Average: a measure of central tendency. Mean, median and mode are different ways of measuring central tendency, i.e., they're 3 different kinds of average. Mean is just one kind of average.
Second this (and pretty much all of the books listed by redmid17). Lila, the sequel to Zen, is also a pretty good read.
I'd add the following to the fiction list: The Name of the Rose, A Game of Thrones (heck, the whole A Song of Ice and Fire series), Jonathan Livingston Seagull and Illusions, Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass, Starship Troopers, Robinson Crusoe, Swiss Family Robinson, Gulliver's Travels, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (and anything else by Jules Verne), Sandman (especially Season of Mists), Neverwhere, American Gods (and anything else by Neil Gaiman).
Non-fiction: The Road Less Travelled (this, like Zen, you read over and over and learn something new every time), Meditations (Descartes), Critique of Pure Reason, The Prince (Machiavelli), Thus Spake Zarathustra (and Nietzsche's other works), The Art of War, The Book of Five Rings, anything by Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell.
Fiction/non-fiction, depending on the reader: Mythology (I read Edith Hamilton's when I was very young and Bullfinch's much later, either will do), Tao Te Ching, Divine Comedy.
Many of these I recommend not because I categorically agree with them, but because they broaden perspectives and make you think.
Time runs at different speeds at different points in space. The poster has a point. When astronauts return to earth their watches are slightly out of synch with clocks on earth
RELATIVITY DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY
The emphasized bit is correct, and another AC claimed "relativity does not work that way", which is incorrect, because relativity does work that way. Astronauts on the ISS experience a net dilation of 21 or so microseconds per day -- dilation of about 25 microseconds due to velocity relative to ground and compression of about 4 microseconds due to being higher up the gravity well. Over a 6-month stay, that would be about 4 milliseconds.
While that's probably well within the margin of error of any mechanical watch, GPS devices are a different story. They have rather accurate internal clocks, and relativistic errors are large enough that GPS satellites have to compensate for the discrepancy.
The topic was anti-aliased font, in printed books. You'll be hard-pressed finding one of those that didn't go through a RIP, hence digital.
The analog workflow (be it manual typesetting or direct carving of master plates) is only used in limited artisitic endeavor. The goalposts have been moved off-topic.
I wasn't trying to move the goalposts on you. The last print job (black and white book with some diagrams) I worked on used film-to-plate transfers with manual layouts, but that was well over a decade ago, in a third-world country. Looks like technology has moved forward a lot from that. I'd heard about newer print processes using direct computer-to-plate transfers (which is probably what you're referring to). I didn't know how prevalent that was for predominantly monochrome text printing nowadays until your comments got me reading. I'm happy to be corrected. Thanks:)
The analog I was referring to are, in this case, letter shapes. They don't need to be approximated with discrete pixels when you're using movable type, for example, or carved woodblocks; and even etched plates can use analog curves if the master image does, hence, no anti-aliasing. As to color mixing, I'm familiar with the dithering and registration required to render them because of the inks. It can be a real pain to get right.
I don't remember the details of the 2-bit grayscale printer, i read about it was some time back. I'm not even sure now if it was an experimental technology or if it was commercially available. It might even have been vaporware...:p
Generally, books are printed with a press. Whether it uses movable type or etched plates, the printing technology is analog, even if digital technology is used to lay out the plate or type. That's why I made the distinction between analog vs. digital... analog type don't need to be anti-aliased, since their "pixels" are effectively molecules.
My statement about digital print was a hasty generalization. In retrospect, it's probably only a handful of digital printers that are capable of anti-aliasing, like one with 2-bit grayscale pixels that I read about somewhere.
> 2x2 for lowercase. Right. That's 16 possible "characters"
Correct.
> with one of those being empty space and 4 of them being single pixels.
Wow you figured out not every possible combination is -> useful <- all on your own? Here is your sticker.
Condescending sarcasm only works if you're actually making an intelligent point, otherwise you just end up sounding like a jackass. The point of my statement, in case it went over your head, was that there are 26 characters in the English alphabet, and 9 pixel patterns are insufficient to portray them all. Nice try anyway.
It should also be pointed out that the 2x2 lowercase font you're bragging about isn't 2x2. The h is 2x3; n, m, u and v are 3x2, s, t and y are 3x3... and those are just the ones I spotted in the first line. So yes, BS for a 2x2 font was correct.
Those fonts are readable in the same way grass is edible. Just because it's possible doesn't mean it's useful as a reading font. It can be used to convey information and the reader can with some adjustment get used to it. That is far from "perfectly readable." Reading anything longer than a paragraph becomes an exercise in masochism. They might be useful as a small machine readable font that needs to remain decipherable by humans, similar to OCR-A.
And just to demonstrate one can bold any font...
Simply changing the color of text from grey to white doesn't make it boldface. What if the text is white to begin with? Boldface refers to using heavier weight strokes, which you can't do with your 3x3 font without making it unreadable.
people like you who know absolutely nothing about fonts.
So now you're passing judgement on the knowledge or lack thereof of complete strangers on the Internet, when your own demonstrated credentials are the presentation of the work of another person?
I'd normally refrain from this, but you did bring it up. I worked with 8-bit machines running CRT displays in the early 80s. Those displays are pretty low res and the built-in text patterns tended to use an 8x8 grid. To fit more information on the screen, I designed 7x5 and 5x5 pixel character sets. I also made one for 3x5 but I thought it was terribly ugly. I was 12 at the time. In high school, I was a writer and later editor of my schools' papers. In later years, I did a lot of desktop publishing work -- editing, layout and graphic design. I've also run an in-house press for one company.
None of that really matters, because the original point, which others have also raised, is that your friend's 3x3 font isn't very readable. Not unreadable, but definitely far from anything any reasonable person would describe as readable. Anyway, you have a nice day, Mr. Has-a-friend-who's-an-expert-on-fonts.
It's a JavaScript comparison operator for strict equality, which tests both value and type. JS is dynamically typed, so 3 == '3' evaluates to true, but 3 === '3' is false. The inequality analogues are != and !==.
Just because the term "Computer scientist" contains the words "Scientist" does not actually make it one. It's a misnomer. Computer scientists are actually either mathematicians or engineers, depending on their specialties.
That's a rather narrow understanding of a fairly broad field of study.
Computer science or computing science (abbreviated CS or CompSci) is the scientific and practical approach to computation and its applications. A computer scientist specializes in the theory of computation and the design of computational systems.
Applied science is typically (i.e., not always) engineering, which develops technology, although there might be feedback between basic science and applied science: research and development (R&D).
R&D, like say, a prototype networked information system that makes data available on "pages" of hyper-linked text -- a "web" of data. The proof-of-concept came first, the engineering came after.
Also, to put it quite simply, scientists do not create things. They just think about things; engineers create them.
People who "just think about things" are called philosophers. Scientists create a great number of things. If such creations are found to have useful properties, someone then figures out how to efficiently produce them in larger quantities. Those people can be scientists or engineers or both, depending on the challenges involved. Other engineers then figure out how to use those creations to make stuff that gets used by other people.
Tim Berners-Lee is a computer scientist. Robert Cailliau is an informatics engineer and a computer scientist. Nicola Pellow was a math undergrad. The Web was created at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) and first deployed to science departments and physics labs like SLAC (Stanford Linear Accelerator Center) and Fermilab.
True evil is very very rare (about 2% of the population is capable of this, but even orders of magnitude less than these 2% are really out to harm others and abuse nature).
2% is over 70 million people. That's not rare by most definitions. How many people do you know? All it takes is one to ruin lives. Do remember that these people gravitate towards positions of power in corporations and governments. They don't have to be "really out to harm others and abuse nature." The harm and misery they cause is simply collateral damage to them, and they don't care how much harm they cause in the pursuit of their goals.
Slashdot Mirror
Javascript. Pretty much everybody has a browser, though I'd love to have a non-browser JS interpreter I could write shell scripts in...
New Zealand Defense Force: Wikipedia, Home Page
New Zealand Army: Wikipedia, Home Page
Search "new zealand armed forces": Results
Average: a measure of central tendency. Mean, median and mode are different ways of measuring central tendency, i.e., they're 3 different kinds of average. Mean is just one kind of average.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Second this (and pretty much all of the books listed by redmid17). Lila, the sequel to Zen, is also a pretty good read.
I'd add the following to the fiction list: The Name of the Rose, A Game of Thrones (heck, the whole A Song of Ice and Fire series), Jonathan Livingston Seagull and Illusions, Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass, Starship Troopers, Robinson Crusoe, Swiss Family Robinson, Gulliver's Travels, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (and anything else by Jules Verne), Sandman (especially Season of Mists), Neverwhere, American Gods (and anything else by Neil Gaiman).
Non-fiction: The Road Less Travelled (this, like Zen, you read over and over and learn something new every time), Meditations (Descartes), Critique of Pure Reason, The Prince (Machiavelli), Thus Spake Zarathustra (and Nietzsche's other works), The Art of War, The Book of Five Rings, anything by Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell.
Fiction/non-fiction, depending on the reader: Mythology (I read Edith Hamilton's when I was very young and Bullfinch's much later, either will do), Tao Te Ching, Divine Comedy.
Many of these I recommend not because I categorically agree with them, but because they broaden perspectives and make you think.
Time runs at different speeds at different points in space. The poster has a point. When astronauts return to earth their watches are slightly out of synch with clocks on earth
RELATIVITY DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY
The emphasized bit is correct, and another AC claimed "relativity does not work that way", which is incorrect, because relativity does work that way. Astronauts on the ISS experience a net dilation of 21 or so microseconds per day -- dilation of about 25 microseconds due to velocity relative to ground and compression of about 4 microseconds due to being higher up the gravity well. Over a 6-month stay, that would be about 4 milliseconds.
While that's probably well within the margin of error of any mechanical watch, GPS devices are a different story. They have rather accurate internal clocks, and relativistic errors are large enough that GPS satellites have to compensate for the discrepancy.
CDC, poultry, pigs, more pigs (the references have more). Good overview of the CDC report from Wired: here and here.
So yeah, maybe not cows, directly. Not yet.
Yes, it does.
their phone is inferior
their cheap phone can do EVERYTHING my iPhone can do at a quarter of the price.
I guess inferiority is relative...
Does it really make a difference if those on-premise solutions are _also_ back-doored?
The topic was anti-aliased font, in printed books. You'll be hard-pressed finding one of those that didn't go through a RIP, hence digital.
The analog workflow (be it manual typesetting or direct carving of master plates) is only used in limited artisitic endeavor. The goalposts have been moved off-topic.
I wasn't trying to move the goalposts on you. The last print job (black and white book with some diagrams) I worked on used film-to-plate transfers with manual layouts, but that was well over a decade ago, in a third-world country. Looks like technology has moved forward a lot from that. I'd heard about newer print processes using direct computer-to-plate transfers (which is probably what you're referring to). I didn't know how prevalent that was for predominantly monochrome text printing nowadays until your comments got me reading. I'm happy to be corrected. Thanks :)
The analog I was referring to are, in this case, letter shapes. They don't need to be approximated with discrete pixels when you're using movable type, for example, or carved woodblocks; and even etched plates can use analog curves if the master image does, hence, no anti-aliasing. As to color mixing, I'm familiar with the dithering and registration required to render them because of the inks. It can be a real pain to get right.
I don't remember the details of the 2-bit grayscale printer, i read about it was some time back. I'm not even sure now if it was an experimental technology or if it was commercially available. It might even have been vaporware... :p
Generally, books are printed with a press. Whether it uses movable type or etched plates, the printing technology is analog, even if digital technology is used to lay out the plate or type. That's why I made the distinction between analog vs. digital... analog type don't need to be anti-aliased, since their "pixels" are effectively molecules.
My statement about digital print was a hasty generalization. In retrospect, it's probably only a handful of digital printers that are capable of anti-aliasing, like one with 2-bit grayscale pixels that I read about somewhere.
> 2x2 for lowercase. Right. That's 16 possible "characters" Correct. > with one of those being empty space and 4 of them being single pixels. Wow you figured out not every possible combination is -> useful <- all on your own? Here is your sticker.
Condescending sarcasm only works if you're actually making an intelligent point, otherwise you just end up sounding like a jackass. The point of my statement, in case it went over your head, was that there are 26 characters in the English alphabet, and 9 pixel patterns are insufficient to portray them all. Nice try anyway.
It should also be pointed out that the 2x2 lowercase font you're bragging about isn't 2x2. The h is 2x3; n, m, u and v are 3x2, s, t and y are 3x3... and those are just the ones I spotted in the first line. So yes, BS for a 2x2 font was correct.
As you can see the uppercase is perfectly readable ...
... it is a great test to see what DPI is good, poor, and fail. (The lower the better for readability, but poorer for sharpness.)
* http://peopleofhonoronly.com/michael/dev/fonts/font_uppercase.bmp
The lowercase is "mostly" readable
* http://peopleofhonoronly.com/michael/dev/fonts/font_lowercase.bmp
Those fonts are readable in the same way grass is edible. Just because it's possible doesn't mean it's useful as a reading font. It can be used to convey information and the reader can with some adjustment get used to it. That is far from "perfectly readable." Reading anything longer than a paragraph becomes an exercise in masochism. They might be useful as a small machine readable font that needs to remain decipherable by humans, similar to OCR-A.
And just to demonstrate one can bold any font ...
Simply changing the color of text from grey to white doesn't make it boldface. What if the text is white to begin with? Boldface refers to using heavier weight strokes, which you can't do with your 3x3 font without making it unreadable.
people like you who know absolutely nothing about fonts.
So now you're passing judgement on the knowledge or lack thereof of complete strangers on the Internet, when your own demonstrated credentials are the presentation of the work of another person?
I'd normally refrain from this, but you did bring it up. I worked with 8-bit machines running CRT displays in the early 80s. Those displays are pretty low res and the built-in text patterns tended to use an 8x8 grid. To fit more information on the screen, I designed 7x5 and 5x5 pixel character sets. I also made one for 3x5 but I thought it was terribly ugly. I was 12 at the time. In high school, I was a writer and later editor of my schools' papers. In later years, I did a lot of desktop publishing work -- editing, layout and graphic design. I've also run an in-house press for one company.
None of that really matters, because the original point, which others have also raised, is that your friend's 3x3 font isn't very readable. Not unreadable, but definitely far from anything any reasonable person would describe as readable. Anyway, you have a nice day, Mr. Has-a-friend-who's-an-expert-on-fonts.
Thank you. I thought i was going to have to post "The median is an average, as are the mean and mode." five times. :)
Analog vs digital. And digital print is aliased.
scenarios
Sorry, pet peeve: pseudo-latin/greek plurals.
2x2 for lowercase. Right. That's 16 possible "characters", with one of those being empty space and 4 of them being single pixels. I call BS.
This should go to +11. Thanks!
That links to Desktop Browser Market Share. He said "iPhones and iPads", i.e. not desktop: Mobile/Tablet Browser Market Share.
Here's a pretty good book: Javascript: The Good Parts. You're welcome. :)
It's a JavaScript comparison operator for strict equality, which tests both value and type. JS is dynamically typed, so 3 == '3' evaluates to true, but 3 === '3' is false. The inequality analogues are != and !==.
Just because the term "Computer scientist" contains the words "Scientist" does not actually make it one. It's a misnomer. Computer scientists are actually either mathematicians or engineers, depending on their specialties.
That's a rather narrow understanding of a fairly broad field of study.
Computer Science:
Computer science or computing science (abbreviated CS or CompSci) is the scientific and practical approach to computation and its applications. A computer scientist specializes in the theory of computation and the design of computational systems.
See also: Applied Science
Applied science is typically (i.e., not always) engineering, which develops technology, although there might be feedback between basic science and applied science: research and development (R&D).
R&D, like say, a prototype networked information system that makes data available on "pages" of hyper-linked text -- a "web" of data. The proof-of-concept came first, the engineering came after.
Also, to put it quite simply, scientists do not create things. They just think about things; engineers create them.
People who "just think about things" are called philosophers. Scientists create a great number of things. If such creations are found to have useful properties, someone then figures out how to efficiently produce them in larger quantities. Those people can be scientists or engineers or both, depending on the challenges involved. Other engineers then figure out how to use those creations to make stuff that gets used by other people.
Tim Berners-Lee is a computer scientist. Robert Cailliau is an informatics engineer and a computer scientist. Nicola Pellow was a math undergrad. The Web was created at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) and first deployed to science departments and physics labs like SLAC (Stanford Linear Accelerator Center) and Fermilab.
So yes, _scientists_ did create the Web.
more female terminators with big boobs that open up to be machine gun cannons or flame throwers.
You know, that doesn't sound bad at all... :)
True evil is very very rare (about 2% of the population is capable of this, but even orders of magnitude less than these 2% are really out to harm others and abuse nature).
2% is over 70 million people. That's not rare by most definitions. How many people do you know? All it takes is one to ruin lives. Do remember that these people gravitate towards positions of power in corporations and governments. They don't have to be "really out to harm others and abuse nature." The harm and misery they cause is simply collateral damage to them, and they don't care how much harm they cause in the pursuit of their goals.