It seems to me that this test predicts mortality primarily because heart disease is currently the #1 cause of death in America. So if you measure cardiovascular health, statistically you're also going to be successful in predicting mortality.
But my excellent heart health doesn't seem likely to stop me from dying of cancer or ALS or any of those other things. All it says is that heart disease won't kill me early. And maybe that, since the others develop more slowly, I'll live a few years longer before dying in some other way.
"Boys don't count?" What a crock. Of course boys count. So do African-Americans, Asians, Latinos, women, autism-spectrum people, and pretty much every other identifiable subgroup you can think of. Here's a clue: no subgroup has more innate ability for CS than any other. Unless your chosen subgroup is "people who have innate ability for CS."
Every time the gender imbalance in CS comes up on Slashdot, we see the same phenomenon: a huge phalanx of men jumps out and tries to defend their ignorant biases. Actually, it's kind of generous of you folks: by loudly proclaiming your prejudices, you make it easy for savvy employers to avoid you. Because frankly, one hugely skilled guy who pisses off ten talented women just isn't worth having around.
In the interest of full disclosure, I'm one of the two people (both men, BTW) who taught the first Harvey Mudd course for students with experience. (See TFA if that isn't meaningful to you.) We weren't the first to figure it out (that credit goes to CMU) but we were the first to do it in a compelling intro course (I don't get credit for that either--write me privately if you're dying for details of how I fell into it). But I'm currently the only one who teaches that course to experienced students. The whole idea was originally developed by two amazing men (not me) and one brilliant woman (not Maria Klawe, BTW; she'll tell you that herself because she wasn't even at Mudd at the time). So let's not pretend that anti-male bias was a factor.
But what has been found based on *science* (oh, that) is that some groups of people, women included, are easily intimidated by show-offs. Which, if you haven't caught on, includes most of the noisiest Slashdot crowd. By and large, these are people who are fascinated with computers and don't have the social skills to see that some of their questions and opinions are irrelevant to whatever discussion is going at the moment. So they blurt out their questions, and the intimidated ones think (this really happens) "Maybe if I don't know the multiply cycle times of the latest Intel chip then I can't do CS." And then we lose those people even though they're incredibly gifted. (BTW, this example was taken from a class this week--and the person who announced multiply cycle times was wrong. Which is often the case in these situations, but they still intimidate others because they make their statements with such confidence. But I politely pointed out that the information was irrelevant, giving the rest of the students a chance to concentrate on the material that actually matters. I can only hope that the message gets across.)
The data is incontrovertible. Gently shutting down the show-offs (most of whom aren't even trying to show off; they're just eager and socially inept) doesn't discourage them in the least. But it keeps them from discouraging others. The result is more total people majoring in CS, and a far wider variety of ideas. All benefit, no loss.
If you feel threatened by that, I suggest that maybe *you're* the intimidated one. And I encourage you to try to develop your self-confidence by taking pride in your own strengths, rather than dissing complete strangers.
Back in the 70's when Sony introduced the Walkman in Japan, it flopped because nobody wanted to be seen with a cassette player on their belt and dorky headphones on their ears.
So Sony hired a bunch of professional models to parade around the Tokyo business district wearing Walkmans. ("Walkmen"?) Pretty soon the public associated headphones with sexy people, and the rest is history.
Google should do the same. Manipulating popular taste is possible.
I use BT to distribute large files from the SNIA IOTTA Trace Repository (http://iotta.snia.org/). Although there are typically no swarms, BT is still useful for a number of reasons, including in particular the ability to manage large collections of related files and the ability to deal with intermittent connections.
Unfortunately, many of my users work at sites that block BT, forcing them to revert to a horrible HTTP option.
And no, rsync isn't a solution for our situation.
As to what is needed, the primary thing is better tracker and seeder daemons. I use opentracker, which is OK but hardly perfect. I seed with deluge because it's one of the few seeders that can be run as a daemon (almost all BT clients expect you to dedicate a GUI window to them or they stop running--imagine what running a Web service would be like if you had to have a GUI for every instance of Apache).
> Rather, they are saying, "I don't want my taxes to pay for other people to read this trash."
Not quite. In fact, not at all. What they are saying (and you seem to be supporting) is "Even though my tax money has already been spent, and even though other people contributed THEIR tax money to help buy this book, and even though those people might think the money was well-spent, I want to remove this book from the shelves so that it will be more difficult--or better, impossible--for anyone to read this book that I personally dislike, despite the fact that there is no financial benefit to doing so." It's all about suppressing ideas, and the people who make the complaints make that position quite clear.
There are mechanisms (e.g., elections) for changing future spending priorities. After-the-fact censorship isn't one of them.
Your ignorance of the issues is glaring and appalling. If the people were really objecting to the choices made by librarians, they would be clamoring for particular purchases as well as objecting to the books that were currently on the shelves. That's not the case. Nor are the citizens asking for the librarian to be replaced or instructed in their tastes. They are quite simply saying, "I don't think anybody in my school/town should be allowed to read this particular book." That's a hugely different question.
You seriously misunderstand. Most of these libraries are government-operated, either public libraries or schools. While it's true that SOME of the libraries rightfully resisted, the ALA's primary point is to illustrate the pressure that is being put on these libraries. And in many cases, the books were actually removed (note that the second-most-frequent challengers were administrators). Sometimes, lawsuits got them back, sometimes not. So yes, it's censorship.
Nor is your claim that "All these materials are easily available elsewhere" supported by the facts. In many cases, the library facing the challenge is the only library in a small town that doesn't have a bookstore, and often the readers can't afford to buy their own books. So your argument really boils down to "If you're poor, you don't get to read what you want."
Obviously, the TSA is slipping, because there are several threats they missed in the current warning. For example, I heard that the bad guys are planning to kidnap the President, replace him with a robot, and hide a nuke inside.
If that doesn't work, they're going to hijack a rocket, land on an asteroid, and divert it to crash into New York City.
Expect porno scanners for astronauts to be announced in the next few days.
The reason terrorism is relevant is because it is regularly used as justification for loosening wiretap restrictions. If the wiretaps aren't actually being used for terrorism, the justification is bogus.
Your claim about the rise in wiretaps being due to the rise in electronic communication is completely wrong; in case you haven't noticed the telephone is over 100 years old and has been the normal mode of communication for many decades. If mobiles were the cause of the increase, you'd expect a very high number of "roving" wiretaps, but the report lists only a tiny number. Likewise, online accounts are a poor explanation since wiretap orders can cover multiple technologies.
But your worst "reasoning" is in your postscript, where you try to imply that two year-to-year decreases prove there is no upward trend. A glance at the graphe is sufficient to nuke that allegation; it's obvious that there is noise in the data but the trend is upward (and although it's too early to be sure, there seems to be an explosion going on since Obama took office).
It's even worse than you think. It's midnight right now in California, and the number of calls on the map is tiny. And since you can use Google Maps to zoom in, I had no trouble learning that there was an onSIP customer at the headquarters of the Los Angeles Police Department.
Just think of the fun: you can zoom in on somebody's house and tell that they're awake...
I had this same issue (different only in minor details) a few months ago. The best I found was Red Pocket (http://www.redpocketmobile.com). They operate on AT&T's network, so coverage is good. They sell prepaid service at a reasonable price.
Cons: you have to get the SIM card ahead of time, and overseas shipping is slow, so if you're leaving soon that's a problem. When I got to the US, only voice worked, and it was impossible to activate data using Firefox & NoScript. IIRC, I eventually had to bring up a VM with Internet Explorer to get data to go. But once I had leapt through the hoops, it was fine.
Has anybody actually read the complaint? IANAL by a long shot, but I would have no trouble whatsoever writing a better complaint. And this guy seems to have a law degree!
The suit starts with a rambling recitation of accusations, none of which is even properly stated as an allegation, none of which is supported, and many of which are completely irrelevant to the alleged harm. Then it makes two complaints: assault and negligence. The assault charge is unsupported on its face, since it alleges damage without specifying what damage occurred. The negligence is apparently based on the same unsupported claim of damage.
So the suit will be thrown out instantly for failure to state an actionable claim. But I doubt that it'll make the news at that point.
Sorry, not impressed. 99% of long takes are just directors showing off. They drive me nuts, because in the vain attempt to demonstrate skill, the director winds up calling attention to himself and either robbing the audience of reaction shots, or swinging the camera wildly as if an earthquake had hit the set. Spare me the artsy "look at me, I'm so talented and trendy" crap and give me a movie that actually tells a story in the best way possible instead of trying to wow the brainless "in" crowd.
As someone who has been trying for some time to offer BitTorrent as a download option, I think a big part of the problem is that the server software is lousy. Many of the trackers out there are slow, flaky, fragile, and horribly documented. You also need a seeder, and again the server-side seeder software is consistently poor.
If you could go to bittorrent.org, download a couple of programs, and set up bittorrent distribution in an hour or two, that would make a huge difference in adoption rates. As it is, you have to REALLY want to set up a site because of the crappy distributions you have to wade through.
> In general, if you think you know the material better than Khan, why don't you teach your own kid?
I do. I teach for a living, and I supplement my kid's schoolwork with lots of extra lessons. And yes, she knows what "perpendicular" means.
What I object to is that Khan obviously didn't bother to prepare before he turned on the camera, and didn't bother to rewind and try again when he got himself into trouble because of his lack of preparation. That's an amazingly amateurish stunt. But even more, I object to the fact that Bill Gates is lionizing this guy. At best, he's merely OK. There are thousands of better teachers out there. And the TRULY best are making outstanding videos that actually teach math well. Of course, most of those cost money, and Khan's are free. But I think that Gates can probably afford the good ones. Even better, he could easily subsidize their production so that everybody could see them for free, instead of having to suffer through Khan's second-rate stuff.
I'm looking for a solution to let my daughter study geometry at a distance, so Khan Academy sounded intriguing. I watched about half of the first video before puking.
It's not just that the videos are non-interactive lectures. It's not that they're so unpolished, full of hemming and hawing. It's that this guy can't even get his facts right. He tries to define "perpendicular," stumbles ("I wanted to say that they're perpendicular"), and eventually defines them as a horizontal line intersecting a vertical one. Um, yeah.
I suppose the stuff might be useful as a review. But it's diastrous as a substitute for a real--and competent--teacher.
The key is that you use your favorite viewer to look at photos, and your favorite editor to edit the embedded EXIF comment information. All the data is stored inside the photos themselves. Simple tools like exiftool can then extract the data and put it into a database or wherever you want. Editor abbreviations can make tagging quick and easy; I even have simple "next photo" commands in my editor (emacs) so I don't have to move my cursor between windows.
I started feeling funny one day about 18 months ago. Long story short, I typed "heart attack symptoms" into Google; what I found led me to call 911 immediately.
They tell me that I didn't have the actual heart attack (which they called "massive") until I was already in the ER. Google might not have saved my life, but it certainly meant that there was very little permanent damage.
Wow, I can't believe the number of people pontificating who have absolutely no clue what they're talking about.
Oh, wait. This is Slashdot.
Let's get some things straight. "Perfect" pitch (I prefer the term "absolute pitch") has nothing to do with the Western scale or equal temperament. It refers to the ability to recognize a given audio frequency as a unique individual to within a small tolerance, and possibly to be able to reproduce it without any external reference.
All of us can tell pitches apart. If I tell you I'm going to play either the highest or the lowest note on the piano, and then do so, you will reliably be able to tell me which I chose. Most people can do better than that, such as distinguishing high, middle, and low; a few can nail it to within a particular octave or even a few notes. Even fewer (including me) can get it down to the particular note, and a very few can even tell 440 Hz from 441 (I know a person who has this level of sensitivity). We usually use the term "perfect pitch" to talk about people who can at least get it down to the note in a 12-note octave.
Some individuals have a stronger sense than others. My own sense isn't bothered by 440 vs. 442, but quarter tones are clearly audible. On the other hand, if you very gradually increase or decrease the frequency, you can throw me off by as much as a half step. I'm also sensitive to the timbre of a note: I'm much more likely to be accurate with a piano note than a coloratura soprano.
Absolute pitch isn't the ability to give a name to a frequency (though most musicians with absolute pitch can do so). It's not the ability to match somebody else's note (though that's an essential talent for a musician).
As for orchestra tuning, professional musicians would laugh at the idea of there being an cast-in-stone international standard. A-440 is a nominal standard, but lots of orchestras tune a few Hertz sharp because it makes the music sound brighter. (BTW, as somebody else pointed out, the reference comes from the oboe, not the violin. The reason is that an oboe's tuning is controlled by how the reed is cut, so it's independent of things like weather and how the instrument was assembled. A violin often won't stay stable for even five minutes.) Period orchestras often tune below 440. And who knows what damage recording engineers do after the fact? The good ones wouldn't dare, but there are always the clueless ones.
Regarding issues of performing in an "off" situation, it depends on the person's sensitivity. As I said, I'm not bothered by a Hz or two in either direction. If I'm singing and the ensemble drifts, I usually don't notice until it's gotten fairly far off. At that point I just have to convince my brain that the pitch standard has shifted. If the conductor decides to transpose the piece up or down by a large amount (I've had conductors change our starting note by as much as a major third), I have to sight-transpose the music to compensate. The first time that happened, it was horrible, but it was great training and now I can do it without difficulty. But that's only incidental to the issue of absolute pitch.
Other then dealing with camel case, there's no need to stand on your head in Perl; ispell can already spell-check software by using the "external deformatter" feature. It even comes with sample deformatters that handle C, C++ (in two ways), and sh/bash. In fact, one of the reasons I added the capability for external deformatters was to be able to spell-check program comments.
To deal with camel case, one might change Ed's Perl script so that instead of converting "camelCase" to "camel Case" and downcasing the result, you instead converted it to something reversible like "camel___Case". Write that to a temp file, ispell it with the appropriate external deformatter, and convert it back to the original form.
That said, when I tested the C deformatter on my own code (I think it was the ispell source), the results quickly convinced me to give up. Look through your code again, and note all the variable names that contain unusual abbreviations ("ch", "cp", "ptr", etc.). Note the line comments that have been abbreviated to make them fit. Note the application-specific terminology in the comments, and the huge list of odd library function names. The first time through, you're going to get very tired of adding all those things to your personal dictionary, even if you remember to make a dictionary specific to the application.
Yes, there are ways to mitigate the problem, such as providing a predefined dictionary for popular libraries (but have you done ls/usr/lib | wc lately?). But even that's a problem, because a lot of libraries can have function names that will hide legitimate misspellings.
I'm not saying that it's an impossible wish. But it's nontrivial to get it right.
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned "Rite of Passage" by Alexei Panshin. It's a great story for any preteen, but especially girls. Heck, it's a good read for adults, too.
This guy is a master at using statistics to lie. For example, he cites an alarming rise in violent deaths "in and around" schools: 17, 16, 48 in three successive years.
A quick Google search leads us to the widely reported data: this is actually "school-related deaths", and it includes suicides. First problem. But the second and biggest problem, highlighted prominently in "How to Lie with Statistics", is what happened in the twoyears before those three: 33 and 31 deaths, respectively.
So instead of the alarming trend of 17, 16, 48, we have the highly varying trend of 33, 31, 17, 16, 49 (the Web site I'm quoting gives a different number). That last number is certainly worrisome, but hardly proof by itself. Especially when you look at this year's count of 37. So what we have is a dip and a blip, not a trend. Of course, Thompson will probably take credit for the latest drop.
...and of course there's the question of whether those school-related deaths were related to video games at all. But it wouldn't suit Thompson's agenda to investigate that possibility.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems to me that this test predicts mortality primarily because heart disease is currently the #1 cause of death in America. So if you measure cardiovascular health, statistically you're also going to be successful in predicting mortality. But my excellent heart health doesn't seem likely to stop me from dying of cancer or ALS or any of those other things. All it says is that heart disease won't kill me early. And maybe that, since the others develop more slowly, I'll live a few years longer before dying in some other way.
"Boys don't count?" What a crock. Of course boys count. So do African-Americans, Asians, Latinos, women, autism-spectrum people, and pretty much every other identifiable subgroup you can think of. Here's a clue: no subgroup has more innate ability for CS than any other. Unless your chosen subgroup is "people who have innate ability for CS."
Every time the gender imbalance in CS comes up on Slashdot, we see the same phenomenon: a huge phalanx of men jumps out and tries to defend their ignorant biases. Actually, it's kind of generous of you folks: by loudly proclaiming your prejudices, you make it easy for savvy employers to avoid you. Because frankly, one hugely skilled guy who pisses off ten talented women just isn't worth having around.
In the interest of full disclosure, I'm one of the two people (both men, BTW) who taught the first Harvey Mudd course for students with experience. (See TFA if that isn't meaningful to you.) We weren't the first to figure it out (that credit goes to CMU) but we were the first to do it in a compelling intro course (I don't get credit for that either--write me privately if you're dying for details of how I fell into it). But I'm currently the only one who teaches that course to experienced students. The whole idea was originally developed by two amazing men (not me) and one brilliant woman (not Maria Klawe, BTW; she'll tell you that herself because she wasn't even at Mudd at the time). So let's not pretend that anti-male bias was a factor.
But what has been found based on *science* (oh, that) is that some groups of people, women included, are easily intimidated by show-offs. Which, if you haven't caught on, includes most of the noisiest Slashdot crowd. By and large, these are people who are fascinated with computers and don't have the social skills to see that some of their questions and opinions are irrelevant to whatever discussion is going at the moment. So they blurt out their questions, and the intimidated ones think (this really happens) "Maybe if I don't know the multiply cycle times of the latest Intel chip then I can't do CS." And then we lose those people even though they're incredibly gifted. (BTW, this example was taken from a class this week--and the person who announced multiply cycle times was wrong. Which is often the case in these situations, but they still intimidate others because they make their statements with such confidence. But I politely pointed out that the information was irrelevant, giving the rest of the students a chance to concentrate on the material that actually matters. I can only hope that the message gets across.)
The data is incontrovertible. Gently shutting down the show-offs (most of whom aren't even trying to show off; they're just eager and socially inept) doesn't discourage them in the least. But it keeps them from discouraging others. The result is more total people majoring in CS, and a far wider variety of ideas. All benefit, no loss.
If you feel threatened by that, I suggest that maybe *you're* the intimidated one. And I encourage you to try to develop your self-confidence by taking pride in your own strengths, rather than dissing complete strangers.
Google should do the same. Manipulating popular taste is possible.
Unfortunately, many of my users work at sites that block BT, forcing them to revert to a horrible HTTP option.
And no, rsync isn't a solution for our situation.
As to what is needed, the primary thing is better tracker and seeder daemons. I use opentracker, which is OK but hardly perfect. I seed with deluge because it's one of the few seeders that can be run as a daemon (almost all BT clients expect you to dedicate a GUI window to them or they stop running--imagine what running a Web service would be like if you had to have a GUI for every instance of Apache).
> Rather, they are saying, "I don't want my taxes to pay for other people to read this trash."
Not quite. In fact, not at all. What they are saying (and you seem to be supporting) is "Even though my tax money has already been spent, and even though other people contributed THEIR tax money to help buy this book, and even though those people might think the money was well-spent, I want to remove this book from the shelves so that it will be more difficult--or better, impossible--for anyone to read this book that I personally dislike, despite the fact that there is no financial benefit to doing so." It's all about suppressing ideas, and the people who make the complaints make that position quite clear.
There are mechanisms (e.g., elections) for changing future spending priorities. After-the-fact censorship isn't one of them.
Your ignorance of the issues is glaring and appalling.
If the people were really objecting to the choices made by librarians, they would be clamoring for particular purchases as well as objecting to the books that were currently on the shelves. That's not the case. Nor are the citizens asking for the librarian to be replaced or instructed in their tastes. They are quite simply saying, "I don't think anybody in my school/town should be allowed to read this particular book." That's a hugely different question.
You seriously misunderstand. Most of these libraries are government-operated, either public libraries or schools. While it's true that SOME of the libraries rightfully resisted, the ALA's primary point is to illustrate the pressure that is being put on these libraries. And in many cases, the books were actually removed (note that the second-most-frequent challengers were administrators). Sometimes, lawsuits got them back, sometimes not. So yes, it's censorship.
Nor is your claim that "All these materials are easily available elsewhere" supported by the facts. In many cases, the library facing the challenge is the only library in a small town that doesn't have a bookstore, and often the readers can't afford to buy their own books. So your argument really boils down to "If you're poor, you don't get to read what you want."
At least your dig at Twilight gets humor points.
Clearly, the Mozilla folks are clueles. But there's hope: they should just ask Netflix for business advice, and then all will be well.
Obviously, the TSA is slipping, because there are several threats they missed in the current warning. For example, I heard that the bad guys are planning to kidnap the President, replace him with a robot, and hide a nuke inside. If that doesn't work, they're going to hijack a rocket, land on an asteroid, and divert it to crash into New York City. Expect porno scanners for astronauts to be announced in the next few days.
The reason terrorism is relevant is because it is regularly used as justification for loosening wiretap restrictions. If the wiretaps aren't actually being used for terrorism, the justification is bogus. Your claim about the rise in wiretaps being due to the rise in electronic communication is completely wrong; in case you haven't noticed the telephone is over 100 years old and has been the normal mode of communication for many decades. If mobiles were the cause of the increase, you'd expect a very high number of "roving" wiretaps, but the report lists only a tiny number. Likewise, online accounts are a poor explanation since wiretap orders can cover multiple technologies. But your worst "reasoning" is in your postscript, where you try to imply that two year-to-year decreases prove there is no upward trend. A glance at the graphe is sufficient to nuke that allegation; it's obvious that there is noise in the data but the trend is upward (and although it's too early to be sure, there seems to be an explosion going on since Obama took office).
It's even worse than you think. It's midnight right now in California, and the number of calls on the map is tiny. And since you can use Google Maps to zoom in, I had no trouble learning that there was an onSIP customer at the headquarters of the Los Angeles Police Department. Just think of the fun: you can zoom in on somebody's house and tell that they're awake...
I had this same issue (different only in minor details) a few months ago. The best I found was Red Pocket (http://www.redpocketmobile.com). They operate on AT&T's network, so coverage is good. They sell prepaid service at a reasonable price. Cons: you have to get the SIM card ahead of time, and overseas shipping is slow, so if you're leaving soon that's a problem. When I got to the US, only voice worked, and it was impossible to activate data using Firefox & NoScript. IIRC, I eventually had to bring up a VM with Internet Explorer to get data to go. But once I had leapt through the hoops, it was fine.
Funny how it's the right wing that always decries the "nanny state" while constantly trying to control behavior...
Has anybody actually read the complaint? IANAL by a long shot, but I would have no trouble whatsoever writing a better complaint. And this guy seems to have a law degree!
The suit starts with a rambling recitation of accusations, none of which is even properly stated as an allegation, none of which is supported, and many of which are completely irrelevant to the alleged harm. Then it makes two complaints: assault and negligence. The assault charge is unsupported on its face, since it alleges damage without specifying what damage occurred. The negligence is apparently based on the same unsupported claim of damage.
So the suit will be thrown out instantly for failure to state an actionable claim. But I doubt that it'll make the news at that point.
Sorry, not impressed. 99% of long takes are just directors showing off. They drive me nuts, because in the vain attempt to demonstrate skill, the director winds up calling attention to himself and either robbing the audience of reaction shots, or swinging the camera wildly as if an earthquake had hit the set. Spare me the artsy "look at me, I'm so talented and trendy" crap and give me a movie that actually tells a story in the best way possible instead of trying to wow the brainless "in" crowd.
As someone who has been trying for some time to offer BitTorrent as a download option, I think a big part of the problem is that the server software is lousy. Many of the trackers out there are slow, flaky, fragile, and horribly documented. You also need a seeder, and again the server-side seeder software is consistently poor.
If you could go to bittorrent.org, download a couple of programs, and set up bittorrent distribution in an hour or two, that would make a huge difference in adoption rates. As it is, you have to REALLY want to set up a site because of the crappy distributions you have to wade through.
> In general, if you think you know the material better than Khan, why don't you teach your own kid?
I do. I teach for a living, and I supplement my kid's schoolwork with lots of extra lessons. And yes, she knows what "perpendicular" means.
What I object to is that Khan obviously didn't bother to prepare before he turned on the camera, and didn't bother to rewind and try again when he got himself into trouble because of his lack of preparation. That's an amazingly amateurish stunt. But even more, I object to the fact that Bill Gates is lionizing this guy. At best, he's merely OK. There are thousands of better teachers out there. And the TRULY best are making outstanding videos that actually teach math well. Of course, most of those cost money, and Khan's are free. But I think that Gates can probably afford the good ones. Even better, he could easily subsidize their production so that everybody could see them for free, instead of having to suffer through Khan's second-rate stuff.
I stand by what I said.
I'm looking for a solution to let my daughter study geometry at a distance, so Khan Academy sounded intriguing. I watched about half of the first video before puking.
It's not just that the videos are non-interactive lectures. It's not that they're so unpolished, full of hemming and hawing. It's that this guy can't even get his facts right. He tries to define "perpendicular," stumbles ("I wanted to say that they're perpendicular"), and eventually defines them as a horizontal line intersecting a vertical one. Um, yeah.
I suppose the stuff might be useful as a review. But it's diastrous as a substitute for a real--and competent--teacher.
http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~geoff/digicam/camcomment
The key is that you use your favorite viewer to look at photos, and your favorite editor to edit the embedded EXIF comment information. All the data is stored inside the photos themselves. Simple tools like exiftool can then extract the data and put it into a database or wherever you want. Editor abbreviations can make tagging quick and easy; I even have simple "next photo" commands in my editor (emacs) so I don't have to move my cursor between windows.
Me too.
I started feeling funny one day about 18 months ago. Long story short, I typed "heart attack symptoms" into Google; what I found led me to call 911 immediately.
They tell me that I didn't have the actual heart attack (which they called "massive") until I was already in the ER. Google might not have saved my life, but it certainly meant that there was very little permanent damage.
Oh, wait. This is Slashdot.
Let's get some things straight. "Perfect" pitch (I prefer the term "absolute pitch") has nothing to do with the Western scale or equal temperament. It refers to the ability to recognize a given audio frequency as a unique individual to within a small tolerance, and possibly to be able to reproduce it without any external reference.
All of us can tell pitches apart. If I tell you I'm going to play either the highest or the lowest note on the piano, and then do so, you will reliably be able to tell me which I chose. Most people can do better than that, such as distinguishing high, middle, and low; a few can nail it to within a particular octave or even a few notes. Even fewer (including me) can get it down to the particular note, and a very few can even tell 440 Hz from 441 (I know a person who has this level of sensitivity). We usually use the term "perfect pitch" to talk about people who can at least get it down to the note in a 12-note octave.
Some individuals have a stronger sense than others. My own sense isn't bothered by 440 vs. 442, but quarter tones are clearly audible. On the other hand, if you very gradually increase or decrease the frequency, you can throw me off by as much as a half step. I'm also sensitive to the timbre of a note: I'm much more likely to be accurate with a piano note than a coloratura soprano.
Absolute pitch isn't the ability to give a name to a frequency (though most musicians with absolute pitch can do so). It's not the ability to match somebody else's note (though that's an essential talent for a musician).
As for orchestra tuning, professional musicians would laugh at the idea of there being an cast-in-stone international standard. A-440 is a nominal standard, but lots of orchestras tune a few Hertz sharp because it makes the music sound brighter. (BTW, as somebody else pointed out, the reference comes from the oboe, not the violin. The reason is that an oboe's tuning is controlled by how the reed is cut, so it's independent of things like weather and how the instrument was assembled. A violin often won't stay stable for even five minutes.) Period orchestras often tune below 440. And who knows what damage recording engineers do after the fact? The good ones wouldn't dare, but there are always the clueless ones.
Regarding issues of performing in an "off" situation, it depends on the person's sensitivity. As I said, I'm not bothered by a Hz or two in either direction. If I'm singing and the ensemble drifts, I usually don't notice until it's gotten fairly far off. At that point I just have to convince my brain that the pitch standard has shifted. If the conductor decides to transpose the piece up or down by a large amount (I've had conductors change our starting note by as much as a major third), I have to sight-transpose the music to compensate. The first time that happened, it was horrible, but it was great training and now I can do it without difficulty. But that's only incidental to the issue of absolute pitch.
Other then dealing with camel case, there's no need to stand on your head in Perl; ispell can already spell-check software by using the "external deformatter" feature. It even comes with sample deformatters that handle C, C++ (in two ways), and sh/bash. In fact, one of the reasons I added the capability for external deformatters was to be able to spell-check program comments. To deal with camel case, one might change Ed's Perl script so that instead of converting "camelCase" to "camel Case" and downcasing the result, you instead converted it to something reversible like "camel___Case". Write that to a temp file, ispell it with the appropriate external deformatter, and convert it back to the original form. That said, when I tested the C deformatter on my own code (I think it was the ispell source), the results quickly convinced me to give up. Look through your code again, and note all the variable names that contain unusual abbreviations ("ch", "cp", "ptr", etc.). Note the line comments that have been abbreviated to make them fit. Note the application-specific terminology in the comments, and the huge list of odd library function names. The first time through, you're going to get very tired of adding all those things to your personal dictionary, even if you remember to make a dictionary specific to the application. Yes, there are ways to mitigate the problem, such as providing a predefined dictionary for popular libraries (but have you done ls /usr/lib | wc lately?). But even that's a problem, because a lot of libraries can have function names that will hide legitimate misspellings.
I'm not saying that it's an impossible wish. But it's nontrivial to get it right.
The "large" ispell dictionary has a lot of biological and medical terms. It might serve as a good starting point.
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned "Rite of Passage" by Alexei Panshin. It's a great story for any preteen, but especially girls. Heck, it's a good read for adults, too.
A quick Google search leads us to the widely reported data: this is actually "school-related deaths", and it includes suicides. First problem. But the second and biggest problem, highlighted prominently in "How to Lie with Statistics", is what happened in the two years before those three: 33 and 31 deaths, respectively.
So instead of the alarming trend of 17, 16, 48, we have the highly varying trend of 33, 31, 17, 16, 49 (the Web site I'm quoting gives a different number). That last number is certainly worrisome, but hardly proof by itself. Especially when you look at this year's count of 37. So what we have is a dip and a blip, not a trend. Of course, Thompson will probably take credit for the latest drop.