We've been doing maglev for quite a while now, though few people tried to ride them like a skateboard before.
No kidding.
The electrical demos in Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry had a demonstrator in the late '50s. It was a half-transformer-like device about the size of a small outside unit for a whole-house air conditioner - a cylinder about 3 feet across and three feet high.
It generated a large, repulsive, "elevator field" in the center - over the bulk of the upper surface, and a slightly inward-directed "fence field" around the perimiter, to keep whatever it was floating centered.
What they usually floated was a metal (copper?) disk about 3 feet across, which floated maybe 6 inches above the device. They could angle the fence field slightly and make the disk spin slowly. The guy demonstrating it also removed the device by holding a second, slightly larger, disk just below it and edging it into the field from the side. When this was moved into the fence field it disrupted it at that spot, so the remaining fields convenient spit the disk onto this "hot tray.
And hot tray it was. The disk got hot from the eddy currents. The demonstrator said they had considered using this as a stovetop (anticipating induction cooktops, but with levitation) but it hadn't worked out.
Came back a decade later and they were still using it - but the sides of the disk had gotten folded upward about 30 degrees and somewhat randomly, turning it into an artsy-looking bowl. Seems somebody had left it floating long enough for the metal to soften, and the fence fields had pushed it up.
Miniaturizing the elevator-field portion of this, probably raising the frequency, and turning it upside down, with field-shape tweaks to keep it level, would produce an over-a-conductive-plate hoverboard. Tweak the fence fields into a couple linear motors along the edge to provide propulsion and steering. (You might even be able to set up the fields so you accelerate, brake, and steer by tilting, making local effects stronger on particular regions of the edge by bringing the pole pieces closer to the conductive surface.)
Slow aging-related cognitive decline (as measured by IQ tests) is a myth, which has been known to be incorrect for decades.
The bulk of the stereotype of the old being senile is the result of a handful of diseases (such as Alzheimers, CJD, and strokes). These affect a significant number of individuals, but not the bulk of them. Considering the rest:
During the first few decades after the invention of IQ tests, much research was done on many people in many age groups and many regions of the US (and elsewhere). Graphing the average IQ scores versus age made curves that told seemed to tell a simple story:
- IQ rises steeply and linearly from birth to about age 19.
- From about 19 to about 21 it knees over.
- After about age 21 it declines slowly (and with a few wiggles) for the rest of life.
But this story was wrong. It conflated two things: IQ vs. age, and IQ versus date of birth (and thus period of history of childhood, adolescence, and adulthood). The two needed to be separated.
After tests had been conducted for several decades, enough results had been compiled on particular people to follow their scores as they aged, and thus separate the two effects. NOW the graphs told a very different story:
- IQ rises steeply and linearly from birth to about age 19.
- From about 19 to about 21 it knees over.
- After about age 21 it rises very linearly but much more slowly, for the rest of life.
- People born in earlier decades (of the first few decades of IQ testing) scored lower on IQ tests. (This has since flattened out - recent generations score about equally.)
For a long time the date-of-cohort influence on IQ scores was a big puzzle. Was it changes in education? More exposure to ideas thanks to better news media penetration? Cultural bias in the tests being compensated for by cultural homogenization? (Regional effects were present and much stronger in the earlier generations.) Much more research went into figuring this out.
At last the culprits were apparently identified: Several dietary deficiencies stunt the brain, and they were pretty much eliminated over those same decades. The 800 lb gorilla of them was iodine deficiency (far more prevalent in the interior than on the coasts) and this (along with goiter) was pretty much eliminated by iodizing salt.
the highest reliably-measured surface winds on record for a tropical cyclone, anywhere on the Earth. [but] the maximum sustained winds estimated for typhoons during the 1940s to 1960s were too strong.
So measurements aren't "reliable" before about 1970 - 45 years ago. Assuming you start in 1970 and take at least one "reliable" measurement of the strongest storm of the year, and there is no change trend to the storm strengths at all:
- In 1970 you have a 100% chance of a new record.
- In 1971 you have a 50% chance of a new record.
- In 1972 you have a 33.33...% chance of a new record....
- In 2015 you have a 2.17...% chance for a new record.
Pick enough weather events with similar "reliable" histories and you can find several that are setting new records every year. Attribute them to "global warming" (or demons, or space alien intervention,...) and you can get several media events per year, too.
Similarly with daily high and low temperatures. Even accepting "unreliable" data, most locations have fewer years of measurements than days in the year, producing several new "all time record" high or low temperatures every year.
Is this really Google's doing because none of this seems to be search engine related.
There were news items a few months ago saying some of the Silicon Valley billionaires were planning to fund anti-ageing medical research.
- The medical establishment hasn't been pushing it because the FDA considers ageing to be a normal process, rather than a disease, and so treatments and drugs to retard or reverse it, even if they were amazingly effective, would be unlikely to be something they can bring to market and recover and profit from an investment.
- The Federal Government has a strong financial interest in oldsters dying off, because they're more of a drag on entitlement programs than a source of tax money (and less likely to vote for the current crop of politicians - of either party - than better-indoctrinated and/or less experienced younger people). They've been talking about "bringing the death rate up to meet the birth rate" in order to avoid the bankruptcy of Social Security since at least the early '80s. Obamacare has similar financial issues but has raised the ante, and taken over control of the dispensing of most healthcare. (Some believe it's the end-game for getting rid of the Boomers. Witness the discussion about whether it includes "death panels".) So don't expect a lot of anti-ageing funding from the government.
Medical insurance companies have a similar incentive structure - as has long been noted.
Even the life-extension movement people are not funded well enough to do more than watch the literature for possible age-slowing discoveries and work on better ways to put their members into cryonic suspension when they die (funded mainly by life insurance policies) in the hope of future breakthroughs.
(A real cure for ageing, of course, or even a close approximation, wouldn't produce the bankruptcy scenario. By restoring youth and health it would avoid the need to retire and be supported by ever-increasing medical intervention. The reduction of these costs, and increasing value produced by longer working life, after deducting the costs of the anti-ageing treatments itself, should be big drop in expense. But that's beyond the bureaucratic planning horizon.)
So if Internet Billionaires want any medical research that might extend their lives and those of their employees, friends, associates, the builders and maintainers of the infrastructure that supports them, and perhaps the rest of humanity, they'll have to fund it themselves.
Very few people are worried about government surveillance...
The very fact that we're having this conversation proves that statement wrong. There are plenty of people who care. Some of them are in high places. Some of them are doing their best to stop it.
But the press gets its power mainly by creating illusions for the legislators about how much, and which way, the voters care about various issues.
"Nobody cares" really means that Sumner Redstone (CBS), GE and Vivendi (NBC), The Walt Disney Company (ABC), Rupert Murdoch (Fox News, Newscorp, WSJ), Mitt Romney (now via his cronies) (Clear Channel), and Garry Pruit (the CEO) and a "bunch of rich guys" who bought the rest of the newspapers from the conglomerates (AP), all want the government to snoop.
In other news, it is reported that Secret Service is allowed to use guns and rifles. The fact that one does not see agents firing their guns everyday is simply because unless in "exceptional circumstances" there is no need, not because they are not allowed to.
So is every body else.
At least to the extent this civil right is not "infringed", in violation of the constitution. or lost, along with other civil rights, as part of the penalty for conviction of a {constitutionally valid} crime.
If so, it has to be held down to let the computer keep doing what it wants to. That way, if the car does something that jars the backup driver away from the switch, the car stops, rather than continuing on some wild and dangerous runaway activity.
dude is named Lowell Wood; he was once behind the infamous 'Star Wars' space laser project, and he was a protege of Edward Telle Wood seems to be using his powers more for good these days
Okalee dokalee
Goes double here.
I'm betting the author of that didn't live through the Cold War - as an aware adult or child, at least.
A few decades of waiting for a nuclear surprise attack and going through elementary school "duck and cover" (and kiss your a** goodbye) drills can make using tech to actually try to intercept enough incoming missiles to avoid total extinction (and using the threat of being able to do so to end the saber-rattling) seem like a VERY good idea.
There's another argument against comments I occasionally hear as well, which is "a competent coder should be able to discern what the code is doing without comments." While that's technically true, it's another argument I would reject.
Me, too.
Sure, a competent coder can tell what the code IS DOING. So can a compiler. That's not the issue. What do you do if what the code is doing is the wrong thing? What is the RIGHT thing? If all you've go is the code, you're hosed.
NO process can look at code alone and find bugs - because correct code for one thing is not correct for another. A perfect implementation of "cat", for instance, is not correct when what you want is "echo". All correctness checking can do is compare two (or more) expressions of the intent for discrepancies.
I feel the best comments can and should declare the intent of a block of code, rather than drilling down into the mechanics of the code.
And that's what they're for. When writing multiple expressions of intent, the less similar the languages used are, the less likely an identical error will end up in all of them.
With the comments you have a chance. With allegedly "self-documenting code" all you can test is the compiler.
it was the most preventable of man-made disasters -- war
Yeah. I'll buy that for a dollar.
Hear hear!
About the closest you can come to "preventing war" is "Never start a fight, always finish one."
Mathematically, the "Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma" is a simple model that comes close to politics and war. In a no-noise situation "Tit For Tat" is close to optimum, and in noisy ones the best solutions are tweaks of it. Tweaks that improve things come in two forms:
1) A little forgiveness up front (like "tit for two tats, then tit for tat until some no-tats") helps keep confusion from turning into an ongoing vendetta. (You killed my dad, I kill you, your son kills me, my son kills him,...)
2) When things have degenerated into war or headed there (such as intermittent unprovoked tats in no discernible pattern), go to all tits. (Once the war starts, pound them into the ground as hard and fast as possible.)
On a more human conceptual scale: Proportional response leads to continuous escalation. (The opposition is never given a schelling point where they can retreat with honor. They must continue to fight and escalate or lose power to those who will.)
Suicidal rates drop with measures preventing people from obtaining guns.(see the book More Guns Less crime)
I have a strong respect for Lott's work - but haven't read all of it. This is the first time I'd heard that he was putting forth that assertion.
It would be interesting to examine how much of the effect, if any, was an actual reduction in the suicide rate and how much, if any, was that some of the suicidal simply went to another location.
However:
Studies have shown that well-designed suicide barriers not only stop people from jumping at a particular site, but also decrease the overall suicide rate in the surrounding area.
If suicide barriers go up on one high-profile site, making the act difficult there, at least some would-be suicides go to the next-lower-profile site and do it there. If it happens to be out of "the surrounding area" used in the statistics, it will look like a drop even if there is none. (This displacement has already been observed in at least one major metropolitan area on the West Coast.) Similarly, would-be suicides who switch methods and succeed may, as a result, not travel INTO "the surrounding area" to use the high-profile site in question.
So how much, if any, of the drop in "the surrounding area" is an actual reduction in suicide counts and how much is from suicides that still did happen, but elsewhere.
All of which begs the question: "Why are non-suicidal people being disarmed, and thus denied the right to self defence?" (Also: "Why are suicidal people being denied the right to end their lives in the manner they prefer?")
Some current and proposed gun regulations disarm people for whom there is no evidence to indicate that, if they were armed, they would be more of a problem (and often there is evidence they would be LESS) than an average person.
My expectation is that such a test would provide impartial supporting evidence that such regulations are misguided and an improper denial of civil rights.
Meanwhile, the arrogance is not on MY part, but on the part of the people who ARE ALREADY DISARMING PEOPLE on the basis of unsubstantiated - and often disproved - psychological theories and/or political dogma.
Of course it's science (or at least statistical processing of real-world data). Maybe it WILL find some non-trivial predictor. If so, we can cross that bridge when we come to it.
In the past, what came out of these efforts war universally horrible.
What I'm expecting, or at least hoping for, is for this impartial algorithm to fail to identify any strong predictors (other than previous history of initiated violence). Or at least not find anything far enough above statistical noise to be used as an excuse for government to deny a person the fundamental rights to self-defence from threat to life or limb - (either individual threats or a government disarming its own opposition before implementing tyranny or genocide.)
If it turns out that history of initiated violence is the ONLY substantial predictor it can find, that would argue for the only reason for abridging a person's RKBA would be "Ajudicated, by a court of competent jurisdiction, as being a danger to others, on the basis of a history of unjustified violent attacks against innocent parties." Even most RKBA advocates can get behind that. (Of those that don't, their reasoning would be things like: "We can't allow a potentially tyrannical government ANY excuse to, through malice or incompetence, disarm its potential righteous opposition." or "If this guy really IS a danger to others he should still be in jail or committed to a mental institution.)
If it DOES find some strong predictor, we'd then have some decent data on which to discuss what, if anything, should be done about "risky people". That's FAR better than the current laws and proposals, which amount to disarming people (and thus denying them a civil right) arbitrarily, on the basis of unsubstantiated - and so far proven incorrect - fads among the mental-health segment of the medical community and various political factions.
Those who study such behavior have come up with the aphorism "The only effective predictor of future violent behavior is past violent behavior." Let's see if the program can identify any other indicators.
It might be interesting to try it at predicting future violent behavior of individuals.
Those who study such behavior have come up with the aphorism "The only effective predictor of future violent behavior is past violent behavior." Let's see if the
Shrinks who try to make predictions about individuals come out WORSE than chance - which implies that there may be SOME prediction possible - but the current paradigms have it backward.
This, by the way, is ONE of the reasons the pro-gun crowd pooh-poohs mental health tests for gun ownership or purchase. Another is the observation that people with mental illnesses are, on the average, far LESS likely to cause harm to others than the average of the population. (They may harm THEMSELVES, but suicide rates don't change if guns aren't available: Instead the suicidal switch to less effective and usually more painful means, averaging more tries before they succeed.)
Back in my misspent youth, when I was cutting my hacking teeth, I processed some Skylab multispectral scanner data.
The scanner at first seemed an oddball: Instead of sweeping crossrange while the lab orbited, it swept in a cone-shaped fan somewhat forward of the flight path.
"Why?" you may ask. (I did, too.) Because that way the line-of-sight always passed through the same amount of atmosphere at the same angle from zenith (though at different angles to the sun - which you'd have gotten anyway, though differently). This equalized the absorption, and thus the spectral distortion, of the light from pixels at different distances from the flight track. Very cute.
It also made the scan artifacts on the geometry-corrected output into a series of arcs. Very odd looking.
There's an entire song cycle, in fact; Baba Yetu is the first of a set.
Just listened through it once. I read the album as a symphony, of which Baba Yetu is the overture. Each of the songs seems to expand on one theme from it.
Thanks greatly for the link. It also brings up several of Christopher Tin's complete albums - on YouTube deliberately, pending better distribution channels for the recordings.
(He seems to like writing orchestra-and-choral-or-solo-singer pieces in a collection of foreign languages. My wife is one of the few hundred remaining speakers of Chinook Wawa - the west-coast trade jargon - and has written some stories in it (using associated cultural themes and styles) that received some popularity. I'm tempted to try to get them together to see if he'd like to do one in The Jargon. B-) )
It's a (WTF!) musical setting of The Lord's Prayer translated into Swahili - and well enough done to be a regular performance on a premier art attraction in the United Arab Emirates.
I've probably watched/listened to this more than any other thing on You Tube.
Hugh Hefner handed top control spot of the company to his daughter Christie in 1988. She resigned on the 2008/2009 new year boundary.
The magazine's market performance has apparently been gradually declining since then, starting by dropping back to 11 issues per year in 2009. (What mix, if any, of Chistie leaving because the writing was already on the wall, the third generation's changes resulting in a slide, and/or other factors may be a good subject for a post-mortem analysis and publication, some time in the future.)
[Quoting Ramesh Ponnuru in Bloomberg] "All in all, then, what Paul is proposing is a big tax cut for high earners and businesses with almost no direct benefits for most Americans...." For the middle class, however, the plan looks like a wash:H And when you look at the article you see that it's mischaracterized. He claims "For the middle class, however, the plan looks like a wash" because the massive tax cut would be offset by two factors:
1) The replacement of the corporate income tax with a 14.5% "business activity tax" that doesn't include labor costs as a deduction. He treats this as if it were a hidden 14.5% tax on goods, neglecting the compensating benefits of reducing the corporate income tax, AND the costs of computing it and changing business decisions to work around it, to zero. (Yes, some corporations manage to structure their operations so they can get their corporate tax below 14.5%, or even down to zero. Want to bet whether it costs them less than 14.5% when tax-hacking costs are included?)
2) The alleged reduction in benefits to the middle class from cuts in government spending. Do YOU think that the middle-class actually gets any substantial benefits from the government spending that would be cut? Then take into account that cuts in government spending tend to stimulate the economy BIG time (by not having so much of its blood drained every time it circulates another round), something that his source for this claim - the pro-business "The Tax Foundation" - explicitly ignores in its analysis.
IMHO Ponnuru's article was another hit piece - part of business interests' attempts to convince the voters that tax reform plans which favor the working / middle classes, growing the pie and letting them keep a bigger piece of it, are bad ideas, so they elect another shill who is in the moneyed interests' pocket.
Slashdot Mirror
We've been doing maglev for quite a while now, though few people tried to ride them like a skateboard before.
No kidding.
The electrical demos in Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry had a demonstrator in the late '50s. It was a half-transformer-like device about the size of a small outside unit for a whole-house air conditioner - a cylinder about 3 feet across and three feet high.
It generated a large, repulsive, "elevator field" in the center - over the bulk of the upper surface, and a slightly inward-directed "fence field" around the perimiter, to keep whatever it was floating centered.
What they usually floated was a metal (copper?) disk about 3 feet across, which floated maybe 6 inches above the device. They could angle the fence field slightly and make the disk spin slowly. The guy demonstrating it also removed the device by holding a second, slightly larger, disk just below it and edging it into the field from the side. When this was moved into the fence field it disrupted it at that spot, so the remaining fields convenient spit the disk onto this "hot tray.
And hot tray it was. The disk got hot from the eddy currents. The demonstrator said they had considered using this as a stovetop (anticipating induction cooktops, but with levitation) but it hadn't worked out.
Came back a decade later and they were still using it - but the sides of the disk had gotten folded upward about 30 degrees and somewhat randomly, turning it into an artsy-looking bowl. Seems somebody had left it floating long enough for the metal to soften, and the fence fields had pushed it up.
Miniaturizing the elevator-field portion of this, probably raising the frequency, and turning it upside down, with field-shape tweaks to keep it level, would produce an over-a-conductive-plate hoverboard. Tweak the fence fields into a couple linear motors along the edge to provide propulsion and steering. (You might even be able to set up the fields so you accelerate, brake, and steer by tilting, making local effects stronger on particular regions of the edge by bringing the pole pieces closer to the conductive surface.)
Slow aging-related cognitive decline (as measured by IQ tests) is a myth, which has been known to be incorrect for decades.
The bulk of the stereotype of the old being senile is the result of a handful of diseases (such as Alzheimers, CJD, and strokes). These affect a significant number of individuals, but not the bulk of them. Considering the rest:
During the first few decades after the invention of IQ tests, much research was done on many people in many age groups and many regions of the US (and elsewhere). Graphing the average IQ scores versus age made curves that told seemed to tell a simple story:
- IQ rises steeply and linearly from birth to about age 19.
- From about 19 to about 21 it knees over.
- After about age 21 it declines slowly (and with a few wiggles) for the rest of life.
But this story was wrong. It conflated two things: IQ vs. age, and IQ versus date of birth (and thus period of history of childhood, adolescence, and adulthood). The two needed to be separated.
After tests had been conducted for several decades, enough results had been compiled on particular people to follow their scores as they aged, and thus separate the two effects. NOW the graphs told a very different story:
- IQ rises steeply and linearly from birth to about age 19.
- From about 19 to about 21 it knees over.
- After about age 21 it rises very linearly but much more slowly, for the rest of life.
- People born in earlier decades (of the first few decades of IQ testing) scored lower on IQ tests. (This has since flattened out - recent generations score about equally.)
For a long time the date-of-cohort influence on IQ scores was a big puzzle. Was it changes in education? More exposure to ideas thanks to better news media penetration? Cultural bias in the tests being compensated for by cultural homogenization? (Regional effects were present and much stronger in the earlier generations.) Much more research went into figuring this out.
At last the culprits were apparently identified: Several dietary deficiencies stunt the brain, and they were pretty much eliminated over those same decades. The 800 lb gorilla of them was iodine deficiency (far more prevalent in the interior than on the coasts) and this (along with goiter) was pretty much eliminated by iodizing salt.
the highest reliably-measured surface winds on record for a tropical cyclone, anywhere on the Earth. [but] the maximum sustained winds estimated for typhoons during the 1940s to 1960s were too strong.
So measurements aren't "reliable" before about 1970 - 45 years ago. Assuming you start in 1970 and take at least one "reliable" measurement of the strongest storm of the year, and there is no change trend to the storm strengths at all: ...
- In 1970 you have a 100% chance of a new record.
- In 1971 you have a 50% chance of a new record.
- In 1972 you have a 33.33...% chance of a new record.
- In 2015 you have a 2.17...% chance for a new record.
Pick enough weather events with similar "reliable" histories and you can find several that are setting new records every year. Attribute them to "global warming" (or demons, or space alien intervention, ...) and you can get several media events per year, too.
Similarly with daily high and low temperatures. Even accepting "unreliable" data, most locations have fewer years of measurements than days in the year, producing several new "all time record" high or low temperatures every year.
Is this really Google's doing because none of this seems to be search engine related.
There were news items a few months ago saying some of the Silicon Valley billionaires were planning to fund anti-ageing medical research.
- The medical establishment hasn't been pushing it because the FDA considers ageing to be a normal process, rather than a disease, and so treatments and drugs to retard or reverse it, even if they were amazingly effective, would be unlikely to be something they can bring to market and recover and profit from an investment.
- The Federal Government has a strong financial interest in oldsters dying off, because they're more of a drag on entitlement programs than a source of tax money (and less likely to vote for the current crop of politicians - of either party - than better-indoctrinated and/or less experienced younger people). They've been talking about "bringing the death rate up to meet the birth rate" in order to avoid the bankruptcy of Social Security since at least the early '80s. Obamacare has similar financial issues but has raised the ante, and taken over control of the dispensing of most healthcare. (Some believe it's the end-game for getting rid of the Boomers. Witness the discussion about whether it includes "death panels".) So don't expect a lot of anti-ageing funding from the government.
Medical insurance companies have a similar incentive structure - as has long been noted.
Even the life-extension movement people are not funded well enough to do more than watch the literature for possible age-slowing discoveries and work on better ways to put their members into cryonic suspension when they die (funded mainly by life insurance policies) in the hope of future breakthroughs.
(A real cure for ageing, of course, or even a close approximation, wouldn't produce the bankruptcy scenario. By restoring youth and health it would avoid the need to retire and be supported by ever-increasing medical intervention. The reduction of these costs, and increasing value produced by longer working life, after deducting the costs of the anti-ageing treatments itself, should be big drop in expense. But that's beyond the bureaucratic planning horizon.)
So if Internet Billionaires want any medical research that might extend their lives and those of their employees, friends, associates, the builders and maintainers of the infrastructure that supports them, and perhaps the rest of humanity, they'll have to fund it themselves.
Fortunately, a few of them ARE doing so. B-)
Parent post got a down-mod within 45 minutes. I wonder if any meta-moderators believe that's an abuse?
Very few people are worried about government surveillance ...
The very fact that we're having this conversation proves that statement wrong. There are plenty of people who care. Some of them are in high places. Some of them are doing their best to stop it.
But the press gets its power mainly by creating illusions for the legislators about how much, and which way, the voters care about various issues.
"Nobody cares" really means that Sumner Redstone (CBS), GE and Vivendi (NBC), The Walt Disney Company (ABC), Rupert Murdoch (Fox News, Newscorp, WSJ), Mitt Romney (now via his cronies) (Clear Channel), and Garry Pruit (the CEO) and a "bunch of rich guys" who bought the rest of the newspapers from the conglomerates (AP), all want the government to snoop.
In other news, it is reported that Secret Service is allowed to use guns and rifles. The fact that one does not see agents firing their guns everyday is simply because unless in "exceptional circumstances" there is no need, not because they are not allowed to.
So is every body else.
At least to the extent this civil right is not "infringed", in violation of the constitution. or lost, along with other civil rights, as part of the penalty for conviction of a {constitutionally valid} crime.
Looks like a deadman switch.
If so, it has to be held down to let the computer keep doing what it wants to. That way, if the car does something that jars the backup driver away from the switch, the car stops, rather than continuing on some wild and dangerous runaway activity.
dude is named Lowell Wood; he was once behind the infamous 'Star Wars' space laser project, and he was a protege of Edward Telle
Wood seems to be using his powers more for good these days
Okalee dokalee
Goes double here.
I'm betting the author of that didn't live through the Cold War - as an aware adult or child, at least.
A few decades of waiting for a nuclear surprise attack and going through elementary school "duck and cover" (and kiss your a** goodbye) drills can make using tech to actually try to intercept enough incoming missiles to avoid total extinction (and using the threat of being able to do so to end the saber-rattling) seem like a VERY good idea.
There's another argument against comments I occasionally hear as well, which is "a competent coder should be able to discern what the code is doing without comments." While that's technically true, it's another argument I would reject.
Me, too.
Sure, a competent coder can tell what the code IS DOING. So can a compiler. That's not the issue. What do you do if what the code is doing is the wrong thing? What is the RIGHT thing? If all you've go is the code, you're hosed.
NO process can look at code alone and find bugs - because correct code for one thing is not correct for another. A perfect implementation of "cat", for instance, is not correct when what you want is "echo". All correctness checking can do is compare two (or more) expressions of the intent for discrepancies.
I feel the best comments can and should declare the intent of a block of code, rather than drilling down into the mechanics of the code.
And that's what they're for. When writing multiple expressions of intent, the less similar the languages used are, the less likely an identical error will end up in all of them.
With the comments you have a chance. With allegedly "self-documenting code" all you can test is the compiler.
Hear hear!
About the closest you can come to "preventing war" is "Never start a fight, always finish one."
Mathematically, the "Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma" is a simple model that comes close to politics and war. In a no-noise situation "Tit For Tat" is close to optimum, and in noisy ones the best solutions are tweaks of it. Tweaks that improve things come in two forms: ...)
1) A little forgiveness up front (like "tit for two tats, then tit for tat until some no-tats") helps keep confusion from turning into an ongoing vendetta. (You killed my dad, I kill you, your son kills me, my son kills him,
2) When things have degenerated into war or headed there (such as intermittent unprovoked tats in no discernible pattern), go to all tits. (Once the war starts, pound them into the ground as hard and fast as possible.)
On a more human conceptual scale: Proportional response leads to continuous escalation. (The opposition is never given a schelling point where they can retreat with honor. They must continue to fight and escalate or lose power to those who will.)
Suicidal rates drop with measures preventing people from obtaining guns.(see the book More Guns Less crime)
I have a strong respect for Lott's work - but haven't read all of it. This is the first time I'd heard that he was putting forth that assertion.
It would be interesting to examine how much of the effect, if any, was an actual reduction in the suicide rate and how much, if any, was that some of the suicidal simply went to another location.
However:
Studies have shown that well-designed suicide barriers not only stop people from jumping at a particular site, but also decrease the overall suicide rate in the surrounding area.
If suicide barriers go up on one high-profile site, making the act difficult there, at least some would-be suicides go to the next-lower-profile site and do it there. If it happens to be out of "the surrounding area" used in the statistics, it will look like a drop even if there is none. (This displacement has already been observed in at least one major metropolitan area on the West Coast.) Similarly, would-be suicides who switch methods and succeed may, as a result, not travel INTO "the surrounding area" to use the high-profile site in question.
So how much, if any, of the drop in "the surrounding area" is an actual reduction in suicide counts and how much is from suicides that still did happen, but elsewhere.
All of which begs the question: "Why are non-suicidal people being disarmed, and thus denied the right to self defence?" (Also: "Why are suicidal people being denied the right to end their lives in the manner they prefer?")
You seem to misunderstand my point.
Some current and proposed gun regulations disarm people for whom there is no evidence to indicate that, if they were armed, they would be more of a problem (and often there is evidence they would be LESS) than an average person.
My expectation is that such a test would provide impartial supporting evidence that such regulations are misguided and an improper denial of civil rights.
Meanwhile, the arrogance is not on MY part, but on the part of the people who ARE ALREADY DISARMING PEOPLE on the basis of unsubstantiated - and often disproved - psychological theories and/or political dogma.
Of course it's science (or at least statistical processing of real-world data). Maybe it WILL find some non-trivial predictor. If so, we can cross that bridge when we come to it.
>> It might be interesting to try it at predicting future violent behavior of individuals.
>So individuals can be arrested, prosecuted, judged and condemned before they commit a crime. Great world that would be.
No: So we can use the (expected) result to STOP exactly such denials of civil rights, WHICH ARE HAPPENING NOW.
In the past, what came out of these efforts war universally horrible.
What I'm expecting, or at least hoping for, is for this impartial algorithm to fail to identify any strong predictors (other than previous history of initiated violence). Or at least not find anything far enough above statistical noise to be used as an excuse for government to deny a person the fundamental rights to self-defence from threat to life or limb - (either individual threats or a government disarming its own opposition before implementing tyranny or genocide.)
If it turns out that history of initiated violence is the ONLY substantial predictor it can find, that would argue for the only reason for abridging a person's RKBA would be "Ajudicated, by a court of competent jurisdiction, as being a danger to others, on the basis of a history of unjustified violent attacks against innocent parties." Even most RKBA advocates can get behind that. (Of those that don't, their reasoning would be things like: "We can't allow a potentially tyrannical government ANY excuse to, through malice or incompetence, disarm its potential righteous opposition." or "If this guy really IS a danger to others he should still be in jail or committed to a mental institution.)
If it DOES find some strong predictor, we'd then have some decent data on which to discuss what, if anything, should be done about "risky people". That's FAR better than the current laws and proposals, which amount to disarming people (and thus denying them a civil right) arbitrarily, on the basis of unsubstantiated - and so far proven incorrect - fads among the mental-health segment of the medical community and various political factions.
(The Lenovo Trackpad ate my homework again. B-b )
Those who study such behavior have come up with the aphorism "The only effective predictor of future violent behavior is past violent behavior." Let's see if the program can identify any other indicators.
It might be interesting to try it at predicting future violent behavior of individuals.
Those who study such behavior have come up with the aphorism "The only effective predictor of future violent behavior is past violent behavior." Let's see if the
Shrinks who try to make predictions about individuals come out WORSE than chance - which implies that there may be SOME prediction possible - but the current paradigms have it backward.
This, by the way, is ONE of the reasons the pro-gun crowd pooh-poohs mental health tests for gun ownership or purchase. Another is the observation that people with mental illnesses are, on the average, far LESS likely to cause harm to others than the average of the population. (They may harm THEMSELVES, but suicide rates don't change if guns aren't available: Instead the suicidal switch to less effective and usually more painful means, averaging more tries before they succeed.)
The title is a coinage my wife would drop into discussions when engineers would try to deflect bug reports with claims of how fast the new code is.
Related, for speedups of crash-buggy code: "So you've shortened the mean time to failure?"
Back in my misspent youth, when I was cutting my hacking teeth, I processed some Skylab multispectral scanner data.
The scanner at first seemed an oddball: Instead of sweeping crossrange while the lab orbited, it swept in a cone-shaped fan somewhat forward of the flight path.
"Why?" you may ask. (I did, too.) Because that way the line-of-sight always passed through the same amount of atmosphere at the same angle from zenith (though at different angles to the sun - which you'd have gotten anyway, though differently). This equalized the absorption, and thus the spectral distortion, of the light from pixels at different distances from the flight track. Very cute.
It also made the scan artifacts on the geometry-corrected output into a series of arcs. Very odd looking.
There's an entire song cycle, in fact; Baba Yetu is the first of a set.
Just listened through it once. I read the album as a symphony, of which Baba Yetu is the overture. Each of the songs seems to expand on one theme from it.
Thanks greatly for the link. It also brings up several of Christopher Tin's complete albums - on YouTube deliberately, pending better distribution channels for the recordings.
(He seems to like writing orchestra-and-choral-or-solo-singer pieces in a collection of foreign languages. My wife is one of the few hundred remaining speakers of
Chinook Wawa - the west-coast trade jargon - and has written some stories in it (using associated cultural themes and styles) that received some popularity. I'm tempted to try to get them together to see if he'd like to do one in The Jargon. B-) )
ROFL
The Civililization IV theme - first videogame music to win a Grammy.
The official trailer
Video Games Live orchestra and choir on PBS
views of performances on the Dubai Fountain
and lots more performances
It's a (WTF!) musical setting of The Lord's Prayer translated into Swahili - and well enough done to be a regular performance on a premier art attraction in the United Arab Emirates.
I've probably watched/listened to this more than any other thing on You Tube.
She resigned on the 2008/2009 new year boundary.
Correction: Jan 31 2009
Hugh Hefner handed top control spot of the company to his daughter Christie in 1988. She resigned on the 2008/2009 new year boundary.
The magazine's market performance has apparently been gradually declining since then, starting by dropping back to 11 issues per year in 2009. (What mix, if any, of Chistie leaving because the writing was already on the wall, the third generation's changes resulting in a slide, and/or other factors may be a good subject for a post-mortem analysis and publication, some time in the future.)
[Quoting Ramesh Ponnuru in Bloomberg] "All in all, then, what Paul is proposing is a big tax cut for high earners and businesses with almost no direct benefits for most Americans. ..."
For the middle class, however, the plan looks like a wash:H
And when you look at the article you see that it's mischaracterized. He claims "For the middle class, however, the plan looks like a wash" because the massive tax cut would be offset by two factors:
1) The replacement of the corporate income tax with a 14.5% "business activity tax" that doesn't include labor costs as a deduction. He treats this as if it were a hidden 14.5% tax on goods, neglecting the compensating benefits of reducing the corporate income tax, AND the costs of computing it and changing business decisions to work around it, to zero. (Yes, some corporations manage to structure their operations so they can get their corporate tax below 14.5%, or even down to zero. Want to bet whether it costs them less than 14.5% when tax-hacking costs are included?)
2) The alleged reduction in benefits to the middle class from cuts in government spending. Do YOU think that the middle-class actually gets any substantial benefits from the government spending that would be cut? Then take into account that cuts in government spending tend to stimulate the economy BIG time (by not having so much of its blood drained every time it circulates another round), something that his source for this claim - the pro-business "The Tax Foundation" - explicitly ignores in its analysis.
IMHO Ponnuru's article was another hit piece - part of business interests' attempts to convince the voters that tax reform plans which favor the working / middle classes, growing the pie and letting them keep a bigger piece of it, are bad ideas, so they elect another shill who is in the moneyed interests' pocket.