Er, sorry. I was trying to be funny -
If "he" refers to a man and "she" refers to a woman, then "s/he" (see great-grandparent) must refer to a "wo/man". It was my way of agreeing with CGP re. the silliness of the term "s/he".
My wide and I spent last Saturday at home playing snap. You know, where you each take turns to put a card down, and if they're both the same, you shout "SNAP" and win all the cards? Maybe it's called something different in the US.
Anyway, I didn't want to play at first, bacause I thought it was a stupid kid's game, but actually there's a lot of skill in volved - just not the sort of skill usually involved in card games - more speed of pattern recognition and quickness of reactions (hence this post being wonderfully on topic).
After a while, we both got so fast that we had to put an empty cigarette packet on the table, which we hit as we shouted "snap", so , by seeing who actually hit the packet first, we vcuold break ties.
It gets more complex, too - snap can actually be quite a deep game:
We were both playing our cards to separate stacks in front of us; a snap situation was defined as when the cards on top of both piles matched. However, we often felt the urge to call out "snap" when putting a matching card on the same pile. So we put another cigarette packet on the other side of the table, and defined such a condition as "autosnap". Calling out the wrong sort of snap or hitting the wrong fag packet counted as a foul. Next time we plan to implement more features: contrasnap, where the top card on one pile matches the second-from top on the opposite pile, consecutive snap, where the card is one away in sequence from the other, autoconsecutive snap, and contraconsecutive snap.
We'll need six empty cigarette packets (or similar, to count as "bases" in different parts of the room. Should be quite a workout.
But surely it is copyrighted, it's just that the copyright is owned by the students - the univeristy is just enocuraging the copyright holders to share.
Wouldn't it be nice if some of these students later become famous mega-popstars, and, after having had such a positive introduction to P2P filesharing by their alma mater, decide to give all their music away free and bring the RIAA et al to thier knees?
In my amateur playing about with software synthesis etc, particularly the very cool (and free) Buzz (www.buzz2.com), I've found that the coolest stereo effects come from panning using both delay and volume differences - that is, delaying the sound in one channel and making it slightly quieter.
Interesting effects, to varying levels of "realism", can also be acheived with stereo reverb - having, for example, the "dry" sound of an instrument dominate in the left channel, but the reverby sound dominate in the right.
I am a fan, and I want to see more of Liv Tyler. No matter how you look at it, there are not enough wonem in LotR. If it were up to me, I would have had Eowyn fighting on the battlements of hlem's Deep. That would have ruled. Although I think that many of Jackson's deviations from the books detracted from the storytelling, especially in The Two Towers, many of other changes were, I think, improvements on the book.
Furthermore, by relegating certain scnes to the DVD special edition, Jackson's really only doing what Tolkien did in keeping certain elements of the story in the appendices.
So he takes the Arwen / Aragorn love interest out of the appendix and puts it in the main narrative, and takes elements of the Gandalf / Sauron relationship out and puts them in an appendix (ie DVD special edition).
You know, call me a heretic, but I'd quite like to see a book of the film of the book, like they did with Tim Burton's horrible remake of Planet of the Apes. I'm not saying it would be better than the original, but I do think it would be bettter in some ways.
The Goonies, I believe (although, in thse referential times, the script could well have been quoting something else). And I think it was "Your mother wears combat boots." Sounds kind of gnarlier.
The poll showed that 80% of the 2,000 votes that they counted were in favour. They did not count an additional 5,000 votes, nearly all of which were against.
So in fact the results were, of 7,000 votes: 23% in favour, 77% not.
The reason given for disregarding most votes made is that they came from an anti-ID card website, so they were biased.
I swear I couldn't make it up.
In the UK, we don't have advertisements for prescription drugs - they're banned. On the grounds, I think, that your doctor should be able to choose what drug to prescribe you without you the patient pestering him for whatever it was you saw on TV
Which would make sense, were it not for all the money spent on promoting prescription drugs to doctors - free gifts, points schemes (like, you get points for prescribing drugs and can collect them to get stuff), free 'conferences' that are realy an excuse to spend weekend at a hotel eating driumking at the pharmecutical companies' expense, etc, etc, ad nauseam.
I've tried to get her into Star Wars, but she shies away from it, probably due to her having had an ubergeek ex-boyfriend who would not consider you a real Star Wars fan unless you knew the name of the elephant that played the big monster that the sand people ride about on in A New Hope.
From what you say, it sounds as though this kind of thing is much less common in the US than in Britain (where I am). Here in the UK, where gambling is much more legally, and socially, acceptable, bookies (high street gambling shops) take bets on most things that can be bet on. Huge amounts of money change hands during the general elections. And in political reporting, for example with the recent leadership challenge to the leader of the opposition, it's very common for the reporters to quote the odds given to various outcomes by the big bookies.
Other non-sports bets include:
Celebrity and royal marriages / breakups.
The Booker Prize (a bit like your national book award, I think)
Outcomes of television programmes such as Big Brother
The weather on Christmas day (snow / not snow).
I even heard a science programme about SETI on the radio where they got a big bookie to give odds on the discovery of alien intelligence.
"Whilst" is, strictly speaking, past tense. For example "I like to eat tacos while playing my gameboy" / "When I was young, I liked eating tacos whilst playing on my gameboy".
Not that you have ever called me a pretentious jackass, but I tohught you might like to know.
That's a good point. Last major fireworks display I was at, I was with a rather grizzled-looking vietnam vet who started having flashbacks and had to go away somewhere quiet and have a lie down.
And the neighbours to my parents' house were Iraqi. They complained about me and my small brother setting off fireworks, as it brought back painful memories of the Iran-Iraq war, or something.
Not that I believe you should ban fireworks just because it freaks out a few unfortunate people, but a bit of consideration for one's neighbours, espicially if they're ex-airborne infantry acid-freaks, is probvably a good thing.
Also, what about the USAF bombing all those Afghani weddings due to their unfortunate tradition of celebrating the marriage by firing automatic weapons into the air? What about that, eh?
Abaci are digital, though, aren't they? The bead's either on the left or the right of the bead-stick-thingy; no in-betweens allowed.
Better to use one huge set of scales, or even better, a big thermometer-looking thing that rings a bell at the top if it gets to 10 Exabytes. Yup, that'd be cool.
I've actually found that Excel is a really quick and easy environment to program cellular automata.
The implementation of Conway's Life is trivial and is left as an exercise for the reader - or let met know and I'll email the.xls file, or just the code if you'd rather.
Polar animals store massive amounts of Vitamin A in their livers, for some reason. Scott, when exloring the Antarctic, actually died of a Vitamin A overdose from eating the livers of his huskies, rather than dying of lead poisoning (as previously believed). Not strictly relevant, I know, but if you're ever in a survival situation in the Antarctic, you might be glad I told you.
Being even more pedantic, there's no absolute frame of reference for time, so there's not really such a thing as 'right now' over astronomical distances. I think.
You probably know better than me. I'll shut up now.
If the long-term costs of using fossil fuels were included in their price, it is highly unlikely that they would be the cheapest
Yeah, that's true, and an interesting point. I think there's a good argument to charging for the total cost of a product or commodity, in terms of its total impact from production to disposal. I read a similar thread here a while back about how some countries were getting electronic-goods manufacturers to include the cost of disposal in the retail price of the item. Similarly, yeah, maybe oil companies should be forced to pay for the environmental damage, cleanup costs, healthcare costs for those suffering from air-quality-related respiratory diseases, etc, and relfect this in their retail costs, but I can't see any way of doing this without draconian regulatory legislation on an international scale. Unfortunately, this seems to be both unlikely (look at Kyoto) and possibly idealogically dodgy. The lefty enviro-hippie part of me says "yeah, make the oil companies pay", but the paranoid libertarian part of me says "no, we don't want some global cartel fixing the prices of everything that might have some kind of environmental impact".
Yeah, that's what gets me, too. All this talk about "the hydrogen economy" yadda yaddda yadda tends to assume that people will be charging their fuel cell up from renewable energy sources. But surely, in a free market, they'll be charging it up from the cheapest energy source, which will be the same as the variety of (generally non-renewable) sources that drive today's power grids. So it won't make a blind bit of difference. And I bet that OPEC et al are looking into the most efficient way to convert oil into hydrogen - I mean, what else are they going to do with it once eveyone starts driving fuel-cell powered cars?
Anyway, point of this slightly incoherent post: Fuel cells are cool, but, unlike oil, they are not an energy source and therefore will not replace oil. Hopefully something will, though.
Have you ever had trouble writing upside down with a ballpoint anyways?
yes, I have. Or, as another poster said, on a vertical surface. Also, if I put a ballpoint pen upside-down in my trouser pocket, all the ink dribbles out and gives me a blue stain on my thigh.
Generally, I don't notice this until I'm in the shower the next morning, and mistake it for a big nasty bruise, especially if I've been out drinking the night before and can't quite remember if I fell over or not.
Well, not really, because the definition you give in kind of recursive. What do you call the organisation to which these wonderful men and women belong? And is it a singular or a plural?
My take on it is that generally, yeah, organisations, groups, etc shoulds be treated as singular nouns, and those who don't are woefully ignorant and fair game to be laughed at by those of us who know better, but that "The Police" is an illogical exception.
It's English, it doen't have to obey logical rules.
Slashdot Mirror
Er, sorry. I was trying to be funny -
If "he" refers to a man and "she" refers to a woman, then "s/he" (see great-grandparent) must refer to a "wo/man".
It was my way of agreeing with CGP re. the silliness of the term "s/he".
Hey, I am a wo/man, you insensitive clod!
My wide and I spent last Saturday at home playing snap. You know, where you each take turns to put a card down, and if they're both the same, you shout "SNAP" and win all the cards? Maybe it's called something different in the US.
Anyway, I didn't want to play at first, bacause I thought it was a stupid kid's game, but actually there's a lot of skill in volved - just not the sort of skill usually involved in card games - more speed of pattern recognition and quickness of reactions (hence this post being wonderfully on topic).
After a while, we both got so fast that we had to put an empty cigarette packet on the table, which we hit as we shouted "snap", so , by seeing who actually hit the packet first, we vcuold break ties.
It gets more complex, too - snap can actually be quite a deep game:
We were both playing our cards to separate stacks in front of us; a snap situation was defined as when the cards on top of both piles matched. However, we often felt the urge to call out "snap" when putting a matching card on the same pile. So we put another cigarette packet on the other side of the table, and defined such a condition as "autosnap". Calling out the wrong sort of snap or hitting the wrong fag packet counted as a foul. Next time we plan to implement more features: contrasnap, where the top card on one pile matches the second-from top on the opposite pile, consecutive snap, where the card is one away in sequence from the other, autoconsecutive snap, and contraconsecutive snap.
We'll need six empty cigarette packets (or similar, to count as "bases" in different parts of the room. Should be quite a workout.
But surely it is copyrighted, it's just that the copyright is owned by the students - the univeristy is just enocuraging the copyright holders to share.
Wouldn't it be nice if some of these students later become famous mega-popstars, and, after having had such a positive introduction to P2P filesharing by their alma mater, decide to give all their music away free and bring the RIAA et al to thier knees?
Yeah, I know, but it would be cool.
In my amateur playing about with software synthesis etc, particularly the very cool (and free) Buzz (www.buzz2.com), I've found that the coolest stereo effects come from panning using both delay and volume differences - that is, delaying the sound in one channel and making it slightly quieter.
Interesting effects, to varying levels of "realism", can also be acheived with stereo reverb - having, for example, the "dry" sound of an instrument dominate in the left channel, but the reverby sound dominate in the right.
I am a fan, and I want to see more of Liv Tyler. No matter how you look at it, there are not enough wonem in LotR. If it were up to me, I would have had Eowyn fighting on the battlements of hlem's Deep. That would have ruled.
Although I think that many of Jackson's deviations from the books detracted from the storytelling, especially in The Two Towers, many of other changes were, I think, improvements on the book.
Furthermore, by relegating certain scnes to the DVD special edition, Jackson's really only doing what Tolkien did in keeping certain elements of the story in the appendices.
So he takes the Arwen / Aragorn love interest out of the appendix and puts it in the main narrative, and takes elements of the Gandalf / Sauron relationship out and puts them in an appendix (ie DVD special edition).
You know, call me a heretic, but I'd quite like to see a book of the film of the book, like they did with Tim Burton's horrible remake of Planet of the Apes. I'm not saying it would be better than the original, but I do think it would be bettter in some ways.
Extra Terrestrial Real Estate (ETRE from now on)
Which forces one to ask, "ETRE ou ne pas ETRE? C'est le question."
The Goonies, I believe (although, in thse referential times, the script could well have been quoting something else). And I think it was "Your mother wears combat boots." Sounds kind of gnarlier.
The poll showed that 80% of the 2,000 votes that they counted were in favour. They did not count an additional 5,000 votes, nearly all of which were against.
So in fact the results were, of 7,000 votes: 23% in favour, 77% not.
The reason given for disregarding most votes made is that they came from an anti-ID card website, so they were biased.
I swear I couldn't make it up.
In the UK, we don't have advertisements for prescription drugs - they're banned. On the grounds, I think, that your doctor should be able to choose what drug to prescribe you without you the patient pestering him for whatever it was you saw on TV
Which would make sense, were it not for all the money spent on promoting prescription drugs to doctors - free gifts, points schemes (like, you get points for prescribing drugs and can collect them to get stuff), free 'conferences' that are realy an excuse to spend weekend at a hotel eating driumking at the pharmecutical companies' expense, etc, etc, ad nauseam.
My wife is a Star Trek fan, you insensitive clod!
I've tried to get her into Star Wars, but she shies away from it, probably due to her having had an ubergeek ex-boyfriend who would not consider you a real Star Wars fan unless you knew the name of the elephant that played the big monster that the sand people ride about on in A New Hope.
Dude, you brush your teats in the morning?
That's got to chafe.
Yeah, it's the past tense in British English. Maybe it doesn't apply in the US.
From what you say, it sounds as though this kind of thing is much less common in the US than in Britain (where I am). Here in the UK, where gambling is much more legally, and socially, acceptable, bookies (high street gambling shops) take bets on most things that can be bet on. Huge amounts of money change hands during the general elections. And in political reporting, for example with the recent leadership challenge to the leader of the opposition, it's very common for the reporters to quote the odds given to various outcomes by the big bookies.
Other non-sports bets include:
Celebrity and royal marriages / breakups.
The Booker Prize (a bit like your national book award, I think)
Outcomes of television programmes such as Big Brother
The weather on Christmas day (snow / not snow).
I even heard a science programme about SETI on the radio where they got a big bookie to give odds on the discovery of alien intelligence.
"Whilst" is, strictly speaking, past tense. For example "I like to eat tacos while playing my gameboy" / "When I was young, I liked eating tacos whilst playing on my gameboy".
Not that you have ever called me a pretentious jackass, but I tohught you might like to know.
That's a good point. Last major fireworks display I was at, I was with a rather grizzled-looking vietnam vet who started having flashbacks and had to go away somewhere quiet and have a lie down.
And the neighbours to my parents' house were Iraqi. They complained about me and my small brother setting off fireworks, as it brought back painful memories of the Iran-Iraq war, or something.
Not that I believe you should ban fireworks just because it freaks out a few unfortunate people, but a bit of consideration for one's neighbours, espicially if they're ex-airborne infantry acid-freaks, is probvably a good thing.
Also, what about the USAF bombing all those Afghani weddings due to their unfortunate tradition of celebrating the marriage by firing automatic weapons into the air? What about that, eh?
Because if he hadn't got caught, there wouldn't be a book about him.
Like the anthropic principle in cosmology:
The universe is as it is because if it wasn't then we wouldn't be arount to observe it being so.
Abaci are digital, though, aren't they? The bead's either on the left or the right of the bead-stick-thingy; no in-betweens allowed.
Better to use one huge set of scales, or even better, a big thermometer-looking thing that rings a bell at the top if it gets to 10 Exabytes. Yup, that'd be cool.
Whatever happened to analogue computing anyway?
I've actually found that Excel is a really quick and easy environment to program cellular automata.
.xls file, or just the code if you'd rather.
The implementation of Conway's Life is trivial and is left as an exercise for the reader - or let met know and I'll email the
Enough Vitamin A will kill you.
Polar animals store massive amounts of Vitamin A in their livers, for some reason. Scott, when exloring the Antarctic, actually died of a Vitamin A overdose from eating the livers of his huskies, rather than dying of lead poisoning (as previously believed). Not strictly relevant, I know, but if you're ever in a survival situation in the Antarctic, you might be glad I told you.
Being even more pedantic, there's no absolute frame of reference for time, so there's not really such a thing as 'right now' over astronomical distances. I think.
You probably know better than me. I'll shut up now.
If the long-term costs of using fossil fuels were included in their price, it is highly unlikely that they would be the cheapest
Yeah, that's true, and an interesting point. I think there's a good argument to charging for the total cost of a product or commodity, in terms of its total impact from production to disposal. I read a similar thread here a while back about how some countries were getting electronic-goods manufacturers to include the cost of disposal in the retail price of the item. Similarly, yeah, maybe oil companies should be forced to pay for the environmental damage, cleanup costs, healthcare costs for those suffering from air-quality-related respiratory diseases, etc, and relfect this in their retail costs, but I can't see any way of doing this without draconian regulatory legislation on an international scale.
Unfortunately, this seems to be both unlikely (look at Kyoto) and possibly idealogically dodgy. The lefty enviro-hippie part of me says "yeah, make the oil companies pay", but the paranoid libertarian part of me says "no, we don't want some global cartel fixing the prices of everything that might have some kind of environmental impact".
So I'm undecided.
Yeah, that's what gets me, too. All this talk about "the hydrogen economy" yadda yaddda yadda tends to assume that people will be charging their fuel cell up from renewable energy sources. But surely, in a free market, they'll be charging it up from the cheapest energy source, which will be the same as the variety of (generally non-renewable) sources that drive today's power grids. So it won't make a blind bit of difference. And I bet that OPEC et al are looking into the most efficient way to convert oil into hydrogen - I mean, what else are they going to do with it once eveyone starts driving fuel-cell powered cars?
Anyway, point of this slightly incoherent post: Fuel cells are cool, but, unlike oil, they are not an energy source and therefore will not replace oil. Hopefully something will, though.
Have you ever had trouble writing upside down with a ballpoint anyways?
yes, I have. Or, as another poster said, on a vertical surface. Also, if I put a ballpoint pen upside-down in my trouser pocket, all the ink dribbles out and gives me a blue stain on my thigh.
Generally, I don't notice this until I'm in the shower the next morning, and mistake it for a big nasty bruise, especially if I've been out drinking the night before and can't quite remember if I fell over or not.
I'm still waiting for NASA to solve this problem.
Well, not really, because the definition you give in kind of recursive. What do you call the organisation to which these wonderful men and women belong? And is it a singular or a plural?
My take on it is that generally, yeah, organisations, groups, etc shoulds be treated as singular nouns, and those who don't are woefully ignorant and fair game to be laughed at by those of us who know better, but that "The Police" is an illogical exception.
It's English, it doen't have to obey logical rules.