I was in 3 different long lasting D&D groups in the 1980s. I think most of us would have loved to have girls join, but no girls played with us in that decade. Whenever we got the balls to ask a girl to play they just looked at us like we were crazy, like they would get nerd cooties. I went to a D&D convention in New Haven at that time and I remember there was only one girl out of about 500 guys. She was very popular, with a whole lot of guys wanting to be in her group.
Many of my D&D groups had women in them, and not always the significant other of the DM, but in general, I saw the same thing. There were very few women in tabletop RPGs for a long time, and not wanting to associate with the type of boys that played RPGs was certainly one of them. Women didn't really enter into the tabletop arena in large numbers till Vampire the Masquerade showed up on the scene. Catching the vampire trend near the beginning of the swell, it appealed to women in both it's theme, social nature of even the tabletop game, and subject matter. My first experience with it was a group of goth girls literally brining it to me and my friends and saying "You play RPGs, right? We want to play this game but don't know how. We've decided to let you run it for us. Show up at our house this Sunday." This experience was not uncommon from discussions I've been part of on RPG.net. Once LARPing became big, women seemed particularly interested in that also to even out the gender make up to around 50/50.
I did some ancestry work on my wife's family awhile back. The family story was that they came from Russia. I was surprised to find that one of her direct ancestors was listed as coming from Germany in one census and then Russia in another census. Now, it could have been a mistake (census takers were never perfect) or it could have been a German ancestor lying and saying he was Russian to escape anti-German sentiment. It would have been right around this time as well.
I've done some genealogy work and seen similar things. My conclusions is that the censuses simply weren't taken all that seriously. I've been looking at pictures of the original census pages and it's obvious that they were filled out by a single person doing all the writing and getting information from the head of the household, probably waiting in line. Either the person giving the information, most likely head of household, or the person doing the writing were not looking at correctness and detailed records, but a headcount for states voting purposes. I've seen names that were illegible or abbreviated severely, different spellings of first names, names that changed from census to census and hardly followed any sort of legal name criteria usually bouncing between first and middle given names, the wrong last names being used because it was too similar to the name of the person previous in the census and the writer probably misheard and assumed they were the same family, different states of birth listed for people I know are the same person, etc. No doubt your ancestor could have given a fake country of origin, perhaps gave it as it was at that time, or started to explain and the writer just decided to write something down quickly.
The problem is, the government is not doing what it can do, because it is afraid of offending people in a world where Political Correctness is going to kill millions.
I doubt it is political correctness as much as money. I'd bet a large amount of the traffic going to and from those places is still for business reasons with money on the line. We export and we import from these countries. Flights aren't stopped because the planes flying continent to continent are full of huddled masses, but because they are full of business men.
That was pretty much my thought. A camel that's truly pissed off isn't going to be helping you. They're big ornery creatures, after all. Meanwhile in getting the camera view the camel was provided with fodder, water, medical care, as well as all the other help that a domestic camel gets in exchange for walking around.
It's been said before, might as well say it again: Stop thinking of PETA as a pro-animal group, and rather think of them as an anti-human one.
This is one the things that sucks about being an atheist. Other than the existential dread, of course. I will never really have this feeling of community. I know that I will always be able to count on my close family, but that's where it ends.
I have no belief in god nor any intention to change my mind on the subject, but what you described is pretty appealing.
You could always be a Unitarian. (Sure, you're supposed to say you belief in some higher power, but none of the Unitarians I've ever known would ever press somebody on that and simply saying your higher powers was a collection of impersonal physical laws that is complicated enough to allow life that wonders if the laws themselves are sentient or not, would probably do it.)
Hell, you could also join in with probably a half dozen other churches, be open about your beliefs, and still fit into the community as a whole as a person. I think that atheists overlook that church and religion is more than just some wacky belief system but is also a social construct cultivated to fill the needs of people and communities over thousands of years. My impression is that most European church goers are pretty much atheist, especially in Northern Europe.
Beyond that, you could always join a gang or some other social club.
Bad idea. Downhill is harder on the knees and quads than running flat. I would rather run uphill over distance than the equivalent downhill any day. It's more work, but far less damaging.
You just have to do it once, and then you can use that $50 million for physical therapy.
The "dye" is ochre, dirt. The other two I'll concede readily.
And natural copper is just a rock. That they mined it, probably modified it into powder, and used it for a specific purpose pretty much makes it in the same space as taking natural copper and pounding it into jewelry or an axe head.
Back in the late 90's following the idea of real pathogens favoring a long life for their hosts, we talked about how eventually computer viruses would do the same. We joked how they would be built to keep the computer up and running and actually have functions to make it do all the maintenance that normal users never do and that tech support (the jobs we were doing then) would actually advise catching certain viruses to solve hardware issues. This has just about played out. There have long been things like browser bars that while most consider them malware, some users do love them and will insist on installing them if removed because they actually like them. Even in the past, I have seen articles here on/. about how there has been Windows viruses that made the infected computer install needed Microsoft patches to make them safe from competing viruses. As the life of hardware is growing longer, one can expect malware creators to look for the long game and make their programs less conspicuous and perhaps even beneficial for the computer they infect, thus increasing the length that the computer will remain infected before being discarded or rebuilt. Like I said, we've already seen this.
It seems like an over-production of oxygen on a planet with an abundance of atmospheric CO2 would be a solvable problem. Hasn't this been faced by every grow experiment ever performed in space?
I really wouldn't call Mars' atmosphere much of an abundance. In a lab on Earth, the average Mars atmospheric pressure is considered a medium vacuum. We can get gas out of it but it will take a lot of pumping and energy to do so.
Do _we_ need to take it seriously? If _they_ can get it funded and moving then good on them.
Well, they are basically conning people out of their money to try and get this project moving as they have no good plan or potential to do what they say. The entire thing seems to be one big crowd funding campaign with no option but failure. They're never going to get their project funded and moving in anything like its current state and I would say _we_ probably should inform people of that.
A year ago I bought a Volt. In the month prior I did a bunch of research on electric cars. Six months later I was still getting ads on Leafs and Volts. Those ads seemed fairly pointless as I already owned a Volt. I find it happens a lot that I look for a certain product, then after I buy it, I will get ads for that product. Except for items that I buy regularly, then I never see an ad.
Google, when I buy a bathroom scale, I am no longer interested in hearing about bathrooms scales two weeks later. I buy tea regularly, why do I never see an ad for tea.
Because their are various levels to advertising. The most basic layer shows you ads of sites you've been to, usually within the last 30 days, that are on the advertising companies list of customers. There was six months where that advertising was doing its job before you bought. After you bought, that layer of advertising has no knowledge of this info and keeps feeding you ads. This happens before any other targeted advertising that might actually use algorithms to figure out what you want.
3) They often show you ads for things you've just bought. If I get a new laptop why do I want to see more laptop ads?
A friend that does work in social media answered this one for me. There are multiple levels of advertising, and one of the base levels is to re-advertise sites that you have already been to. Studies show that most people do not buy when they first go to a site and check on something, but will buy in the next 30 days. Therefore, once that level of advertising can tell that you've been to a site that is paying them, they continue to advertise that site to you. I get his all the time for hotels, events, and stores that I have gone to and bought things, usually their only product. Then they keep showing me ads for what I just bought. It's because the ad system doesn't know you bought it and is happening at a lower level than the store you bought it at.
We are pretty bad at detecting dangerously large rocks flying directly at our faces.
We're even worse at putting people on Mars. We'll get better at detecting dangerously large rocks way before we get any better at colonizing Mars. By time we can colonize Mars, detecting and deflecting dangerously large rocks flying directly at our faces will be trivial.
Lot of good that'll do us when Earth gets hit with a large asteroid, as it does periodically. That's why he says this is about hedging our bets, not about human happiness.
Detecting and deflecting any Earth killing asteroid will be trivial to a society capable of putting a self sustaining colony on Mars. As much as I would like for it to happen, the tech needed to reach Mars with four guys is still 30 years away with Apollo-like political drive and funding. By that time, we'll have deep space habitats and research because they'll be needed to get to Mars and our study of space will be a lot greater than it is now. Wanting to protect the human race from asteroid death by colonizing Mars is like the ancient man wanting to build vast man made lakes next to every population center to provide water. Way before we had the earth moving and engineering abilities to build vast man-made lakes, we just built wells, aqueducts, and plumbing instead.
Did we abandon terraforming? I know it takes time but it takes away many problems.
If you're talking of Mars, I did the math for a base attempt on terraforming Mars. To move enough comets that are generally considered close to us, near Kuniper belt, to Mars to give it an Earth like atmosphere would take an amount of energy measured in units of days of total output of the sun. That was after already considering all the material already considered to be on Mars. While better plans with longer time tables could reduce the energy needed by a few orders of magnitude, it would still be dealing with units best described as days of total output on the sun. While we do have a sun we can use to get that energy, the engineering feats and material needed just to build that energy harvesting tools to even start would be another engineering project as big as terraforming Mars. Simply put, the problems solved by terraforming Mars will be mostly trivial and cosmetic to a society capable of actually terraforming Mars.
The question is, what is "American" food? Except for burgers with french fries and Apple tart nothing comes to my mind.
Industrial microwave food from the deep freezer perhaps?
In Japan, it was apparently a beef patty covered in a grey, salt sauce with a side salad and side of pasta. While I Japan, we went to an "American restaurant" to see and this is what we ended up ordering. We could tell it was an American dish because it came with plain pasta rather than rice.
Eventually, and soon with luck, going to space will not be grand projects requiring investing in new tech, it will just be services that NASA will hire. Things like the bidding war between Boeing, SpaceX, and Sierra Nevada for a space ship will be a thing of the past, and NASA will just look for the cheapest bidder to get their stuff up much like paying for shipping on a package. Sierra Nevada should keep working on their Dream Chaser because the days where somebody else will step in to pay them to develop and build it as a new project are hopefully growing near their end.
I suppose the scientific response is, "No, shut up; we just defined this confusing and nonstandard wording as X."
Pretty much, but it is a bit more complicated that that. Right hand rule refers to the cross product dealing with current, magnetic force, and the way it is taught. Essentially, physics follows a pattern that is mimicked by using the right hand and assigning certain related forces and fields to the thumb and fingers. This is known as the Right Hand Rule.
I'm not standing up for Apple... this was a stupid mistake. Didn't any of their beta-testers wear skinny jeans and keep it in the pocket?
Probably did, but this is happening to probably to one hundredth of a percent of people. Their testing probably only included a few hundred people carrying the phone if that many. Still, with large sales, enough for it to be noticed. Much like the antenna issue with earlier phone. Affects practically nobody, but that's still enough to be an issue with the numbers they are selling the attention it is getting. Add in that they seem to assume that people will use cases (and most do IME, I seem to be the only phone user that goes 'bareback' that I know) or just not put a phone under the stresses that it is getting.
The Russians are going to take sixteen years to do theirs. Best wishes!
Pretty much, but I doubt they'll actually go. Sixteen years out is a pretty long time to take. I bet they don't even up their space spending this year....or the next. Sixteen years from now will be somebody else's probably rather than Putin's most likely. My cynical take is that it will go exactly where all of Bush's talk in each Presidential address about going to Mars went, nowhere past the news reporters.
Slashdot Mirror
I haven't seen an Epson printer in a long time. I see HP, Brothers, Panasonic, but not Epsons.
You're probably not a photographer then. They've always been around with photo printers since digital photography became the thing.
"they expect an operational reactor within a decade" - by that time solar will be infinitely efficiency and this will obsolete.
Yay! Fusion power has moved to just being ten years away instead of the twenty years it has been for the last fifty.
I was in 3 different long lasting D&D groups in the 1980s. I think most of us would have loved to have girls join, but no girls played with us in that decade. Whenever we got the balls to ask a girl to play they just looked at us like we were crazy, like they would get nerd cooties. I went to a D&D convention in New Haven at that time and I remember there was only one girl out of about 500 guys. She was very popular, with a whole lot of guys wanting to be in her group.
Many of my D&D groups had women in them, and not always the significant other of the DM, but in general, I saw the same thing. There were very few women in tabletop RPGs for a long time, and not wanting to associate with the type of boys that played RPGs was certainly one of them. Women didn't really enter into the tabletop arena in large numbers till Vampire the Masquerade showed up on the scene. Catching the vampire trend near the beginning of the swell, it appealed to women in both it's theme, social nature of even the tabletop game, and subject matter. My first experience with it was a group of goth girls literally brining it to me and my friends and saying "You play RPGs, right? We want to play this game but don't know how. We've decided to let you run it for us. Show up at our house this Sunday." This experience was not uncommon from discussions I've been part of on RPG.net. Once LARPing became big, women seemed particularly interested in that also to even out the gender make up to around 50/50.
I did some ancestry work on my wife's family awhile back. The family story was that they came from Russia. I was surprised to find that one of her direct ancestors was listed as coming from Germany in one census and then Russia in another census. Now, it could have been a mistake (census takers were never perfect) or it could have been a German ancestor lying and saying he was Russian to escape anti-German sentiment. It would have been right around this time as well.
I've done some genealogy work and seen similar things. My conclusions is that the censuses simply weren't taken all that seriously. I've been looking at pictures of the original census pages and it's obvious that they were filled out by a single person doing all the writing and getting information from the head of the household, probably waiting in line. Either the person giving the information, most likely head of household, or the person doing the writing were not looking at correctness and detailed records, but a headcount for states voting purposes. I've seen names that were illegible or abbreviated severely, different spellings of first names, names that changed from census to census and hardly followed any sort of legal name criteria usually bouncing between first and middle given names, the wrong last names being used because it was too similar to the name of the person previous in the census and the writer probably misheard and assumed they were the same family, different states of birth listed for people I know are the same person, etc. No doubt your ancestor could have given a fake country of origin, perhaps gave it as it was at that time, or started to explain and the writer just decided to write something down quickly.
The problem is, the government is not doing what it can do, because it is afraid of offending people in a world where Political Correctness is going to kill millions.
I doubt it is political correctness as much as money. I'd bet a large amount of the traffic going to and from those places is still for business reasons with money on the line. We export and we import from these countries. Flights aren't stopped because the planes flying continent to continent are full of huddled masses, but because they are full of business men.
That was pretty much my thought. A camel that's truly pissed off isn't going to be helping you. They're big ornery creatures, after all. Meanwhile in getting the camera view the camel was provided with fodder, water, medical care, as well as all the other help that a domestic camel gets in exchange for walking around.
It's been said before, might as well say it again: Stop thinking of PETA as a pro-animal group, and rather think of them as an anti-human one.
This is one the things that sucks about being an atheist. Other than the existential dread, of course. I will never really have this feeling of community. I know that I will always be able to count on my close family, but that's where it ends.
I have no belief in god nor any intention to change my mind on the subject, but what you described is pretty appealing.
You could always be a Unitarian. (Sure, you're supposed to say you belief in some higher power, but none of the Unitarians I've ever known would ever press somebody on that and simply saying your higher powers was a collection of impersonal physical laws that is complicated enough to allow life that wonders if the laws themselves are sentient or not, would probably do it.)
Hell, you could also join in with probably a half dozen other churches, be open about your beliefs, and still fit into the community as a whole as a person. I think that atheists overlook that church and religion is more than just some wacky belief system but is also a social construct cultivated to fill the needs of people and communities over thousands of years. My impression is that most European church goers are pretty much atheist, especially in Northern Europe.
Beyond that, you could always join a gang or some other social club.
Bad idea. Downhill is harder on the knees and quads than running flat. I would rather run uphill over distance than the equivalent downhill any day. It's more work, but far less damaging.
You just have to do it once, and then you can use that $50 million for physical therapy.
6: They are quiet.
Ironically, that'd probably be the one turn off for motorcyclists. Imagine a group of Hells Angels taking off on silent Harley's.
I can imagine a group of Hell's Angels taking off with stereos all blasting Ride of the Valkyries.
The "dye" is ochre, dirt. The other two I'll concede readily.
And natural copper is just a rock. That they mined it, probably modified it into powder, and used it for a specific purpose pretty much makes it in the same space as taking natural copper and pounding it into jewelry or an axe head.
Back in the late 90's following the idea of real pathogens favoring a long life for their hosts, we talked about how eventually computer viruses would do the same. We joked how they would be built to keep the computer up and running and actually have functions to make it do all the maintenance that normal users never do and that tech support (the jobs we were doing then) would actually advise catching certain viruses to solve hardware issues. This has just about played out. There have long been things like browser bars that while most consider them malware, some users do love them and will insist on installing them if removed because they actually like them. Even in the past, I have seen articles here on /. about how there has been Windows viruses that made the infected computer install needed Microsoft patches to make them safe from competing viruses. As the life of hardware is growing longer, one can expect malware creators to look for the long game and make their programs less conspicuous and perhaps even beneficial for the computer they infect, thus increasing the length that the computer will remain infected before being discarded or rebuilt. Like I said, we've already seen this.
Just like sailing to the New World and setting up a colony was an optimistic scam. Why do you care so much what other people do with their money?
No, when they left for the new world, they actually had working ships and intended to go. Mars One, not so much in either capacity.
It seems like an over-production of oxygen on a planet with an abundance of atmospheric CO2 would be a solvable problem. Hasn't this been faced by every grow experiment ever performed in space?
I really wouldn't call Mars' atmosphere much of an abundance. In a lab on Earth, the average Mars atmospheric pressure is considered a medium vacuum. We can get gas out of it but it will take a lot of pumping and energy to do so.
Do _we_ need to take it seriously? If _they_ can get it funded and moving then good on them.
Well, they are basically conning people out of their money to try and get this project moving as they have no good plan or potential to do what they say. The entire thing seems to be one big crowd funding campaign with no option but failure. They're never going to get their project funded and moving in anything like its current state and I would say _we_ probably should inform people of that.
A year ago I bought a Volt. In the month prior I did a bunch of research on electric cars. Six months later I was still getting ads on Leafs and Volts. Those ads seemed fairly pointless as I already owned a Volt. I find it happens a lot that I look for a certain product, then after I buy it, I will get ads for that product. Except for items that I buy regularly, then I never see an ad.
Google, when I buy a bathroom scale, I am no longer interested in hearing about bathrooms scales two weeks later. I buy tea regularly, why do I never see an ad for tea.
Because their are various levels to advertising. The most basic layer shows you ads of sites you've been to, usually within the last 30 days, that are on the advertising companies list of customers. There was six months where that advertising was doing its job before you bought. After you bought, that layer of advertising has no knowledge of this info and keeps feeding you ads. This happens before any other targeted advertising that might actually use algorithms to figure out what you want.
3) They often show you ads for things you've just bought. If I get a new laptop why do I want to see more laptop ads?
A friend that does work in social media answered this one for me. There are multiple levels of advertising, and one of the base levels is to re-advertise sites that you have already been to. Studies show that most people do not buy when they first go to a site and check on something, but will buy in the next 30 days. Therefore, once that level of advertising can tell that you've been to a site that is paying them, they continue to advertise that site to you. I get his all the time for hotels, events, and stores that I have gone to and bought things, usually their only product. Then they keep showing me ads for what I just bought. It's because the ad system doesn't know you bought it and is happening at a lower level than the store you bought it at.
This++. I wish I could mod this up.
Well, create and account and log in instead of being an AC, and maybe they'd give you mod points.
We are pretty bad at detecting dangerously large rocks flying directly at our faces.
We're even worse at putting people on Mars. We'll get better at detecting dangerously large rocks way before we get any better at colonizing Mars. By time we can colonize Mars, detecting and deflecting dangerously large rocks flying directly at our faces will be trivial.
Lot of good that'll do us when Earth gets hit with a large asteroid, as it does periodically. That's why he says this is about hedging our bets, not about human happiness.
Detecting and deflecting any Earth killing asteroid will be trivial to a society capable of putting a self sustaining colony on Mars. As much as I would like for it to happen, the tech needed to reach Mars with four guys is still 30 years away with Apollo-like political drive and funding. By that time, we'll have deep space habitats and research because they'll be needed to get to Mars and our study of space will be a lot greater than it is now. Wanting to protect the human race from asteroid death by colonizing Mars is like the ancient man wanting to build vast man made lakes next to every population center to provide water. Way before we had the earth moving and engineering abilities to build vast man-made lakes, we just built wells, aqueducts, and plumbing instead.
Did we abandon terraforming? I know it takes time but it takes away many problems.
If you're talking of Mars, I did the math for a base attempt on terraforming Mars. To move enough comets that are generally considered close to us, near Kuniper belt, to Mars to give it an Earth like atmosphere would take an amount of energy measured in units of days of total output of the sun. That was after already considering all the material already considered to be on Mars. While better plans with longer time tables could reduce the energy needed by a few orders of magnitude, it would still be dealing with units best described as days of total output on the sun. While we do have a sun we can use to get that energy, the engineering feats and material needed just to build that energy harvesting tools to even start would be another engineering project as big as terraforming Mars. Simply put, the problems solved by terraforming Mars will be mostly trivial and cosmetic to a society capable of actually terraforming Mars.
The question is, what is "American" food? Except for burgers with french fries and Apple tart nothing comes to my mind.
Industrial microwave food from the deep freezer perhaps?
In Japan, it was apparently a beef patty covered in a grey, salt sauce with a side salad and side of pasta. While I Japan, we went to an "American restaurant" to see and this is what we ended up ordering. We could tell it was an American dish because it came with plain pasta rather than rice.
Eventually, and soon with luck, going to space will not be grand projects requiring investing in new tech, it will just be services that NASA will hire. Things like the bidding war between Boeing, SpaceX, and Sierra Nevada for a space ship will be a thing of the past, and NASA will just look for the cheapest bidder to get their stuff up much like paying for shipping on a package. Sierra Nevada should keep working on their Dream Chaser because the days where somebody else will step in to pay them to develop and build it as a new project are hopefully growing near their end.
Why "right-handed"?
I suppose the scientific response is, "No, shut up; we just defined this confusing and nonstandard wording as X."
Pretty much, but it is a bit more complicated that that. Right hand rule refers to the cross product dealing with current, magnetic force, and the way it is taught. Essentially, physics follows a pattern that is mimicked by using the right hand and assigning certain related forces and fields to the thumb and fingers. This is known as the Right Hand Rule.
I'm not standing up for Apple... this was a stupid mistake. Didn't any of their beta-testers wear skinny jeans and keep it in the pocket?
Probably did, but this is happening to probably to one hundredth of a percent of people. Their testing probably only included a few hundred people carrying the phone if that many. Still, with large sales, enough for it to be noticed. Much like the antenna issue with earlier phone. Affects practically nobody, but that's still enough to be an issue with the numbers they are selling the attention it is getting. Add in that they seem to assume that people will use cases (and most do IME, I seem to be the only phone user that goes 'bareback' that I know) or just not put a phone under the stresses that it is getting.
The Russians are going to take sixteen years to do theirs. Best wishes!
Pretty much, but I doubt they'll actually go. Sixteen years out is a pretty long time to take. I bet they don't even up their space spending this year. ...or the next. Sixteen years from now will be somebody else's probably rather than Putin's most likely. My cynical take is that it will go exactly where all of Bush's talk in each Presidential address about going to Mars went, nowhere past the news reporters.