A work colleague rented a flat in London, and he had no TV set. After a little while, he received a standard "you have not paid for your TV licence" notification, which had a number of tick-boxes on the reply slip to allow you to say why you felt you were exempt....
And I do not have a TV set wasn't an option!
So he wrote in huge letters, in a big black marker pen:
> Using a plural pronoun to represent a singular noun is poor grammar.
If you use it as a direct replacement, then yes. But I usually find that it is a trivial task to use the plural form consistently, without significant loss of clarity or elegance:
"Administrators will need to install the upgrade package before they can initialize the database..."
I just imagine that I'm talking about a pair of programmers, or administrators, or users, who are working together.
The only problems I find with this approach are that it can seem very formal (but that's easily solved - if you want to drop the formality, you start using 2nd person "you"), and it can be awkward if you really do need to introduce another player (but then you just assign role-names - makes things clearer anyway).
OTOH, using "it" sounds like a good way of letting off steam when you're writing support documentation to avoid pilot-induced errors...:-)
If you have a square manhole cover, you can turn it 45 degrees on a vertical axis and drop it in the manhole.
Sorry, dude, that's the answer that "everyone knows", and I think the parent poster knew that.
But I think his point is that although the "can't fall down" advantage is a nice side-effect, it isn't the core reason, and that "ease of manufacture" is. And thinking about it, it isn't at all clear that "obvious usability advantages" should trump "cheap" in municipal planning and purchasing departments!
Now, that poster may have been talking complete crap - this is Slashdot, after all! - but it is an interesting angle that I hadn't thought about. A good opening conversational gambit next time I find myself chatting to an Industrial Historian...:-)
The thing that got me running for the dictionary was the question of whether a zombie is strictly dead, or whether "resurrected" could be counted. As it turned out, the dictionary just got bogged down in the means, rather than the state, which I found disappointing.
If resurrection is allowed, then it puts a whole new slant on the Easter story! "Eating the brains of the living", hmmm....
I suspect that the problem here is your use of the word proven, where I would have been happier with the word "demonstrated". Certainly the QM phenomena that we're talking about have been demonstrated, and that's a sufficient condition for us to take QC seriously.
With regards falsification, I'm not sure I agree that "Actually all theories are falsifiable". Theories that involve messing with reality can easily be made unfalsifiable, such as "we're all in a big computer game", a la The Matrix. There would appear to be an indefinite number of variants on that theme, and none of them make testable predictions or seem very useful.
Your optimization assumes that the larger X is, the better. You'd better get busy!:-)
However, this is by no means as simple an equation as that. Having a disabled person around can be a challenge for everyone, and if handled well, can make others into better people: more generous, more caring and attentive, less grasping. Now feed those people back into the population, and see if humanity is better or worse.
Not any more. It's just "verb". I verb, you verb...
And so you have just witnessed a "verbing", which is a noun, and so that was me "nouning" a verb. So the verb is now nouned, and thus "noun" can be adjectived as well.
One counter-argument might run that although we might be going downhill fast in evolutionary terms, we're also going uphill very fast technologically.
Doesn't matter how dumb the primordial organic neuroprocessor is when it's been augmented with a Cyberdyne Systems omni-intelligent prepare-to-be-assimilated super jewel. Or, translated into Earth-speak, in the time-frame that these problems might become manifest, we might be able to fix them, or make them irrelevant.
Now, the above argument can be fired at all sorts of things where people might prefer to sit on their asses rather than fix something - the environment, for example! - but it raises an interesting point: if you don't like the Hope-We-Can-Fix-It answer, then just what alternative solution do you propose?
We can't exactly just turn people away from hospitals; I don't think we want our government to start imposing sterilization orders on "stupid people". So the study that you propose isn't gonna result in any useful action - is it? Except that if it revealed what you suggest, it would just be used as ammunition by people who want to control everyone. And therefore, even if it's true, it isn't actually anything we want to have sanctioned!
BTW, I'm not arguing against you here - it's pretty likely, in my view, that our capabilities and societies are acting pretty anti-evolutionarily, as you say. It's debatable about how strong such influences are - the nature vs nurture debate and so on - but even assuming that the influences are strong, I'm not sure what a decent humanitarian society can do about it.
Apart from develop yet more remedial technology...
Hang on... they weren't the journalist's words. The whole issue revolved around the claim that someone in government had requested that the document in question be "sexed up".
The question you should therefore be asking is whether phrases like that indicate professional government! The evidence seem to suggest not...
Wander backwards through time to "real" vi, and the concept of visual selection is like the idea of Windows being generally intelligent!:-)
Thanks for the tip though! - I do use vim a lot of the time. If we're not careful, we're going to end up banished to a special Slashdot section of our own, full of weird helpful stuff.
It would be cool if I could have one key that puts me into insert mode, and turns on the Chinese input method. Not possible to do, not the least because vi already uses pretty much every key.
Have you tried to map a key, using good old ":map"? I can go:
:map v ihello
and it maps the command mode "v" key to put me insert mode, enter the "hello", and leaves me in insert mode. I could put a ^V^[ on the end to escape back to cmd mode - but it sounds like you want to automate something that stays in input mode.
Of course, you may have been trying this for the last year and have written a textbook on why this doesn't work... but if you haven't, then it might be worth a try.
Note that you can stick the map into your.exrc to make it permanent. I usually use 'v', 'V', 'Q' for mappings, as they aren't used for anything I've ever found. Or you can use #1 to #9 for function keys. Also, note that:map! will define the map to work in insert mode, not cmd mode, so you can write "get me out of ins mode and then do something else" macros.
Have you ever seen that maze solver, written entirely in vi mappings? Awesome. Terrible. Nerve shaking. After I saw it, I had to write a useful expression solver the same way, just to prove that I still had any testicles at all...:-)
Half the people in my class still thing/usr is short for 'user' and not 'unix system resources'
Nope. It's "user". Users' home dirs used to live there. The system stuff is a new-fangled thing, based on the way people used to use/usr as a good place to stick weird application directories there that only needed to be on-hand when the users were on hand, like X. Of course, gradually, these applications have became almost essential, and are now part of a system distribution.
However, it's ok - after all, half of your class are right!:-)
And if you want some fun.... you can always try re-propagating the rumour amongst your buddies that/etc stands for "extended tool-chest"! It doesn't, of course - it's just "everything else", from the days when you only had/lib,/bin,/dev,/usr,/mnt,/tmp and/unix. From the POV of a Unix system inventor, config files and utils were just "other stuff"!
Wow. You learn something every day. (Really, I just did.)
Sorry, dude, 'fraid you didn't. It really does mean "user". It used to be where the user accounts lived -/usr/fred,/usr/kt, and so on.
But it gradually got filled with increasingly important system stuff, because it was usually the biggest area on the disk, sort of how/usr/local is now. Then the SVR4 filesystem revision came along, endorsing/var,/opt, and/home, and/usr was relegated to non-essential system stuff. The Unix System Resources thing is a sort of unofficial backronym.
With observations like that in reputable news sources like the Economist it is no wonder that investment in fusion waxes and wanes.
I think that the Economist's comment demonstrates a cynical naivity about long term research planning, as if suggesting that it's some kind of in-joke committed by the researchers involved. Fact is, the researchers don't know when the research will bear economic fruit, because it's a hard problem. It's not their fault - they're trying to make educated guesses about problems that they haven't encountered yet.
When you're studying and developing ideas, you frequently encounter unexpected hurdles. In jumping those hurdles, you sometimes encounter "sub-hurdles" - problems that must be solved before you can get a grip on the bigger problem. Some problems are almost fractal! - at every layer, there are more details to fill in. Hell, I feel like that when I start tidying my house - sometimes, you can clear up a whole room in a few minutes; other times, I spend a whole day seemingly clearing a single drawer. It depends on what's inside.
Now, the only way you can make a long term estimate is to rely on experience of similar problems, and try and guess the "fractal dimension" of the problem in hand. Turns out that managing fission - explosive and controlled - was reasonably un-nested. Same with building fast microprocessors - these problems have had many sub-problems, but they've turned out to be readily and incrementally soluble.
Fusion hasn't worked out that way. It's always been suspected to be hard, but until the problems are unfolded, the estimates are simply educated judgements based on partial information. And when you're projecting over a long time-scale, you really have no idea whether left-field solutions (such as fast CPUs) might leap in and make apparently difficult problems evaporate. On the one hand, there may be apparently simple things that turn into serious show-stoppers, and on the other, there may be insoluable problems with surprise saviours. And unsurprisingly, the projections end up declaring "oooh, about 30 years" - translates to "not soon, not never".
It's all very similar to the experiences in AI, where so many apparently simple problems have turned out to require a vast associative knowledge store: the "AI completeness" problem. Some problems are like that. Quantum computing may turn out to be another one. I've always suspected that getting printers to work reliably will require some deep insight in state management of which we currently have no understanding!:-)
I have just looked at my intro sentence, and it's actually harsher than I meant - I have a lot of respect for The Economist, and their comment is exactly the kind of semi-humorous thing that draws me in. So I forgive them. Perhaps the rest of the article was about the difficulties of projecting long term research results! (Maybe it was, and I read it, and I'm regurgitating it here! Isn't life complicated?)
I always find it a shock to discover how much work you have to put into photography to make a picture look "normal" - the filters, the light management, the scene composition. You look at some snap that you took, and you think "but the room wasn't *that* blue - or dark - and where did that plant come from?"
It's quite a testament to our optical system that it maintains such uniformity in the face of such diversity.
Something I like about the enhanced "car engine" picture in the article's example is that, in a way, it is how I see the engine in the first picture. In the same way that photographic filters and lights turn a photo into something that "looks like how I see it", the feature enhancement looks like how I think it!
Now, if a photo-realistic camera is one that tries hard to compensate automatically for bad light and color, then in a way, this is making it even more realistic by eliminating deficiencies in feature demarcation! Ok, it's arguably not photo-realistic, but its realism extends slightly further along the brain's processing pipe-line!
What you said was: "Wikipedia let us any third grader edit articles willy nillie."
Not necessarily. We don't know what he said! All we know is that something was cut, although I think that your interpretation is the only one that parses to English.
It is also possible that his sentence was meant exactly as you describe, but was poorly punctuated. It could have meant: "Wikipedia! (please) let us, any (lowly) third grader, edit articles willy nillie." Obviously, "grader" should have been plural, but perhaps the poster was German and mistakenly thought it already was (like "kinder").
Quibble - the Moon is high enough up that its orbital speed is in the range of a good rifle-bullet. If you're willing to accept a less than circular orbit, 60,000 Km up, a good varmint rifle ought to be able to manage an orbit that just missed atmosphere at perigee.
Yup, good points! I must learn to state my assumptions. I must learn to state my assumptions. I must learn to state my assumptions.:-)
Though with most of Islam's, Christianity's, and Jadaism's religious cities in the mid-east [paperlined.org], it does seem destined to be a place of conflict.
Hardly likely, as religion becomes progressively less important, forced back by the tide of reason and rational explanation. Oh, wait...:-)
consider the fact that if you fired a bullet from a decent rifle a thousand miles up, it would go into orbit, but obviously bullets don't go into orbit here on the ground.
Well, careful here. That's the big misconception - that orbital velocity is anything like the speed of a bullet. Ok, ok, it depends on your definition of "decent rifle":-), but no Earth rifle even comes close to firing at 5 miles a second - a tenth of that is more likely.
Similarly, SpaceShip One only achieved about 0.6miles/sec. That's why - amazing though it is that they achieved what they did on such a small budget - the orbit challenge is so much harder than just "touching space". When you consider that chemical rockets project propellant at about 2 miles/sec, you'll see that a single-stage rocket's mass must be almost entirely fuel (>85%) to achieve orbital speed alone - and that's after you've reached a suitable height! Multi-stage boosters help with the physics, of course, but they slaughter the economics.:-)
Anyway, achieving height is just the easy "Part 1" of the problem. Speed's the hard part. Try doing the momentum sums yourself - it gives you serious respect for people who can build machines to overcome the problems, and it shows how close Earth is to being completely un-escapable (at least using chemical rockets)!
Of course, re-reading your post, the rifle thing does illustrate your point rather well. Oh well...
True - but the trade-routes went through there too, so it was worth fighting for. The only bit that matters in that respect now is the Suez Canal; otherwise, we have lots of alternatives these days for importing Eastern goods!
Slashdot Mirror
And I do not have a TV set wasn't an option!
So he wrote in huge letters, in a big black marker pen:
HAVE NO TELLY!
and sent it back. He didn't hear from them again.
If you use it as a direct replacement, then yes. But I usually find that it is a trivial task to use the plural form consistently, without significant loss of clarity or elegance:
"Administrators will need to install the upgrade package before they can initialize the database..."
I just imagine that I'm talking about a pair of programmers, or administrators, or users, who are working together.
The only problems I find with this approach are that it can seem very formal (but that's easily solved - if you want to drop the formality, you start using 2nd person "you"), and it can be awkward if you really do need to introduce another player (but then you just assign role-names - makes things clearer anyway).
OTOH, using "it" sounds like a good way of letting off steam when you're writing support documentation to avoid pilot-induced errors... :-)
Ok, but how would you know if you had? Seriously, though, it's probably one of the multitude of things that accounts for why we die at 80, not 40.
Just don't ask me to prepare your food ;)
Just cook it very, very, very thoroughly :-)
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a4_220.html
Keep washing those hands, kids!
Sorry, dude, that's the answer that "everyone knows", and I think the parent poster knew that.
But I think his point is that although the "can't fall down" advantage is a nice side-effect, it isn't the core reason, and that "ease of manufacture" is. And thinking about it, it isn't at all clear that "obvious usability advantages" should trump "cheap" in municipal planning and purchasing departments!
Now, that poster may have been talking complete crap - this is Slashdot, after all! - but it is an interesting angle that I hadn't thought about. A good opening conversational gambit next time I find myself chatting to an Industrial Historian ... :-)
The thing that got me running for the dictionary was the question of whether a zombie is strictly dead, or whether "resurrected" could be counted. As it turned out, the dictionary just got bogged down in the means, rather than the state, which I found disappointing.
If resurrection is allowed, then it puts a whole new slant on the Easter story! "Eating the brains of the living", hmmm ....
I assumed that they were referring to the reawakened dogs as the zombies, implying that they were sort of dead during their little sleep.
However, there's still a problem because according to a dictionary, a zombie is:
- A supernatural power or spell that according to voodoo belief can enter into and reanimate a corpse.
- A corpse revived in this way.
and from the experiment description, there is no voodoo or supernatural agent involved!Escaped on a technicality!
With regards falsification, I'm not sure I agree that "Actually all theories are falsifiable". Theories that involve messing with reality can easily be made unfalsifiable, such as "we're all in a big computer game", a la The Matrix. There would appear to be an indefinite number of variants on that theme, and none of them make testable predictions or seem very useful.
Unusual spelling though.
However, this is by no means as simple an equation as that. Having a disabled person around can be a challenge for everyone, and if handled well, can make others into better people: more generous, more caring and attentive, less grasping. Now feed those people back into the population, and see if humanity is better or worse.
Yes, good, thanks! I was looking for something better than just spelling abuse....
And so you have just witnessed a "verbing", which is a noun, and so that was me "nouning" a verb. So the verb is now nouned, and thus "noun" can be adjectived as well.
I luv gramma. :-)
Doesn't matter how dumb the primordial organic neuroprocessor is when it's been augmented with a Cyberdyne Systems omni-intelligent prepare-to-be-assimilated super jewel. Or, translated into Earth-speak, in the time-frame that these problems might become manifest, we might be able to fix them, or make them irrelevant.
Now, the above argument can be fired at all sorts of things where people might prefer to sit on their asses rather than fix something - the environment, for example! - but it raises an interesting point: if you don't like the Hope-We-Can-Fix-It answer, then just what alternative solution do you propose?
We can't exactly just turn people away from hospitals; I don't think we want our government to start imposing sterilization orders on "stupid people". So the study that you propose isn't gonna result in any useful action - is it? Except that if it revealed what you suggest, it would just be used as ammunition by people who want to control everyone. And therefore, even if it's true, it isn't actually anything we want to have sanctioned!
BTW, I'm not arguing against you here - it's pretty likely, in my view, that our capabilities and societies are acting pretty anti-evolutionarily, as you say. It's debatable about how strong such influences are - the nature vs nurture debate and so on - but even assuming that the influences are strong, I'm not sure what a decent humanitarian society can do about it.
Apart from develop yet more remedial technology...
The question you should therefore be asking is whether phrases like that indicate professional government! The evidence seem to suggest not...
Wander backwards through time to "real" vi, and the concept of visual selection is like the idea of Windows being generally intelligent! :-)
Thanks for the tip though! - I do use vim a lot of the time. If we're not careful, we're going to end up banished to a special Slashdot section of our own, full of weird helpful stuff.
But ....
It would be cool if I could have one key that puts me into insert mode, and turns on the Chinese input method. Not possible to do, not the least because vi already uses pretty much every key.
Have you tried to map a key, using good old ":map"? I can go:
:map v ihello
and it maps the command mode "v" key to put me insert mode, enter the "hello", and leaves me in insert mode. I could put a ^V^[ on the end to escape back to cmd mode - but it sounds like you want to automate something that stays in input mode.Of course, you may have been trying this for the last year and have written a textbook on why this doesn't work ... but if you haven't, then it might be worth a try.
Note that you can stick the map into your .exrc to make it permanent. I usually use 'v', 'V', 'Q' for mappings, as they aren't used for anything I've ever found. Or you can use #1 to #9 for function keys. Also, note that :map! will define the map to work in insert mode, not cmd mode, so you can write "get me out of ins mode and then do something else" macros.
Have you ever seen that maze solver, written entirely in vi mappings? Awesome. Terrible. Nerve shaking. After I saw it, I had to write a useful expression solver the same way, just to prove that I still had any testicles at all ... :-)
Nope. It's "user". Users' home dirs used to live there. The system stuff is a new-fangled thing, based on the way people used to use /usr as a good place to stick weird application directories there that only needed to be on-hand when the users were on hand, like X. Of course, gradually, these applications have became almost essential, and are now part of a system distribution.
However, it's ok - after all, half of your class are right! :-)
And if you want some fun .... you can always try re-propagating the rumour amongst your buddies that /etc stands for "extended tool-chest"! It doesn't, of course - it's just "everything else", from the days when you only had /lib, /bin, /dev, /usr, /mnt, /tmp and /unix. From the POV of a Unix system inventor, config files and utils were just "other stuff"!
Sorry, dude, 'fraid you didn't. It really does mean "user". It used to be where the user accounts lived - /usr/fred, /usr/kt, and so on.
But it gradually got filled with increasingly important system stuff, because it was usually the biggest area on the disk, sort of how /usr/local is now. Then the SVR4 filesystem revision came along, endorsing /var, /opt, and /home, and /usr was relegated to non-essential system stuff. The Unix System Resources thing is a sort of unofficial backronym.
I think that the Economist's comment demonstrates a cynical naivity about long term research planning, as if suggesting that it's some kind of in-joke committed by the researchers involved. Fact is, the researchers don't know when the research will bear economic fruit, because it's a hard problem. It's not their fault - they're trying to make educated guesses about problems that they haven't encountered yet.
When you're studying and developing ideas, you frequently encounter unexpected hurdles. In jumping those hurdles, you sometimes encounter "sub-hurdles" - problems that must be solved before you can get a grip on the bigger problem. Some problems are almost fractal! - at every layer, there are more details to fill in. Hell, I feel like that when I start tidying my house - sometimes, you can clear up a whole room in a few minutes; other times, I spend a whole day seemingly clearing a single drawer. It depends on what's inside.
Now, the only way you can make a long term estimate is to rely on experience of similar problems, and try and guess the "fractal dimension" of the problem in hand. Turns out that managing fission - explosive and controlled - was reasonably un-nested. Same with building fast microprocessors - these problems have had many sub-problems, but they've turned out to be readily and incrementally soluble.
Fusion hasn't worked out that way. It's always been suspected to be hard, but until the problems are unfolded, the estimates are simply educated judgements based on partial information. And when you're projecting over a long time-scale, you really have no idea whether left-field solutions (such as fast CPUs) might leap in and make apparently difficult problems evaporate. On the one hand, there may be apparently simple things that turn into serious show-stoppers, and on the other, there may be insoluable problems with surprise saviours. And unsurprisingly, the projections end up declaring "oooh, about 30 years" - translates to "not soon, not never".
It's all very similar to the experiences in AI, where so many apparently simple problems have turned out to require a vast associative knowledge store: the "AI completeness" problem. Some problems are like that. Quantum computing may turn out to be another one. I've always suspected that getting printers to work reliably will require some deep insight in state management of which we currently have no understanding! :-)
I have just looked at my intro sentence, and it's actually harsher than I meant - I have a lot of respect for The Economist, and their comment is exactly the kind of semi-humorous thing that draws me in. So I forgive them. Perhaps the rest of the article was about the difficulties of projecting long term research results! (Maybe it was, and I read it, and I'm regurgitating it here! Isn't life complicated?)
Cheers!
I always find it a shock to discover how much work you have to put into photography to make a picture look "normal" - the filters, the light management, the scene composition. You look at some snap that you took, and you think "but the room wasn't *that* blue - or dark - and where did that plant come from?"
It's quite a testament to our optical system that it maintains such uniformity in the face of such diversity.
Something I like about the enhanced "car engine" picture in the article's example is that, in a way, it is how I see the engine in the first picture. In the same way that photographic filters and lights turn a photo into something that "looks like how I see it", the feature enhancement looks like how I think it!
Now, if a photo-realistic camera is one that tries hard to compensate automatically for bad light and color, then in a way, this is making it even more realistic by eliminating deficiencies in feature demarcation! Ok, it's arguably not photo-realistic, but its realism extends slightly further along the brain's processing pipe-line!
What you said was: "Wikipedia let us any third grader edit articles willy nillie."
Not necessarily. We don't know what he said! All we know is that something was cut, although I think that your interpretation is the only one that parses to English.
It is also possible that his sentence was meant exactly as you describe, but was poorly punctuated. It could have meant: "Wikipedia! (please) let us, any (lowly) third grader, edit articles willy nillie." Obviously, "grader" should have been plural, but perhaps the poster was German and mistakenly thought it already was (like "kinder").
Hope this helps! :-)
Moderators, mod this interesting - make my day!
Yup, good points! I must learn to state my assumptions. I must learn to state my assumptions. I must learn to state my assumptions. :-)
Hardly likely, as religion becomes progressively less important, forced back by the tide of reason and rational explanation. Oh, wait ... :-)
Anyway, thanks for the links.
Well, careful here. That's the big misconception - that orbital velocity is anything like the speed of a bullet. Ok, ok, it depends on your definition of "decent rifle" :-), but no Earth rifle even comes close to firing at 5 miles a second - a tenth of that is more likely.
Similarly, SpaceShip One only achieved about 0.6miles/sec. That's why - amazing though it is that they achieved what they did on such a small budget - the orbit challenge is so much harder than just "touching space". When you consider that chemical rockets project propellant at about 2 miles/sec, you'll see that a single-stage rocket's mass must be almost entirely fuel (>85%) to achieve orbital speed alone - and that's after you've reached a suitable height! Multi-stage boosters help with the physics, of course, but they slaughter the economics. :-)
Anyway, achieving height is just the easy "Part 1" of the problem. Speed's the hard part. Try doing the momentum sums yourself - it gives you serious respect for people who can build machines to overcome the problems, and it shows how close Earth is to being completely un-escapable (at least using chemical rockets)!
Of course, re-reading your post, the rifle thing does illustrate your point rather well. Oh well ...
True - but the trade-routes went through there too, so it was worth fighting for. The only bit that matters in that respect now is the Suez Canal; otherwise, we have lots of alternatives these days for importing Eastern goods!