It sounds like you have lots of healthy habits, which is great. Meat is one of those interesting foods that has a lot of great nutrients and so I'm certainly not advocating that everyone in the world should give up meat. Personally I drink a lot of milk and eat eggs on occasion.
From a health perspective, eating lots of red meat seems to be tied to various issues popping up later in life. Processed meat in particular seems tied to cancer and red meat seems tied to heart disease. At 30, you probably won't notice it, but as you get closer to 50 or 60, you might. At the same time, some people seem to be able to eat whatever they want and never have health problems. It's impossible to predict how an individual might do even though as a group people statistically show problems.
The other issue is tied into environmental and land use issues. I'd rather not contribute to overfishing, cutting down rain forests to raise cattle, the price of real estate, and so on.
Still, I make a weird vegetarian. I'm generally supportive of animal testing, wear leather, and think hunting and fishing are perfectly fine pasttimes. I'd just rather people cut back on meat consumption.
That seems to be the optimal human diet, summed up nicely in seven words. That's the main reason I'm a vegetarian. As I went through my biology coursework in college, I realized that eating red meat wasn't great for me. From there, I eventually cut out other meat. Now as I look around my cubicle farm of IT staff, I'm one of the few thin and fit people around.
The other reason not to eat so much meat is economic and environmental. It's inefficient. When you convert sunlight to meat, it has to go through a plant phase, and you end up having to cultivate a lot of grain to make a little meat. It's simple physics, and difficult to argue against (the best I've heard is that you can graze animals on land not useful for much else).
Vat grown meat might help with the latter issue, but probably won't help much with the first one. Eating lots of meat likely isn't the most healthy option for humans. It's not inherently bad, but causes health issues in the quantities Americans seem to eat it.
When usage starts peaking there is no way to get the sun to send down more energy
I thought the plan was to "pull a Niven" and have the mirrors burn off all the cloud cover.
We've actually moved away from this, fairly strongly. We work in a healthcare organization and having people develop applications on our servers can potentially cause huge issues. While it's possible to create little sandbox areas for them, it's an administrative hassle, and it's always hard to be positive their applications can't cross security lines or impact another application's performance. Then there's the support issues - who fixes their business critical application when they've left or are on vacation? It's like the days when people would make Microsoft Access applications for everything, and then it would be dumped in our lap.
Our reponse has been to staff up to meet customer demand and spent a lot of time bringing other IT folks up to speed on web development. It's worked out fairly well, and the number of times I've been called in to fix a Microsoft Access report or the like has dropped dramatically.
It looks like the size of this is pretty darn small (Figure 1 shows plots of heat capacities determined for aluminum
cluster anions with 43-48 atoms for temperatures below room temperature. At that size, it's not particularly useful except when creating tiny electronics. I'm not sure you can string together these tiny atom clusters and get the same effect. Sadly that means we can't send power across the country without significant energy loss.
My son Sam has been playing video games for several years and I feel he's learned quite a bit:
WWII weapons suck and are extremely inaccurate.
Always lay down suppressing fire and try to flank the enemy.
When engaging the enemy, use overwhelming force whenever possible.
If you pull back on the stick while firing afterburners, you will black out.
Joking aside, I think gaming has snuck in a variety of educational facts into his noggin. Planning, thinking logically, history, reading, and problem solving are just a few of the things I've noticed rubbing off in the name of fun.
Back in the day when I taught high school biology, I wrote a dog breeding program that taught genetics. The kids loved it, even though the interface was simple and the genetics were overly simplified. The key is that a game must be fun first and slyly sneak in some educational content along the way.
Maybe the kid born with the super-human immune system was ugly as sin and all the girls ignored him when it was time to make babies. The good looking guy was able to father dozens of children and keeled over at a young age due to an infected hang-nail.
You'd think a site full of supposed nerds would understand the concept instinctively.
What's funny is that the whole concept of advantageous traits is a shifting thing. I listened to some NPR reporters asking why native trees from New York had big thorns on them. It turns out they're very similar to thorns on some trees in Africa, which evolved to minimize predation by elephants. Well, it turns out these trees from New York evolved these spikes to fend of mammoths, though it seems like a silly waste of energy now.
The trees that didn't have the spikes were all eaten. The alligators who couldn't heal quickly all died. That's evolution for ya.
If people continue to purchase DVD players (which are easily under $100), the Blu-ray player prices may drop after a few months. For many people, the quality of DVDs are just fine and they don't have the massive television displays to support them anyway. The cynic in me thinks we're seeing a price hike so stores get the cash from all the early adopters who bought HD-DVD and now feel obligated to buy a Blu-ray player.
While I wasn't a big D&D fan, I loved the idea and always enjoyed tinkering and making up stories. When Bioware put out Neverwinter Nights, I started my own campaign, which was received quite well. When Neverwinter Nights 2 came along, I started yet another and don't plan on stopping.
At one level, it's simply a hobby that combines a lot of skills I enjoy practicing. The scripting language is C-like, which probably helped me get over a long habit of programming in Basic-like languages. Modding is also something I can share with my kids, as my son enjoys tinkering around with the toolset and putting together simple modules.
On another level, I'm in awe of the people who have played my modules and how I've touched their lives. I remember getting an e-mail from a woman who was dying of cancer and how a particular moment in my game made her husband laugh for the first time in a long while. I got another letter from a young man in the Israeli army, talking about how my games were a bright moment in an otherwise terrifying life.
I think Dungeons and Dragons has ended up being something larger than it was originally envisioned. My kids make up these elaborate "playing pretend" stories. D&D has turned this instinct for adventure into something adults can do without too many funny looks. We all need to play the hero and live a life bigger than ourselves. Gary helped give that to us, and for that I am most grateful.
Keep in mind that any time you have a factory make something for you, there will be delays and costs associated with getting the product into your hands. Over the last few decades, they've done an amazing job streamlining this process. Still, it costs five bucks and three days between the time I place my order for my widget and the time it shows up at my doorstep.
I think that for many goods, that's fine. For things that cost a few dollars to make, spending five dollars on shipping will seem like madness. Plus there's always the "gimme now" factor, which seems to permiate our society.
There's a reason most people have printers in their houses. We may send our photos off periodically to get printed in bulk for cheap, but still print the one or two off when we feel like it.
On our company's Internet site, we've recently been getting lots of one-time submissions via various forms for things that are obviously advertisements. We don't have pages where you can actually post things and have them appear (like a discussion group), so this is mostly annoying the humans on the receiving end of the forms.
There's a few ways to deter bots, but based on the stuff people would have to do to fill them out, about half seem human. How you could earn your keep trying to submit advertising links to pages all day long, I have no idea.
They're really pushing the command-line thing for all their products. We got a demo of Exchange 2007 and not everything is configurable from within the GUI. Where it is, it gives you the PowerShell command at the bottom.
The worst part for me is that they're reducing support for a lot of their "old" API and everything has to be rewritten using command line tools. Essentially what I'm doing is making pretty web interfaces for something that should be part of their own product. Madness!
I see they were taking it already canned, but why not get it freshly fermented? The hard part about Kimchi is the fermentation step. Since you can't bury it in the ground as tradition requires, they've fortunately come up with a patented fermentation system:
A Kimchi fermentation or cool storage apparatus comprises a chamber for either fermenting or coolly storing Kimchi, the chamber being formed of a hollow barrel with opened upper end; a cover for either entering or enclosing the chamber; a thermoelectric module for heating or cooling the chamber, the thermoelectric module being mounted on the outside of the bottom wall of the chamber; a power supplying section for supplying electric power with the thermoelectric module; a temperature sensing section for sensing the interior temperature of the chamber; and, a microprocessor for receiving the temperature signal from the temperature sensing section, for controlling the power supplying section to keep the chamber at a reference fermentation temperature for a predetermined time duration while fermenting Kimchi, and keep the chamber at a reference storage temperature while coolly storing Kimchi. I know people complain about the high costs of our space program, but the spin-off technologies make our lives so much better.
I'm thinking about opening up a service that takes electronic messages, prints them out, and hand delivers them to a reciplient's address. Fortunately paper is still protected by the 1st Amendment and as long as everything printed within is true, it's generally not unlawful (minus death threats, etc.). How about this slogan:
Want to hurt someone's feelings? Do it on Paper(tm)!
Actually, it's all my fault. Everything I think comes true. I made you say that.
Joking aside, my above silly statement is an example of Magic Thinking. I always felt it was the opposite of victimization, the idea that everything I think and do affects the world.
Personally I feel that the concepts of "self" and "other" are illusory. Everything is interconnected. Just by reading this sentence I typed, your brain has been physically altered forever. Addiction is just the result of mental processes, feedback systems reacting to internal and external stimuli. It's unlikely warning labels would help. Electric shocks when you use them too often would do nicely.
/. is slipping....a story about lasers and no sharks tag?!? Shocked I tell, shocked. They tried mounting a Deathalyzer on a shark, but the result was always that the subject would die within a few seconds.
I realize the XML is used for a lot of things, but whenever my fellow developers learn that the vendor is shipping us some interface in XML, the groans are audible. About half the time, their XML format isn't quite standard, and we've got to dig around for utilities to try and work with it (or write something custom). I'd say the vast majority of our interfaces are good ol' delimited text files.
For other purposes, XML is great and very readable, but I'm not sure it makes sense to use it everywhere.
I read the abstract (the article is for-purchase) and it looks like they have a better feel for what it takes to turn adult cells into embryonic stems cells. Furthermore, they identified cell markers that let you better isolate these cells from other cells that haven't made the transitions between the two states.
I think what you'll start seeing is much better efficiencies for upcoming cloning experiments (currently it's incredibly poor), as well as people starting to talk about theraputic stem cell treatments (since you can better guarantee the "purity" of the cells you're injecting into people).
Since my employer is a healthcare organization, there's a reasonably good chance that someone accessing my laptop would violate HIPPA laws. I'm not sure law enforcement can look at people's medical records without a court order, so there are likely some cases where government officials forcing someone to disclose private information may be unlawful.
He also has a great family and we had dinner at his house a couple weeks ago, Zoltán making a tasty Thai soup. The best part about visiting is that his wife is French and they're always talking in various languages at the dinner table. For some reason when the dog is bad, they always chastise him in German.
I tinkered with D&D back in the day, but never really managed to find the time or people to play with. When the first Neverwinter Nights came out, I had a great time making modules. It was a treat to use all my programming skills, entertain others, and generally have a good time playing with the setting and the technology.
These days I'm working on a new campaign for NWN2. The new engine is more challenging to work with, but it's quite pretty. I'm able to give my new computer quite a workout with all the new graphics features.
Ironically I'm 38 too, occasionally feeling old as well.
When I skim down the list of the world's billionaires, the ones that stand out when it comes to philanthropy tend to be the ones that made their money in software. Phillip Knight (of Nike) has given a lot to the University of Oregon, where he started out, but that's all I see from a first glance. I wonder if software folks have a different take on poverty than the rest of the super-wealthy?
Slashdot Mirror
It sounds like you have lots of healthy habits, which is great. Meat is one of those interesting foods that has a lot of great nutrients and so I'm certainly not advocating that everyone in the world should give up meat. Personally I drink a lot of milk and eat eggs on occasion.
From a health perspective, eating lots of red meat seems to be tied to various issues popping up later in life. Processed meat in particular seems tied to cancer and red meat seems tied to heart disease. At 30, you probably won't notice it, but as you get closer to 50 or 60, you might. At the same time, some people seem to be able to eat whatever they want and never have health problems. It's impossible to predict how an individual might do even though as a group people statistically show problems.
The other issue is tied into environmental and land use issues. I'd rather not contribute to overfishing, cutting down rain forests to raise cattle, the price of real estate, and so on.
Still, I make a weird vegetarian. I'm generally supportive of animal testing, wear leather, and think hunting and fishing are perfectly fine pasttimes. I'd just rather people cut back on meat consumption.
Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
That seems to be the optimal human diet, summed up nicely in seven words. That's the main reason I'm a vegetarian. As I went through my biology coursework in college, I realized that eating red meat wasn't great for me. From there, I eventually cut out other meat. Now as I look around my cubicle farm of IT staff, I'm one of the few thin and fit people around.
The other reason not to eat so much meat is economic and environmental. It's inefficient. When you convert sunlight to meat, it has to go through a plant phase, and you end up having to cultivate a lot of grain to make a little meat. It's simple physics, and difficult to argue against (the best I've heard is that you can graze animals on land not useful for much else).
Vat grown meat might help with the latter issue, but probably won't help much with the first one. Eating lots of meat likely isn't the most healthy option for humans. It's not inherently bad, but causes health issues in the quantities Americans seem to eat it.
I thought the plan was to "pull a Niven" and have the mirrors burn off all the cloud cover.
We've actually moved away from this, fairly strongly. We work in a healthcare organization and having people develop applications on our servers can potentially cause huge issues. While it's possible to create little sandbox areas for them, it's an administrative hassle, and it's always hard to be positive their applications can't cross security lines or impact another application's performance. Then there's the support issues - who fixes their business critical application when they've left or are on vacation? It's like the days when people would make Microsoft Access applications for everything, and then it would be dumped in our lap.
Our reponse has been to staff up to meet customer demand and spent a lot of time bringing other IT folks up to speed on web development. It's worked out fairly well, and the number of times I've been called in to fix a Microsoft Access report or the like has dropped dramatically.
It looks like the size of this is pretty darn small (Figure 1 shows plots of heat capacities determined for aluminum cluster anions with 43-48 atoms for temperatures below room temperature. At that size, it's not particularly useful except when creating tiny electronics. I'm not sure you can string together these tiny atom clusters and get the same effect. Sadly that means we can't send power across the country without significant energy loss.
- WWII weapons suck and are extremely inaccurate.
- Always lay down suppressing fire and try to flank the enemy.
- When engaging the enemy, use overwhelming force whenever possible.
- If you pull back on the stick while firing afterburners, you will black out.
Joking aside, I think gaming has snuck in a variety of educational facts into his noggin. Planning, thinking logically, history, reading, and problem solving are just a few of the things I've noticed rubbing off in the name of fun.Back in the day when I taught high school biology, I wrote a dog breeding program that taught genetics. The kids loved it, even though the interface was simple and the genetics were overly simplified. The key is that a game must be fun first and slyly sneak in some educational content along the way.
Maybe the kid born with the super-human immune system was ugly as sin and all the girls ignored him when it was time to make babies. The good looking guy was able to father dozens of children and keeled over at a young age due to an infected hang-nail.
You'd think a site full of supposed nerds would understand the concept instinctively.
What's funny is that the whole concept of advantageous traits is a shifting thing. I listened to some NPR reporters asking why native trees from New York had big thorns on them. It turns out they're very similar to thorns on some trees in Africa, which evolved to minimize predation by elephants. Well, it turns out these trees from New York evolved these spikes to fend of mammoths, though it seems like a silly waste of energy now.
The trees that didn't have the spikes were all eaten. The alligators who couldn't heal quickly all died. That's evolution for ya.
If people continue to purchase DVD players (which are easily under $100), the Blu-ray player prices may drop after a few months. For many people, the quality of DVDs are just fine and they don't have the massive television displays to support them anyway. The cynic in me thinks we're seeing a price hike so stores get the cash from all the early adopters who bought HD-DVD and now feel obligated to buy a Blu-ray player.
While I wasn't a big D&D fan, I loved the idea and always enjoyed tinkering and making up stories. When Bioware put out Neverwinter Nights, I started my own campaign, which was received quite well. When Neverwinter Nights 2 came along, I started yet another and don't plan on stopping.
At one level, it's simply a hobby that combines a lot of skills I enjoy practicing. The scripting language is C-like, which probably helped me get over a long habit of programming in Basic-like languages. Modding is also something I can share with my kids, as my son enjoys tinkering around with the toolset and putting together simple modules.
On another level, I'm in awe of the people who have played my modules and how I've touched their lives. I remember getting an e-mail from a woman who was dying of cancer and how a particular moment in my game made her husband laugh for the first time in a long while. I got another letter from a young man in the Israeli army, talking about how my games were a bright moment in an otherwise terrifying life.
I think Dungeons and Dragons has ended up being something larger than it was originally envisioned. My kids make up these elaborate "playing pretend" stories. D&D has turned this instinct for adventure into something adults can do without too many funny looks. We all need to play the hero and live a life bigger than ourselves. Gary helped give that to us, and for that I am most grateful.
Keep in mind that any time you have a factory make something for you, there will be delays and costs associated with getting the product into your hands. Over the last few decades, they've done an amazing job streamlining this process. Still, it costs five bucks and three days between the time I place my order for my widget and the time it shows up at my doorstep.
I think that for many goods, that's fine. For things that cost a few dollars to make, spending five dollars on shipping will seem like madness. Plus there's always the "gimme now" factor, which seems to permiate our society.
There's a reason most people have printers in their houses. We may send our photos off periodically to get printed in bulk for cheap, but still print the one or two off when we feel like it.
On our company's Internet site, we've recently been getting lots of one-time submissions via various forms for things that are obviously advertisements. We don't have pages where you can actually post things and have them appear (like a discussion group), so this is mostly annoying the humans on the receiving end of the forms.
There's a few ways to deter bots, but based on the stuff people would have to do to fill them out, about half seem human. How you could earn your keep trying to submit advertising links to pages all day long, I have no idea.
They're really pushing the command-line thing for all their products. We got a demo of Exchange 2007 and not everything is configurable from within the GUI. Where it is, it gives you the PowerShell command at the bottom.
The worst part for me is that they're reducing support for a lot of their "old" API and everything has to be rewritten using command line tools. Essentially what I'm doing is making pretty web interfaces for something that should be part of their own product. Madness!
I'm thinking about opening up a service that takes electronic messages, prints them out, and hand delivers them to a reciplient's address. Fortunately paper is still protected by the 1st Amendment and as long as everything printed within is true, it's generally not unlawful (minus death threats, etc.). How about this slogan:
Want to hurt someone's feelings? Do it on Paper(tm)!
Actually, it's all my fault. Everything I think comes true. I made you say that.
Joking aside, my above silly statement is an example of Magic Thinking. I always felt it was the opposite of victimization, the idea that everything I think and do affects the world.
Personally I feel that the concepts of "self" and "other" are illusory. Everything is interconnected. Just by reading this sentence I typed, your brain has been physically altered forever. Addiction is just the result of mental processes, feedback systems reacting to internal and external stimuli. It's unlikely warning labels would help. Electric shocks when you use them too often would do nicely.
/. is slipping....a story about lasers and no sharks tag?!? Shocked I tell, shocked. They tried mounting a Deathalyzer on a shark, but the result was always that the subject would die within a few seconds.So if my wife starts getting a lot of ads for porn, do you think she'll put two and two together?
I realize the XML is used for a lot of things, but whenever my fellow developers learn that the vendor is shipping us some interface in XML, the groans are audible. About half the time, their XML format isn't quite standard, and we've got to dig around for utilities to try and work with it (or write something custom). I'd say the vast majority of our interfaces are good ol' delimited text files.
For other purposes, XML is great and very readable, but I'm not sure it makes sense to use it everywhere.
I read the abstract (the article is for-purchase) and it looks like they have a better feel for what it takes to turn adult cells into embryonic stems cells. Furthermore, they identified cell markers that let you better isolate these cells from other cells that haven't made the transitions between the two states.
I think what you'll start seeing is much better efficiencies for upcoming cloning experiments (currently it's incredibly poor), as well as people starting to talk about theraputic stem cell treatments (since you can better guarantee the "purity" of the cells you're injecting into people).
Since my employer is a healthcare organization, there's a reasonably good chance that someone accessing my laptop would violate HIPPA laws. I'm not sure law enforcement can look at people's medical records without a court order, so there are likely some cases where government officials forcing someone to disclose private information may be unlawful.
For other universities who happen to want to work with these fish, I recommend contacting Zoltán Varga. He's a director at the Zebrafish International Resource Center at the University of Oregon.
He also has a great family and we had dinner at his house a couple weeks ago, Zoltán making a tasty Thai soup. The best part about visiting is that his wife is French and they're always talking in various languages at the dinner table. For some reason when the dog is bad, they always chastise him in German.
I tinkered with D&D back in the day, but never really managed to find the time or people to play with. When the first Neverwinter Nights came out, I had a great time making modules. It was a treat to use all my programming skills, entertain others, and generally have a good time playing with the setting and the technology.
These days I'm working on a new campaign for NWN2. The new engine is more challenging to work with, but it's quite pretty. I'm able to give my new computer quite a workout with all the new graphics features.
Ironically I'm 38 too, occasionally feeling old as well.
I was wondering why we had so many drive failures on our GSAs . . .
When I skim down the list of the world's billionaires, the ones that stand out when it comes to philanthropy tend to be the ones that made their money in software. Phillip Knight (of Nike) has given a lot to the University of Oregon, where he started out, but that's all I see from a first glance. I wonder if software folks have a different take on poverty than the rest of the super-wealthy?