No. The selfish act is telling people that suicide is wrong. The selfish act is those that wish to live placing their feelings over the terrible suffering of those that wish to die.
The reason why religions classify suicide as a terrible sin is quite different. The religions that survive today are those that do best at promoting their own survival. This is why religions try to take control over the sex lives and deaths of their believers. They wish to control sex because they want to ensure that sex serves one purpose - increasing the flock, and they wish to control death because they need to ensure that any death results in the recruitment of more followers eg. martyrdom rather than quiet suicide.
"Google will be unveiling its new product." "Google will be unveiling their new product." Both are acceptable English but one is plural and one is singular. English is a little schizophrenic when it comes to collective nouns.
You actually have to know some grammar to be a grammar dork. "Google" is a collective noun and in this context it is correct to use the singular form even though it is used to represent a collection of people.
Hey! Thanks for those links. That last one, describing various friction models, is interesting. I'm surprised by how different the various models look but I presume that for some choices of parameters they turn out to be similar to each other. Are you guys actually planning to model the area of contact between the tire and the road?
I can't afford the car...have you seen house prices in the SF Bay Area? And I have the cheapest house on the block.
Unfortunately the company lawyers would come down on me like a ton of bricks if I were to work on entertainment software for the simple reason that it's the same area I already work in. (It's curious that one of the biggest consumers of mathematics is in fact the entertainment business. But then a large chunk of it was invented to deal with art - eg. understanding projection onto a plane.) Cool project though, I've just been browsing the source. I'm curious though - have you documented your tire issues anywhere? Are you talking about friction? Or bounce? Or something different?
262537412640768000? Do you really think exp(pi*sqrt(163)) can be an integer? That's a transcendental function there. And sure there are barbers! But are there any barbers who shave everyone in town except those who shave themselves?
Anyway...back to waves. Yes, it eventually drained back. But the draining wasn't wave motion. Typically in wave motion water travels back and forth, not with the wave. But that clearly breaks down when a wave breaks at the coast.
You're right that there was probably some displacement of water. But even if the motion at the seabed was such that there was no change in overall volume we could expect a significant wave at the surface. Waves can travel significant distances through water without significantly displacing water.
...because they believe it to be less likely to contain traces of (liability causing) deleted text. Word, on the other hand, has been known to leave deleted text still in the binary.doc file.
Good choice! A black hole gives the greatest data storage per unit surface are of the device. And Hawking's latest work shows that the data can be accessed again by carefully examining the Hawking radiation emitted by the black hole.
Good example. In this case the human perceptual system is tricked because the path of the light is itself is modified. (Though in this case it could be said that the reason why we are mistaken is that our vision systems are based on the assumption of straight line paths for light so it is a perceptual issue.) Nonetheless, this is definitely not what is happening in the 'tadpole' example.
Only a tiny proportion of the water involved actually moved a significant distance horizontally. After the tsunami passed through, most sea water returned more or less where it was before the wave passed through. It's only at the very end, as the wave hit the coastline, that a sizeable amount of water was irreversibly displaced horizontally.
I'm doing fine writing code with my Mathematics PhD (>$200,000 salary last few years (dropped a bit this year - working on fixing it)). So did Sergey Brin. Most people I know who studied mathematics just forgot it all when they finished their course. Some people (like Brin) have the sense to actually use it to solve difficult problems that non-mathematicians can't solve. Mathematics isn't just for entertainment value, some of it can actually be applied in the real world.
I strongly believe this is BS. The reason is simple: in some entire industrues companies make employees work longer. Many successful companies in such indistries make employees work longer. Now we all know that market forces can sometimes be slow to act. If changing the length of the working week by 1 hour, say, affects productivity, it can take a long time for that effect to final show up in the company accounts as an increase or decrease in productivity. But you know what? For the last few decades people have been working hours way above the 'optimal' and if that were really 'suboptimal' you'd think that even the slow optimizing machine that the market is would have forced many companies to change their behavior by now, after all there are thousands of companies out there where this experiment is taking place all day long, and the people conducting this experiment have a strong financial incentive to get the result right. The fact that we aren't working 8 hours makes me think that this 'optimum' is more an artifact of the research methodology than a real reflection of productivity. In this case I think I trust market forces more than some research by academics.
Of course these things aren't optical illusions! Optical illusions are artifacts of the human vision system and when you attempt to explain an optical illusion you give a description in terms of sensory organs (eg. this bit appears to wiggle because because the visual systems's motion sensors are still active from previous stimulation yada, yada, yada...). This phenomenon has (tentatively) been explained in terms of physical phenomena taking place at the Sun. So clearly it isn't an optical illusion.
(I guess a case could be made that one aspect of these phenomena is illusory. For example we often imagine that the horizontal motion of the crest of a wave represents a horizontal motion of fluid even if the only motion is vertical. But I'd like to see someone tell the family of a victim of the recent tsunami that the wave was an optical illusion! A wave is a real physical phenomenon even if our vision perceives one aspect of that wave incorrectly.)
a healthy way to relieve some natural stress and aggression, in the same way a punching bag would be
Here's one place I disagree. There is a big difference between video games and physical activity. While playing video games your adrenaline levels rise. It's as if your endocrine system is being fooled into thinking that you arelly are taking part in the activities that are only represented virtually. (For example once or twice I've had my wife disturb me while playing video games and I've completely lost my temper. This was clearly out of proportion to what was going on in the real world and it happened because I was hyped up by the game.) Physical activity, on the other hand, actually uses adrenaline and other hormones. These are 'fight or flight' hormones and if you don't actually use them for fight or flight (ie. muscular activity) they stick around. They do eventually get mopped up if you just sit around but until they do you're suffering from stress and that has deletrious effects over time.
I guess it's pretty obvious if you're vaguely familiar with what parts are available. But it's probably a surprise to many people just how easy it is to piece these parts together.
You can build something like this for any laptop. The parts would be something like a USB module like this ($20 unless you're happy just using a regular serial port), an Atmel AVR microcontroller (this ($30 for the development board which is easier to use than just the component). The accelerometer outputs a pulse with a width that varies linearly with acceleration you can just write a simple loop on the AVR (using avr-gcc) to count the pulse length and then report back via the USB (or serial port). Total cost: probably well under $100 including building an AVR programmer.
Far more prosaic. In modern physics particles are described by waves that say how likely a particle is to be found at a given position. 'Destruction' just means the trough of one wave is added to the crest of another. The net effect of destruction is merely that the particle is less likely to be found where the crest and trough meet and is more likely to be found somewhere else. In the lab this is measured as peaks and valleys in the distribution of the positions of the particles. When we're talking about photons destructive interference simply means a dark spot. Constructive interference means a bright spot.
So in the usual dual slit experiment the state of a photon, say, that has passed through the slits, is a superposition of two states - having gone through one slit or having gone through another slit. What makes this interesting is that the states are described by wavefunctions and the superposition is the sum of two sets of waves. As anyone who's played with water ripples knows, when two sets of waves are added you get areas where the different waves cancel or reinforce each other giving so-called interference patterns.
In this experiment we have an atom which has a 50% chance of being ionized at time t0 and a 50% chance of being ionized at time t1 (OK, the probablities cannot literally be those values but this is an example) so we have a superposition of two states - one corresponding to an atom ionized at one time and one ionized at another time. As the wavefunction for the atoms is essentially oscillatory it means that as the wavefunctions for these two separate states evolve they are out of phase with each other (or are sums of terms that are out of phase with each other). This means we can expect constructive or destructive interference depending on the exact value of t1-t0. This is what was observed.
I used to turn up to meetings because everyone used to use Outlook under W2K. Often I had no clue a meeting was due but then suddenly something would pop up and tell me I had to go. Even if I wasn't at my desk they'd end up on my Palm so I'd be reminded even if sitting on the john. My current employer, OTOH, uses Linux. They basically have to pay an actual person to chase us up and make us attend meetings otherwise we'd all miss them. And a person can never follow you around as well as a PDA.
So now you decide which is more productive based on whether or not you think meetings are productive.
Basically: for pure development work which involves work in a text editor I like Linux. For anything else, especially if it requires a GUI or officey type stuff I'd use Windows.
And for personal use I like my Mac at home that gives me the best of both worlds.
Yes, US banks simply don't care about fraud because it's already built into their accounting and it's only a relatively small figure. Unfortunately the suffering it causes customers is immense and can have repercussions for years. But to the banks it's just another tax deduction.
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Why don't you try installing the OS it came with? You never know, you might like it!
The reason why religions classify suicide as a terrible sin is quite different. The religions that survive today are those that do best at promoting their own survival. This is why religions try to take control over the sex lives and deaths of their believers. They wish to control sex because they want to ensure that sex serves one purpose - increasing the flock, and they wish to control death because they need to ensure that any death results in the recruitment of more followers eg. martyrdom rather than quiet suicide.
"Google will be unveiling its new product." "Google will be unveiling their new product." Both are acceptable English but one is plural and one is singular. English is a little schizophrenic when it comes to collective nouns.
You actually have to know some grammar to be a grammar dork. "Google" is a collective noun and in this context it is correct to use the singular form even though it is used to represent a collection of people.
Hey! Thanks for those links. That last one, describing various friction models, is interesting. I'm surprised by how different the various models look but I presume that for some choices of parameters they turn out to be similar to each other. Are you guys actually planning to model the area of contact between the tire and the road?
Unfortunately the company lawyers would come down on me like a ton of bricks if I were to work on entertainment software for the simple reason that it's the same area I already work in. (It's curious that one of the biggest consumers of mathematics is in fact the entertainment business. But then a large chunk of it was invented to deal with art - eg. understanding projection onto a plane.) Cool project though, I've just been browsing the source. I'm curious though - have you documented your tire issues anywhere? Are you talking about friction? Or bounce? Or something different?
Anyway...back to waves. Yes, it eventually drained back. But the draining wasn't wave motion. Typically in wave motion water travels back and forth, not with the wave. But that clearly breaks down when a wave breaks at the coast.
You're right that there was probably some displacement of water. But even if the motion at the seabed was such that there was no change in overall volume we could expect a significant wave at the surface. Waves can travel significant distances through water without significantly displacing water.
...because they believe it to be less likely to contain traces of (liability causing) deleted text. Word, on the other hand, has been known to leave deleted text still in the binary .doc file.
Good choice! A black hole gives the greatest data storage per unit surface are of the device. And Hawking's latest work shows that the data can be accessed again by carefully examining the Hawking radiation emitted by the black hole.
Good example. In this case the human perceptual system is tricked because the path of the light is itself is modified. (Though in this case it could be said that the reason why we are mistaken is that our vision systems are based on the assumption of straight line paths for light so it is a perceptual issue.) Nonetheless, this is definitely not what is happening in the 'tadpole' example.
Only a tiny proportion of the water involved actually moved a significant distance horizontally. After the tsunami passed through, most sea water returned more or less where it was before the wave passed through. It's only at the very end, as the wave hit the coastline, that a sizeable amount of water was irreversibly displaced horizontally.
I'm doing fine writing code with my Mathematics PhD (>$200,000 salary last few years (dropped a bit this year - working on fixing it)). So did Sergey Brin. Most people I know who studied mathematics just forgot it all when they finished their course. Some people (like Brin) have the sense to actually use it to solve difficult problems that non-mathematicians can't solve. Mathematics isn't just for entertainment value, some of it can actually be applied in the real world.
I strongly believe this is BS. The reason is simple: in some entire industrues companies make employees work longer. Many successful companies in such indistries make employees work longer. Now we all know that market forces can sometimes be slow to act. If changing the length of the working week by 1 hour, say, affects productivity, it can take a long time for that effect to final show up in the company accounts as an increase or decrease in productivity. But you know what? For the last few decades people have been working hours way above the 'optimal' and if that were really 'suboptimal' you'd think that even the slow optimizing machine that the market is would have forced many companies to change their behavior by now, after all there are thousands of companies out there where this experiment is taking place all day long, and the people conducting this experiment have a strong financial incentive to get the result right. The fact that we aren't working 8 hours makes me think that this 'optimum' is more an artifact of the research methodology than a real reflection of productivity. In this case I think I trust market forces more than some research by academics.
(I guess a case could be made that one aspect of these phenomena is illusory. For example we often imagine that the horizontal motion of the crest of a wave represents a horizontal motion of fluid even if the only motion is vertical. But I'd like to see someone tell the family of a victim of the recent tsunami that the wave was an optical illusion! A wave is a real physical phenomenon even if our vision perceives one aspect of that wave incorrectly.)
I guess it's pretty obvious if you're vaguely familiar with what parts are available. But it's probably a surprise to many people just how easy it is to piece these parts together.
You can build something like this for any laptop. The parts would be something like a USB module like this ($20 unless you're happy just using a regular serial port), an Atmel AVR microcontroller (this ($30 for the development board which is easier to use than just the component). The accelerometer outputs a pulse with a width that varies linearly with acceleration you can just write a simple loop on the AVR (using avr-gcc) to count the pulse length and then report back via the USB (or serial port). Total cost: probably well under $100 including building an AVR programmer.
Far more prosaic. In modern physics particles are described by waves that say how likely a particle is to be found at a given position. 'Destruction' just means the trough of one wave is added to the crest of another. The net effect of destruction is merely that the particle is less likely to be found where the crest and trough meet and is more likely to be found somewhere else. In the lab this is measured as peaks and valleys in the distribution of the positions of the particles. When we're talking about photons destructive interference simply means a dark spot. Constructive interference means a bright spot.
In this experiment we have an atom which has a 50% chance of being ionized at time t0 and a 50% chance of being ionized at time t1 (OK, the probablities cannot literally be those values but this is an example) so we have a superposition of two states - one corresponding to an atom ionized at one time and one ionized at another time. As the wavefunction for the atoms is essentially oscillatory it means that as the wavefunctions for these two separate states evolve they are out of phase with each other (or are sums of terms that are out of phase with each other). This means we can expect constructive or destructive interference depending on the exact value of t1-t0. This is what was observed.
That's a pity because your nanoscale penis is probably about the right size for quantum effects to be significant.
...if you can get a front page story on /. where thousands (or is it millions) of geeks can see you loudly snubbing a Microsoft product? Priceless!
Doesn't seem to do anything for me. How do you activate the changes? Log out then in again? Reboot?
So now you decide which is more productive based on whether or not you think meetings are productive.
Basically: for pure development work which involves work in a text editor I like Linux. For anything else, especially if it requires a GUI or officey type stuff I'd use Windows.
And for personal use I like my Mac at home that gives me the best of both worlds.
Yes, US banks simply don't care about fraud because it's already built into their accounting and it's only a relatively small figure. Unfortunately the suffering it causes customers is immense and can have repercussions for years. But to the banks it's just another tax deduction.
I think you'll find you'll recover your ability to scatter women pretty damn quickly.