Monkeys and middle-schoolers
on
The Primate Police
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
My wife teaches at a small middle school. For years she was complaining about this one class. Far more than other classes at this school, this one was torn apart by clicquishness, mean gossip, social scheming, climbing, backstabbing, deliberate exclusion, etc. -- all the sins for which middle school is notorious. She often said that the problem was that there were no clearly dominant figures in the class. If the dominant figures are nice, then the class tends to be nice. If they are miserable, the class tends to be miserable. But when they were absent, it caused anxiety and uncertainty that led to a loss of minimal standards of social behavior.
*sigh* So we're monkeys. At least we don't throw excrement at each other. Mostly.
Watch a little kid running down a hump-shaped hill and managing to catch a slowing, banking frisbee that's drifting in an accelerating gust of wind and you'll know what I mean. Hell, my dogs can do calculus, even when the birds they're after are using anti-calculus to try to defeat them."
I've always thought that was silly. If your kid is doing calculus to end up where the Frisbee does, think how much calculus the Frisbee must be doing! Plus the Frisbee is always right!
As alluded to in the post, Cage's estate actually sued someone named Batt for violating the copyright on Cage's recording of dead silence (Batt had the poor judgement to give Cage partial credit for his own, much shorter "composition"). My favorite moment was when Batt asked the estate to tell him which minute he had copied out of Cage's work. It didn't help him any, of course, but it was wonderful nonetheless.
Eventually he was forced to settle for "a large sum".
It does raise the question, though, why SCO can be asked to identify which lines of code IBM infringed, while Cage's estate didn't have to identify which moments of silence had been copied.
In a related scandal, it was discovered that Ashley Simpson was not performing her three-minute silence live during a recent concert, but was in fact playing a pre-recorded three-minute silence.
Of course, this is a nice illustration of the Gaia hypothesis at work. However, caution is called for, for several reasons. The Gaia hypothesis represents danger scientifically, socially, and ecologically.
Scientifically, the danger is that we will be seduced by the filedrawer effect. Creatures definitely affect their environments. In some instances their effect will tend to feed back negatively (as the G.H. would predict), and in some cases positively. Whenever we come across an attractive example like this one, we trumpet it (and rightfully so). But when we come across a counterexample, we might tend to file it away as uninteresting. Would there have been a/. article saying, "Coral reefs have no particular effect on their local weather!"?
The social danger is that people's faith in the Earth Mother's ability to protect herself and them from harm will cause them to discount the importance of human-induced climate change.
The ecological danger is that, if the G.H. is accurate, then there are negative feedback loops maintaining our climate, and masking the effects of human (or other) influences on the climate. But it would be foolish to imagine that these mechanisms have no breaking point, no limit beyond which they can no longer maintain their local environment. If the strong G.H. turns out to be accurate, irreparable harm may be done to our environment before we see the signs.
When I used to teach a course on MS Office (pauses while PTSD-style flashbacks ease off a bit) I used to explain it like this. "Office is like having a big, friendly, eager-to-please giant with an IQ of 80 standing helpfully between you and your work."
Don't worry, I'll capitalize that for you. When do I get to pat the rabbits, George?
It's not really a replacement for Appleworks, since it doesn't have
spreadsheet, drawing, or painting components, although the FA
hints that there might be a spreadsheet in a future release. Those
get used a lot in our house, where three school-age children use
Appleworks (and occasionally Office) to prepare their lab reports,
papers, and projects.
On the plus side, it:
does'nt have a grammar checker, Who need's 1, anyway's?
imports/exports Word docs
integrate with iLife. It's a matter of hours until my daughter has a garageband track backing her history report. Wait, maybe that's
a minus...
Apple's site (cited in the OP) is short on details. But from what we see, I'm going to wait until the product fills out a little more. Appleworks with the occasional resorting to Office is working well enough that I don't need to spend $80US.
But I would tell anyone who wanted cheap, high-quality presentation and layout software to grab it. The samples on the Apple site look just lovely.
TFA (a press release about the pending publication) is woefully short of the kind of info we want to see. It appears to be a nice confirmation of earlier claims of cavitation-induced fusion that were disputed due to imprecise measuring technique. I couldn't find anything about it on Phys Rev E yet.
In any event, it's not Mr. Fusion. The amount of actual fusion is tiny, and well below any commercially or societally interesting level.
Interesting. Sargent has lots of papers about electroluminescence,
and even photoconductivity
using these quantum dots. But this looks like new work. The earliest reference I see is from September.
I always am skeptical when I see articles about new exciting energy sources in the popular press, but this
looks exciting. I wonder what the material's physical properties are -- how it stands
up to wear, radiation, etc., and especially, how much it costs to make and apply.
At the moment these systems rely on the social contract to make sure they aren't abused by people who download without contributing upload bandwidth. This creates an opportunity for those who wish to push out content at little-to-no cost to simply turn their upload bandwidth to zero, or play games with firewalls to prevent uploads.
If the paradigm really pays off, the upload bandwidth for heavy users may become significant. The reward for defecting from the contract will increase. Remember that at one time no one would think of sponging off the Internet to mass mail a commercial message (Horrors!) and the first ones to do so were roundly excoriated.
The advantage here is that there may be valuable mitigating strategies (For example, blessed client binaries with authentication keys built in, with a checkbox to only upload to authorized clients is one possibility). The question in my mind is, will parasitism be an inconvenience(like email spam), a pain in the ass (like worms/trojans requiring active efforts to suppress), or virtually debilitating (as it is on Usenet)?
It will depend on a lot of factors, including the growth and shape of the torrent-style community (how many uploaders/downloaders/freeloaders), the cost of the upload streams for those that will end up having to pay for extra bandwidth, etc.
It's a great, rich, and compelling world, and I loved the books. But I quail at the thought of all those people getting some twisted view of American history.
This is a recessive mutation (ignoring partial immunity for a minute). The truly-immune percentage of the population will be the square of the gene frequency. Let's say that AIDS begins to recede when 36% of the population is immune. For 36% of the population to be immune, 60% of the genes will need to be the mutated variety. At that point only 16% of the population will be carrying two non-mutated genes. Okay, maybe I exaggerated the "not many generations" but the point stands.
This is the opposite of the recessive extinction problem, where the percentages work against you (that's why deleterious recessives thrive so well when they are rare).
The number of people who die from AIDS is a very strong selection pressure. Unless the epidemic is halted medically, we can expect that it won't be many generations before these mutations are nearly universal. If they have lingered this long in the population, they can't be strongly deleterious.
Eventually we will probably be like the chimpanzees, who have a pronounced lack of diversity in the genes for certain immune receptors as well as immunity to AIDS. Scientists view this as evidence that an AIDS-like plague swept through the Chimpanzee population in the not-too-distant past.
The idea that AIDS will one day burn itself out of the population may not be much comfort to those who have it, nor to those who must grow up in a world where they must face that risk -- especially for those growing up in coutries with 40% infection rates. But I find it comforting, anyway.
In the US, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1996 states that no privacy is required unless you provide the user with the "reasonable expectation of privacy."
Subsequent court rulings have determined that any communications generated using company equipment are the sole property of the employer. I believe that this has been interpreted to mean that unless the employees are specifically told that their communications are private, the company can do anything they want with the emails, including monitor them without the employee's knowledge or consent.
the company did right here. If they DIDN'T record all employee communication, the regulators (at least those we deal with in the US) would have demanded that they do so. Not only that, but they would be leaving themselves open to customer and shareholder lawsuits. I'm sure that somewhere in the mammoth stack of forms anyone working in securities must sign when they're hired on was one saying, "No facility is provided for private electronic communication."
The really shameful thing (aside from working on company time to screw your employer) is that these people didn't know this already. Looking at the list of those being sued, I see IT people who should have known better. Perhaps the company would have punished them more effectively by letting them go form their own company without understanding the basics of ethics, law (including allegedly trying to steal customer databases), or security.
They've known about this problem for 20+ years. "But we never lost any important tiles." NOW they decide it's time to do something about the chunks of ice. If you needed any more evidence that NASA was a haven of groupthink, bureaucracy, and institutional cowardice, here it is.
But because of their automation, blogs are different from typical home pages. Blogs (as their name suggests) are dynamic, ongoing threads, whereas home pages tended to be static. And it seems to me that the great majority of blogs are based on politics or (possibly highly specialized) current events. So although they will certainly reflect their author's viewpoint, they are not about their authors.
We've gone from "My page about me!" to "My page about what I think about politics!" to "My political blog!" and the change is one of kind, as well as one of degree.
is that it's easier than ever to get news and views that support your opinion without being exposed to those that challenge it.
People have always done this, but the trend has gotten more pronounced. I sometimes imagine that we're going to end up as completely distinct logical entities that happen to share the same geological space. Imagine two countries with exactly the same borders, with different tax structures, different social benefits, different foreign policy.
No real principles are at stake here. It's not like they've decided that taxing storage media to help discourage piracy is a bad thing.
All that was found was that the law that allowed them to tax blank writable media wasn't written broadly enough to include MP3 players. All they have to to help protect the poor recording industry from the scourge of piracy will be to amend the law slightly.
Will there be a big outcry if they do? Will the combination of industry pressure and promised revenue overcome whatever outcry there is?
According to tFA, was that some spammer "affiliates" actually seemed to honor the remove requests.
Re:Doctors hand out antibiotics like candy?
on
Seaweed Antibiotics?
·
· Score: 1
Actual conversation I had once:
"It looks like a viral infection. I'm going to prescribe some antibiotics." "If it's viral, aren't antibiotics useless?" "Well, sometimes they help." "Really? How?" "Well, it's really just sort of as a placebo." "But now that you've told me that, it's not going to work as a placebo, is it?" "No, I guess not."
I actually felt embarassed for the guy. The question I didn't think of until I was out of the office was, "Don't you have PLACEBOS you can give out as placebos? Why are you giving out antibiotics? Why not antipsychotics, or baldness cures, or blood pressure medication?"
Roald Dahl's work tends to be a little creepier, a little darker, a little weirder than most children's fiction. The original Charley and the Chocolate Factory film caught some of that (I quite liked Gene Wilder in that regard), but it felt disjointed, like an intrusion into what felt like it was supposed to be a nicer film.
My hope is that Burton doesn't overdo it and miss the complexity the other way by doing that "HEY, LOOK EVERYBODY, I'M MAKING A DARK FILM" thing he sometimes does.
It's the combination of wholesome, non-ironic, typical childhood themes and imagery with a lurking psychological darkness that make Dahl such a treat.
A treatment like "Mathilda" got, where you lose some of the remarkable sweetness in order to make it more like "Home Alone," or in this case, "The Nightmare Before Christmas," would be a disappointment.
Slashdot Mirror
*sigh* So we're monkeys. At least we don't throw excrement at each other. Mostly.
"See I told you guys it wasn't flying monkeys! Turns out it's flying Unicorns!"
I've always thought that was silly. If your kid is doing calculus to end up where the Frisbee does, think how much calculus the Frisbee must be doing! Plus the Frisbee is always right!
Quite seriously, one wonders what irritating DRM Apple will put in to avoid just those suits -- Or worse, add in later "upgrades".
Eventually he was forced to settle for "a large sum".
It does raise the question, though, why SCO can be asked to identify which lines of code IBM infringed, while Cage's estate didn't have to identify which moments of silence had been copied.
In a related scandal, it was discovered that Ashley Simpson was not performing her three-minute silence live during a recent concert, but was in fact playing a pre-recorded three-minute silence.
Scientifically, the danger is that we will be seduced by the filedrawer effect. Creatures definitely affect their environments. In some instances their effect will tend to feed back negatively (as the G.H. would predict), and in some cases positively. Whenever we come across an attractive example like this one, we trumpet it (and rightfully so). But when we come across a counterexample, we might tend to file it away as uninteresting. Would there have been a /. article saying, "Coral reefs have no particular effect on their local weather!"?
The social danger is that people's faith in the Earth Mother's ability to protect herself and them from harm will cause them to discount the importance of human-induced climate change.
The ecological danger is that, if the G.H. is accurate, then there are negative feedback loops maintaining our climate, and masking the effects of human (or other) influences on the climate. But it would be foolish to imagine that these mechanisms have no breaking point, no limit beyond which they can no longer maintain their local environment. If the strong G.H. turns out to be accurate, irreparable harm may be done to our environment before we see the signs.
Don't worry, I'll capitalize that for you. When do I get to pat the rabbits, George?
On the plus side, it:
does'nt have a grammar checker, Who need's 1, anyway's?
imports/exports Word docs
integrate with iLife. It's a matter of hours until my daughter has a garageband track backing her history report. Wait, maybe that's a minus...
Apple's site (cited in the OP) is short on details. But from what we see, I'm going to wait until the product fills out a little more. Appleworks with the occasional resorting to Office is working well enough that I don't need to spend $80US.
But I would tell anyone who wanted cheap, high-quality presentation and layout software to grab it. The samples on the Apple site look just lovely.
In any event, it's not Mr. Fusion. The amount of actual fusion is tiny, and well below any commercially or societally interesting level.
I always am skeptical when I see articles about new exciting energy sources in the popular press, but this looks exciting. I wonder what the material's physical properties are -- how it stands up to wear, radiation, etc., and especially, how much it costs to make and apply.
If the paradigm really pays off, the upload bandwidth for heavy users may become significant. The reward for defecting from the contract will increase. Remember that at one time no one would think of sponging off the Internet to mass mail a commercial message (Horrors!) and the first ones to do so were roundly excoriated.
The advantage here is that there may be valuable mitigating strategies (For example, blessed client binaries with authentication keys built in, with a checkbox to only upload to authorized clients is one possibility). The question in my mind is, will parasitism be an inconvenience(like email spam), a pain in the ass (like worms/trojans requiring active efforts to suppress), or virtually debilitating (as it is on Usenet)?
It will depend on a lot of factors, including the growth and shape of the torrent-style community (how many uploaders/downloaders/freeloaders), the cost of the upload streams for those that will end up having to pay for extra bandwidth, etc.
On the other hand, it can't be much worse than what they got in high school.
This is the opposite of the recessive extinction problem, where the percentages work against you (that's why deleterious recessives thrive so well when they are rare).
Eventually we will probably be like the chimpanzees, who have a pronounced lack of diversity in the genes for certain immune receptors as well as immunity to AIDS. Scientists view this as evidence that an AIDS-like plague swept through the Chimpanzee population in the not-too-distant past.
The idea that AIDS will one day burn itself out of the population may not be much comfort to those who have it, nor to those who must grow up in a world where they must face that risk -- especially for those growing up in coutries with 40% infection rates. But I find it comforting, anyway.
Subsequent court rulings have determined that any communications generated using company equipment are the sole property of the employer. I believe that this has been interpreted to mean that unless the employees are specifically told that their communications are private, the company can do anything they want with the emails, including monitor them without the employee's knowledge or consent.
The really shameful thing (aside from working on company time to screw your employer) is that these people didn't know this already. Looking at the list of those being sued, I see IT people who should have known better. Perhaps the company would have punished them more effectively by letting them go form their own company without understanding the basics of ethics, law (including allegedly trying to steal customer databases), or security.
They've known about this problem for 20+ years. "But we never lost any important tiles." NOW they decide it's time to do something about the chunks of ice. If you needed any more evidence that NASA was a haven of groupthink, bureaucracy, and institutional cowardice, here it is.
We've gone from "My page about me!" to "My page about what I think about politics!" to "My political blog!" and the change is one of kind, as well as one of degree.
People have always done this, but the trend has gotten more pronounced. I sometimes imagine that we're going to end up as completely distinct logical entities that happen to share the same geological space. Imagine two countries with exactly the same borders, with different tax structures, different social benefits, different foreign policy.
All that was found was that the law that allowed them to tax blank writable media wasn't written broadly enough to include MP3 players. All they have to to help protect the poor recording industry from the scourge of piracy will be to amend the law slightly.
Will there be a big outcry if they do? Will the combination of industry pressure and promised revenue overcome whatever outcry there is?
The product is transparent. Maybe the article was FULL of pictures. How would you know?
Anyway, here's a pic for you:
And now one from the side:
According to tFA, was that some spammer "affiliates" actually seemed to honor the remove requests.
Actual conversation I had once:
"It looks like a viral infection. I'm going to prescribe some antibiotics."
"If it's viral, aren't antibiotics useless?"
"Well, sometimes they help."
"Really? How?"
"Well, it's really just sort of as a placebo."
"But now that you've told me that, it's not going to work as a placebo, is it?"
"No, I guess not."
I actually felt embarassed for the guy. The question I didn't think of until I was out of the office was, "Don't you have PLACEBOS you can give out as placebos? Why are you giving out antibiotics? Why not antipsychotics, or baldness cures, or blood pressure medication?"
My hope is that Burton doesn't overdo it and miss the complexity the other way by doing that "HEY, LOOK EVERYBODY, I'M MAKING A DARK FILM" thing he sometimes does.
It's the combination of wholesome, non-ironic, typical childhood themes and imagery with a lurking psychological darkness that make Dahl such a treat.
A treatment like "Mathilda" got, where you lose some of the remarkable sweetness in order to make it more like "Home Alone," or in this case, "The Nightmare Before Christmas," would be a disappointment.