Robert Forward's "Rocheworld" does the best job I've ever seen at thinking up a plausible scenario for travel to a nearby star, plus a fair attempt to weave a human plot into the timescales involved. Also excellent was Forward's "Dragon's Egg", while other books by him are not nearly so good, specifically the sequels to both of these.
Both Sanford's "Genetic Entropy" and Behe's "The Edge of Evolution" contain back-of-the-envelope order-of-magnitude musings on "scale" related to the random-mutation-fantasy. David Swift's "Evolution Under the Microscope" stands out for repeatedly marveling over the "folding" issue, including the snip-and-rejoin magic needed to copy a helix. I mean I have repeatedly had the experience of spending tens of minutes unraveling a 50-meter stretch of 11-millimeter Edelrid perlon climbing rope, which is specifically designed to be easy-to-handle. The idea of your genome getting tied up into knots, I mean really you DO want to ask how it possibly AVOIDS getting tied up in knots !
Even today William Poundstone's "Prisoner's Dilemma" commands $3.95 used from Amazon Marketplace, while some other great books like "On Call In Hell" by Cdr./MD Jadick go for a penny.
Game Theory gets messy with more than two players. Googling (( TRUEL )) finds even a Wikipedia article on the subtleties of a three-person-duel.
Someday, inevitably, at least a dirty bomb, maybe a primitive Hiroshima-class terrorist nuke is going to go off, probably in a harbor-city because primitive nukes won't fit in carry-on baggage. WHODUNNIT, who to retaliate against ?
Consider the difficulties of retaliation against folks in what one might think are open-and-shut cases.
(( Brian Nichols 1.8 million )) reveals the legal bills to retaliate against the guy who took an officer's gun while IN CUSTODY.
(( Yale Raymond Clark Annie Le Defense Budget )) will be an interesting story. What with the card-key-swiping and DNA evidence, one might think a defense impossible. In other words "The cost of prosecuting open-and-shut cases" I think is a good benchmark of a legal system.
Yet the cost of retaliating instinctively are also high. Even the old book "Blackhawk Down" is full of indiscriminate-return-fire incidents, that was long before Pat Tillman.
For sure, we will look back nostalgically at the 2-player-Cold-War days.
$4500-$6000 a month is a LOT of coin for pretty much most of the country not containing coastline.
Truthfully, this is real news to me, I never heard of interns making that kind of money. In this economy - and yes, I'm talking about the US - it just seems... absurd.
The Google query (( CHAKALES WHITFIELD CNN SEP 12 )) gets you to the transcript of a CNN video which at this very moment is about 1/5 from the top of their scrollbar-of-videos. With her 3.0 GPA, along with many others she plans to save tons of money by accepting the full in-state-scholarship AS LONG AS she maintains the 3.0 GPA. Game-theory-wise just a little ways down the road the state would be able to save tons of money just by say reforming to cure the (predicted) grade-inflation-crisis. CNN will probably follow her pretty face into the future, we'll see....
Your remarks indicate you know more than I do on such issues - I wonder if you tend to assign any credibility to J.C. Sanford's musings in his book "Genetic Entropy". Among ID books this one is at least to be praised for its conciseness / lack-of-rambling. Even the most devout blind-watchmaker type must consider the back-of-the-envelope remarks on "How much selection pressure would be needed" to counteract entropy, much less select for the elusive benign mutation. Especially considering the dubious state of selection in Western Civilization. Case-in-point, I've never had the athletic requirements for serious rock-climbing although I enjoy it - it seems that the late "John Bachar" ( nice video on YouTube ) managed to father only one child over his lifetime, surely a quality stud by my metric, anyway.
Its "$50k a year" because say if a pattern could be proved, that they were deleting say "minority-porn" preferentially, acting as employees, then the corporation's entire assets are at-risk.
Having aging vision, I can no longer live without the proprietary(?) "Magnifier" technology which I get with the itty-5th-button on my Microsoft "Wireless Intellimouse Explorer 2.0". On Windows-XP it is instant GLASSY-SMOOTH magnification even as you continue to move the cursor. Evidently there are problems with the fancy compositing technology because it just doesn't work as smoothly under Vista or Windows-7.
Actually I am not sure this excellent technology is totally proprietary, as long as I get it for free with my mouse I need not research further - but I would of course be interested in any insight on this.
Recently I saw Nova's "The Incredible Journey of the Butterflies". Given your die-hard-determinist mindset, the new-age-y flavor of the two-minute "Watch a Preview" video at the site http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/butterflies/ is guaranteed to cause cognitive dissonance. I would compare stuff like this to facts like photoelectric-emission-before-quantum-theory, it doesn't fit, it causes cognitive dissonance, it demands a better model. I would like to know if science has more to say about the Monarchs than mumbling stuff like "Natural Selection". I don't even know the figure for the typical mass of a monarch brain, or how many neurons it has, BUT buried in the full Nova episode is a key experiment - they captured some southbound Monarchs in Kansas and released them near Washington D.C. Initially they vectored fairly due-south BUT THEN they changed course towards Mexico, presumably being unfamiliar with any landmarks near D.C, after all they were born in Canada and never went to college. Navigationally LATITUDE is a problem, its why chronometers were invented, how did the butterflies know they weren't being released in Berkeley - I want to see that experiment someday.
Narcissism-out-of-school was a huge problem for me personally, decades ago. I had good grades from good schools but could have used a better set of "mirror neurons".
In particular I remember always being vocal that code ought to be rewritten because it didn't look pretty. Learning-by-hard-knocks to have some respect for legacy-wisdom is such a painful memory, not least because being-rejected-by-team-mates due to such LACK of respect I now realize was justified.
I wonder what is the earliest age at which kids are capable of learning bargaining concepts ? "The Power of a Positive No" is such a great book, author Ury is still sharp. I speculate that he might round out his career with a children's book targeted at this age. The "BATNA for kids" course might start out with a screening of "Shipbreakers of Bangladesh", my favorite CBS video on global-economics.
"Waldo must figure out what effect broadcast power has on humans. Grimes is seeing a slow weakening of the human physique, and he blames the radiant power industry." -- from the Wikipedia entry on WALDO
I remember seeing some PBS show about the routine performance of the Roman warrior, how far they would march carrying standard kit, and how modern folks were not up to it anymore. It could also of course be those hormone-confusing-chemicals which the genome has never had to deal with before. Sigh.
(( Did you do that before or after taking out the power cable to shake out the loose electrons? )). Actually that's a deep remark. I have read of cases in which primitive peoples do things which ultimately DO have a scientific foundation, but the tribesman's explanation of why he does it is ridiculous. Bottom line if something experimentally seems to work then forget about the theory. In particular, "taking out the power cable" has worked for me several times, say when my ancient Dell no longer "wants to" SUSPEND correctly. Taking out the power cable has definitely fixed that, obviously there is some state-variable in some chip, no idea where. Indeed this is a worrisome thing as Windows is increasingly aggressive in saving-state-to-disk, what if the saved-state becomes corrupt, how do you reset that if the OS becomes so sure it has got it right ?
(( 'In fact, the law is very well designed to say that you have to treat H-1Bs the same as US citizens in all regards.' ))
I wonder does anyone else have an obsession with the "equalization meme" - which I define as "A and B are different, but we must make them equal" ?
For example, you can Google (( Canada Equalization )) to find that this meme is a cornerstone of their philosophy of governance.
At its most ridiculous is sexual equalization, male and female are SO different.
Anyway it seems like "there ought to be a book", but I have not found one. I would found a website myself, if I could figure out how to make money off it.
RTFM-wise I looked for Permian and Sulfur in the slashdot page and did not find them, nor did I find this scenario in the cited article.
Anyway Googling (( Global Warming Permian Extinction )) brings up all sorts of stuff. Tacking on the word CCSM brings up an easy-to-skim article with lot s of pretty graphics, including a reference to a computer simulation of this "Final Tipping Point".
At least in Windows XP, I have found that the TraceMessage() function seems to run nicely with the MessageFlags parameter set to zero, meaning that only the USHORT MessageNumber identifies your message, thus minimizing log-file-size. But if you're the only app logging to your ETW session then 64k message-types are enough, why would I need a 16-byte GUID in each message ?! By comparison only TraceEvent() was available in Win2K, significantly more overhead. I also briefly examined EventWrite()( VISTA ) and it seemed way more bloated than even TraceEvent(). According to MSDN TraceMessage() continues to be officially supported in Vista and server-2008, so there is still a way to do fairly lightweight tracing. It's definitely nice to have these kernel-logging-sessions just keep on ticking while your apps crash.
I was unable to find free info, although my search (( CERN LHC FINANCE PIE CHART )) does seem to find an abstract of a pay-for-PDF that would describe the costs as of 1997, sigh. Really, it would be neat to know approximately who is paying for this, while the US budget goes for war like you say, and the McMansion-Bailout which is so embarrassing.
Shooting demo uses real bullets, injures 16 - CNN
Actually this story posted to CNN recently, that is, on 29-June-2008. A good keyword query to find the article : (( Lemaire hostage rescue demo real bullets )).
For a few months I have owned a Matias 508. I was so intrigued by the idea of one-hand typing. On the plus side, it's so nice to have an ENTER key in place of "Caps Lock". And I am now totally used to "Space-bar-Tab" as backspace for the left hand. But on the other hand I find it impossible to type with two hands when the keyboard is in one-hand mode. I keep getting special "Matias typos" when I type a space and it interferes with the next character I type( with two hands ). So on the high-tech side a proximity sensor could sense your two hands. More cheaply a move of the mouse by a few pixels could cue it that you want one-hand, while a hit on the right-keys such as "JKLIOP" would cue it that you are using both hands, no need to do the spacebar-modal-thing and risk those typos. This is an obvious idea, but my guess is that the 508 was designed around existing parts. For example an even more obvious thing would be a light to tell you if the 508 is *IN* Matias-mode or not, but my guess is there is some off-the-shelf-chip which only handles the standard caps-scroll-num lights. Anyway with enough interest, if every slash-dotter preorders one, then they can afford to tool up and then I get my one-two-hand-Automode keyboard too.
>> Code that was written while... half-asleep has 25 minutes of video which are worth watching just to catch e.g. the beautiful French accent when the researcher Van Cauter remarks that Americans regard going without sleep as a "badge of honour". The idea that you might actually be more effective at linking together all those pieces of information while asleep than awake - if true, it's a paradigm shift from the jolted-caffeine-philosophy.
[[ where's the proof my emotional brain is learning anything "socially unacceptable" ]]
"GROK" - from Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land"
"you must research this deeply" - typical English translation from Musashi's "The Book of Five Rings"
What a synchronicity-full time to be chatting about emotional IQ.
With his INTELLECTUAL brain:
Spitzer was a stellar law school grad - great exam scores.
Beyond school, "in real life" he Really Did "Have It All"
But, *Spitzer's* Emotional Brain....
My personal archival Google query on this is (( Eliot Spitzer McGreevey Shakespeare Held )) - it brings up the very nice ABCnews chat with some shrinks "Spitzer Shares Arrogance of Other Powerful Men - In Fall Worthy of Shakespeare, Gang-Busting Governor Entrapped in Sex Scandal". "Dina Matos McGreevey, whose husband left the New Jersey governorship in shame and a marriage in shambles after admitting an affair with a gay aide" - gives the article the victim's perspective from a similar case.
[[ where's the proof MY emotional brain ]] Did you catch the article on Wim Hof the 'Iceman' today on Abcnews, it includes comments by Dr. Kamler - his "Surviving the Extremes" is a great book, I flagged many pages. On the usually automatic nature of emotional response, I found the scenarios in Gonzales' "Deep Survival" to be enlightening, although a few but not the majority of Amazon reviewers have a lower opinion on that one. Obviously there are genes and epi-genes related to emotional control - like "Wim Hof", some have the right stuff, others don't.
I was foolish to phrase my comments with "your", although "one's urges" sounds stilted it is less personal and I am not interested in personal attacks, just trying to play "Wise Person".
From the above "When I" history, you definitely have better emotional control than I do.
Sorry,
PG
Slashdot Mirror
Robert Forward's "Rocheworld" does the best job I've ever seen at thinking up a plausible scenario for travel to a nearby star, plus a fair attempt to weave a human plot into the timescales involved. Also excellent was Forward's "Dragon's Egg", while other books by him are not nearly so good, specifically the sequels to both of these.
sheer marvel and scale
Both Sanford's "Genetic Entropy" and Behe's "The Edge of Evolution" contain back-of-the-envelope order-of-magnitude musings on "scale" related to the random-mutation-fantasy. David Swift's "Evolution Under the Microscope" stands out for repeatedly marveling over the "folding" issue, including the snip-and-rejoin magic needed to copy a helix. I mean I have repeatedly had the experience of spending tens of minutes unraveling a 50-meter stretch of 11-millimeter Edelrid perlon climbing rope, which is specifically designed to be easy-to-handle. The idea of your genome getting tied up into knots, I mean really you DO want to ask how it possibly AVOIDS getting tied up in knots !
Even today William Poundstone's "Prisoner's Dilemma" commands $3.95 used from Amazon Marketplace, while some other great books like "On Call In Hell" by Cdr./MD Jadick go for a penny.
Game Theory gets messy with more than two players. Googling (( TRUEL )) finds even a Wikipedia article on the subtleties of a three-person-duel. Someday, inevitably, at least a dirty bomb, maybe a primitive Hiroshima-class terrorist nuke is going to go off, probably in a harbor-city because primitive nukes won't fit in carry-on baggage. WHODUNNIT, who to retaliate against ?
Consider the difficulties of retaliation against folks in what one might think are open-and-shut cases.
(( Brian Nichols 1.8 million )) reveals the legal bills to retaliate against the guy who took an officer's gun while IN CUSTODY.
(( Yale Raymond Clark Annie Le Defense Budget )) will be an interesting story. What with the card-key-swiping and DNA evidence, one might think a defense impossible. In other words "The cost of prosecuting open-and-shut cases" I think is a good benchmark of a legal system.
Yet the cost of retaliating instinctively are also high. Even the old book "Blackhawk Down" is full of indiscriminate-return-fire incidents, that was long before Pat Tillman.
For sure, we will look back nostalgically at the 2-player-Cold-War days.
$4500-$6000 a month is a LOT of coin for pretty much most of the country not containing coastline.
Truthfully, this is real news to me, I never heard of interns making that kind of money. In this economy - and yes, I'm talking about the US - it just seems... absurd.
The Google query (( CHAKALES WHITFIELD CNN SEP 12 )) gets you to the transcript of a CNN video which at this very moment is about 1/5 from the top of their scrollbar-of-videos. With her 3.0 GPA, along with many others she plans to save tons of money by accepting the full in-state-scholarship AS LONG AS she maintains the 3.0 GPA. Game-theory-wise just a little ways down the road the state would be able to save tons of money just by say reforming to cure the (predicted) grade-inflation-crisis. CNN will probably follow her pretty face into the future, we'll see....
Your remarks indicate you know more than I do on such issues - I wonder if you tend to assign any credibility to J.C. Sanford's musings in his book "Genetic Entropy". Among ID books this one is at least to be praised for its conciseness / lack-of-rambling. Even the most devout blind-watchmaker type must consider the back-of-the-envelope remarks on "How much selection pressure would be needed" to counteract entropy, much less select for the elusive benign mutation. Especially considering the dubious state of selection in Western Civilization. Case-in-point, I've never had the athletic requirements for serious rock-climbing although I enjoy it - it seems that the late "John Bachar" ( nice video on YouTube ) managed to father only one child over his lifetime, surely a quality stud by my metric, anyway.
"Wireless Intellimouse Explorer 2.0" ... just doesn't work as smoothly under Vista or Windows-7
I'm so pleased - with the build 7100 the Intellipoint-Magnifier now seems perfect, perhaps even better than with XP.
Its "$50k a year" because say if a pattern could be proved, that they were deleting say "minority-porn" preferentially, acting as employees, then the corporation's entire assets are at-risk.
Having aging vision, I can no longer live without the proprietary(?) "Magnifier" technology which I get with the itty-5th-button on my Microsoft "Wireless Intellimouse Explorer 2.0". On Windows-XP it is instant GLASSY-SMOOTH magnification even as you continue to move the cursor. Evidently there are problems with the fancy compositing technology because it just doesn't work as smoothly under Vista or Windows-7.
Actually I am not sure this excellent technology is totally proprietary, as long as I get it for free with my mouse I need not research further - but I would of course be interested in any insight on this.
Recently I saw Nova's "The Incredible Journey of the Butterflies". Given your die-hard-determinist mindset, the new-age-y flavor of the two-minute "Watch a Preview" video at the site http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/butterflies/ is guaranteed to cause cognitive dissonance. I would compare stuff like this to facts like photoelectric-emission-before-quantum-theory, it doesn't fit, it causes cognitive dissonance, it demands a better model. I would like to know if science has more to say about the Monarchs than mumbling stuff like "Natural Selection". I don't even know the figure for the typical mass of a monarch brain, or how many neurons it has, BUT buried in the full Nova episode is a key experiment - they captured some southbound Monarchs in Kansas and released them near Washington D.C. Initially they vectored fairly due-south BUT THEN they changed course towards Mexico, presumably being unfamiliar with any landmarks near D.C, after all they were born in Canada and never went to college. Navigationally LATITUDE is a problem, its why chronometers were invented, how did the butterflies know they weren't being released in Berkeley - I want to see that experiment someday.
Not being familiar with this font, I searched around and found the official "Type Specimen" page showing what it looks like in the different HTML sizes etc -- http://www.microsoft.com/typography/web/fonts/comicsns/default.htm
Narcissism-out-of-school was a huge problem for me personally, decades ago. I had good grades from good schools but could have used a better set of "mirror neurons".
In particular I remember always being vocal that code ought to be rewritten because it didn't look pretty. Learning-by-hard-knocks to have some respect for legacy-wisdom is such a painful memory, not least because being-rejected-by-team-mates due to such LACK of respect I now realize was justified.
I wonder what is the earliest age at which kids are capable of learning bargaining concepts ? "The Power of a Positive No" is such a great book, author Ury is still sharp. I speculate that he might round out his career with a children's book targeted at this age. The "BATNA for kids" course might start out with a screening of "Shipbreakers of Bangladesh", my favorite CBS video on global-economics.
"Waldo must figure out what effect broadcast power has on humans. Grimes is seeing a slow weakening of the human physique, and he blames the radiant power industry." -- from the Wikipedia entry on WALDO
I remember seeing some PBS show about the routine performance of the Roman warrior, how far they would march carrying standard kit, and how modern folks were not up to it anymore. It could also of course be those hormone-confusing-chemicals which the genome has never had to deal with before. Sigh.
(( Did you do that before or after taking out the power cable to shake out the loose electrons? )). Actually that's a deep remark. I have read of cases in which primitive peoples do things which ultimately DO have a scientific foundation, but the tribesman's explanation of why he does it is ridiculous. Bottom line if something experimentally seems to work then forget about the theory. In particular, "taking out the power cable" has worked for me several times, say when my ancient Dell no longer "wants to" SUSPEND correctly. Taking out the power cable has definitely fixed that, obviously there is some state-variable in some chip, no idea where. Indeed this is a worrisome thing as Windows is increasingly aggressive in saving-state-to-disk, what if the saved-state becomes corrupt, how do you reset that if the OS becomes so sure it has got it right ?
(( 'In fact, the law is very well designed to say that you have to treat H-1Bs the same as US citizens in all regards.' )) I wonder does anyone else have an obsession with the "equalization meme" - which I define as "A and B are different, but we must make them equal" ? For example, you can Google (( Canada Equalization )) to find that this meme is a cornerstone of their philosophy of governance. At its most ridiculous is sexual equalization, male and female are SO different. Anyway it seems like "there ought to be a book", but I have not found one. I would found a website myself, if I could figure out how to make money off it.
Several times I have restored speed using Chkdsk, it's an easy thing to try anyway.
RTFM-wise I looked for Permian and Sulfur in the slashdot page and did not find them, nor did I find this scenario in the cited article. Anyway Googling (( Global Warming Permian Extinction )) brings up all sorts of stuff. Tacking on the word CCSM brings up an easy-to-skim article with lot s of pretty graphics, including a reference to a computer simulation of this "Final Tipping Point".
At least in Windows XP, I have found that the TraceMessage() function seems to run nicely with the MessageFlags parameter set to zero, meaning that only the USHORT MessageNumber identifies your message, thus minimizing log-file-size. But if you're the only app logging to your ETW session then 64k message-types are enough, why would I need a 16-byte GUID in each message ?! By comparison only TraceEvent() was available in Win2K, significantly more overhead. I also briefly examined EventWrite()( VISTA ) and it seemed way more bloated than even TraceEvent(). According to MSDN TraceMessage() continues to be officially supported in Vista and server-2008, so there is still a way to do fairly lightweight tracing. It's definitely nice to have these kernel-logging-sessions just keep on ticking while your apps crash.
I was unable to find free info, although my search (( CERN LHC FINANCE PIE CHART )) does seem to find an abstract of a pay-for-PDF that would describe the costs as of 1997, sigh. Really, it would be neat to know approximately who is paying for this, while the US budget goes for war like you say, and the McMansion-Bailout which is so embarrassing.
Shooting demo uses real bullets, injures 16 - CNN Actually this story posted to CNN recently, that is, on 29-June-2008. A good keyword query to find the article : (( Lemaire hostage rescue demo real bullets )).
For a few months I have owned a Matias 508. I was so intrigued by the idea of one-hand typing. On the plus side, it's so nice to have an ENTER key in place of "Caps Lock". And I am now totally used to "Space-bar-Tab" as backspace for the left hand. But on the other hand I find it impossible to type with two hands when the keyboard is in one-hand mode. I keep getting special "Matias typos" when I type a space and it interferes with the next character I type( with two hands ). So on the high-tech side a proximity sensor could sense your two hands. More cheaply a move of the mouse by a few pixels could cue it that you want one-hand, while a hit on the right-keys such as "JKLIOP" would cue it that you are using both hands, no need to do the spacebar-modal-thing and risk those typos. This is an obvious idea, but my guess is that the 508 was designed around existing parts. For example an even more obvious thing would be a light to tell you if the 508 is *IN* Matias-mode or not, but my guess is there is some off-the-shelf-chip which only handles the standard caps-scroll-num lights. Anyway with enough interest, if every slash-dotter preorders one, then they can afford to tool up and then I get my one-two-hand-Automode keyboard too.
Sorry, the URL for the CBSnews videos "Science of Sleep" is http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/03/14/60minutes/main3939721.shtml?source=mostpop_story
>> Code that was written while ... half-asleep has 25 minutes of video which are worth watching just to catch e.g. the beautiful French accent when the researcher Van Cauter remarks that Americans regard going without sleep as a "badge of honour". The idea that you might actually be more effective at linking together all those pieces of information while asleep than awake - if true, it's a paradigm shift from the jolted-caffeine-philosophy.
[[ where's the proof my emotional brain is learning anything "socially unacceptable" ]] "GROK" - from Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land" "you must research this deeply" - typical English translation from Musashi's "The Book of Five Rings" What a synchronicity-full time to be chatting about emotional IQ. With his INTELLECTUAL brain: Spitzer was a stellar law school grad - great exam scores. Beyond school, "in real life" he Really Did "Have It All" But, *Spitzer's* Emotional Brain.... My personal archival Google query on this is (( Eliot Spitzer McGreevey Shakespeare Held )) - it brings up the very nice ABCnews chat with some shrinks "Spitzer Shares Arrogance of Other Powerful Men - In Fall Worthy of Shakespeare, Gang-Busting Governor Entrapped in Sex Scandal". "Dina Matos McGreevey, whose husband left the New Jersey governorship in shame and a marriage in shambles after admitting an affair with a gay aide" - gives the article the victim's perspective from a similar case.
[[ where's the proof MY emotional brain ]] Did you catch the article on Wim Hof the 'Iceman' today on Abcnews, it includes comments by Dr. Kamler - his "Surviving the Extremes" is a great book, I flagged many pages. On the usually automatic nature of emotional response, I found the scenarios in Gonzales' "Deep Survival" to be enlightening, although a few but not the majority of Amazon reviewers have a lower opinion on that one. Obviously there are genes and epi-genes related to emotional control - like "Wim Hof", some have the right stuff, others don't.
I was foolish to phrase my comments with "your", although "one's urges" sounds stilted it is less personal and I am not interested in personal attacks, just trying to play "Wise Person". From the above "When I" history, you definitely have better emotional control than I do. Sorry, PG