Vanderbilt, being closely tied to the research hospital of the same name, has offered Biomedical Engineering in the School of Engineering for a while now, and it's a pretty popular major among the more determined engineers there.
Whats strange about using a neutrino generator to modulate a tachyon field to create a holographic reconstruction ?
Nothing, until you route it through the deflector array to crate gravitic interference in the nearby protonic cloud that has been destabilizing the matter-antimatter interface preventing safe use of the main engines.
Science is based on observation. With astronomy, there's a limit to our abilities to observe, and we stay at the edge of that, stretching it with probes, new telescopes, etc. With cloning research, there's an increased ability to observe certain processes in what some apparently consider acceptable ways. Do you deny that if we actually could travel interstellar distances, we would? These scientists feel that it's within their ethical limits to be doing the experiments they are doing. Whether that fits with some universal standard of ethics I don't know, but I don't think that most of them are doing this just because they can. They want to learn from it, like the astronomers using revolutionary equipment to gain more knowledge about their own field of study. This isn't an endorsement of the cloning stuff, and I don't know where I would draw the line, either, but I don't think the comparison to astronomy is particularly valid, as astronomy is limited by the means of observation.
I agree with some of your sentiment, but without knowing much of the established knowledge base, I'm not sure how practical or realistic your advice is. How far are we able to go at a theoretical level before we're just treading water? Are we there already? How far are these researchers planning to go? From the sound of it, I doubt they'll be trying to clone a human, though even that might depend on one's definition of "human," I suppose. How much can be learned from non-human cloning experiments? Have we reached a barrier there, too? And I agree that some form of ethical standards would be a good idea, but who would be the arbiter of such a code? Would there be some international cloning council that would decide it, and who would appoint them or enforce their decrees?
This feels, to some degree, like a lot of the legal things going on with digital rights. It's something that people haven't really had to think about until now, so they really don't know where they stand, and may or may not even understand what's going on, but they feel that some kind of decision needs to be made.
I've unsubscribed from a few. Sony's is uniformly painless. The worst I've had was just needing to call in to cancel my Earth and Beyond account, mainly so they could try to convince me not to. Still, I had no difficulties with continued billing or anything.
I'll tell you what. You and all your imaginaut "lovers of discovery in general" can go to your ramshackle "HUGE Family Guy friends" clubhouse and talk about that time somebody did something. Those of us apparently unable to withstand the unprecedented randomness of your tired, predictable fast-cut pop culture regurgitator will somehow manage without your truly dizzing and, frankly, rather frightening intellects that are uniquely suited to interpreting the brilliance contained within such bits as "Peter's ancestor was tiny and fought chickens."
I've a theory that just popped into my head. I think that Family Guy may be relatively unique in that it's a show that appeals to a very broad section of the population due to its use of incredibly mainstream yet still specific pop culture references that people are only now able to get into because of a previously volatile and sparse airing schedule. Now that it is on nightly on not one but two basic cable channels, people are able to tune in to it nightly, confident that they have found a lost gem of a series, cut down before its time. They then go on to spew one-liners and recount the various shock-value bits to friends, believing they are evangelizing some little-known treasure.
I was actually saying that Family Guy pulled one or two of the particular types of humor that was used in the Simpsons in that period and stretched a show around high concentrations of a few types of joke.
I did misinterpret your tone, though. It struck me that you were praising Family Guy rather than drawing attention to the apparent hypocrisy of certain fans. I'd like to add to that certain other fans who hail the purported unprecedented creative genius of Seth MacFarlane while blissfully ignoring the liberal (and freely admitted by MacFarlane himself) borrowing of humor from a particular era of the Simpsons.
That said, I do find Simpsons episodes of that era to be more story-based than Family Guy. With Simpsons, I remember particular episodes and generally the context of jokes within. With Family Guy, I really have to struggle to recall the episode in which a memorable gag was featured because of the completely tangential nature of most of them.
Wow, when I read the first part of your post, I really thought it was going to turn out as a joke, but somehow it maintained its unabashed and unwarranted praise for a program that is not separated so much into episodes as it is into memorable bits. If I recall a joke from the show, I can almost never remember what episode it was from because almost every joke is a complete tangent from the main, usually generic, plot. Maybe it's rewatchable just because of that. You can never remember which jokes are coming because there's no way to remember any of them in a context of any sort. Woo! Epiphany!
Objection! Family Guy took a few comedic elements that the Simpsons used in some of the middle seasons, and the show is pretty much a hasty framework on which to hang predictable cutaway gags, random and consistent placement of widely remembered pop culture bits in unlikely positions, and hit-and-miss attempts at real humor. An episode here and there is amusing, but when one watches it consistently, the reuse of maybe three humor devices becomes predictable, and one begins to see the hastily assembled show underneath. Despite that, I still watch it on occasion and enjoy some of the humor. And the more general riffs on some broad cultural feature can be amusing. One of my favorite bits in the show is the Brian and Stewie-hosted introduction to the Treehouse of Horror/Anthology of Interest-style episode in the (until recently) final season, as it's not (to me, at least) obviously pulling from any single source, but is definitely using some vaudevillean standard base.
Also, it's not hard to come up with comical juxtapositions of particular cultural icons. Observe:
Peter: "Hey, i-it's like that time that the Beav witnessed that mob hit!" [cut to black-and-white scene of child looking in horror as gunshots are fired, perhaps injecting a bit of Road to Perdition by having Ward as one of the mobsters]
Is Immersion the company that sued Sony and Microsoft over certain portions and uses of their force feedback functionalities?
Re:Why such extreme lens flare in Hubble images?
on
A Star of Space and Film
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I always assumed the lens flare itself is due at least partially to long exposure times to get decent brightness on the dimmer features (in this case the reflections from the gas cloud). As for the shape of the flare, I've not a clue. My knowledge of optics ends at second semester college physics.
Though I'm a Nintendo fan, and the Gamecube was the first console of this generation that I owned, I was about to mention that I reluctantly disagreed with your assertion there.
Until I realized that for the most part, it may be that there just aren't many core game types out there, and true innovation in gameplay is rare. What Nintendo manages to do is hold on to those core game types, making some changes and additions, and still keep them engaging and fun and at the same time technologically competitive with the games that get by on newness alone. And if you have a context (franchise, etc.) in which a particular game type works, there's not necessarily a reason to abandon it. The reuse of franchises allows them to refine the gameplay experience instead of having to worry about both creating a new brand and delivering good game mechanics.
Granted, there are new and original games out there. Pikmin, for example, managed to make RTS-style gameplay playable on a console. And the gaming snobs' favorite this year, Katamari Damacy, is indeed unique and delivers both a world and gameplay experience unlike any other game.
Not a clue. I've only just gotten a Mini (haven't ordered new memory for it yet, so it's still at 256MB). I do notice a lot of hard drive swapping going on, but I've not noticed if it's worse while Firefox is running or not. Where do I find memory usage stats in OS X?
Agreed. That's the only logical and fair categorization of ownership and liability I can think of. As others have pointed out, though, blogs should not be singled out. One could do the same thing on a personal web site, in physical media, or anywhere else. That this is arising as a blog problem seems to stem from two main factors:
1) easy-to-use blogging services mean that there is no longer any significant technical hurdle to making your words viewable worldwide
2) people seem to have a false sense of security or invulnerability, especially when just adding your own words to a sea already overrun with others. The problem there is that if one knows what they're looking for, a simple URL leads straight to the potentially incriminating content.
For clarity, the Onion AV Club is pretty much serious treatment of various media from an unabashed Gen X point of view.
The weekly features are generally interviews with people important to various bits of an assortment of subcultures, media subgenres, and so on. The rest tends to be reviews of new movies, DVDs, books, and music, with one or two recurring humorous columns (e.g. "Commentary Tracks of the Damned" and now Wheaton's new column), but even those are just cynical treatments of actual media.
Just thought I'd try to clear that up, as the name "The Onion" is generally linked to satire/parody.
I like how the requisite HTML to make that a link is 15 characters including spaces in addition to the Ctrl+V (or Apple+V or whatever you're using) that you did to paste the URL, while your declaration of sloth was 35 characters with spaces.
Anyway, that does sound like a pretty nice setup, and the Bluetooth phone deal seems interesting. What's the range on a decent Bluetooth-enabled phone?
Oh, and those 15 extra characters? Here ya go. (though the "Here ya go." was another 11)
Slashdot Mirror
Vanderbilt, being closely tied to the research hospital of the same name, has offered Biomedical Engineering in the School of Engineering for a while now, and it's a pretty popular major among the more determined engineers there.
No, no, the upside-down skulls were on spider legs. And the flying skulls had jetpacks, not wings.
I'm not kidding.
Who spent $280 on a GBA? I got mine for $90 the week after it came out (though the official retail price was $99). Even the DS is just $150.
Nothing, until you route it through the deflector array to crate gravitic interference in the nearby protonic cloud that has been destabilizing the matter-antimatter interface preventing safe use of the main engines.
Yeah, but Cheney's lightsaber fight would look awesome.
Science is based on observation. With astronomy, there's a limit to our abilities to observe, and we stay at the edge of that, stretching it with probes, new telescopes, etc. With cloning research, there's an increased ability to observe certain processes in what some apparently consider acceptable ways. Do you deny that if we actually could travel interstellar distances, we would? These scientists feel that it's within their ethical limits to be doing the experiments they are doing. Whether that fits with some universal standard of ethics I don't know, but I don't think that most of them are doing this just because they can. They want to learn from it, like the astronomers using revolutionary equipment to gain more knowledge about their own field of study. This isn't an endorsement of the cloning stuff, and I don't know where I would draw the line, either, but I don't think the comparison to astronomy is particularly valid, as astronomy is limited by the means of observation.
This feels, to some degree, like a lot of the legal things going on with digital rights. It's something that people haven't really had to think about until now, so they really don't know where they stand, and may or may not even understand what's going on, but they feel that some kind of decision needs to be made.
I've unsubscribed from a few. Sony's is uniformly painless. The worst I've had was just needing to call in to cancel my Earth and Beyond account, mainly so they could try to convince me not to. Still, I had no difficulties with continued billing or anything.
I guess it's time I take a long look at where I am in life right now and how much time I've wasted not randomly mentioning things from the 80s.
I'll tell you what. You and all your imaginaut "lovers of discovery in general" can go to your ramshackle "HUGE Family Guy friends" clubhouse and talk about that time somebody did something. Those of us apparently unable to withstand the unprecedented randomness of your tired, predictable fast-cut pop culture regurgitator will somehow manage without your truly dizzing and, frankly, rather frightening intellects that are uniquely suited to interpreting the brilliance contained within such bits as "Peter's ancestor was tiny and fought chickens."
I've a theory that just popped into my head. I think that Family Guy may be relatively unique in that it's a show that appeals to a very broad section of the population due to its use of incredibly mainstream yet still specific pop culture references that people are only now able to get into because of a previously volatile and sparse airing schedule. Now that it is on nightly on not one but two basic cable channels, people are able to tune in to it nightly, confident that they have found a lost gem of a series, cut down before its time. They then go on to spew one-liners and recount the various shock-value bits to friends, believing they are evangelizing some little-known treasure.
[cut away to Underdog in some undignified position]
I did misinterpret your tone, though. It struck me that you were praising Family Guy rather than drawing attention to the apparent hypocrisy of certain fans. I'd like to add to that certain other fans who hail the purported unprecedented creative genius of Seth MacFarlane while blissfully ignoring the liberal (and freely admitted by MacFarlane himself) borrowing of humor from a particular era of the Simpsons.
That said, I do find Simpsons episodes of that era to be more story-based than Family Guy. With Simpsons, I remember particular episodes and generally the context of jokes within. With Family Guy, I really have to struggle to recall the episode in which a memorable gag was featured because of the completely tangential nature of most of them.
Wow, when I read the first part of your post, I really thought it was going to turn out as a joke, but somehow it maintained its unabashed and unwarranted praise for a program that is not separated so much into episodes as it is into memorable bits. If I recall a joke from the show, I can almost never remember what episode it was from because almost every joke is a complete tangent from the main, usually generic, plot. Maybe it's rewatchable just because of that. You can never remember which jokes are coming because there's no way to remember any of them in a context of any sort. Woo! Epiphany!
Also, it's not hard to come up with comical juxtapositions of particular cultural icons. Observe:
Peter: "Hey, i-it's like that time that the Beav witnessed that mob hit!" [cut to black-and-white scene of child looking in horror as gunshots are fired, perhaps injecting a bit of Road to Perdition by having Ward as one of the mobsters]
Maybe, but somehow Uwe Boll would get the rights to it.
Is Immersion the company that sued Sony and Microsoft over certain portions and uses of their force feedback functionalities?
I always assumed the lens flare itself is due at least partially to long exposure times to get decent brightness on the dimmer features (in this case the reflections from the gas cloud). As for the shape of the flare, I've not a clue. My knowledge of optics ends at second semester college physics.
Totally agreed. I guess I was just saying that sequels don't necessarily mean stagnation, even if the properties are as old as the Nintendo staples.
Until I realized that for the most part, it may be that there just aren't many core game types out there, and true innovation in gameplay is rare. What Nintendo manages to do is hold on to those core game types, making some changes and additions, and still keep them engaging and fun and at the same time technologically competitive with the games that get by on newness alone. And if you have a context (franchise, etc.) in which a particular game type works, there's not necessarily a reason to abandon it. The reuse of franchises allows them to refine the gameplay experience instead of having to worry about both creating a new brand and delivering good game mechanics.
Granted, there are new and original games out there. Pikmin, for example, managed to make RTS-style gameplay playable on a console. And the gaming snobs' favorite this year, Katamari Damacy, is indeed unique and delivers both a world and gameplay experience unlike any other game.
Not a clue. I've only just gotten a Mini (haven't ordered new memory for it yet, so it's still at 256MB). I do notice a lot of hard drive swapping going on, but I've not noticed if it's worse while Firefox is running or not. Where do I find memory usage stats in OS X?
I'd like to extend my appreciation to the person who modded the parent "Redundant."
1) easy-to-use blogging services mean that there is no longer any significant technical hurdle to making your words viewable worldwide
2) people seem to have a false sense of security or invulnerability, especially when just adding your own words to a sea already overrun with others. The problem there is that if one knows what they're looking for, a simple URL leads straight to the potentially incriminating content.
The weekly features are generally interviews with people important to various bits of an assortment of subcultures, media subgenres, and so on. The rest tends to be reviews of new movies, DVDs, books, and music, with one or two recurring humorous columns (e.g. "Commentary Tracks of the Damned" and now Wheaton's new column), but even those are just cynical treatments of actual media.
Just thought I'd try to clear that up, as the name "The Onion" is generally linked to satire/parody.
Anyway, that does sound like a pretty nice setup, and the Bluetooth phone deal seems interesting. What's the range on a decent Bluetooth-enabled phone?
Oh, and those 15 extra characters? Here ya go. (though the "Here ya go." was another 11)