information that falls out when you start tying different mailing lists together -- everything from magazine subscription lists, to stores you have purchased things from, to club and organization membership lists. All for sale. All very useful. Want to make a statistically valid guess at someone's gender preference? It isn't difficult, and I expect you will be able to purchase such information on line in the near future (you can probably do so already, but I haven't looked into it).
In summary, it is true that what Facebook is doing is not unique, it is just a new dimension (web of associations between persons) added to already available information (web of associations to organizations). On that point I would agree. I disagree that this is not meaningful. It all depends on how creative you are at cross-referencing. An email-address, in particular, is *very* valuable in this regard -- better than a physical address for some things.
I had originally started reading this article and started to comment, then had to leave for several hours. Came back and finished my comment, which was regarding our decision for "No Baby Talk" with our daughters. Now I see that many others here have made similar choices, so we are not alone, even if it seems that way to us.
You can read that comment here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2026642&cid=35416946
I would like to reassure others that I so far see no sign that what Lemmy here says is true. Daughter one is 15 years old now, ahead of her peers in school with respect to her age, well adjusted, in all honors classes in a tough school system. She is a successful artist, with some of her artwork on display currently in Washington, D.C., and a talented musician, playing seven instruments and currently a member of three orchestras, one of them at the national level. She isn't currently taking an art class so that she can fit in three years of Japanese and double up on sciences, intending to double up on art classes next year -- this arrangement being the only way to fit things into her schedule. She intends to take C++ programming classes next year if she will be allowed to drop her study hall. She isn't "cognitively engineered" at all. We keep her engaged, and we support her in whatever way we can, but she motivates herself. Her biggest problem is that there isn't enough time to do everything she would like. She has played soccer for ten years, but dropped off the team at her high school this year because it consumed too much time. Many of her friends are just like her.
Daughter two (7 now) shows every sign that she's heading along the same route.
I agree with the observation that reinforcing behaviors are deliberate. My wife and I discussed exactly how to handle these issues on an ongoing basis. It was also my habit to spend a lot of time with both daughters, walking around and observing things, pointing out, explaining, and reading every street sign or anything else that presented an opportunity. Language is incredibly important. Beyond this is the part where I disagree -- "short sentences" are *not* obvious. I actually have clear memories of learning to speak and read, and I *hated* it when people spoke down to me. So I did not do that with my daughters. No baby talk. Use complete sentences. Use the correct word, even if it is not common vocabulary, etc. Of course, if my kids had not been capable of learning from this I am sure I would have reverted to tradition, but that did not happen. Both began speaking very early, and learned rapidly.
I don't recall specifics around 18 months, but I do know that my older daughter was reading well before she turned 3, because we read together every night and I would write the date that she first read a book on her own inside the front cover. I remember the exact book that convinced me that this wasn't just a good memory: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0679832696/?tag=googhydr-20&hvadid=3878470371&ref=pd_sl_17n0twlwjr_e#reader_0679832696 (P.J. FunnyBunny Camps Out). She read that out loud to me about 3 months before her third birthday, without any help from me, and without anyone having read it to her first. After a year of preschool at age 3, we were convinced that a second year of it would be a waste of time, especially when she would recognize misspellings on paperwork the administrator was sending home to parents. We found a private kindergarten that would take her if she passed an interview and made it through a class (this while she was still 3, in order to register for the fall classes that would start a few weeks before she turned 4). During her class time, she took to walking around the class to help the other kids with their work, including writing names for those kids that did not know how to write their own yet. I remember the kindergarten teacher being shocked that she had correctly spelled "Christopher" for one of those kids.
Daughter two has always been a little more difficult to assess. I can't tell you when she learned to read. Before she was 3, she confirmed with me that she had read the phrases on two signs in a parking lot correctly, after we took her to get glasses to correct for her "lazy eye". This was in the parking lot of the optometrist, when I was putting her into the car seat while her mother was still inside paying the bill. I believe she was just validating that her glasses were working properly. After that, she refused to perform -- would not even read the same signs to her mother. I would read to her every night just like I had with her sister, but she refused to ever read for me. I was convinced that she understood how to do it, she just did not want to. When she went to preschool, we would hear gushing reports from her teachers about how well she read, but never got any demonstration of it at home. Likewise it went, on up through the other grades. She is in second grade now, and I am still reading to her every night and she still refuses to read out loud for me, except when it is a homework assignment. My wife helps out with the school, doing math and reading assessments, and daughter two is in the "advanced readers" group. My wife says she is so far ahead of the other "advanced readers" that it is like night and day. She does read voraciously on her own now, having just completed several of the Harry Potter novels. I had recently read a few of the "Illustrated Classics" versions of some of Jack London's books to her, including White Fang and Call of the Wild. Tonight she told me she doesn't like the simplified
I've encountered a few really annoying newsgroup trolls over the years, people that only showed up in order to stir up crap for no good reason. Those types invariably seem to think that they're anonymous because they use an assumed name and some Yahoo/AOL/Google address they acquired for that particular purpose. Although it cost me dearly in hours and eyestrain, I've hunted a couple of those people down, identified them, then posted all of the steps necessary to connect the dots back to the newsgroups they were making asses of themselves on, with information detailed enough to derive their home telephone numbers, names, place of employment, and even more sensitive personal information (in one case, if someone chose to read between the lines). In both cases, that was the end of it -- no more troll. I did this the first time after having had a discussion with a friend, who suggested that this was the best way he had found to deal with astroturfers. I believe he was right (thanks Alex). For casual trolls, I still think it is advisable to simply ignore them -- for people that are seriously asinine, a little vigilantism can be effective.
Unlike some, I have no appreciation for "the Art of Trolling". Appreciating a skillful trolling is no more worthwhile than appreciating fine sewage-making. They add essentially the same benefit to society -- in fact, the sewage might be the greater contribution: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pecunia_non_olet
Meh. Someone my Dad was friends with when I was growing up had memory that was near enough to photographic to convince me. He could watch a train go by and then recite off the colors of each car and read off the signage of everything from his memory, dictating it back to you. My brother is a train geek, and tested this a few times by picking a train car at random, then asking the guy to describe, say, "the 37th car" after the train had gone by. You could also hand him a book, and let him flip through the pages, then have him 'read' a particular page from memory. This guy did not consider his ability to be an asset -- quite the opposite. He insisted that his head was constantly full of "noise" from random rememberings, and that he could not forget things that he really would much rather not remember. He wasn't especially successful, either. IIRC, he was a coal miner.
It isn't difficult to learn, or to teach, at least to the younger generation. Even my 7-year-old knows the difference between, 'To:', 'CC:', and 'BCC:'. She even complained to her second-grade teacher about putting everyone in the 'To:' field, because now everyone has her address, which she was told to keep private. He's learned his lesson. My 15-year-old's soccer coach is another story, though. The concept seems too difficult for him. He's at least learned to distribute those nasty .docx files with a PDF as well, though.
I taught my wife and daughters: Use the 'To:' field for the primary people you are corresponding with, and might expect a response from. Use 'CC:' for those that might also need the information but probably don't need to act on it in any way. Use 'BCC:' for large distributions or any email where not all of the parties will know each other and you don't have permission to share their contact information with other people (a good example is sharing a joke with a bunch of people in your address book). My oldest daughter also uses it to keep me informed when her online conversations wander into the territory of "stuff Dad had better know about."
Mine comes well after yours, and I was going to guess 1997 for myself. My oldest daughter was about 2 at the time, I seem to recall.
I have copies of many of my favorite anime either as fan subs or Korean-made English dubs, and some just in the original Japanese with no English at all, but bought the U.S. releases as soon as they were available. Sometimes that was ten years after my initial purchase. But I do currently own a "legitimate" copy of everything. I actually like some of the subs better -- they sometimes dumb down the English dialog to fit the mouth movements better. A (good) sub gives you the audio cues for emotion from the original actors, along with a more accurate representation of the meaning.
I've only seen one of the episodes in which they attempted to set a boat on fire with a solar reflector. They did manage to make a lot of smoke, but no flame. There were a few obvious things that might have worked against the effort simply because they were *not* made from "ancient materials". The boat itself was wooden, but painted. Ancient boats would almost certainly have been coated entirely in pitch. They didn't nail things together then, they actually drilled holes through the planks and tied them together with cords, then coated the entire works in pitch to seal out water and to prevent rot (we use paint mostly for the latter purpose). If you've ever played with a lens and asphalt as a kid, you know it is relatively easy to set it on fire, compared to other materials. I used to take a dab of hot tar and put it on the side of an empty soda can, which made it then easy to heat that spot enough to punch a hole in the can and/or set the paint on fire.
In other words, I don't think it is unreasonable to propose that they are missing some important variable.
It is now, it wasn't then. This was immediately after the 3GS came out.
I had not thought of that distinction before, but your observation seems about right. Interesting. Thanks, AC.
...posted a comment and it did not appear. Slashcode 3.0 appears to be broken.
...and there's still no first post? I can't believe *everyone* is reading the article!
...that is probably full of examples. I don't have it close at hand, but I remember such strange things in there, such as using a bowstring to separate and sort beaver fur into different lengths for making beaver felt hats. It is truly an interesting old book. I have another, an old machinist's handbook, that tells the precise mixtures of old and new bone to burn in your forge for producing various grades of carbon steel, and how to drop-test locomotive axles to verify the strength of a weld.
I would have a horrible time even defining a single 'geek culture'. Most of the list in the summary I have nothing to do with and no interest in. I don't fit many of the other generalities either (I bathe every day, have sex with my wife often, and have never lived in my parent's basement, and I don't like asian food). But I have no doubt that the label 'geek' fits me. I do my own thing and don't care about fitting into any particular niche -- geek, pop, or otherwise. Honestly, I think this defines a geek more than most anything else -- an individualist. If that is so, it should follow that the culture of individualists will never become 'popular culture', almost by definition.
I dropped my original iPhone in the tub. I was taking a soak and reading/answering emails -- one of those hell weeks where I was working around the clock and getting 45 minutes of sleep a day, if I was that lucky. I dozed off for a minute and startled back awake, and had let the bottom of the phone drop into the water. It was dead, dead, dead. I tried drying it out with desiccant, but no luck. It had *not* triggered the sensor (it was still pure white). I was honest though, took it to the store and told them what I had done. They replaced it with the 3Gs for $100 and a re-up on my AT&T contract.
They completely replaced the innards on my uni-body MacBook Pro, gratis, when it started having power management issues. It would just shut down at random. This, despite the fact that I had previously taken the thing completely apart to clean the keyboard out after my daughter dumped a full can of Diet Sprite into it. It had been six months since that had happened, so I was confident the new issue was unrelated, and they had evidently seen enough of the same symptom to agree with me.
I imagine the experience varies from Apple Store to Apple Store, but the one here certainly treats me well. I have no complaints. I can say that for very, very few other vendors.