You're right! If he hits her that way, she should hit back!
Girl should get revenge by exposing the guy for the asshole he is, so that he loses his job, status and maybe an existing girlfriend! That would be fitting. What future girlfriend would want to go out with an asshole who'd done that to an ex, no matter what justification he was able to conjure?
I used to live under the flight path in Windsor - it was certainly pretty impressive. If you were sleeping in, it would put an end to that.
And I remember sitting in my car in stationary traffic on the M25 just near Heathrow early one evening. It was dark, and suddenly my car started to shudder, as though it was thundering. And then I saw Concorde flying over, just taking off for its evening trip to NY. It had its burners on, and it looked like the Millenium Falcon, with bright white light pouring from its engines. It honestly looked like it was powered by light!
Then the burners went off, the sound collapsed and it just disappeared into the evening. Amazing.
People talk at a volume appropriate to their own surroundings, and they forget that the other person on the call isn't in the same environment. You usually have to talk loudly in noisy places - turns out it isn't necessary on the phone, but a lot of people don't realise that.
Also, we are trained to treat "half-conversations" as high priority interrupts. If you hear "Hello!"... followed by a silence... it calls your "maybe they are talking to me?" handler. And even after you've suppressed the interrupt, it still wakes you up. Really annoying, but kind of interesting once you realize what's going on.
Definitely. We used to call it "PPL" - Property-file Programming Language - the tendency for simple name-value property files to acquire strange little bespoke syntaxes and nesting structures. The question isn't whether you will do it - it's how soon you face it and how elegantly you'll achieve it.
You really have to put that AC idea away. The poster was talking about the UK. In the UK, air conditioning is something we have in server rooms, meeting rooms and cars. I don't know anyone here who has AC in their house. In fact, you have to call it "air-conditioning", because if you talk about the AC, people here start thinking about the mains supply.
We have warm-ish evenings in summer, but mostly by the time the lights go on, the temperature has dropped enough for you to wish there was a little heating on. I never bother to turn the heating on specially, but that doesn't mean that a little extra light-bulb heat isn't wanted. There is a summer every 25 years when it's warm enough for this not to apply!
In cold places, light-bulbs are about as good as any other form of electric heating. Even the thing about convection optimization is fake - all room heaters heat the ceiling first and fill downwards, and light-bulbs just ensure that the ceiling fills quicker.
In one way, light-bulbs are better than other heaters - they are generally likely to be on only in rooms that are in use (assuming you are careful about leaving lights on). Most central heating systems don't do that.
Yep, a UK fluid ounce of water is meant to weigh an ounce. But - and this is the crazy thing - it doesn't! It's about about 1/4% too small: not much, I grant you, but it's a few pounds out of a ton.
The US one is about 5% small, which is verging on the coincidental.
I don't know either. But I'm British, and anti-French sentiment is actually mandatory! It's ok - it's mutual... (and I'm rebelling against my training, too - notice I didn't deduct the point!
Did you ever see this? 112 Gripes about the French - published shortly after the war to try to deal with American soldiers' incessant complaints about the French when stationed in France, trying to explain the cultural differences. Interesting.
Obviously, you have missed the most vital aspect of Imperial units, which is that people THINK in Imperial measurements. How can any other system overcome such a hurdle?
I don't think that the linking you describe is really much of a guide to the relative value of a weights and measures system. I think we can make some reasonable demands of a system and judge it according to them. The key values for me might be:
broad acceptance, with the existence of strong standards backed by standards bodies;
usable and convenient unit divisions (eg inches, mm, km,...) across a wide spread of applications;
simple arithmetic when scaling across those divisions;
inter-unit correlations (eg one litre of water == 1kg == 1000cc); and
meaning (a minor criterion, but I prefer units to be based on something non-arbitrary).
Scoring out of 10: Imperial gets a point for (1), but only because it hitches on the back of metric. It gets 2 points for (2), because all the divisions are pretty practical across a narrow range. Then it gets 0 for (3), as anyone who tries to multiply 2'10" by 5 will tell you. It gets 0 for (4), because, like, how much does a cubic foot of water weight? And anyway, most of the units are missing - I mean, what's the imperial unit of voltage? luminosity? And then it gets one point for (5), because most of the measures have a slightly real basis in history, and I'm sentimental. And then there's a general 1 point deduction, because having US gallons that are different from Imperial gallons is just madness. And nautical miles. And so on. 2/10. What a crock.
Now, I'd give metric a 9/10. It drops a point for being a bit arbitrary in places (criterion 5), (although water does feature fairly prominently and consistently). This is the basis of your comment above, I think, about the arbitrariness? Perhaps we should be harsher, and drop another point for it being French - a serious political barrier to acceptance!
Anyway, this all suggests to me that metric really is superior - it's not just a matter of life-style. I take your point about getting good at handling units and understanding their limitations, but I think weights and measures is too important for us to have such a dog of a system as imperial cluttering up our lives. As you say, the people who need the exercise will get it anyway as soon as they start playing in the extremities.
Perhaps we should rate God's Units against my criteria above. Actually, they do better than I thought they would: they have the strongest standards body in the universe, the inter-unit correlations are out of this world, and you couldn't get more meaning in your units if you tried! 6/10...
You can't (easily) induce a differential voltage across the two. But there's nothing to stop a massive induced common-mode voltage. The two wires could be leaping around together at a thousand volts AC, causing all sorts of problems at both ends.
Please refer back to the original post. I quote: "Phase 1 - Invent a sport where a piece of equipment that, at times, travels towards your face at 160 km/hour and weighs only 170 grams."
This is plainly a reference to the puck. Other types of facial injury will be discussed in a separate thread. Do keep up!
Of course, if you'd asked why everyone has assumed that we're talking about hockey, *then* you'd have a point. I thought they were talking about tiddleywinks.
Not sure blackmail applies here. It would be blackmail if the guy had *threatened* exposure, but there was no threat here - the guy just published anyway.
Yup, I had exactly this problem - I was desperate to know about electronics, and although the kits made me familiar with soldering and components, I just couldn't figure out where to start understanding them. I could interpret the diagrams, but I couldn't infer the Purpose. I had a number of books, but they were either archaic (all about valves) or too low-level (semiconductor theory).
And when I was a student, someone recommended Horowitz and Hill "The Art of Electronics" - and it was like a light going on! Fantastic book - I read it cover to cover, and ensured that I understood every single example. And I went back and had a look at my "150 Electronics Projects" project guide that had so puzzled me when I was 13, and it was totally clear what the problem was....
The circuit diagrams! They were CRAP! They gave no indication of signal flow, or purpose - they were just a pile of symbols with lines between them. I took a couple of the ones that I was more familiar with, and redrew them properly, and it was instantly clear what the functional modules were: "this is a diff amp, this is a high-pass filter,..." etc.
Each project was also accompanied with an "explanation", which was the analog electronics equivalent of the
x++;// add 1 to x
style of commenting. It told you what each component did, without giving any kind of modular breakdown. Crazy.
Of course, if it was now, I'd know that there had to be something better. The problem is that when you're a kid, you just accept that things are awkward - you tend to give up rather than say "let's find a better way!" Kits like that can be used as the basis of an educational experience, but there has to be someone watching who can say "hang on, this bit's not clear, let's do it like this instead!"
Ok... but my interpretation here is that although there was an explosion - the fireball you mentioned - it wasn't anything to do with causing the damage or the deaths. It happened afterwards.
However, in terms of Myth#2 in the article, you are correct - they say "The shuttle did not explode in the common definition of that word.", when clearly there was a huge fireball. Now, I suspect that they have poorly expressed the myth that they are actually trying to describe, which is that people think "the disaster was caused by a huge explosion".
Perhaps there's room for discussion over which bits of the shuttle exploded (fuel tanks, not orbiter), whether a break-up is really also a kind of explosion (I don't think so - I wouldn't call something smashing to pieces an explosion), and what a "common definition" actually is... But the core point (IMHO) is to do with causes: the explosion seen on TV happened after the break-up, and did not cause - or even significantly affect (according to the grandparent post) - the disaster.
I propose they rephrase Myth#2. And then send us all $10 to compensate us for the time wasted debating the subject caused by their sloppy writing.:-)
> Unfortunately, as the review made clear, the Dell doesn't come with any install discs. So have fun trying to "reinstall". This seems to be a general trend -- my sister recently bought a Gateway, and it too came without the OS installation discs. You were supposed to create them yourself with a special one-time-use-only routine that copied the OS to CD-RW discs. But the routine crapped out, and produced bad install discs. Gateway's support recommendatation was for her to send the machine back to get her drives reinitialized! Building your own box is making a lot more sense now.
Hi,
I read this article yesterday (it's Tuesday), and it reawakened some anger that I felt when I bought a Dell in September, and found a little note saying You Don't Need Install Disks With This Machine Because It Has A Recovery Partition.
So, I tried running the "make an install disk" tool, which crapped out and couldn't write to the DVD.
I phoned Dell Support, and asked where my WinXP install disk was. They initially gave me the "your system won't need one of them" line, but I just said (repeatedly) "I've paid for it. Where is it?", which seemed to wilt them. It worked nicely, I feel, because there's no technical come-back to that - I didn't want a long discussion about the security of backup partitions! I ensured that I had my itemized receipt from Dell on screen, so that I could see the line item nice and clearly, which bolstered my resolve.
Anyway. A courier turned up this morning, with 5 packages from Dell, including the "Custom Dell" WinXP disk, which isn't exactly a straight Windows install disk, but it was what I was expecting. The other packages were driver disks, apps, etc - the whole install set.
So that was good - nice fast response, and not really any arguments. YMMV, but I was happy. Maybe it's different if you have MCE.
Oh, and BTW, one of the pre-installed apps DID break the machine. There was a Browser Redirector to, er, some 3rd party partner Dell partner site, but its DLL kept causing the Explorer (AND the ensuing DrWatson) to crash. I removed the offending DLL, its been fine since - just glad it wasn't my old Mum's machine!
> Really? Just out of curiosity, what is the range of RFID in these cards?
That is one of those unanswerable questions. You can only determine the maximum range of a radio system if the capabilities of both the endpoints are known (plus the characteristics of the channel, of course).
An RFID is powered by the emissions of the reader, and transmits a small signal back.
So with a sufficiently powerful and/or directional transmitter, I could activate your card from any distance. With a sufficiently directional and sensitive receiver, I can pick up the response. If the device sends the same response each time, I can repeat this over and over, and incrementally cancel out the noise.
The readers in Japan sound as though they are pretty short-range, but that might be so that they don't activate many cards at once, which means that they can keep their signal processing system simple and cheap.
But it isn't when it's an impact shock. The thing about an impact is that it's an almost instantaneous deceleration.
Imagine - the drive is moving at just 1 m/s (as if dropped from 5cm). It decelerates to zero in, what, a millisecond or so on a solid surface? Do the sums, and out drops 1000ms-2, or 100G.
And I have a suspicion that my 1ms collision time is generous - after all, that suggests that your concrete floor and the drive's chassis bend by a signficant proportion of a millimetre on impact. OTOH, the drive will have internal shock mounts to spread the impulse out a bit.
Either way, this is just 5cm (2 inches) from a hard surface. If it falls the 20cm from the case of your PC when it's on its side, then you're up to 200G: 3 times the rated shock. Scary!
Here's a question to any mechanics folks out there. What is a typical impact duration for two such uncompressible objects? I've just been searching for some real data, because I wanted to not have to guesstimate, and the 1ms was based on a number of pages, including this bat and ball estimate, but the ball is obviously highly compressible. Are there any better references?
Slashdot Mirror
Girl should get revenge by exposing the guy for the asshole he is, so that he loses his job, status and maybe an existing girlfriend! That would be fitting. What future girlfriend would want to go out with an asshole who'd done that to an ex, no matter what justification he was able to conjure?
And I remember sitting in my car in stationary traffic on the M25 just near Heathrow early one evening. It was dark, and suddenly my car started to shudder, as though it was thundering. And then I saw Concorde flying over, just taking off for its evening trip to NY. It had its burners on, and it looked like the Millenium Falcon, with bright white light pouring from its engines. It honestly looked like it was powered by light!
Then the burners went off, the sound collapsed and it just disappeared into the evening. Amazing.
Gravitational_wave - General Relativity
Wikipedia does not constitute proof, but it's probably right in this case.
So the lesson is "if you suck up to local gangs and pay protection money, then you'll live in a better society"? Cool!
People talk at a volume appropriate to their own surroundings, and they forget that the other person on the call isn't in the same environment. You usually have to talk loudly in noisy places - turns out it isn't necessary on the phone, but a lot of people don't realise that.
Also, we are trained to treat "half-conversations" as high priority interrupts. If you hear "Hello!" ... followed by a silence ... it calls your "maybe they are talking to me?" handler. And even after you've suppressed the interrupt, it still wakes you up. Really annoying, but kind of interesting once you realize what's going on.
Definitely. We used to call it "PPL" - Property-file Programming Language - the tendency for simple name-value property files to acquire strange little bespoke syntaxes and nesting structures. The question isn't whether you will do it - it's how soon you face it and how elegantly you'll achieve it.
You kidding? Apparently I've even got windows on my computer!
You really have to put that AC idea away. The poster was talking about the UK. In the UK, air conditioning is something we have in server rooms, meeting rooms and cars. I don't know anyone here who has AC in their house. In fact, you have to call it "air-conditioning", because if you talk about the AC, people here start thinking about the mains supply.
We have warm-ish evenings in summer, but mostly by the time the lights go on, the temperature has dropped enough for you to wish there was a little heating on. I never bother to turn the heating on specially, but that doesn't mean that a little extra light-bulb heat isn't wanted. There is a summer every 25 years when it's warm enough for this not to apply!
In cold places, light-bulbs are about as good as any other form of electric heating. Even the thing about convection optimization is fake - all room heaters heat the ceiling first and fill downwards, and light-bulbs just ensure that the ceiling fills quicker.
In one way, light-bulbs are better than other heaters - they are generally likely to be on only in rooms that are in use (assuming you are careful about leaving lights on). Most central heating systems don't do that.
Cheers!
The US one is about 5% small, which is verging on the coincidental.
Did you ever see this? 112 Gripes about the French - published shortly after the war to try to deal with American soldiers' incessant complaints about the French when stationed in France, trying to explain the cultural differences. Interesting.
Obviously, you have missed the most vital aspect of Imperial units, which is that people THINK in Imperial measurements. How can any other system overcome such a hurdle?
- broad acceptance, with the existence of strong standards backed by standards bodies;
- usable and convenient unit divisions (eg inches, mm, km,
...) across a wide spread of applications; - simple arithmetic when scaling across those divisions;
- inter-unit correlations (eg one litre of water == 1kg == 1000cc); and
- meaning (a minor criterion, but I prefer units to be based on something non-arbitrary).
Scoring out of 10: Imperial gets a point for (1), but only because it hitches on the back of metric. It gets 2 points for (2), because all the divisions are pretty practical across a narrow range. Then it gets 0 for (3), as anyone who tries to multiply 2'10" by 5 will tell you. It gets 0 for (4), because, like, how much does a cubic foot of water weight? And anyway, most of the units are missing - I mean, what's the imperial unit of voltage? luminosity? And then it gets one point for (5), because most of the measures have a slightly real basis in history, and I'm sentimental. And then there's a general 1 point deduction, because having US gallons that are different from Imperial gallons is just madness. And nautical miles. And so on. 2/10. What a crock.Now, I'd give metric a 9/10. It drops a point for being a bit arbitrary in places (criterion 5), (although water does feature fairly prominently and consistently). This is the basis of your comment above, I think, about the arbitrariness? Perhaps we should be harsher, and drop another point for it being French - a serious political barrier to acceptance!
Anyway, this all suggests to me that metric really is superior - it's not just a matter of life-style. I take your point about getting good at handling units and understanding their limitations, but I think weights and measures is too important for us to have such a dog of a system as imperial cluttering up our lives. As you say, the people who need the exercise will get it anyway as soon as they start playing in the extremities.
Perhaps we should rate God's Units against my criteria above. Actually, they do better than I thought they would: they have the strongest standards body in the universe, the inter-unit correlations are out of this world, and you couldn't get more meaning in your units if you tried! 6/10 ...
You can't (easily) induce a differential voltage across the two. But there's nothing to stop a massive induced common-mode voltage. The two wires could be leaping around together at a thousand volts AC, causing all sorts of problems at both ends.
Uh, yes, there is.
However, it means that his energy usage is accelerating. After a year, at 25W/h, he'd be up to 200kW. Scary.
This is plainly a reference to the puck. Other types of facial injury will be discussed in a separate thread. Do keep up!
Of course, if you'd asked why everyone has assumed that we're talking about hockey, *then* you'd have a point. I thought they were talking about tiddleywinks.
Not sure blackmail applies here. It would be blackmail if the guy had *threatened* exposure, but there was no threat here - the guy just published anyway.
Thanks for saying that. It saved me writing a long explanation about why the GP's post was all wrong :-)
And when I was a student, someone recommended Horowitz and Hill "The Art of Electronics" - and it was like a light going on! Fantastic book - I read it cover to cover, and ensured that I understood every single example. And I went back and had a look at my "150 Electronics Projects" project guide that had so puzzled me when I was 13, and it was totally clear what the problem was....
The circuit diagrams! They were CRAP! They gave no indication of signal flow, or purpose - they were just a pile of symbols with lines between them. I took a couple of the ones that I was more familiar with, and redrew them properly, and it was instantly clear what the functional modules were: "this is a diff amp, this is a high-pass filter, ..." etc.
Each project was also accompanied with an "explanation", which was the analog electronics equivalent of the
style of commenting. It told you what each component did, without giving any kind of modular breakdown. Crazy.Of course, if it was now, I'd know that there had to be something better. The problem is that when you're a kid, you just accept that things are awkward - you tend to give up rather than say "let's find a better way!" Kits like that can be used as the basis of an educational experience, but there has to be someone watching who can say "hang on, this bit's not clear, let's do it like this instead!"
However, in terms of Myth#2 in the article, you are correct - they say "The shuttle did not explode in the common definition of that word.", when clearly there was a huge fireball. Now, I suspect that they have poorly expressed the myth that they are actually trying to describe, which is that people think "the disaster was caused by a huge explosion".
Perhaps there's room for discussion over which bits of the shuttle exploded (fuel tanks, not orbiter), whether a break-up is really also a kind of explosion (I don't think so - I wouldn't call something smashing to pieces an explosion), and what a "common definition" actually is... But the core point (IMHO) is to do with causes: the explosion seen on TV happened after the break-up, and did not cause - or even significantly affect (according to the grandparent post) - the disaster.
I propose they rephrase Myth#2. And then send us all $10 to compensate us for the time wasted debating the subject caused by their sloppy writing. :-)
Hi,
I read this article yesterday (it's Tuesday), and it reawakened some anger that I felt when I bought a Dell in September, and found a little note saying You Don't Need Install Disks With This Machine Because It Has A Recovery Partition.
So, I tried running the "make an install disk" tool, which crapped out and couldn't write to the DVD.
I phoned Dell Support, and asked where my WinXP install disk was. They initially gave me the "your system won't need one of them" line, but I just said (repeatedly) "I've paid for it. Where is it?", which seemed to wilt them. It worked nicely, I feel, because there's no technical come-back to that - I didn't want a long discussion about the security of backup partitions! I ensured that I had my itemized receipt from Dell on screen, so that I could see the line item nice and clearly, which bolstered my resolve.
Anyway. A courier turned up this morning, with 5 packages from Dell, including the "Custom Dell" WinXP disk, which isn't exactly a straight Windows install disk, but it was what I was expecting. The other packages were driver disks, apps, etc - the whole install set.
So that was good - nice fast response, and not really any arguments. YMMV, but I was happy. Maybe it's different if you have MCE.
Oh, and BTW, one of the pre-installed apps DID break the machine. There was a Browser Redirector to, er, some 3rd party partner Dell partner site, but its DLL kept causing the Explorer (AND the ensuing DrWatson) to crash. I removed the offending DLL, its been fine since - just glad it wasn't my old Mum's machine!
667 - Neighbour of the Beast? :-)
Cheers!
That is one of those unanswerable questions. You can only determine the maximum range of a radio system if the capabilities of both the endpoints are known (plus the characteristics of the channel, of course).
An RFID is powered by the emissions of the reader, and transmits a small signal back.
So with a sufficiently powerful and/or directional transmitter, I could activate your card from any distance. With a sufficiently directional and sensitive receiver, I can pick up the response. If the device sends the same response each time, I can repeat this over and over, and incrementally cancel out the noise.
The readers in Japan sound as though they are pretty short-range, but that might be so that they don't activate many cards at once, which means that they can keep their signal processing system simple and cheap.
It is, if it's you, cornering in a jet fighter!
But it isn't when it's an impact shock. The thing about an impact is that it's an almost instantaneous deceleration.
Imagine - the drive is moving at just 1 m/s (as if dropped from 5cm). It decelerates to zero in, what, a millisecond or so on a solid surface? Do the sums, and out drops 1000ms-2, or 100G.
And I have a suspicion that my 1ms collision time is generous - after all, that suggests that your concrete floor and the drive's chassis bend by a signficant proportion of a millimetre on impact. OTOH, the drive will have internal shock mounts to spread the impulse out a bit.
Either way, this is just 5cm (2 inches) from a hard surface. If it falls the 20cm from the case of your PC when it's on its side, then you're up to 200G: 3 times the rated shock. Scary!
Here's a question to any mechanics folks out there. What is a typical impact duration for two such uncompressible objects? I've just been searching for some real data, because I wanted to not have to guesstimate, and the 1ms was based on a number of pages, including this bat and ball estimate, but the ball is obviously highly compressible. Are there any better references?