Re:How is this not totally pointless?
on
The Real da Vinci Code
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
How is this not totally pointless?
Dude, let me count the ways:
1. Da Vinci is, like, one of the foremost intellectual figures of the Italian Renaissance, which is a pretty important period in history, especially as regards culture and technology and stuff.
2. One of the most interesting things about the invention of the computer is not the various engineering challenges such as how to build the logic gates and stuff, but the initial idea that computation itself can be usefully reduced to a physical, deterministic process. If, back in the 15th century or whenever, there was some guy thinking along the lines of encoding machine-readable data in the for of little bits of carefully-crafted wood, then, even if the idea didn't work, the fact that he had the idea at all is pretty amazing and has all sorts of implications for the Renaissance concept of the mind, of logic, etc, etc.
3. One of the reasons that Da Vinci's inventions are so famous is that, while they are obviously shockingly ahead of their time, no-one knows in many cases whether they were ever built, whether they worked, or even what they were for. Any progress in unravelling these mysteries is a significant step towards understanding Da Vinci himself (For the point of this, see point 1 above).
4. It's a mediaeval-style robot. Not only is this self-evidently cool in itself, it also has major implications for Dungeons-and-Dragons-playing Slashdotters, who can now, with an arguable degree of verisimilitude, introduce clockwork robot buggies into their campaigns.
I mean, how can you ask what is the point? What's not the point? This is Slashdot, a website for geeks. Da Vinci is the proto-geek, if not The Uber-Geek Of All Time. This is an article about how he built a clockwork robot. This should be rocking your world. If it were not for your low UID I would assume that you'd found your way on here by accident.
Hope this answers your question
I saw this one on TV, on a pop-psychology programme. The guy said that he was going to play a short video, and that you should watch it carefully.
The video consisted of about eight people standing in a circle. Some of them were wearing white t-shirts and some of them were wearing black t-shirts. They had two basketballs and people were engaged in passing basketballs to others wearing the same colour t-shirts. Occasionally two of them would swap places.
It went on for a couple of minutes, and was pretty hard to follow, what with people changing places and everything.
But it was only on the second play-through that I noticed a guy in a gorilla suit, halfway through the video, walk on from one side of the screen, slowly stroll through the circle of ball-passing people, and off the other side of the screen.
Thanks! That is, as far as I know, the first time that anyone from/. has followed the link. I will forward your comments to the editor. He will be very pleased to hear we have a following, even a following of one, in the US. Maybe you'd like to contact him yourself: godsrudewireless at hotmail dot com
I don't know if US law or social etiquette prohibits this (I'm from the UK), but if you're a sports-related company, why not run a book on various sporting events? I've done this for football (soccer) here, as well as David Beckham's next haircut, and political events (next leader of the Tory party, etc).
It's fun, and it has geek value too, for the bookmaker, as you try to juggle the various odds so you won't be too out of pocket whatever the result.
Free money, sport, and spreadsheets. What's not to like?
Not yet, but the video from these CCTV cameras is far from "grainy" (I work in a place that uses them (for non-evil purposes) and the quality and maximum zoom level is really impressive. Secondly, with the introduction of biometric data on your ID card combined with better image-recognition software, then yes, they will be able to pull up the names and addresses of everyone in a crowd just by videoing them.
This argument (cameras in public places don't violate privacy, because the public places are already public) comes up a lot, and it's one that has given me, as an instictive cameras-are-evil person, a fair bit of cause for thought.
I think the difference between, say, someone on the other side of a public square being able to watch what you're doing and someone in a control room somewhere miles away being able to watch watch you're doing, is that in the first case the degree of privacy and the potential for violation of privacy is pretty much equal: in a public place, sure everyone can see you, but at least you can see who's watching you, and watch them back.
One might argue that the problem with surveillance in public place is not that people in public places are subject to scrutiny, but that those doing the surveilling are not, and it is this imbalance that makes people feel uneasy.
So what might be interesting is some scheme where either the video feed from these surveillance cameras is made public, either on the 'net or via public monitors, or that all the CCTV control rooms are themselves monitored, with the video feeding through to monitors positioned at the public camera sites. At least then we would know who it was who was watching us.
I remember reading a post on/. a while back explaining precisely how to do this.
I'm not a P'shop expert, but as far as I remember it involved taking a long, long shot with the lens cap on, in order to create a image file that should be totally black but for the dodgy pixels on your camera's CCD, and then subtacting this image from any subsequent ones taken with that camera. It was something like that, anyway.
Heh. First time I read any of the Bible in depth was at University, in Literature Class.
My end of year essay was on the use of humour in "Genesis".
It didn't seem to piss anybody off, or even strike anyone as paticualarly controversial, but then I'm living in Britain, possibly the most secular society in the world, for which I thank the Lord.
Taking office supplies isn't stealing. It's, like, compensation, for having to work in an office. All jobs have their unofficial perks. With working in an office it's free broadband and pencils and stuff.
It tends to be a situation of, "Here's the Internet, GO!" with no instruction on how to use it as an effective tool.
Well that approach worked for us, didn't it? I think that the most exciting thing about the internet is that it doesn't come with an instruction manual.
I couldn't make that link work, but subsequent googling of my own solves the mystery - the 4x4 in the first Lara Croft film was a Land Rover, and in the second (which I didn't see), it was a Jeep.
So we can be friends now.
Except for the fact that Lara's obviously a Land-Rover kind of girl. They've got that drivin'-round-the-country-estate, upper-class-type thing going for them. A Jeep is just out of character.
I acan't believe we're arguing about this, btw. So I'm going to stop now.
No, the 4x4 in Tomb Raider was a Land Rover Defender. I don't know if you get them much in the US, but that's what it was. A Land Rover Defender, as used by the military, and farmers, and stuff. Land Rover even brought out a limited "Tomb Raider" edition.
It's "Alpha Male".
Unless you're like the world's best postman or something.
Which would actually rock pretty hard, thinking about it. And would probably be a good way to meet chicks.
I was surprised not to see any books specifically about Guerilla Warefare. A couple of how-to manuals, such as Douglas Taber's "The War of The Flea", or Che Guevara's "Guerilla Warefare", wuold, I would have thought, be pertinent.
Whether or not you agree with the guy's politics, I've got to reccommend Guevara's book. If you accept the broader definition of the word "hacker" as someone who cobbles together working solutions to problems by making tools do things that they weren't supposed to do, then Guevara is a hacker (eg, adapting a 12-bore shotgun to launch molotov cocktails, using a mortar to distribute leaflets over enemy-held towns, etc.).
It seems to me that fusion research in the US is never going to get decent levels of funding all the time that the Whitehouse is full of people with millions of dollars invested in oil companies.
And furthermore, it seems to me that fusion research in the EU is never going to get decent levels of funding all the time that people here instinctively equate all nuclear power with dangerous, radioactive evil.
Which is a great shame, because it seems that fusion is the best long-term bet to avoid either:
a) the major cities of the world being swamped in a series of catastrophic floods as the icecaps break up
and/or
b) the world running out of fuels before finding adequate replacement and reverting to a state of pre-industrial, Mad-Max-style savagery.
So, in conclusion, I reckon that if our respective governments aren't willing to fund proper fusion research, then they should at least get working on the Thunderdome.
I've asked to swap cigarette packets before, when the guy behind the counter's given me one with a warning about not being able to get an erection.
If I get the choice, I go for the one about "smiking dries out your skin", as I reckon that one's targeted at girls. They can have the impotence-warning ones.
And there's a joke somewhere here, linking this to "Don't copy that floppy", but I can't work it out.
Slashdot Mirror
How is this not totally pointless?
Dude, let me count the ways:
1. Da Vinci is, like, one of the foremost intellectual figures of the Italian Renaissance, which is a pretty important period in history, especially as regards culture and technology and stuff.
2. One of the most interesting things about the invention of the computer is not the various engineering challenges such as how to build the logic gates and stuff, but the initial idea that computation itself can be usefully reduced to a physical, deterministic process. If, back in the 15th century or whenever, there was some guy thinking along the lines of encoding machine-readable data in the for of little bits of carefully-crafted wood, then, even if the idea didn't work, the fact that he had the idea at all is pretty amazing and has all sorts of implications for the Renaissance concept of the mind, of logic, etc, etc.
3. One of the reasons that Da Vinci's inventions are so famous is that, while they are obviously shockingly ahead of their time, no-one knows in many cases whether they were ever built, whether they worked, or even what they were for. Any progress in unravelling these mysteries is a significant step towards understanding Da Vinci himself (For the point of this, see point 1 above).
4. It's a mediaeval-style robot. Not only is this self-evidently cool in itself, it also has major implications for Dungeons-and-Dragons-playing Slashdotters, who can now, with an arguable degree of verisimilitude, introduce clockwork robot buggies into their campaigns.
I mean, how can you ask what is the point? What's not the point? This is Slashdot, a website for geeks. Da Vinci is the proto-geek, if not The Uber-Geek Of All Time. This is an article about how he built a clockwork robot. This should be rocking your world. If it were not for your low UID I would assume that you'd found your way on here by accident.
Hope this answers your question
I think that the over-the-top writing in the first paragraph of the article was supposed to be a parody of "The Da Vinci Code" style.
Uhh, the French masses do. And I bet they mostly haven't read la disparation, either.
I saw this one on TV, on a pop-psychology programme. The guy said that he was going to play a short video, and that you should watch it carefully.
The video consisted of about eight people standing in a circle. Some of them were wearing white t-shirts and some of them were wearing black t-shirts. They had two basketballs and people were engaged in passing basketballs to others wearing the same colour t-shirts. Occasionally two of them would swap places.
It went on for a couple of minutes, and was pretty hard to follow, what with people changing places and everything.
But it was only on the second play-through that I noticed a guy in a gorilla suit, halfway through the video, walk on from one side of the screen, slowly stroll through the circle of ball-passing people, and off the other side of the screen.
Truly astonishing.
Yeah, but which Islington Variant? The Holloway Road version comes with a three-point starting penalty.
Dude,
you are lying!
1828675309 is not prime - it is equal to 37 * 49423657.
And they said I was wasting my time learning the 37 times table up that far...
Thanks! That is, as far as I know, the first time that anyone from /. has followed the link. I will forward your comments to the editor. He will be very pleased to hear we have a following, even a following of one, in the US. Maybe you'd like to contact him yourself: godsrudewireless at hotmail dot com
Download! Print out! Redistribute!
Yes, effect is also a verb. But it's not the verb you're looking for.
He's still a polictician - he's in the House of Lords, isn't he? And he goes on marches and makes speeches and stuff.
I don't know if US law or social etiquette prohibits this (I'm from the UK), but if you're a sports-related company, why not run a book on various sporting events? I've done this for football (soccer) here, as well as David Beckham's next haircut, and political events (next leader of the Tory party, etc).
It's fun, and it has geek value too, for the bookmaker, as you try to juggle the various odds so you won't be too out of pocket whatever the result.
Free money, sport, and spreadsheets. What's not to like?
Not yet, but the video from these CCTV cameras is far from "grainy" (I work in a place that uses them (for non-evil purposes) and the quality and maximum zoom level is really impressive. Secondly, with the introduction of biometric data on your ID card combined with better image-recognition software, then yes, they will be able to pull up the names and addresses of everyone in a crowd just by videoing them.
This argument (cameras in public places don't violate privacy, because the public places are already public) comes up a lot, and it's one that has given me, as an instictive cameras-are-evil person, a fair bit of cause for thought.
I think the difference between, say, someone on the other side of a public square being able to watch what you're doing and someone in a control room somewhere miles away being able to watch watch you're doing, is that in the first case the degree of privacy and the potential for violation of privacy is pretty much equal: in a public place, sure everyone can see you, but at least you can see who's watching you, and watch them back.
One might argue that the problem with surveillance in public place is not that people in public places are subject to scrutiny, but that those doing the surveilling are not, and it is this imbalance that makes people feel uneasy.
So what might be interesting is some scheme where either the video feed from these surveillance cameras is made public, either on the 'net or via public monitors, or that all the CCTV control rooms are themselves monitored, with the video feeding through to monitors positioned at the public camera sites. At least then we would know who it was who was watching us.
I remember reading a post on /. a while back explaining precisely how to do this.
I'm not a P'shop expert, but as far as I remember it involved taking a long, long shot with the lens cap on, in order to create a image file that should be totally black but for the dodgy pixels on your camera's CCD, and then subtacting this image from any subsequent ones taken with that camera. It was something like that, anyway.
Heh. First time I read any of the Bible in depth was at University, in Literature Class.
My end of year essay was on the use of humour in "Genesis".
It didn't seem to piss anybody off, or even strike anyone as paticualarly controversial, but then I'm living in Britain, possibly the most secular society in the world, for which I thank the Lord.
Taking office supplies isn't stealing. It's, like, compensation, for having to work in an office. All jobs have their unofficial perks. With working in an office it's free broadband and pencils and stuff.
It tends to be a situation of, "Here's the Internet, GO!" with no instruction on how to use it as an effective tool.
Well that approach worked for us, didn't it? I think that the most exciting thing about the internet is that it doesn't come with an instruction manual.
Any vagrant can walk into a public library and use the internet. Are they suddenly part of a privileged class?
If they know how to use a computer to access the internet, then yes, they are.
Most people have never even used a telephone.
I couldn't make that link work, but subsequent googling of my own solves the mystery - the 4x4 in the first Lara Croft film was a Land Rover, and in the second (which I didn't see), it was a Jeep.
So we can be friends now.
Except for the fact that Lara's obviously a Land-Rover kind of girl. They've got that drivin'-round-the-country-estate, upper-class-type thing going for them. A Jeep is just out of character.
I acan't believe we're arguing about this, btw. So I'm going to stop now.
No, the 4x4 in Tomb Raider was a Land Rover Defender. I don't know if you get them much in the US, but that's what it was. A Land Rover Defender, as used by the military, and farmers, and stuff. Land Rover even brought out a limited "Tomb Raider" edition.
It's "Alpha Male".
Unless you're like the world's best postman or something.
Which would actually rock pretty hard, thinking about it. And would probably be a good way to meet chicks.
OK, I know there's no such word as "warefare", despite my having typed it twice. Please spare me the corrections.
I was surprised not to see any books specifically about Guerilla Warefare. A couple of how-to manuals, such as Douglas Taber's "The War of The Flea", or Che Guevara's "Guerilla Warefare", wuold, I would have thought, be pertinent.
Whether or not you agree with the guy's politics, I've got to reccommend Guevara's book. If you accept the broader definition of the word "hacker" as someone who cobbles together working solutions to problems by making tools do things that they weren't supposed to do, then Guevara is a hacker (eg, adapting a 12-bore shotgun to launch molotov cocktails, using a mortar to distribute leaflets over enemy-held towns, etc.).
It seems to me that fusion research in the US is never going to get decent levels of funding all the time that the Whitehouse is full of people with millions of dollars invested in oil companies.
And furthermore, it seems to me that fusion research in the EU is never going to get decent levels of funding all the time that people here instinctively equate all nuclear power with dangerous, radioactive evil.
Which is a great shame, because it seems that fusion is the best long-term bet to avoid either:
a) the major cities of the world being swamped in a series of catastrophic floods as the icecaps break up
and/or
b) the world running out of fuels before finding adequate replacement and reverting to a state of pre-industrial, Mad-Max-style savagery.
So, in conclusion, I reckon that if our respective governments aren't willing to fund proper fusion research, then they should at least get working on the Thunderdome.
Funny, I imagine it more like this:
>N
Plain
You are on a flat red plain, featureless apart from occasional scattered rocks. To the East lies a crater.
>E
Crater's Edge.
You are on the edge of a shallow crater. You can go down into the crater, or West, back to the plain.
There is a small rock here.
>look at rock
You can't see anything like that here.
>Look at stone
You can't see anything special about the stone.
>Test stone for life.
I only understood you so far as wanting to test the stone.
I've asked to swap cigarette packets before, when the guy behind the counter's given me one with a warning about not being able to get an erection.
If I get the choice, I go for the one about "smiking dries out your skin", as I reckon that one's targeted at girls. They can have the impotence-warning ones.
And there's a joke somewhere here, linking this to "Don't copy that floppy", but I can't work it out.