Give yourself structure. Make yourself a list of things you need to do every day.
Sure thing, that's a good idea! I'll just write this/. post first, and then get started on the list... Ooh, a shiny link to xkcd...!
Other things are make sure your hygiene is good.
Of course. I shower every night before going to bed, 'cos that'll keep the sheets and pillows cleaner too. Except tonight, I'm just too tired from doing stuff in the Internet, this time I'll shower in the morning... Except I guess I won't get up early enough so I have to rush out without taking the shower then.
Get exercise.
Yes! I do that every day... Except today I got stuck reading the paper and then looking related totally irrelevant stuff at wikipedia for too long, so no time any more, but tomorrow for sure!
Keeping your body in shape helps you think more clearly, and the running theme is here that providing yourself with structure and goals is the best thing you can do for yourself this side of medication.
Spot on! Today I'll just do it! But first I'll see if anybody has replied to any of my/. posts...
I swear that giving myself some structure is the only reason I was able to graduate from college on time and the only way I'll succeed in making my career go somewhere and being the husband my wife deserves.
Good for you (and I mean that). Not everybody can pull it of. Are they just slobs, or are they genetically doomed to fail in what you succeeded in, I don't know...
What's the difference between giving up hope that a "square peg" will fit in a "round hole", and learning that it won't fit?
Besides, I think this is not directly related to intellgience. This is not about learning how to solve problems, not about how make that square peg fit into the round hole. But if you don't "learn" it won't fit, you're perhaps more likely to find a way to make it fit (if you're intelligent enough).
It's easy to imagine that whoever first learned to use fire was with this gene. He didn't learn that fire burns, fire bad, he just had to go and play with it again, and again...
now now if you ran a business you'd be a libertarian too.
Unless you live in a country where the current government is actually able to do it's job (maintaining an environment and a society where you can run your business) well enough for a business owner to not want to get rid most of it, of course...
If the Beast gets wind of this concept, they'll start shutting down Quicken, Firefox, Thunderbird....
They already have this concept, and at least I use it every time the opportunity is offered with Windows Update. Thus far, at least FF is working just fine, so apparently for the time being it's not considered malicious and to-be-removed by MS...
This sort of problem is now years past the place where it can be solved by "voting with your dollars," or hoping that exposing the problem will create bad PR and shame the company into correcting it.
To be fair, I think the problem indeed was/is solved by creating awareness and voting with dollars. Unfortunately the vote just didn't go our way...
Democracy is a bitch, but fortunately every new product is a new opprotunity for creating new awareness to get everybody to vote the "right way".
Except that explanation is scientifically naive: evolution requires natural selection (which we stopped doing when we invented civilization), and doesn't necessarily make individuals morally better. Often the opposite.
As long as children inherit the DNA from their parents (not necessarily fully true in a society with widespread, pervasive genetic engineering of all children), and as long as different people have different reproductive success, biological evolution will work on humans at full force.
Only the selection criteria will be more complex than "likelyhood of being killed by X". Remember, it's not really about who lives, it's about who has children (that will have more children (that will have more children (that...))). I suspect a strong maternal/paternal instict is being strongly selected for these days, at least.
It sound like they have essentially developed a solid refrigerant. That has got to be far less useful than a liquid refrigerant that can me moved around to where it is needed.
I think more useful point of view is, they have developed a refridgerant that can change temperature without moving parts, by just application of electric field.
And presumably they do it quite efficiently, since otherwise this would not be news. Then again, inefficiency might be precisely the reason they don't tell any numbers...
Anyway, this particular substance is solid, but just imagine if they managed to make a liquid version... No more compressor, just passing the liquid through electric field at one point of a simple closed loop with heat sinks attached to it... Elegant. Well, pretty much like refridgerators using heat (either buring gas or resistor), except without need to produce heat on purpose.
And a step further (nothing to do with this particular material, just speculating), imagine if an electric field could force a phase change from gas to a super-critical liquid, giving both a possibility of greater heat capacity via phase change, and a possibility of no-moving-parts pump.
I'm not so sure most of the heat would go the right way, I think it would be fifty-fifty-deal mostly. So a method like that could something like halve (or worse than halve, since there are 3 heat exchange interfaces in your system) the theoretical efficiency, since so much heat would be leaking back. It might still be worthwhile (and more efficient than peltier) because there are no moving parts, if the basic efficiency, the energy required for the electric field, is good enough.
But adding minimal moving parts by having a heat pipe or just plain aluminum contact surfaces that could be disconnected could increase the cooling power per size quite a bit, and especially improve efficiency by reducing heat leaking the wrong way. Of course this is easy only as long as you're not trying to go below freezing point of water, after that there'll be a freezing problem with the moving parts...
Depends on where you are. If you're in the Internet could, then it's a fog, not a cloud;-).
Anyway, to me "cloud" is not same as the Internet, it's roughly the same as "rest of the Internet". This is an important distinction! Local site is not in the cloud. Remote site (for example another office of the same company) usually is not be in the cloud either, or it could be considered a separate cloud, even though connection to it goes through the big Internet cloud.
The totality of Internet is not dependant on the observer. But the cloud is different for every observer, since at least the computer of the observer is not part of the cloud in their own frame of reference.
Since it's known that some of the dark matter is regular baryonic matter such as MACHOs, then if MOND is the right way to go, shouldn't it be possible to determine from the galaxy rotations plus MOND, how much of the effect is due to MACHOs, and how much is due to theory being wrong?
I mean, to me it sounds a bit fishy, if there is no observable difference between effects of invisible dark matter without MOND, and MOND with just baryonic dark matter...
Just to clarify, I am quite fine with both dark matter and dark energy, I was just giving suggestions to the AC poster comparing dark matter to the aether.
Of course, abstaining from sex is an ideal solution.
No it's not, it's far from ideal. Abstaining from sex completely has a lot of side effects, including reduced pleasure in life, which can lead to higher stress levels or reduced happiness. Also it can lead to difficulties in having a healthy, stable relationship, which again can have negative social and emotional effects.
Of course if you don't want pills because you don't think they're safe, then IMHO it does not make much sense to want an IUD if doctors don't think they're safe enough for you...
Of course there can be other reasons for not wanting pills than just "safety", in which case above does not apply.
It's waste of money only if it's more expensive to buy the commercial product for EU-wide use... So I suspect it's not waste after all, but saving money.
If only you could do the equivalent of Michelson-Morley_experiment , and save everybody a lot of trouble... Now we're stuck doing these other simulations and experiments trying to find something you know will not be found.
Read a bit on Go algorithms. This one isn't using a dumb search. If it were, the Go program playing this good wouldn't be finished calculating it first move yet... No, this one must have used an extremely advanced search algorithm, very smartly removing unlikely branches of the search.
Unfortunately we're stuck with algorithmically searching for the right move until we have sufficiently large quantum computers, that they can run a go algorithm and do it all at once. This may be impossible in our current universe, due to practical limitations caused by laws of physics (just like building a space elevator on Jupiter may be impossible due to practical limitations of physically possible materials in our universe).
It's quite understandable that a business that needs some industry-spesific application and comes to the conclusion that they must pay to have it made, won't make it open source. It's kind of against traditional business sense to pay for something, and then give it away so that your competitors get access to it for free... And even the usual open source arguments of getting "community development" benefit won't fly here. It's unlikely the competitors would "give back" their modifications/fixes with GPL, if they are just using the software internally, as they probably would with a lot of "industry specific" software. And even if they're distributing it, they probably wouldn't put any effort in "giving back", they'd do it only if somebody found out and actively requested they comply with the license.
I think a yet different kind of licence is needed... It could for example require at least read-only online version control repository for anybody who compiles the software from source and uses it in any way, and also require that the internal version is compiled unpatched from the public repository, and that if some closed code is used with it, the open code must not depend on the closed code (only the other way around). Or something like that, making sure that whatever competitors do with the open software, they can't hide their improvements easily.
Also, since the mass of the earth/mbh doesn't change, all those nasty time-drag effects won't happen at the orbital distance of the iss.
Actually, I believe something like 10% of the mass of the Earth would end up being converted to energy in the accretion disk (a figure I've read for bigger black holes, for an Earth sucking one it might be less), so the mass would not stay the same.
Of course if you consider ISS at a distance of under 7000km from a radiation source that is converting 10% of the mass of Earth to energy, the change of orbit is kind of irrelevant;-)
Does it really have to be said, for the billionith time, that Slashdot is not an international Website, but one built and geared towards Americans?
Now these aren't contradictory. Slashdot may very well be built and geared towards Americans, yet still be international website.
And only way to stop that would be to start limiting access or rights from international IPs. Until then, nyah nyah, here we are, behaving like we own the place, moderating and metamoderating and submitting stories and fantasizing about taking your fantasy women.;-)
Climate Change is GOING to happen. It is not an "if". It is not a "maybe". It is not a thing of the past. It is not some automatically 'man-made' "thing" that we can stop and play with if we so feel like it.
Indeed, but it's a question of "when" and "how fast" and "how much". These are the questions that have some meaning. For some reason, so called "climate sceptics" don't like to ask these questions though...
I assume (because otherwise what you say makes no sense) you believe either that our release of carbon from stable reserves hundreds of millions of years old has no effect on things like the CO2 content of atmosphere, or alternatively you must believe that even if there's an effect on CO2, that CO2 has no effect on the climate. Well, you seem to be in minority with this belief.
Not to mention I find it kind of illogical to believe that changing things should be assumed to have no effect unless otherwise proven. But then again, being an engineer, I've seen enough small, seemingly irrelevant things being changed by people who didn't know why it was like it was, and causing... unfortunate consequences.
So coming from this background, it's awfully hard for me to just believe either that release of carbon does nothing to the carbon cycle, and it's also awfully hard for me to believe that increasing CO2 does nothing to the climate. And general scientific concensus seems to agree with my gut feeling.
IMHO the general principle in things like this is "no, stop it until you know what you're doing... just keep your damn hands off of it already, you idiot". Now with climate, keeping our hands off and stopping our massive carbon release isn't really an option, but slowing it down is still better than incresing it even more.
Now that said, you recognize that the models we use today are hopelessly broken. You're not totally lost, yet.
But your conclusion from this seems to be, keep changing things (releasing carbon) at will (which in practice means increasing rate of release, what with industrializing developing countries and increasing human population) until we have 100% proven models and simulations. Now if climate weren't a "misison critical" system, I'd be all for that kind of experimentation, let's see what happens. But for mission criticla systems, no no, you're giving me a headache just thinking about it.
You're being sarcastic about bad argument, right? I mean, you're trying to argue that venture means same as gambling by giving a dictionary entry that doesn't even contain the word "gambling" (there must be some, considering that the meanings are reasonably close). So I sure hope you're not serious, for your own sake:-)
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Give yourself structure. Make yourself a list of things you need to do every day.
Sure thing, that's a good idea! I'll just write this /. post first, and then get started on the list... Ooh, a shiny link to xkcd...!
Other things are make sure your hygiene is good.
Of course. I shower every night before going to bed, 'cos that'll keep the sheets and pillows cleaner too. Except tonight, I'm just too tired from doing stuff in the Internet, this time I'll shower in the morning... Except I guess I won't get up early enough so I have to rush out without taking the shower then.
Get exercise.
Yes! I do that every day... Except today I got stuck reading the paper and then looking related totally irrelevant stuff at wikipedia for too long, so no time any more, but tomorrow for sure!
Keeping your body in shape helps you think more clearly, and the running theme is here that providing yourself with structure and goals is the best thing you can do for yourself this side of medication.
Spot on! Today I'll just do it! But first I'll see if anybody has replied to any of my /. posts...
I swear that giving myself some structure is the only reason I was able to graduate from college on time and the only way I'll succeed in making my career go somewhere and being the husband my wife deserves.
Good for you (and I mean that). Not everybody can pull it of. Are they just slobs, or are they genetically doomed to fail in what you succeeded in, I don't know...
That's giving up hope.
What's the difference between giving up hope that a "square peg" will fit in a "round hole", and learning that it won't fit?
Besides, I think this is not directly related to intellgience. This is not about learning how to solve problems, not about how make that square peg fit into the round hole. But if you don't "learn" it won't fit, you're perhaps more likely to find a way to make it fit (if you're intelligent enough).
It's easy to imagine that whoever first learned to use fire was with this gene. He didn't learn that fire burns, fire bad, he just had to go and play with it again, and again...
now now if you ran a business you'd be a libertarian too.
Unless you live in a country where the current government is actually able to do it's job (maintaining an environment and a society where you can run your business) well enough for a business owner to not want to get rid most of it, of course...
If the Beast gets wind of this concept, they'll start shutting down Quicken, Firefox, Thunderbird....
They already have this concept, and at least I use it every time the opportunity is offered with Windows Update. Thus far, at least FF is working just fine, so apparently for the time being it's not considered malicious and to-be-removed by MS...
This sort of problem is now years past the place where it can be solved by "voting with your dollars," or hoping that exposing the problem will create bad PR and shame the company into correcting it.
To be fair, I think the problem indeed was/is solved by creating awareness and voting with dollars. Unfortunately the vote just didn't go our way...
Democracy is a bitch, but fortunately every new product is a new opprotunity for creating new awareness to get everybody to vote the "right way".
Isn't the "Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool" (or whatever it was) in Windows Update already essentially doing that?
Of course with it you have the control of not running it if you don't want... Is anybody here so paranoid that they don't?
Except that explanation is scientifically naive: evolution requires natural selection (which we stopped doing when we invented civilization), and doesn't necessarily make individuals morally better. Often the opposite.
As long as children inherit the DNA from their parents (not necessarily fully true in a society with widespread, pervasive genetic engineering of all children), and as long as different people have different reproductive success, biological evolution will work on humans at full force.
Only the selection criteria will be more complex than "likelyhood of being killed by X". Remember, it's not really about who lives, it's about who has children (that will have more children (that will have more children (that...))). I suspect a strong maternal/paternal instict is being strongly selected for these days, at least.
It sound like they have essentially developed a solid refrigerant. That has got to be far less useful than a liquid refrigerant that can me moved around to where it is needed.
I think more useful point of view is, they have developed a refridgerant that can change temperature without moving parts, by just application of electric field.
And presumably they do it quite efficiently, since otherwise this would not be news. Then again, inefficiency might be precisely the reason they don't tell any numbers...
Anyway, this particular substance is solid, but just imagine if they managed to make a liquid version... No more compressor, just passing the liquid through electric field at one point of a simple closed loop with heat sinks attached to it... Elegant. Well, pretty much like refridgerators using heat (either buring gas or resistor), except without need to produce heat on purpose.
And a step further (nothing to do with this particular material, just speculating), imagine if an electric field could force a phase change from gas to a super-critical liquid, giving both a possibility of greater heat capacity via phase change, and a possibility of no-moving-parts pump.
I'm not so sure most of the heat would go the right way, I think it would be fifty-fifty-deal mostly. So a method like that could something like halve (or worse than halve, since there are 3 heat exchange interfaces in your system) the theoretical efficiency, since so much heat would be leaking back. It might still be worthwhile (and more efficient than peltier) because there are no moving parts, if the basic efficiency, the energy required for the electric field, is good enough.
But adding minimal moving parts by having a heat pipe or just plain aluminum contact surfaces that could be disconnected could increase the cooling power per size quite a bit, and especially improve efficiency by reducing heat leaking the wrong way. Of course this is easy only as long as you're not trying to go below freezing point of water, after that there'll be a freezing problem with the moving parts...
Depends on where you are. If you're in the Internet could, then it's a fog, not a cloud ;-).
Anyway, to me "cloud" is not same as the Internet, it's roughly the same as "rest of the Internet". This is an important distinction! Local site is not in the cloud. Remote site (for example another office of the same company) usually is not be in the cloud either, or it could be considered a separate cloud, even though connection to it goes through the big Internet cloud.
The totality of Internet is not dependant on the observer. But the cloud is different for every observer, since at least the computer of the observer is not part of the cloud in their own frame of reference.
These "very specific predictions" are manufactured by scientists trying to explain the unexplainable
And how is that different from, say, General Relativity?
Since it's known that some of the dark matter is regular baryonic matter such as MACHOs, then if MOND is the right way to go, shouldn't it be possible to determine from the galaxy rotations plus MOND, how much of the effect is due to MACHOs, and how much is due to theory being wrong?
I mean, to me it sounds a bit fishy, if there is no observable difference between effects of invisible dark matter without MOND, and MOND with just baryonic dark matter...
Just to clarify, I am quite fine with both dark matter and dark energy, I was just giving suggestions to the AC poster comparing dark matter to the aether.
Of course, abstaining from sex is an ideal solution.
No it's not, it's far from ideal. Abstaining from sex completely has a lot of side effects, including reduced pleasure in life, which can lead to higher stress levels or reduced happiness. Also it can lead to difficulties in having a healthy, stable relationship, which again can have negative social and emotional effects.
Of course if you don't want pills because you don't think they're safe, then IMHO it does not make much sense to want an IUD if doctors don't think they're safe enough for you...
Of course there can be other reasons for not wanting pills than just "safety", in which case above does not apply.
It's waste of money only if it's more expensive to buy the commercial product for EU-wide use... So I suspect it's not waste after all, but saving money.
If only you could do the equivalent of Michelson-Morley_experiment , and save everybody a lot of trouble... Now we're stuck doing these other simulations and experiments trying to find something you know will not be found.
Read a bit on Go algorithms. This one isn't using a dumb search. If it were, the Go program playing this good wouldn't be finished calculating it first move yet... No, this one must have used an extremely advanced search algorithm, very smartly removing unlikely branches of the search.
Unfortunately we're stuck with algorithmically searching for the right move until we have sufficiently large quantum computers, that they can run a go algorithm and do it all at once. This may be impossible in our current universe, due to practical limitations caused by laws of physics (just like building a space elevator on Jupiter may be impossible due to practical limitations of physically possible materials in our universe).
It's quite understandable that a business that needs some industry-spesific application and comes to the conclusion that they must pay to have it made, won't make it open source. It's kind of against traditional business sense to pay for something, and then give it away so that your competitors get access to it for free... And even the usual open source arguments of getting "community development" benefit won't fly here. It's unlikely the competitors would "give back" their modifications/fixes with GPL, if they are just using the software internally, as they probably would with a lot of "industry specific" software. And even if they're distributing it, they probably wouldn't put any effort in "giving back", they'd do it only if somebody found out and actively requested they comply with the license.
I think a yet different kind of licence is needed... It could for example require at least read-only online version control repository for anybody who compiles the software from source and uses it in any way, and also require that the internal version is compiled unpatched from the public repository, and that if some closed code is used with it, the open code must not depend on the closed code (only the other way around). Or something like that, making sure that whatever competitors do with the open software, they can't hide their improvements easily.
What the heck was this guy thinking?
I don't know that, but I bet we both know what he was thinking with...
Also, since the mass of the earth/mbh doesn't change, all those nasty time-drag effects won't happen at the orbital distance of the iss.
Actually, I believe something like 10% of the mass of the Earth would end up being converted to energy in the accretion disk (a figure I've read for bigger black holes, for an Earth sucking one it might be less), so the mass would not stay the same.
Of course if you consider ISS at a distance of under 7000km from a radiation source that is converting 10% of the mass of Earth to energy, the change of orbit is kind of irrelevant ;-)
Does it really have to be said, for the billionith time, that Slashdot is not an international Website, but one built and geared towards Americans?
Now these aren't contradictory. Slashdot may very well be built and geared towards Americans, yet still be international website.
And only way to stop that would be to start limiting access or rights from international IPs. Until then, nyah nyah, here we are, behaving like we own the place, moderating and metamoderating and submitting stories and fantasizing about taking your fantasy women. ;-)
Climate Change is GOING to happen. It is not an "if". It is not a "maybe". It is not a thing of the past. It is not some automatically 'man-made' "thing" that we can stop and play with if we so feel like it.
Indeed, but it's a question of "when" and "how fast" and "how much". These are the questions that have some meaning. For some reason, so called "climate sceptics" don't like to ask these questions though...
I assume (because otherwise what you say makes no sense) you believe either that our release of carbon from stable reserves hundreds of millions of years old has no effect on things like the CO2 content of atmosphere, or alternatively you must believe that even if there's an effect on CO2, that CO2 has no effect on the climate. Well, you seem to be in minority with this belief.
Not to mention I find it kind of illogical to believe that changing things should be assumed to have no effect unless otherwise proven. But then again, being an engineer, I've seen enough small, seemingly irrelevant things being changed by people who didn't know why it was like it was, and causing... unfortunate consequences.
So coming from this background, it's awfully hard for me to just believe either that release of carbon does nothing to the carbon cycle, and it's also awfully hard for me to believe that increasing CO2 does nothing to the climate. And general scientific concensus seems to agree with my gut feeling.
IMHO the general principle in things like this is "no, stop it until you know what you're doing... just keep your damn hands off of it already, you idiot". Now with climate, keeping our hands off and stopping our massive carbon release isn't really an option, but slowing it down is still better than incresing it even more.
Now that said, you recognize that the models we use today are hopelessly broken. You're not totally lost, yet.
But your conclusion from this seems to be, keep changing things (releasing carbon) at will (which in practice means increasing rate of release, what with industrializing developing countries and increasing human population) until we have 100% proven models and simulations. Now if climate weren't a "misison critical" system, I'd be all for that kind of experimentation, let's see what happens. But for mission criticla systems, no no, you're giving me a headache just thinking about it.
You're being sarcastic about bad argument, right? I mean, you're trying to argue that venture means same as gambling by giving a dictionary entry that doesn't even contain the word "gambling" (there must be some, considering that the meanings are reasonably close). So I sure hope you're not serious, for your own sake :-)
Then I believe something like these proposed Apophis missions might be what you are after?
On that page there is also a detailed description of Apophis orbit, both as pure numbers and as a layman explanation.
Sure it is rocket science, but really, it's just undergrad student level of rocket science...