In between my Ph.D. and first post-doctoral stint, I took three months off. Bicycle touring, surfing lessons, and visiting friends across the country. It was one of the best things I've ever done (even considering the credit card debt).
So whatever counts as an adventure for you, go and do it now. Unstructured time off is hard to come by in the sciences, except for the very few elite scientists and engineers who can manage their career on a 40 hour work week. I'm now in year 5 of my post-doctoral work, and I don't see another vacation like that any time soon.
Definitely necessary. MRI has a visual/spatial resolution of about 10^-3 meters; microscopy has a resolution of about 10^-6. Its like the difference peering through the window of a bookstore vs being able to go inside and read.
In addition, depending on how you prepare the tissue, you can investigate the protein or genomic content of the neurons and learn about their functional properties (as well as their structure). Along with functional MRI, this technique is the bread-and-butter for learning about normal and abnormal brain function in humans.
I'd go farther and say that clear writing is especially desirable in academic papers. When you're trying to communicate complex, abstract ideas, why make the prose any more complex and abstract than it needs to be?
BrokenHalo makes a good point about Improving Our Word Power, but I think writers benefit less from a good vocabulary than they do from good editing skills -- and the willingness to rewrite, revise, and edit until their prose is crisp, clean, direct, and clear.
I would agree that the summaries in Science and Nature are pretty good, but I find the articles themselves to be almost worthless if you're not in the specific field. The articles are written to cram the most information into the smallest space. Important details are often left out, and jargon and abbreviations dominate the text. And even then, some of the articles there were published because they were "sexy", or because the senior author is a big name -- and as a result have bald, outrageous flaws. For well written articles that tackle good science, I'd take SciAm any day . . .
You make a good point: This set would be a perfect gift to a school library.
But that being said, I think that having only paperback editions really diminishes the value of the set. If I were going to buy these books, it would be a serious long term investment, and I would want a set of books that could hold up over time -- something that I could give to my family or donate to a public library after many years. Also, I don't know what kind of stock they're printed on, but if its the typical inexpensive paperback stock, then the pages will turn yellow and become brittle after 30 years or so -- which is how long it might take you to get through all of them! = )
I, too, am too lazy to look for the story, but IIRC . ..
The guy bought a couple of gallons of the stuff and submerged his mobo in a styrofoam tank. For cooling, he ran the Fluorintert through an A/C compressor. It worked really, really well, until the fluid got so cold that it gelled, and clogged the A/C.
Yep, they did. I was at the concert where they first sang it about a year ago. They also did some performance-y stuff too: IIRC they had large cardboard cut-outs featuring the various 8-bit heros and villains that corresponded to the songs. Oh, and they also did the "blow on the cart" gag = )
I think they also did the Mario "underwater" theme, which was pretty cool.
Moreover: why do you have a critical system that hasn't been patched in over five years?
Check the date on that news.com article linked in the main story -- it's from March of 1999. The bug is that old, and as I recall the fix didn't take that long to get out.
If LAX was trying to upgrade to/integrate win2k with ancient, unpatched Win95 systems, its no wonder that they're having problems . ..
I absolutely agree. I think that basic psychology has done alot for marketing, and if you want to develop a product that is desiriable, basic psych is what you should use -- not a scanner.
fMRI is a great research technique -- I've worked with it for years -- but I think that zealous companies that want to find the best way to tickle comsumers' brains are going to be pretty disappointed in fMRI as a marketing research tool. (And at $400+/hr, their disappointment is going to cost them . ..)
What these companies want is to be able to look at a scan of someone viewing/thinking about their product and to then be able to say, "Aha, he really wants this!", or, "She is debating on whether shee needs this," or even perhaps, "This product makes him feel secure."
That's bullshit -- its mindreading -- and given what we know about the brain and the signals that can be read in an fMRI, it can't be done. Perhaps one day, far in the future, something like that will be possible. Right now, though, people are still debating what exactly it means (in terms of neural activity) when you see a brain region "light up" in an fMRI scan. And even if we could know how exactly fMRI signals and neural activity relate, there's still a/vast/ dearth of knowledge about what various brain areas actually do, what they represent and how, etc. Maybe one day neuromarketing will pay off, but I honestly don't think it will be any time soon.
Just make a few minor changes in the game artwork, and rename the game.
But this is what you/can't/ do. Follow the link and look at the screenshot. The characters and buildings look/identical/ to those in WC2.
While I think that you should be able to make a free knockoff of someone else's game, I think that taking artwork crosses the line. As much as I hate to admit it, Blizzard is in the right here . . .
I absolutely agree here. There was a time when doing your own basic car maintentance was pretty easy to figure out on your own. Every car worked in pretty much the same way, and if you had even a little help you could do your own basic engine, heating/cooling and electrical work.
Anything you couldn't do in your driveway you could do in a pay-per-day gararge with rented tools.
Do those even exist anymore? I've read about them but I've never seen even one (in my short life = )
Ahh, good point. And most of mass media is a huge toilet now a days. But if you look there are places that have managed to stay high quality -- such as public television and radio. Now paying is not compulsory in those cases, but people do pay, and the quality is consistently good in my opinion.
Also, what I see happening is web content becoming for-pay in the sense that you pay for news papers. The cost of the paper (mostly) defrays the cost of production -- so in the end its very cheap to subscribe -- there is no "financial information barrier" because paying for certain basic information will become a part of everyday expenses.
I agree. I also think that this might be the way of the future as far as online content goes -- not popup ads, but subscription.
As web advertising returns in slowly diminish, we just might have to start paying for the really good stuff, just as you pay for cable TV or magazines. I know that if I had to pay for Salon or New York Times, I'd probably do it for less than $50 a year -- and I'll wager that in less than 25 years, we will think nothing unusual of paying for online content.
Not to poo-poo the article, because it is a very well done artice, but I was looking for more tips on doing things that could *really* void my warranty --seriously.
It was telling us what we already know : that with a laptop you can upgrade the RAM and the hard drive -- both of those operations take about 10 minutes.
To be fair, the part about upgrading the processor was *uber* cool -- I certainly thought that one wan't able to remove a mobile PIII from its mobo. But what I would like to see is a novel cooling method for a 1GHz PIII installed into a chassis originally not meant to take that much heat. (such as mine, A dell latitude L400, which IMHO is just slighly less sexy than the venerable TiBook.)
Another thing I'd be interested to see is how to play around with the mobo and its components; with integrated everything, laptop mobo's are the most expensive part of the machine next to the TFT -- and when one component breaks, the WHOLE THING has to be replaced.
I'd like to see if there are any solutions for this particular problem -- THAT would be laptop hacking.
I know I personally have a grave fear of hacking around in my laptops innards, partly because it is a relatively expensive device, but also because I know next to nothing about how it is put together, how the components interact and how the damn thing/works/ in general (wheras I will cheerfully crack open a PC and will feel confident about violating the warranty many times over in order to figure out how it works, how to fix things, etc.)
Does anybody else share this laptop apprehension? ; ) Has anybody out there conquered their laptop's guts and become confident/skilled in do-it-yourself repairs?
I recall reading a short article about the limits of computing technology in gaming -- specifically in terms of AI and "solving" classic games such as chess.
The argument went like this: if a computer system can map out every possible finite state (i.e. board position in chess) of a game, then from any point in the game it can be determined what the winning moves are (if there are any, that is.) For a game like chess there are relatively few board postions possible -- thus, all board positions could be explored and the game could conceivably be "solved" at some point by a computer (of course in a brute force sense only, but solved none-the-less.) Any human player would be hopeless against such an adversary.
However, in a game such as checkers, there are many many more possible board positions (I think the estimate I recall was 10^69, could be incorrect though . ..) so that compiling a complete library of all board postions would take considerably longer than the projected life-span of the universe (as estimated by the halflife of a proton). This would be true even if you used a ridiculously large computing system -- say,.1% of the available mass in the universe. So, the argument goes, a computer will never be able to brute-force beat a human at checkers.
Absolutely: there's still IRC, and scour, and gnutella (if one must) and a host of other ways of distributing media, legally and illegally.
Indie bands can still give away music and get noticed; consumers can still "sample music before they buy"; warez kidz can still stuff their FAT32 partictions with every NSync album, ever.
Even the argument that shutting down Napster breaks apart a community of music fans is weak: one program does not make a community, and Napster, in particular, does not facilitate interpersonal communication or the exchange of ideas.
I think that I buy the idea of "protecting one's art." Sure Metalica and Dre are successfull, but they are the one-in-a-million that made it. If it becomes no longer profitable, (or at least substantive) to make music, then people wont. The art will suffer.
Of course, Metalica and Dre *have* made it. Arguably they are both rolling in cash - so why should they care about the money: in the end $3 mil in sales is no different than $3.5 mil. I think that they realize what it took to get where they are; but they still want to protect the ability to make a living off of music, and protect the rights of thousands of struggling musicians that need to sell CD's.
This is true: In my particular instance, the machine that the drive is destined for is (currently) all U2W; the IDE drive will be for very short term storage of data sets (5GB each, oof!) that need to be processed. (When that's done we take the processed data and back it up onto CD's and tapes - so if the drive decides to eat itself, it'll only take a couple of days worth of work with it. ; )
The point is - without/someone/ around making large cheap IDE drives my grant would be out $900 bucks rather then $280 - and chances are any problems cause a minor setback at most.
heh - that's funny I just opted to buy a 40GB IDE drive over a 50GB SCSI one for my lab to solve some storage problems.
IDE still has some advantages that SCSI can't offer: its cheap (the IDE drive was less then one third the price of the SCSI) and its brutally simple: you can yank the drive and mount it on nearly any machine, so long as the bios supports it. If you're looking for Bang-for-the-buck storage, you can't go wrong.
I don't think the solution that he proposes is that unsavory. The important parts of Quake the game can still be open; the closed part would only concern client/server negotiation. Its a sacrifice, true, but I'm not such a purist that I refuse to use a version of Quake that's closed in such a way. I mean, as long as I can make my rocket launcher look like a big twinkie, I'll be happy ; )
Slashdot Mirror
Now is your chance.
In between my Ph.D. and first post-doctoral stint, I took three months off. Bicycle touring, surfing lessons, and visiting friends across the country. It was one of the best things I've ever done (even considering the credit card debt).
So whatever counts as an adventure for you, go and do it now. Unstructured time off is hard to come by in the sciences, except for the very few elite scientists and engineers who can manage their career on a 40 hour work week. I'm now in year 5 of my post-doctoral work, and I don't see another vacation like that any time soon.
Definitely necessary. MRI has a visual/spatial resolution of about 10^-3 meters; microscopy has a resolution of about 10^-6. Its like the difference peering through the window of a bookstore vs being able to go inside and read.
In addition, depending on how you prepare the tissue, you can investigate the protein or genomic content of the neurons and learn about their functional properties (as well as their structure). Along with functional MRI, this technique is the bread-and-butter for learning about normal and abnormal brain function in humans.
I'd go farther and say that clear writing is especially desirable in academic papers. When you're trying to communicate complex, abstract ideas, why make the prose any more complex and abstract than it needs to be?
BrokenHalo makes a good point about Improving Our Word Power, but I think writers benefit less from a good vocabulary than they do from good editing skills -- and the willingness to rewrite, revise, and edit until their prose is crisp, clean, direct, and clear.
Of course, I would still give a kidney to publish in Science or Nature, so perhaps y'all should file my comment under "sour grapes".
-q
I would agree that the summaries in Science and Nature are pretty good, but I find the articles themselves to be almost worthless if you're not in the specific field. The articles are written to cram the most information into the smallest space. Important details are often left out, and jargon and abbreviations dominate the text. And even then, some of the articles there were published because they were "sexy", or because the senior author is a big name -- and as a result have bald, outrageous flaws. For well written articles that tackle good science, I'd take SciAm any day . . .
You make a good point: This set would be a perfect gift to a school library.
But that being said, I think that having only paperback editions really diminishes the value of the set. If I were going to buy these books, it would be a serious long term investment, and I would want a set of books that could hold up over time -- something that I could give to my family or donate to a public library after many years. Also, I don't know what kind of stock they're printed on, but if its the typical inexpensive paperback stock, then the pages will turn yellow and become brittle after 30 years or so -- which is how long it might take you to get through all of them! = )
The guy bought a couple of gallons of the stuff and submerged his mobo in a styrofoam tank. For cooling, he ran the Fluorintert through an A/C compressor. It worked really, really well, until the fluid got so cold that it gelled, and clogged the A/C.
Yep, they did. I was at the concert where they first sang it about a year ago. They also did some performance-y stuff too: IIRC they had large cardboard cut-outs featuring the various 8-bit heros and villains that corresponded to the songs.
Oh, and they also did the "blow on the cart" gag = )
I think they also did the Mario "underwater" theme, which was pretty cool.
-q
Check the date on that news.com article linked in the main story -- it's from March of 1999. The bug is that old, and as I recall the fix didn't take that long to get out.
If LAX was trying to upgrade to/integrate win2k with ancient, unpatched Win95 systems, its no wonder that they're having problems . .
-Q
I absolutely agree. I think that basic psychology has done alot for marketing, and if you want to develop a product that is desiriable, basic psych is what you should use -- not a scanner.
fMRI is a great research technique -- I've worked with it for years -- but I think that zealous companies that want to find the best way to tickle comsumers' brains are going to be pretty disappointed in fMRI as a marketing research tool. (And at $400+/hr, their disappointment is going to cost them . .
What these companies want is to be able to look at a scan of someone viewing/thinking about their product and to then be able to say, "Aha, he really wants this!", or, "She is debating on whether shee needs this," or even perhaps, "This product makes him feel secure."
That's bullshit -- its mindreading -- and given what we know about the brain and the signals that can be read in an fMRI, it can't be done. Perhaps one day, far in the future, something like that will be possible. Right now, though, people are still debating what exactly it means (in terms of neural activity) when you see a brain region "light up" in an fMRI scan. And even if we could know how exactly fMRI signals and neural activity relate, there's still a
-q
Yay. Another undeducated nit-wit just frothing at the mouth to post.
Whoa, back off there. The article doesn't mention that little tid-bit.
But this is what you
While I think that you should be able to make a free knockoff of someone else's game, I think that taking artwork crosses the line. As much as I hate to admit it, Blizzard is in the right here . . .
I absolutely agree here. There was a time when doing your own basic car maintentance was pretty easy to figure out on your own. Every car worked in pretty much the same way, and if you had even a little help you could do your own basic engine, heating/cooling and electrical work.
Anything you couldn't do in your driveway you could do in a pay-per-day gararge with rented tools.
Do those even exist anymore? I've read about them but I've never seen even one (in my short life = )
-q
Also, what I see happening is web content becoming for-pay in the sense that you pay for news papers. The cost of the paper (mostly) defrays the cost of production -- so in the end its very cheap to subscribe -- there is no "financial information barrier" because paying for certain basic information will become a part of everyday expenses.
I agree. I also think that this might be the way of the future as far as online content goes -- not popup ads, but subscription.
As web advertising returns in slowly diminish, we just might have to start paying for the really good stuff, just as you pay for cable TV or magazines. I know that if I had to pay for Salon or New York Times, I'd probably do it for less than $50 a year -- and I'll wager that in less than 25 years, we will think nothing unusual of paying for online content.
Wow, thanks for the advice. I take it you do this often?
-q ; )
It was telling us what we already know : that with a laptop you can upgrade the RAM and the hard drive -- both of those operations take about 10 minutes.
To be fair, the part about upgrading the processor was *uber* cool -- I certainly thought that one wan't able to remove a mobile PIII from its mobo. But what I would like to see is a novel cooling method for a 1GHz PIII installed into a chassis originally not meant to take that much heat. (such as mine, A dell latitude L400, which IMHO is just slighly less sexy than the venerable TiBook.)
Another thing I'd be interested to see is how to play around with the mobo and its components; with integrated everything, laptop mobo's are the most expensive part of the machine next to the TFT -- and when one component breaks, the WHOLE THING has to be replaced.
I'd like to see if there are any solutions for this particular problem -- THAT would be laptop hacking.
I know I personally have a grave fear of hacking around in my laptops innards, partly because it is a relatively expensive device, but also because I know next to nothing about how it is put together, how the components interact and how the damn thing /works/ in general (wheras I will cheerfully crack open a PC and will feel confident about violating the warranty many times over in order to figure out how it works, how to fix things, etc.)
Does anybody else share this laptop apprehension? ; ) Has anybody out there conquered their laptop's guts and become confident/skilled in do-it-yourself repairs?
-q
It was an old SciAm article that I'm thinking of . . . if I can dig up the original I'll paste it in.
The argument went like this: if a computer system can map out every possible finite state (i.e. board position in chess) of a game, then from any point in the game it can be determined what the winning moves are (if there are any, that is.) For a game like chess there are relatively few board postions possible -- thus, all board positions could be explored and the game could conceivably be "solved" at some point by a computer (of course in a brute force sense only, but solved none-the-less.) Any human player would be hopeless against such an adversary.
However, in a game such as checkers, there are many many more possible board positions (I think the estimate I recall was 10^69, could be incorrect though . . .) so that compiling a complete library of all board postions would take considerably longer than the projected life-span of the universe (as estimated by the halflife of a proton). This would be true even if you used a ridiculously large computing system -- say, .1% of the available mass in the universe. So, the argument goes, a computer will never be able to brute-force beat a human at checkers.
Indie bands can still give away music and get noticed; consumers can still "sample music before they buy"; warez kidz can still stuff their FAT32 partictions with every NSync album, ever.
Even the argument that shutting down Napster breaks apart a community of music fans is weak: one program does not make a community, and Napster, in particular, does not facilitate interpersonal communication or the exchange of ideas.
Vince
I think that I buy the idea of "protecting one's art." Sure Metalica and Dre are successfull, but they are the one-in-a-million that made it. If it becomes no longer profitable, (or at least substantive) to make music, then people wont. The art will suffer.
Of course, Metalica and Dre *have* made it. Arguably they are both rolling in cash - so why should they care about the money: in the end $3 mil in sales is no different than $3.5 mil. I think that they realize what it took to get where they are; but they still want to protect the ability to make a living off of music, and protect the rights of thousands of struggling musicians that need to sell CD's.
-Vince
This is true: In my particular instance, the machine that the drive is destined for is (currently) all U2W; the IDE drive will be for very short term storage of data sets (5GB each, oof!) that need to be processed. (When that's done we take the processed data and back it up onto CD's and tapes - so if the drive decides to eat itself, it'll only take a couple of days worth of work with it. ; )
/someone/ around making large cheap IDE drives my grant would be out $900 bucks rather then $280 - and chances are any problems cause a minor setback at most.
The point is - without
heh - that's funny I just opted to buy a 40GB IDE drive over a 50GB SCSI one for my lab to solve some storage problems.
IDE still has some advantages that SCSI can't offer: its cheap (the IDE drive was less then one third the price of the SCSI) and its brutally simple: you can yank the drive and mount it on nearly any machine, so long as the bios supports it. If you're looking for Bang-for-the-buck storage, you can't go wrong.
I don't think the solution that he proposes is that unsavory. The important parts of Quake the game can still be open; the closed part would only concern client/server negotiation. Its a sacrifice, true, but I'm not such a purist that I refuse to use a version of Quake that's closed in such a way. I mean, as long as I can make my rocket launcher look like a big twinkie, I'll be happy ; )
-V