I wanted a tablet at one point, but then I sat down and asked myself "what would I use it for?" I couldn't think of anything that it would do that my 1Ghz dual-core phone couldn't do on a slightly smaller form factor that fits in my pocket. I have a netbook, which I initially got for travelling, but it turns out it sucked for travelling. Tiny screen, cramped keyboard, not enough hp to edit presentations/big documents/loads of email/etc. Now it lives in the kitchen as a "TV" which seems to be the perfect application for it.
Last week I got an Air to replace the netbook as a travel computer and that little computer blows my mind. It weights nothing, boots in no time, has no moving parts, a full keyboard, a 13" display, and runs a full-blown OS on a dual core 2.6 GHz CPU. I haven't touched my desktop since I got it because that involves the unnecessary step of getting off the couch.
Assuming you can afford an Air and a nice touch-screen phone, I see no reason to have a tablet or a netbook. I think the popularity of tablets is that too few people were able to resist the marketing hype. I mean I still find myself wanting a tablet even though I know that I would use it for a week and then forget about it. Netbooks, being un-patentable by Apple, have zero marketing hype behind them and thus zero consumer interest.
FYI what you describe is very close to the situation in the Netherlands. It is "legal" in the sense that the official policy is not to enforce anti-drug laws for up to five plants for personal use or the purchase of five grams from a licensed coffee shop. In turn, the coffee shops can only have something like 200 grams at any given time. The rub is that import and export are illegal and to discourage export, they made growing large quantities illegal, thus the backend of the coffee shops is technically illegal. This gap in the supply chain was immediately filled by gangs, who organize large grow operations in residential areas and glass houses, so the government had to buy fancy remote controlled helicopters with IR cameras to catch them. And then other countries started complaining about drug tourism, so now they want to introduce membership cards to coffee shops to ensure only Dutch residents can buy it, but as the city council of Amsterdam pointed out, that just re-incentivizes street dealing, which was why the coffee shops were allowed in the first place... Anyway, the point is that half-measures and "turning a blind eye" or simple decriminalization just create new problems. Portugal has a pretty good plan: drugs are legal and instead of arresting people, they offer them rehab. If the US decriminalizes pot, and the issue is thrown to the states, they will face the same sort of problems, which the social conservatives will use as "proof" that legalizing drugs is a bad thing, mm kay? (Which, BTW, is exactly what the right-wing government in the Netherlands is doing.)
Just to be clear, I am 100% pro-legalization and use the Netherlands and Portugal as examples of how totally benign pot really is and how absurd any claims that legalized pot will destroy society are. I mean, what, Americans can't hold their drugs as well as Dutch?
Pot smoke contains most of the same carcinogens as regular tobacco smoke. Likewise, THC does have some CNS depressant characteristics.
Yet pot doesn't cause lung cancer. Pot certainly isn't for everyone, but it is about as dangerous as nutmeg or sage oil with all their scary myristicin and thujone. I mean Coka Cola is still made using coca leaves for crying out loud... But don't worry, they remove all the dangerous alkaloids! Imagine if pot were a legal drug, advertised on weekday-afternoon TV between personal injury attorneys and diet pills. Would it have scarier disclaimers then your average pharmaceutical?
PS I get your point that making overly broad claims about the safety of MJ can make the pro-legalization position more difficult to defend, but honestly "100% safe" is pretty defensible compared to other consumables that are widely considered benign.
Yup, and pointing out the absurdity of cloud services asking you not to upload pirated music. I must have seen 200 headlines about the 'iCould Honeypot' theory this morning.
I wrote a script that writes random strings into the comments section of ID3 tags and removes my name/email address from iTunes downloads. And you are correct, I'm not worried about decade-old MP3s; I'm just trying to point out the absurdity of asking people not to upload pirated music to cloud services.
I'm not paranoid, just annoyed; the point of this Ask Slashdot is really to point out the absurdity of demanding that we not upload pirated music--which can be identified by MD5's, watermarks, etc.--to these new cloud services and then not making tools to scan for these marks publicly available. Too subtle?
Hi, American scientist with American-educated engineer wife, both now living in Europe. I have never encountered a non-SI unit in my professional life, but for some inexplicable reason, much of American engineering is apparently done in imperial units, and to a ridiculous degree. They use units I've never even heard of and will actually express lengths in hundredths and thousands of inches. And when the European branch of her (European) company has to deal with the American branch, the Americans often choose to work in imperial units and then convert into SI for their European counterparts.
Stranger still, at my local multi-hectare home improvement store, pipe fittings tend to come in mm and 1/4", 1/2", and 3/4" sizes. C'est pas logique, comrades!
Well, it's supposed to get up to 21 C today, which will make for a pleasant 5 km bike ride home, and help me get down to 84 kg (I'm only 186 cm long)... If I can stay away from a cold, refreshing half-litre this evening! Driving a car that only gets 13 L/100 km through the city seems like such a waste, too.
Noprivacyville sounds to me like one big focus group. Sure, everyone in the center of the bell curve would be happy there, but all the interesting people out at the 1-5% margins would surely leave, either from persecution or bordom. Some of these interesting people are deviants and you would see the crime rate drop, as is suggested by TFA, but the creative and innovative people would have no incentive to try something new because what everyone likes is already known. And even if an intrepid individual dared to offer something new and exciting, no one would be willing to try it because they would all be waiting for enough people to click "Like This" to know that they too can like it. Moreover, businesses wouldn't bother marketing products to these interesting people. If you want proof of this, just look at the music industry circa 2000 (i.e., before anyone with a laptop could produce an album), or the rapid decline in the quality of indie flicks once the big studios got involved, or whatever nonsense is popular on whichever "social networking site." The old cliche that everything was great before it went mainstream reflects the engine that drives innovation and creativity. That and disaster.
I don't think the accusation is that *all* foreigners are spies. I too am an American scientist in Europe; the collapsing economy took the academic job market with it.
The comment was probably in response to articles like this one. In this case the researcher was offered a chaired faculty position at a Chinese university in exchange for trade secrets from a US company.
I've had a shocking number of Chinese colleagues over the years tell me that they were made similar offers. I'm still waiting for MIT to offer me tenure in exchange for European secrets.
As a scientist and an atheist that grew up in a small town full of let's say, people who were very "enthusiastic" about religion, I've never felt that there is anything to debate between religion and science. Really what it boils down to is open-mindedness. The religious people I grew up around were closed-minded; they had their world view and anything that questioned it was a threat. I know scientists like that too. I think that the reality is that science doesn't care about religion, but every time science sheds light on a mystery that was formerly in the domain of religious philosophy closed-minded religious people get their underwear in a knot and run off to try and ban the teaching of evolution in public schools.
Happily wandering through the land of empiricism, I don't really care what religious people believe and on the rare occasions that the subject comes up, am often surprised to find that many of my colleagues (and friends) are religious. And then it happens. Close-minded religious people start influencing public policy and suddenly that bastard child of theocracy The Bush Administration starts slashing funding for science and telling us what we can and cannot (e.g., stem cells) investigate. At this point scientists have to start coming forward to defend their existence and the debate gets framed as "religion versus science" when really there is no versus--science doesn't care, scientists don't care--but we're forced to have this faux argument about fossil records and the absurdity of banning stem cell research while allowing in vitro fertilization.
Some people, though, take it personally and go public, espousing their own close-minded (in the "I'm right and you're wrong, period." sense) views. Suddenly we have Richard Dawkins wasting his intellectual capacity trying to convince people that his perception is the correct one. I think he makes a pretty good case (and a good chunk of change), but that doesn't matter to the people I grew up with. All it does is fuel their misguided contempt towards "science" and get more creationists appointed to school boards. People continue to confuse "belief" with "faith" and make pointless arguments about how scientists have to "believe" in theories and have "faith" in the scientific method and that science is the pursuit of "truth".
We all have to fill the gaps in our own knowledge and understanding--it gives us purpose--and to me those gaps look like missing puzzle pieces, to others maybe something more mystical, but there are no facts in religion and there are no truths in science. The former is based on the faith that tradition doesn't lie, the latter is just a measure of how well something works. Doctor Strangelove-style scientists that try to argue for some unified, perfect truth are close-minded idiots just like crazy people who literally interpret religious texts. Both are dangerous should be marginalized as the fringe lunatics that they are and the rest of us need to stop taking the bait and engaging them.
Ditto for chemistry. In fact proposals and manuscripts had to be submitted in MS Word format until fairly recently; ACS, Wiley, RSC, AAAS, and Nature all accept manuscripts as MS Word + EndNote.
As for the question at hand--is it really that hard to break a paper up in to sections and recombine them before you submit the manuscript? That's how we've always written reviews, multi-PI proposals, and long papers and it works fine. Is there really ever a case where ten people need to make changes to the same paragraph?
"LaTeX is pretty much the standard in academic writing"? In my ten years as an academic researcher I have never met anyone that uses it and only a handful that have even heard of it. At least the author didn't write "Recently LaTeX has attracted much attention as a tool for writing scientific papers". And the word "novel" isn't in the title.
Compatibility. Next to nothing uses Theora and Vorbis, and Matroska and Ogg are very obscure container formats that require codec packs to be installed AND only work on a handful of platforms. For example, Matroska only works properly on Windows.
Well this sucks. I ripped my entire Simpsons DVD collection, encoded it using x264, and put each episode in a Matroska file using GNU/Linux. And all this time I've just been hallucinating while I was watching them! On my MacBook... My Nokia N800... I'd better run out and get a copy of Windows so I can install a CODEC pack that allows me to watch all these videos in the MKV container--maybe the VLC player? That's a CODEC pack, right? Thank you so much for exposing my apparent Mplayer-induced delusional episodes.
I've been a research scientist for, well, long enough and a computer nerd for a lot longer. I've always wondered how it is that a company can make a state-of-the-art piece of research equipment and then bundle it with a PC running Windows 95 with a serial interface and the worst, least intuitive, and most expensive software I have ever seen.
Now that I'm in charge of picking what we buy I make it a point to find companies that support Linux because it usually means they have a real software development team and that they don't outsource their development. (Jovin Yvon who bought up all their competitors were the worst at this, charging $5,000 to re-install their fluorimeter software, the installation CD for which they refused to sell based on "licensing" issues.). And I'm usually right.
Most recently I purchased a $70,000 high-speed InGaAs camera that came with Windows-only software (that wouldn't run in virtual machine either because it required low-level NIC access). They charged another $2,500 for the "intermediate" software package (which I have no problem with in itself) that had a bug in it. The bug? It wouldn't export movies longer than 10,000 frames, which at 1,000 fps is 10 seconds of video. It took them three months to get me a beta version of a different piece of software that would allow me to export longer movies.
Another company, which I love doing business with so I'll mention them here, EPIX Inc., makes less expensive high speed cameras, but develops their software in Java and releases Linux versions. The software is buggy--as is all instrument software--but I can actually call a real software developer on the phone and tell him/her what the problem is--imagine that!
Sorry for the rant, but this story makes it clear to me why instrument software is so terrible. The first major company that figures out how valuable intuitive, functional, cross-platform, (and for the love of god, not hardware-keyed) software that doesn't store data in some unholy proprietary format that physically ties people to the machine that the instrument is attached to just to process the data is... Ok, well the few companies (I'm looking at you Bruker) that have figured that out have staying power and brand loyalty in university research where as the others are used as pejoratives.
Anyway, I got a flyer from them announcing faster-than-ever 7.1 mbps downloads. Of course, in Boston, Comcast offers 16 mbps, but hey, this was still a nice move from my current verizon dsl at 3 mbps.
Sorry to disappoint, but that is a "burst" speed. I get 1.7 MB/s sustained on my "16 mbps" Boston Comcast service. And that falls to around 700 KB/s during "peak" hours. The first one or two megs is quite fast though which makes fetching my email lightning fast--just what I need!
For a while my downloads would start out rather fast, then immediately drop to 1.00 MB/s (seriously, two decimals...), but they swore up and down that they weren't throttling my connection. Then, mysteriously, right around the time the FCC held public hearings here to discuss Comcast's "bandwidth management policies" my download speeds start to hover between 700 KB/s and 2 MB/s.
I guess I can't really complain though because I was paying just as much for a far slower connection in Los Angeles... Wait, I can complain, and I just did.
I use Linux and I buy software, just not my OS.
I also don't have any more problems with Flash in 64 bit GNU/Linux than any other platform.
Perhaps I'm just in the minority.
...without gaining a fraction of an inch around my waste line...
I don't know whether that typo was intentional or not.
I just know that I like it.
To quote a friend of mine from years ago: "I'm not too bright, but I can lift heavy things"
Re:Technical explanation; didn't rtfa.
on
How Do Geeks Exercise?
·
· Score: 5, Informative
To specifically address the question posed (what do we, the Slashdot readers, do to stay in shape):
I eat vegetarian; low dairy, lots of beans, tempeh, and seasonal fruits/veggies. I bring my lunch to work every day which is cheaper and more nutritious than buying it.
I lift weights three times a week for an hour emphasizing multi-join and body-weight-resistance exercises like pull-ups, push-ups, dips, incline and hanging crunches, etc.
I bike to work whenever the weather permits.
I run 5 km at least once a week (though bad knees sometimes demand that I go for a long walk instead).
All of this combined yields a weekly time commitment of about 3.5 hours of exercise plus 90 minutes of biking to and from work (2 mi each way). I'm 185 lbs, 6'1", and I fill out my nerdy T-shirts in the shoulders, not the belly. I don't have six-pack, but I certainly don't have a gut. All around I feel very health even though the vast, vast, majority of my time is spent sitting on my ass in front of a computer at work.
I don't care whose biology teacher told them what about which calories are burned by how many muscles, but my whopping 3.5 hours a week of exercise entitles me to all the beer I can drink and stuffing my face with burritos to my heart's content without gaining a fraction of an inch around my waste line (which hasn't changed in 15 years). And no, I'm not one of those skinny nerds than can eat Taco Bell every day and still look like a bent coat hanger.
I think that the big trick to staying healthy is sticking with your routine, whatever it is. Don't just go on a diet and start running in response to feeling fat and out of shape. Biking to work is a great way to start and, depending on where you live, has the added benefit of being faster than driving.
I'm sorry, I just can't let this one go... I may just be a lowly organic chemist, but there is nothing static about an enzyme. First, the obvious--conformational changes in response to pH, phosphorylation, ionic strength, etc. that turn on, turn off, or alter the functionality of an enzyme. And the even more obvious--the typical behavior of an enzyme is to alter conformation dynamically to stabilize transition states which lowers the activation barrier between two thermodynamic minima--the definition of a catalyst. The whole point of an enzyme is that the active site can accommodate a starting material, alter its conformation to stabilize the transition state that leads to the desired product, then shift again to release it. Traditional synthetic homogeneous catalysts are a trade off between specificity (e.g., stereoselectivity, substrate specificity) and efficiency (e.g., turnover number, rate). People have made entire careers out of designing Lewis acids that stereospecific, for example. Enzymes get around this trade-off precisely because they can dynamically change their conformations.
I think we're conflating political parties with the federal government. Kucinich and Paul were excluded from debates because everything having to do with primary elections are by definition governed by the rules of the participating parties. If they don't want progressive or libertarian views expressed in their primaries then they have the right to exclude people with those views.
Let's face it "centrist" is just Double Speak for "corporatist". Political parties represent whomever gets them elected and thanks to wonderful perversions of logic like "money is free speech" corporate interests not only support both parties (whichever is in power--look at how swiftly they read the tea leaves and backed the Dems this election cycle), but they also own the "mainstream" (a synonym for corporate) media.
And don't give me that "both parties are the same so I'm not going to vote or I'm going to throw my vote away on a third party that can't win" crap. That is a feckless excuse for lazy Americans that like to complain, but are too busy working their asses off to avoid foreclosure--thanks to the baking industry paying politicians for deregulation--to do anything about it. And all this "it's not fair, I supported Ron Paul" garbage is no different. Paul wants to get rid of social security and practically every other government program that makes old people (the most predictable and reliable demographic) vote which makes him unelectable in a general election. (not to mention labor unions)
If you want Ron Paul to be the nominee of the republican party or you want Obama to tell the Democratic leadership to shove their telecom "campaign contributions" where the sun don't shine then get active in the political parties. If people got active in the Democratic and Republican parties between election cycles instead of complaining loudly every four years then politicians would be accountable to the people instead of the corporate interests that lobby them 24/7. Why? Because while money may be considered free speech, it can't cast a vote!
I see a lot of posts from TAs/grad students about endemic data-fudging beginning in undergraduate courses. While I never got that impression when I was teaching, I certainly can see it coming from the top down so to speak.
The modern tenure/funding structure goes something like this: work your tail off and hope that you can meet the right people, expose yourself to the right ideas, and come up with the right proposals to get a job as an assistant professor at a good research university. You'll be hired based on your perceived ability to procure grant money before your start-up runs out which really has nothing to do with science and everything to do with what is being funding (e.g., in my arena everyone is tacking "photovoltaic" onto their proposals despite knowing very little about the topic) by the DOD, DOE, NSF, and NIH.
Now you have our job and the clock starts ticking--in 5-7 years you'd better have established a "vigorous independent research program" which is political-speak for "consistent funding" and on top of that you need to become respected within a community of scientists. This latter part is very important because you can't fudge your way into this; the community that cares about and reviews your publications will wedge open any cracks they see. Your tenure committee will basically phone these people up and say "hey do you know prof. X? Is he/she any good?".
Here's the rub; the relative value placed on these two factors--money and being well-respected in a community--depends on the institution. Some state legislatures don't like to fund universities because their constituents look at "scientists" and see nuclear weapons, drugs that kill people, etc., and take a very negative view (this is, incidentally, why the NSF puts so much emphasis on education--it is the only way to get congress to continue funding them). Thus too much emphasis is placed on money, the peer-review system breaks down, and scientific ethics start looking more like business ethics.
Now you have a young professor being pressured to publish, publish, publish (or perish) in order to get money, money, money. This professor is, depending on the institution, handed 1-5 first year graduate students and perhaps a postdoc (which is a total grab-bag) with which to make or break his/her career (in the form of tenure).
Imagine that these graduate students took the sort of classes discussed in this thread where the emphasis was (incorrectly) placed on getting the "right" answer instead of getting to an answer the right way. Their boss--the stressed out young professor--is breathing down their neck and getting snippy because they aren't in the lab on Saturday morning.
What do you think is going to happen? Obviously a lot of this comes down the management skills of the professor, the "quality" of the research (i.e., they get lucky), and the character of the graduate students. Probably 99% of the time either the fudging just doesn't matter because the work is low-profile and never gets repeated, or everyone is super-ethical and things are as they should be. The other 1% of the time you read about a relatively young professor that earned tenure through some wild success that turned out to be totally fraudulent. Of course, due to the slow pace of science, it has been years, the data are lost, and the grad students graduated, so often people throw their hands in the air and claim plausible deniability.
And sometimes people are just unethical. In any case, there is a systemic breakdown in the peer-review process that is driven largely by policy decisions that affect the funding models for public research. Too much emphasis is placed on publishing and the link between being successful in your career and being a good scientist is being eroded by narrowly-targeted funding models.
I apologize, I didn't mean to disparage anyone's choices in life. What bothered me about these particular people is that I don't feel like they were given a fair shake. I also have plenty of friends that decided to pursue other courses in life (I am routinely subjected to gross baby photos these days) and are far happier and less stressed out than I am!
I suppose there are examples of the opposite--people who were never given the option to work 8-5, come home, have a beer, and play WoW, but were rather pushed into ivy league schools and stressful jobs for family reasons.
... the intelligent kids in the Boston Area have fewer and fewer excuses with places like MIT offering their challenging courses for FREE - http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm
You clearly didn't grow up in the God-fearing countryside of these United States.
I was in a similar situation (didn't have to study to do well in high school) except we didn't have an AP program. I grew up in a red-neck town not unlike South Park where the school rewarded our losing athletic teams and wouldn't give a dime to our prize-winning band. We (the band) had to raise our own money (for instruments, etc.) and get community members to teach pro bono jazz classes before school (which started at 7AM for some reason). The result was that I simply stopped going to most of my classes. I managed to graduate by abusing the school charter and challenging the classes I had failed for a "P" instead of a real grade... Only after my mother threw a fit and had me retroactively un-suspended because one of the school officials called her a bad parent.
Our truancy officer referred to the collective group of intelligent, bored-out-of-our-minds, drug-using slackers as "eggheads" and regularly berated us for not being more like "his athletes" (he also coached our losing wrestling team). Another of his ilk had the bright idea to pair me (the egghead) up with the dumbest misfit in the class (common practice for some reason). When he was arrested and couldn't complete our group project I was taught "a lesson about shared responsibility" by having to do the whole project myself. He spelled Columbia "Clumbia". He was also expelled after being sent to juvie (jail for kids) and I was again taught "a lesson about shared responsibility" by having to finish the semester with no partner for the group activities.
Most of that being small town antics I still can't believe that the state (or even federal) government never stepped in to set some sort of guidelines to catch the part of the bell curve that were neither over-achievers nor mentally challenged, but were bored out of our skulls (e.g., I finished the entire science curriculum my sophomore year).
So what became of me? I went to my state college and discovered a world where one could be truly academically independent--the smart kids could take challenging classes, the over-achievers could join clubs and be pre-med, and we had all kinds of top-notch sports teams.
I wound up with a PhD, but what of my fellow lazy nerds from high school? Unfortunately most of them lacked family support and wound up getting jobs instead of graduating. They are still working at those jobs and despite being happy and as smart as ever (and having found a great community of disaffected intellectuals) their minds could be advancing civilization instead of playing WoW.
In the end the meat grinder of mediocrity took the average kids and the above average kids and the below average kids and floated them into comfortable lives. It also took the mentally disabled kids and the mentally gifted kids (the top and bottom 1%) and shoe-horned them into minimum wage jobs. We always blamed the travesty of our educational experiences on Reagan's purging of free thought from public schools (by claiming everything had a liberal bias), but I can't even imagine what is happening with No Child Left Behind.
I'm no chemist or engineer, I don't know what potential carbon nanotubes have or don't have but whenever I read an article that seems to promise everything, I figure it is about 95% hyperbole and wishful thinking.
I am a chemist, I work in the "nanotechnology" field, and I have spent time in Engineering/MS labs making OLEDs, PV cells, and other thin film devices. Many of "us" consider nanotubes to be the only viable "nanotechnology" at the moment because of the fact that they can be used by spraying thin layers, making entangled sheets, or other easy-to-commercialize methods of preparation. As for the hybperbole, I think the fact that you're reading an article on MSNBC should give you a clue : ) If you read the Science article they make essentially none of the claims present in the MSNBC article. In fact all they really claim is a new method for preparing NT sheets that is way better than the current methods used for preparing NT 'paper' (it really looks and feels like paper).
Yes, nanotubes are cool. Yes, they conduct electricity. Yes, they emit white light in an OLED configuration. I'm not 100% sure where they're getting the artificial muscle thing, but from what I've read (from peer reviewed journals) don't hold your breath - but I'm no expert there. What generally happens here is the inventors like to hype their discovery up (in this case a method for preparing better NT sheets) as much as possible, but in "science speak". That is, this "may be used for ___" or "has the potential for ___" and then they rattle off stuff NTs can be used for which gets all mixed up in the in article. In this case NT sheets are nothing new and most of what they're claiming has been done before (IBM even got light out of a single NT, far more impressive if you ask me), but they're doing it better with higher quality NT sheets. When it was discovered that poly(aniline) had great mechanical properties as well as interesting "chemical switching" and conductive properties there were people that were sure it was going to be used in planes, clothes, computers... You name it. Too bad it is deliquescent - D'Oh. I can't remember whether this happened before or after the discovery that poly(acetylene) had a high tensile strength and people were claiming space elevators, lightweight electric motors, etc etc. Too bad it catches fire in air in its conductive form - D'Oh D'Oh.
At the end of the day this is another step towards some real nanotechnology applications, but you're reading about it because the editors at Science decided it was worth publishing. Only in the Science article they include all the references to the past work that made it possible:) Oh, and the microwave thing is neat because the NTs will spark like crazy in your microwave oven. So will graphite, which you can try at home if you like... If you don't know NTs are essentially "rolled up" graphite sheets, so they share a lot of common properties.
Here is the abstract:
Individual carbon nanotubes are like minute bits of string, and many trillions of these invisible strings must be assembled to make useful macroscopic articles. We demonstrated such assembly at rates above 7 meters per minute by cooperatively rotating carbon nanotubes in vertically oriented nanotube arrays (forests) and made 5-centimeter-wide, meter-long transparent sheets. These self-supporting nanotube sheets are initially formed as a highly anisotropic electronically conducting aerogel that can be densified into strong sheets that are as thin as 50 nanometers. The measured gravimetric strength of orthogonally oriented sheet arrays exceeds that of sheets of high-strength steel. These nanotube sheets have been used in laboratory demonstrations for the microwave bonding of plastics and for making transparent, highly elastomeric electrodes; planar sources of polarized broad-band radiation; conducting appliqués; and flexible organic light-emitting diodes.
Actually that is the spelling I was taught in reference to a psychological phenomenon, but the psychology department certainly doesn't make any claims to excel at spelling (nor do I) and that was a long-ass time ago... Not that I don't trust you, but I asked the French person sitting next to me and laisses-faire is in fact the correct French spelling, as well as the English dictionary spelling : ) I was also treated to a list of French words that we spell differently, such as connoisseur/connaisseur. Perhaps there is an "English spelling" (read: incorrect) of laissez-faire, probably arising from the phonetic attempted-French pronunciation, that will wind up next to "ain't" in the dictionary some day. In any event, I will use the proper spelling in the future. Though I will never make the claim to be even reasonably good at spelling.
BTW wouldn't I have to be a teenager to have been learning how to read when Hooked on Phonics came into being? Rest assured I learned (and unlearned) my grammar, spelling, and cursive the old fashion way.
Slashdot Mirror
I wanted a tablet at one point, but then I sat down and asked myself "what would I use it for?" I couldn't think of anything that it would do that my 1Ghz dual-core phone couldn't do on a slightly smaller form factor that fits in my pocket. I have a netbook, which I initially got for travelling, but it turns out it sucked for travelling. Tiny screen, cramped keyboard, not enough hp to edit presentations/big documents/loads of email/etc. Now it lives in the kitchen as a "TV" which seems to be the perfect application for it.
Last week I got an Air to replace the netbook as a travel computer and that little computer blows my mind. It weights nothing, boots in no time, has no moving parts, a full keyboard, a 13" display, and runs a full-blown OS on a dual core 2.6 GHz CPU. I haven't touched my desktop since I got it because that involves the unnecessary step of getting off the couch.
Assuming you can afford an Air and a nice touch-screen phone, I see no reason to have a tablet or a netbook. I think the popularity of tablets is that too few people were able to resist the marketing hype. I mean I still find myself wanting a tablet even though I know that I would use it for a week and then forget about it. Netbooks, being un-patentable by Apple, have zero marketing hype behind them and thus zero consumer interest.
FYI what you describe is very close to the situation in the Netherlands. It is "legal" in the sense that the official policy is not to enforce anti-drug laws for up to five plants for personal use or the purchase of five grams from a licensed coffee shop. In turn, the coffee shops can only have something like 200 grams at any given time. The rub is that import and export are illegal and to discourage export, they made growing large quantities illegal, thus the backend of the coffee shops is technically illegal. This gap in the supply chain was immediately filled by gangs, who organize large grow operations in residential areas and glass houses, so the government had to buy fancy remote controlled helicopters with IR cameras to catch them. And then other countries started complaining about drug tourism, so now they want to introduce membership cards to coffee shops to ensure only Dutch residents can buy it, but as the city council of Amsterdam pointed out, that just re-incentivizes street dealing, which was why the coffee shops were allowed in the first place... Anyway, the point is that half-measures and "turning a blind eye" or simple decriminalization just create new problems. Portugal has a pretty good plan: drugs are legal and instead of arresting people, they offer them rehab. If the US decriminalizes pot, and the issue is thrown to the states, they will face the same sort of problems, which the social conservatives will use as "proof" that legalizing drugs is a bad thing, mm kay? (Which, BTW, is exactly what the right-wing government in the Netherlands is doing.)
Just to be clear, I am 100% pro-legalization and use the Netherlands and Portugal as examples of how totally benign pot really is and how absurd any claims that legalized pot will destroy society are. I mean, what, Americans can't hold their drugs as well as Dutch?
Pot smoke contains most of the same carcinogens as regular tobacco smoke. Likewise, THC does have some CNS depressant characteristics.
Yet pot doesn't cause lung cancer.
Pot certainly isn't for everyone, but it is about as dangerous as nutmeg or sage oil with all their scary myristicin and thujone. I mean Coka Cola is still made using coca leaves for crying out loud... But don't worry, they remove all the dangerous alkaloids!
Imagine if pot were a legal drug, advertised on weekday-afternoon TV between personal injury attorneys and diet pills. Would it have scarier disclaimers then your average pharmaceutical?
PS I get your point that making overly broad claims about the safety of MJ can make the pro-legalization position more difficult to defend, but honestly "100% safe" is pretty defensible compared to other consumables that are widely considered benign.
Yup, and pointing out the absurdity of cloud services asking you not to upload pirated music. I must have seen 200 headlines about the 'iCould Honeypot' theory this morning.
I wrote a script that writes random strings into the comments section of ID3 tags and removes my name/email address from iTunes downloads. And you are correct, I'm not worried about decade-old MP3s; I'm just trying to point out the absurdity of asking people not to upload pirated music to cloud services.
I'm not paranoid, just annoyed; the point of this Ask Slashdot is really to point out the absurdity of demanding that we not upload pirated music--which can be identified by MD5's, watermarks, etc.--to these new cloud services and then not making tools to scan for these marks publicly available. Too subtle?
Hi, American scientist with American-educated engineer wife, both now living in Europe. I have never encountered a non-SI unit in my professional life, but for some inexplicable reason, much of American engineering is apparently done in imperial units, and to a ridiculous degree. They use units I've never even heard of and will actually express lengths in hundredths and thousands of inches. And when the European branch of her (European) company has to deal with the American branch, the Americans often choose to work in imperial units and then convert into SI for their European counterparts. Stranger still, at my local multi-hectare home improvement store, pipe fittings tend to come in mm and 1/4", 1/2", and 3/4" sizes. C'est pas logique, comrades! Well, it's supposed to get up to 21 C today, which will make for a pleasant 5 km bike ride home, and help me get down to 84 kg (I'm only 186 cm long)... If I can stay away from a cold, refreshing half-litre this evening! Driving a car that only gets 13 L/100 km through the city seems like such a waste, too.
Noprivacyville sounds to me like one big focus group. Sure, everyone in the center of the bell curve would be happy there, but all the interesting people out at the 1-5% margins would surely leave, either from persecution or bordom. Some of these interesting people are deviants and you would see the crime rate drop, as is suggested by TFA, but the creative and innovative people would have no incentive to try something new because what everyone likes is already known. And even if an intrepid individual dared to offer something new and exciting, no one would be willing to try it because they would all be waiting for enough people to click "Like This" to know that they too can like it. Moreover, businesses wouldn't bother marketing products to these interesting people. If you want proof of this, just look at the music industry circa 2000 (i.e., before anyone with a laptop could produce an album), or the rapid decline in the quality of indie flicks once the big studios got involved, or whatever nonsense is popular on whichever "social networking site." The old cliche that everything was great before it went mainstream reflects the engine that drives innovation and creativity. That and disaster.
I don't think the accusation is that *all* foreigners are spies. I too am an American scientist in Europe; the collapsing economy took the academic job market with it.
The comment was probably in response to articles like this one. In this case the researcher was offered a chaired faculty position at a Chinese university in exchange for trade secrets from a US company.
I've had a shocking number of Chinese colleagues over the years tell me that they were made similar offers. I'm still waiting for MIT to offer me tenure in exchange for European secrets.
As a scientist and an atheist that grew up in a small town full of let's say, people who were very "enthusiastic" about religion, I've never felt that there is anything to debate between religion and science. Really what it boils down to is open-mindedness. The religious people I grew up around were closed-minded; they had their world view and anything that questioned it was a threat. I know scientists like that too. I think that the reality is that science doesn't care about religion, but every time science sheds light on a mystery that was formerly in the domain of religious philosophy closed-minded religious people get their underwear in a knot and run off to try and ban the teaching of evolution in public schools.
Happily wandering through the land of empiricism, I don't really care what religious people believe and on the rare occasions that the subject comes up, am often surprised to find that many of my colleagues (and friends) are religious. And then it happens. Close-minded religious people start influencing public policy and suddenly that bastard child of theocracy The Bush Administration starts slashing funding for science and telling us what we can and cannot (e.g., stem cells) investigate. At this point scientists have to start coming forward to defend their existence and the debate gets framed as "religion versus science" when really there is no versus--science doesn't care, scientists don't care--but we're forced to have this faux argument about fossil records and the absurdity of banning stem cell research while allowing in vitro fertilization.
Some people, though, take it personally and go public, espousing their own close-minded (in the "I'm right and you're wrong, period." sense) views. Suddenly we have Richard Dawkins wasting his intellectual capacity trying to convince people that his perception is the correct one. I think he makes a pretty good case (and a good chunk of change), but that doesn't matter to the people I grew up with. All it does is fuel their misguided contempt towards "science" and get more creationists appointed to school boards. People continue to confuse "belief" with "faith" and make pointless arguments about how scientists have to "believe" in theories and have "faith" in the scientific method and that science is the pursuit of "truth".
We all have to fill the gaps in our own knowledge and understanding--it gives us purpose--and to me those gaps look like missing puzzle pieces, to others maybe something more mystical, but there are no facts in religion and there are no truths in science. The former is based on the faith that tradition doesn't lie, the latter is just a measure of how well something works. Doctor Strangelove-style scientists that try to argue for some unified, perfect truth are close-minded idiots just like crazy people who literally interpret religious texts. Both are dangerous should be marginalized as the fringe lunatics that they are and the rest of us need to stop taking the bait and engaging them.
Ditto for chemistry. In fact proposals and manuscripts had to be submitted in MS Word format until fairly recently; ACS, Wiley, RSC, AAAS, and Nature all accept manuscripts as MS Word + EndNote.
As for the question at hand--is it really that hard to break a paper up in to sections and recombine them before you submit the manuscript? That's how we've always written reviews, multi-PI proposals, and long papers and it works fine. Is there really ever a case where ten people need to make changes to the same paragraph?
"LaTeX is pretty much the standard in academic writing"? In my ten years as an academic researcher I have never met anyone that uses it and only a handful that have even heard of it. At least the author didn't write "Recently LaTeX has attracted much attention as a tool for writing scientific papers". And the word "novel" isn't in the title.
Compatibility. Next to nothing uses Theora and Vorbis, and Matroska and Ogg are very obscure container formats that require codec packs to be installed AND only work on a handful of platforms. For example, Matroska only works properly on Windows.
Well this sucks. I ripped my entire Simpsons DVD collection, encoded it using x264, and put each episode in a Matroska file using GNU/Linux. And all this time I've just been hallucinating while I was watching them! On my MacBook... My Nokia N800... I'd better run out and get a copy of Windows so I can install a CODEC pack that allows me to watch all these videos in the MKV container--maybe the VLC player? That's a CODEC pack, right? Thank you so much for exposing my apparent Mplayer-induced delusional episodes.
I've been a research scientist for, well, long enough and a computer nerd for a lot longer. I've always wondered how it is that a company can make a state-of-the-art piece of research equipment and then bundle it with a PC running Windows 95 with a serial interface and the worst, least intuitive, and most expensive software I have ever seen.
Now that I'm in charge of picking what we buy I make it a point to find companies that support Linux because it usually means they have a real software development team and that they don't outsource their development. (Jovin Yvon who bought up all their competitors were the worst at this, charging $5,000 to re-install their fluorimeter software, the installation CD for which they refused to sell based on "licensing" issues.). And I'm usually right.
Most recently I purchased a $70,000 high-speed InGaAs camera that came with Windows-only software (that wouldn't run in virtual machine either because it required low-level NIC access). They charged another $2,500 for the "intermediate" software package (which I have no problem with in itself) that had a bug in it. The bug? It wouldn't export movies longer than 10,000 frames, which at 1,000 fps is 10 seconds of video. It took them three months to get me a beta version of a different piece of software that would allow me to export longer movies.
Another company, which I love doing business with so I'll mention them here, EPIX Inc., makes less expensive high speed cameras, but develops their software in Java and releases Linux versions. The software is buggy--as is all instrument software--but I can actually call a real software developer on the phone and tell him/her what the problem is--imagine that!
Sorry for the rant, but this story makes it clear to me why instrument software is so terrible. The first major company that figures out how valuable intuitive, functional, cross-platform, (and for the love of god, not hardware-keyed) software that doesn't store data in some unholy proprietary format that physically ties people to the machine that the instrument is attached to just to process the data is... Ok, well the few companies (I'm looking at you Bruker) that have figured that out have staying power and brand loyalty in university research where as the others are used as pejoratives.
Anyway, I got a flyer from them announcing faster-than-ever 7.1 mbps downloads. Of course, in Boston, Comcast offers 16 mbps, but hey, this was still a nice move from my current verizon dsl at 3 mbps.
Sorry to disappoint, but that is a "burst" speed. I get 1.7 MB/s sustained on my "16 mbps" Boston Comcast service. And that falls to around 700 KB/s during "peak" hours. The first one or two megs is quite fast though which makes fetching my email lightning fast--just what I need!
For a while my downloads would start out rather fast, then immediately drop to 1.00 MB/s (seriously, two decimals...), but they swore up and down that they weren't throttling my connection. Then, mysteriously, right around the time the FCC held public hearings here to discuss Comcast's "bandwidth management policies" my download speeds start to hover between 700 KB/s and 2 MB/s.
I guess I can't really complain though because I was paying just as much for a far slower connection in Los Angeles... Wait, I can complain, and I just did.
Linux users dont buy software.
I use Linux and I buy software, just not my OS.
I also don't have any more problems with Flash in 64 bit GNU/Linux than any other platform.
Perhaps I'm just in the minority.
...without gaining a fraction of an inch around my waste line...
I don't know whether that typo was intentional or not.
I just know that I like it.
To quote a friend of mine from years ago: "I'm not too bright, but I can lift heavy things"
To specifically address the question posed (what do we, the Slashdot readers, do to stay in shape):
I eat vegetarian; low dairy, lots of beans, tempeh, and seasonal fruits/veggies. I bring my lunch to work every day which is cheaper and more nutritious than buying it.
I lift weights three times a week for an hour emphasizing multi-join and body-weight-resistance exercises like pull-ups, push-ups, dips, incline and hanging crunches, etc.
I bike to work whenever the weather permits.
I run 5 km at least once a week (though bad knees sometimes demand that I go for a long walk instead).
All of this combined yields a weekly time commitment of about 3.5 hours of exercise plus 90 minutes of biking to and from work (2 mi each way). I'm 185 lbs, 6'1", and I fill out my nerdy T-shirts in the shoulders, not the belly. I don't have six-pack, but I certainly don't have a gut. All around I feel very health even though the vast, vast, majority of my time is spent sitting on my ass in front of a computer at work.
I don't care whose biology teacher told them what about which calories are burned by how many muscles, but my whopping 3.5 hours a week of exercise entitles me to all the beer I can drink and stuffing my face with burritos to my heart's content without gaining a fraction of an inch around my waste line (which hasn't changed in 15 years). And no, I'm not one of those skinny nerds than can eat Taco Bell every day and still look like a bent coat hanger.
I think that the big trick to staying healthy is sticking with your routine, whatever it is. Don't just go on a diet and start running in response to feeling fat and out of shape. Biking to work is a great way to start and, depending on where you live, has the added benefit of being faster than driving.
I'm sorry, I just can't let this one go... I may just be a lowly organic chemist, but there is nothing static about an enzyme. First, the obvious--conformational changes in response to pH, phosphorylation, ionic strength, etc. that turn on, turn off, or alter the functionality of an enzyme. And the even more obvious--the typical behavior of an enzyme is to alter conformation dynamically to stabilize transition states which lowers the activation barrier between two thermodynamic minima--the definition of a catalyst. The whole point of an enzyme is that the active site can accommodate a starting material, alter its conformation to stabilize the transition state that leads to the desired product, then shift again to release it. Traditional synthetic homogeneous catalysts are a trade off between specificity (e.g., stereoselectivity, substrate specificity) and efficiency (e.g., turnover number, rate). People have made entire careers out of designing Lewis acids that stereospecific, for example. Enzymes get around this trade-off precisely because they can dynamically change their conformations.
I think we're conflating political parties with the federal government. Kucinich and Paul were excluded from debates because everything having to do with primary elections are by definition governed by the rules of the participating parties. If they don't want progressive or libertarian views expressed in their primaries then they have the right to exclude people with those views.
Let's face it "centrist" is just Double Speak for "corporatist". Political parties represent whomever gets them elected and thanks to wonderful perversions of logic like "money is free speech" corporate interests not only support both parties (whichever is in power--look at how swiftly they read the tea leaves and backed the Dems this election cycle), but they also own the "mainstream" (a synonym for corporate) media.
And don't give me that "both parties are the same so I'm not going to vote or I'm going to throw my vote away on a third party that can't win" crap. That is a feckless excuse for lazy Americans that like to complain, but are too busy working their asses off to avoid foreclosure--thanks to the baking industry paying politicians for deregulation--to do anything about it. And all this "it's not fair, I supported Ron Paul" garbage is no different. Paul wants to get rid of social security and practically every other government program that makes old people (the most predictable and reliable demographic) vote which makes him unelectable in a general election. (not to mention labor unions)
If you want Ron Paul to be the nominee of the republican party or you want Obama to tell the Democratic leadership to shove their telecom "campaign contributions" where the sun don't shine then get active in the political parties. If people got active in the Democratic and Republican parties between election cycles instead of complaining loudly every four years then politicians would be accountable to the people instead of the corporate interests that lobby them 24/7. Why? Because while money may be considered free speech, it can't cast a vote!
I see a lot of posts from TAs/grad students about endemic data-fudging beginning in undergraduate courses. While I never got that impression when I was teaching, I certainly can see it coming from the top down so to speak.
The modern tenure/funding structure goes something like this: work your tail off and hope that you can meet the right people, expose yourself to the right ideas, and come up with the right proposals to get a job as an assistant professor at a good research university. You'll be hired based on your perceived ability to procure grant money before your start-up runs out which really has nothing to do with science and everything to do with what is being funding (e.g., in my arena everyone is tacking "photovoltaic" onto their proposals despite knowing very little about the topic) by the DOD, DOE, NSF, and NIH.
Now you have our job and the clock starts ticking--in 5-7 years you'd better have established a "vigorous independent research program" which is political-speak for "consistent funding" and on top of that you need to become respected within a community of scientists. This latter part is very important because you can't fudge your way into this; the community that cares about and reviews your publications will wedge open any cracks they see. Your tenure committee will basically phone these people up and say "hey do you know prof. X? Is he/she any good?".
Here's the rub; the relative value placed on these two factors--money and being well-respected in a community--depends on the institution. Some state legislatures don't like to fund universities because their constituents look at "scientists" and see nuclear weapons, drugs that kill people, etc., and take a very negative view (this is, incidentally, why the NSF puts so much emphasis on education--it is the only way to get congress to continue funding them). Thus too much emphasis is placed on money, the peer-review system breaks down, and scientific ethics start looking more like business ethics.
Now you have a young professor being pressured to publish, publish, publish (or perish) in order to get money, money, money. This professor is, depending on the institution, handed 1-5 first year graduate students and perhaps a postdoc (which is a total grab-bag) with which to make or break his/her career (in the form of tenure).
Imagine that these graduate students took the sort of classes discussed in this thread where the emphasis was (incorrectly) placed on getting the "right" answer instead of getting to an answer the right way. Their boss--the stressed out young professor--is breathing down their neck and getting snippy because they aren't in the lab on Saturday morning.
What do you think is going to happen? Obviously a lot of this comes down the management skills of the professor, the "quality" of the research (i.e., they get lucky), and the character of the graduate students. Probably 99% of the time either the fudging just doesn't matter because the work is low-profile and never gets repeated, or everyone is super-ethical and things are as they should be. The other 1% of the time you read about a relatively young professor that earned tenure through some wild success that turned out to be totally fraudulent. Of course, due to the slow pace of science, it has been years, the data are lost, and the grad students graduated, so often people throw their hands in the air and claim plausible deniability.
And sometimes people are just unethical. In any case, there is a systemic breakdown in the peer-review process that is driven largely by policy decisions that affect the funding models for public research. Too much emphasis is placed on publishing and the link between being successful in your career and being a good scientist is being eroded by narrowly-targeted funding models.
I apologize, I didn't mean to disparage anyone's choices in life. What bothered me about these particular people is that I don't feel like they were given a fair shake. I also have plenty of friends that decided to pursue other courses in life (I am routinely subjected to gross baby photos these days) and are far happier and less stressed out than I am!
I suppose there are examples of the opposite--people who were never given the option to work 8-5, come home, have a beer, and play WoW, but were rather pushed into ivy league schools and stressful jobs for family reasons.
... the intelligent kids in the Boston Area have fewer and fewer excuses with places like MIT offering their challenging courses for FREE - http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htmYou clearly didn't grow up in the God-fearing countryside of these United States.
I was in a similar situation (didn't have to study to do well in high school) except we didn't have an AP program. I grew up in a red-neck town not unlike South Park where the school rewarded our losing athletic teams and wouldn't give a dime to our prize-winning band. We (the band) had to raise our own money (for instruments, etc.) and get community members to teach pro bono jazz classes before school (which started at 7AM for some reason). The result was that I simply stopped going to most of my classes. I managed to graduate by abusing the school charter and challenging the classes I had failed for a "P" instead of a real grade... Only after my mother threw a fit and had me retroactively un-suspended because one of the school officials called her a bad parent.
Our truancy officer referred to the collective group of intelligent, bored-out-of-our-minds, drug-using slackers as "eggheads" and regularly berated us for not being more like "his athletes" (he also coached our losing wrestling team). Another of his ilk had the bright idea to pair me (the egghead) up with the dumbest misfit in the class (common practice for some reason). When he was arrested and couldn't complete our group project I was taught "a lesson about shared responsibility" by having to do the whole project myself. He spelled Columbia "Clumbia". He was also expelled after being sent to juvie (jail for kids) and I was again taught "a lesson about shared responsibility" by having to finish the semester with no partner for the group activities.
Most of that being small town antics I still can't believe that the state (or even federal) government never stepped in to set some sort of guidelines to catch the part of the bell curve that were neither over-achievers nor mentally challenged, but were bored out of our skulls (e.g., I finished the entire science curriculum my sophomore year).
So what became of me? I went to my state college and discovered a world where one could be truly academically independent--the smart kids could take challenging classes, the over-achievers could join clubs and be pre-med, and we had all kinds of top-notch sports teams.
I wound up with a PhD, but what of my fellow lazy nerds from high school? Unfortunately most of them lacked family support and wound up getting jobs instead of graduating. They are still working at those jobs and despite being happy and as smart as ever (and having found a great community of disaffected intellectuals) their minds could be advancing civilization instead of playing WoW.
In the end the meat grinder of mediocrity took the average kids and the above average kids and the below average kids and floated them into comfortable lives. It also took the mentally disabled kids and the mentally gifted kids (the top and bottom 1%) and shoe-horned them into minimum wage jobs. We always blamed the travesty of our educational experiences on Reagan's purging of free thought from public schools (by claiming everything had a liberal bias), but I can't even imagine what is happening with No Child Left Behind.
I am a chemist, I work in the "nanotechnology" field, and I have spent time in Engineering/MS labs making OLEDs, PV cells, and other thin film devices. Many of "us" consider nanotubes to be the only viable "nanotechnology" at the moment because of the fact that they can be used by spraying thin layers, making entangled sheets, or other easy-to-commercialize methods of preparation. As for the hybperbole, I think the fact that you're reading an article on MSNBC should give you a clue : ) If you read the Science article they make essentially none of the claims present in the MSNBC article. In fact all they really claim is a new method for preparing NT sheets that is way better than the current methods used for preparing NT 'paper' (it really looks and feels like paper).
Yes, nanotubes are cool. Yes, they conduct electricity. Yes, they emit white light in an OLED configuration. I'm not 100% sure where they're getting the artificial muscle thing, but from what I've read (from peer reviewed journals) don't hold your breath - but I'm no expert there. What generally happens here is the inventors like to hype their discovery up (in this case a method for preparing better NT sheets) as much as possible, but in "science speak". That is, this "may be used for ___" or "has the potential for ___" and then they rattle off stuff NTs can be used for which gets all mixed up in the in article. In this case NT sheets are nothing new and most of what they're claiming has been done before (IBM even got light out of a single NT, far more impressive if you ask me), but they're doing it better with higher quality NT sheets. When it was discovered that poly(aniline) had great mechanical properties as well as interesting "chemical switching" and conductive properties there were people that were sure it was going to be used in planes, clothes, computers... You name it. Too bad it is deliquescent - D'Oh. I can't remember whether this happened before or after the discovery that poly(acetylene) had a high tensile strength and people were claiming space elevators, lightweight electric motors, etc etc. Too bad it catches fire in air in its conductive form - D'Oh D'Oh.
At the end of the day this is another step towards some real nanotechnology applications, but you're reading about it because the editors at Science decided it was worth publishing. Only in the Science article they include all the references to the past work that made it possible :) Oh, and the microwave thing is neat because the NTs will spark like crazy in your microwave oven. So will graphite, which you can try at home if you like... If you don't know NTs are essentially "rolled up" graphite sheets, so they share a lot of common properties.
Here is the abstract:
So what they did was create sheets
Actually that is the spelling I was taught in reference to a psychological phenomenon, but the psychology department certainly doesn't make any claims to excel at spelling (nor do I) and that was a long-ass time ago... Not that I don't trust you, but I asked the French person sitting next to me and laisses-faire is in fact the correct French spelling, as well as the English dictionary spelling : ) I was also treated to a list of French words that we spell differently, such as connoisseur/connaisseur. Perhaps there is an "English spelling" (read: incorrect) of laissez-faire, probably arising from the phonetic attempted-French pronunciation, that will wind up next to "ain't" in the dictionary some day. In any event, I will use the proper spelling in the future. Though I will never make the claim to be even reasonably good at spelling.
BTW wouldn't I have to be a teenager to have been learning how to read when Hooked on Phonics came into being? Rest assured I learned (and unlearned) my grammar, spelling, and cursive the old fashion way.