They allow the connection. Then after 30 seconds they cut it, which delays it. Infinitely. Unless you reconnect, then it does the same thing. If you're willing to force a reconnect every 30 seconds (or have a client that can auto-reconnect -- client authors take note) you can complete a download.
I checked the "delay" after the 30 seconds on then cutoff, and after 2.5 hours it hadn't reconnected itself, so the "infinitely" is an assumption. But 30 seconds on and then more than 2.5 hours off makes even a small transfer take so long as to make it untenable to attempt, and thus equal to infinite.
The human brain uses 100% of itself 100% of the time. The content of thoughts, perceptions and memories are processed by collections of cells called Hebbian Cellular Assemblies. The content of these, and the binding of them, are alway active.
I'm glad to see someone has finally replicated Donald O. Hebb's 1939 work.
Yes, it's an OA mistake, or at least they're responsible for making sure Ingenta et al. do it right. They contract out distribution to Ingenta and others. OA specifies which should get charged how much for which things. Thus, OA is responsible for the mistake pictured. And thus the OA admin for open access is the proper contact because he/they are to see to it that the contracted distributors are doing it properly. Or, it may be OA's failure to notify Ingenta et al. that this is not a pay-for journal and article (Ingenta, after all, does not read what they distribute because they don't have enough people or time). If so, OA is still the correct contact to get it fixed.
Did you or did you not contact the OA admin for open access at the email address I gave, and if so, when, and what was the response?
I'll backtrack on one thing. Diazepam is very short acting. Since it's going to take a while to get this fixed, I recommend clonazepam.
The reported science and media coverage was bad. But not as bad as many more, present outlet included.
Having grunt writers cover science stories from press releases rather than having science editors or at least science trained journalists cover makes it worse to print the resulting bilge rather than just leave it out. Invariably the under-, mis- and non-trained end up writing to the formula that makes it look like ever result reported is a breakthrough that nobody's ever seen before, which is almost never the case. Almost all are just another step built on many previous that showed the same thing, just maybe not in this particular fashion.
I don't give a genus Rattus's posterior extremity reflecting lower frequency visible EM radiation how much science they actually know, they can well learn how to accurately report the science and where it fits into the history of relevant research.
If Alan Boyle ever leaves MSNBC, I hope he gets a post at a university training both science and journalism students how to report to the public accurately and without the bogus sensationalizing. I'll travel to where ever and sign up for his first class.
Maybe that kind of position would give you the time to finish your book, Alan.
Slap a filter on all your web sites and torrent trackers that keep Comcast customers out.
Give the reasons that all the bogus resets cause wasted connections and time and deny legitimate users from using the service effectively.
That's just the technical end. No effective net changing strategy will work on only that basis. It requires social fixes also.
Notify Comacst customers what's happening and why. Tell them the action is against Comcast, not them, that you're sorry for them, but have no other choice due to Comcast's actions. Tell them to contact Comcast to tell them to either remove the block or they'll change services or call a class action suit.
The Comcast users become collateral damage. It's a sad thing, but it's what happens sometimes. If it's presented to them in the right way, they'll become and loyal and effective allies.
It's worked before. Against Worldcom/UUNet, PSINet, the pipe into India via their country's long distance, network and satellite company affecting 90% of India, and others. It was called the Usenet Death Penalty. Look it up. It made news stories all over the world. The biggest, against Worldcom, was launched on a Friday evening so they couldn't react until Monday, and by Thursday afternoon John Sidgemore made them change their corporate policy to cut off their downstreams that were major spam sources (which was the reason all these were done). In all cases I/we got many emails from effected customers decrying the need for this, but supporting the action and us, most of them promising to step up complaints against the company involved.
A key is to get individuals participating in doing this based on a publicized suggestions from someone who doesn't participate. That makes the people doing it a temporary autonomous group, not an official body or organized group with a membership or leadership. The result of that is each individual has to be pursued one by one, and they can just drop off if and when they need to, and come back on at another point. Best way is to set aside a few people who aren't participating themselvess, but are holding forth the whys and wherefores, and acting as contacts for the affected users, the press, and inevitably the company.
It works, oh my yes. Combine technical and social tactics, and you'll have them by the nadgers. As big and bullying and rich and litigious as the companies are, they all rely on a user base. When that base threatens to jump ship, they listen and things get done.
The 70% to 80% figure doesn't hold water. The same was said about the increase in traffic on usenet binaries groups, and that was fought off in some cases and gave rise to companies advertising specifically to provide them in others. There's nothing in their TOS that says what sort of programs the users can and can't use, just as when they decided to start dropping and blocking alt.binaries.*. There's stuff about illegal activities which is good and for a good reason, but it's up to the company to prove that's going on. If they don't, forcing their customers to drop P2P connections regardless of content is denial of service, and that's illegal. Since their doing it to people who are paying them to provide the service their denying, it's also fraud. With those points made to the media prior to and during the action, and with some affected but supporting Comcast members having their word in, it'd be damn hard for Comcast to defend itself without looking like thugs, and if they don't defend themselves they look like hypocritical and greedy thieves.
I'm serious. This works a charm. Set up and laid out properly, its the perfect media fodder to garner support -- the little guys inside and out fighting the awful corporate ogre to take back the net. And, it stirs up righteousness more of the affected users, bring them on board, and it's enormous fun for those doing the actual fighting against the suits.
Not planned and executed properly, it falls apart when the press is able to make the action look like a blackmail attempt. P
Nucleic Acids Research is an open journal, which charges the authors a publication fee. It's supposed to be free for reading by their own statement. Thus, this is not some special case of open access submission to a regular journal. The charges window is from OA's regular, pay-for-access journals. It's obviously a simple mistake by OA's web site. Write email to AO's admin for access at openaccess@oxfordjournals.org and let them know, then give them adequate time to fix it. Journals, even open access, even web-based, are not fast action organizations and OA is, in my experience, one of the slower ones.
As for a claim of "my" article from one of a dozen or so authors (the complaint being about 6th or 8th among them) as well as the complaint about not being able to read it (you've got a copy, don't you?) instead of the more accurate "charge being applied to OUR open access article on THEIR open access journal web site", criminy, take a trank and some deep breaths. You're having a tantrum and it's making you spout extravagant and incorrect claims. It took me all of 5 minutes, including reading the blog posts, to find the contact point for OA's open access admin. Contact the right people and let them fix it.
FWIW, NIH has been working to get any publication supported by NIH funding to be made available for free (at least to US sites, as having been supported by US tax money) via National Library of Medicine's PubMed (nee MEDLINE), no matter what journal it's in. NASA has had good luck making their stuff available through their own channels since they won't sign over copyright to journals because they're publicly supported, and NIH is following their example through their own distribution system. And that's working with copyright snatching pay-for journals. Open access journals are already open, and I haven't had this problem with non-OA open pubs, so it's obvious this is simply a bug in the OA system. It happens. They're not evil ogres out to steal "your" pub.
It might go faster if the first author made the contact with OA, but I doubt it since I doubt they intended for this to happen.
I have a spell checker that's extensable. It's in AppleWorks. I put in all the commands and some commonly used variables and arguments like D$ = CHR$(4) from AppleSoft BASIC. Works great. It'd do assembly too if I put in the 6502/65816 op codes.
As for "I don't want a text spell checker, I want a programming-language-aware spell checker", put down the bong and get away from the keyboard for a while. All spell checkers check text no matter what the content, as long as it's made aware of the text to be tested (ie. can be extended via typed additions, linked text files containing the terms, or extended by asking if terms from proven programs that are marked wrong really are and asks if you want to add it to the dictionary). If you're doing your editing in an unextensable closed and proprietary editing routine built into a programming software package rather than linking to an external editor, you're hosed; stop it.
I don't see anything in TwholeFA that says anything about "modern" tuning as opposed to non-modern. The choice of A is arbitrary. Until this is replicated using different notes as the target, they've got too much confluence of musical memory and their theoretical genetics to do more than use the conclusions as the basis for more work. (And what good grant-using researcher doesn't; a PNAS publication makes that very easy for them).
The use of "none were musically naive" is a poor operational definition because it's too vague. Better to use "professionally trained performers with X years performance experience". Those with a lot of listening exposure and only enough performance experience (even if just by themselves) makes it likely that those with true AP and those with relative pitch (RP; being able to tell a pitch compared to another) are mixed together. The latter can have an extensive musical memory and be able to compare a presented tone with a song in memory that they know is in a certain key. They may well have done so, because they included at least one subject with skewed scores that were very consistent in their skewing (always one sharp off) as an AP subject.
The memory problem will probably also come out if they replicate this (as they suggest) with people from other cultures. Those who come from cultures with tonal based languages are going to have a very good tonal memory and discrimination from any given starting note and so good RP.
I'm highly suspect of a 44% sample of AP. I used the more rigorous definition of musical experience in brain imaging experiments and had about 15% true AP among them. Many of those claiming AP had good RP, and their EEG showed more memory than auditory activation, just as those claiming and having only RP. I'm also suspect of getting the same results from sinusoidal tones vs. piano tones. The latter has multiple overtones, providing multiple cues for the pitch. I used only sinusoidal for that reason.
Having the tones presented via web transmission gives no control over the actual output. Despite having as little as 0.01% total harmonic distortion in the amplifiers, output devices such as speakers and headphone or ear buds have around 1% to 3% THD, all of the different kinds having different harmonic distortion profiles.
Their description of aging causing "sharping" due to hair cell stiffening with age is very good. But the possibility remains that the documented time distortion due to perceptual slowing with age can be involved. That needs prying apart with other perceptual testing for time distortion per subject. A longitudinal study with the same "true" AP subjects decades later would be wonderful for the aging/sharpening problem, but figure the odds.
All that aside, good AP and RP probably have the same genetic source for auditory perception (minus auditory memory). I think they're on to something.
Private space start ups will successfully sell and launch tourists then branch out into exploration projects intended to lead to colonization, or
Governments will allow them to develop to the point where it can let them think they're competing with Big Aerospace, offer them 10% of what it pays its corporate welfare favorite children, then have them merged and absorbed into those corporations to provide the equivalent of generic brand launch systems for resale to customers who couldn't otherwise afford it.
Then:
On the first weekend in October 2057 the last three living members of the National Association of Rocketry will meet up at the annual Homer Hickam And The Rocket Boys book signing and barbeque in Coalwood, West Virginia to fly some model rockets and brag about their massive knowledge of widely known (though incorrect) tricks for optimizing drag reduction and nostalgically misremembered trivia from space history, as all 200 citizens of Coalwood try to sell hamburgers and snow cones to the 15 tourists who've shown up to listen to the old farts and gawk at the Homer-shaped robot purchased with funds from the West Virginia Tourism Council, autographing paperback books and DVDs of "October Sky", while the Chinese Ministry of Smiling and Showing Off Our Glorious Technology for Public Relations Purposes launches a Soviet R-7 shaped Long March IX to orbit a Sputnik replica carrying a sample of Burt Rutan's ashes purchased on eBay from one of the 17 of trillionaire His Honorary Majesty Lord Sir Richard Branson's clones.
[To be read in that barely restrained anticipatory baritone half-growl so favored by TV and movie ad voice-overs]:
SATURDAYsaturday, at the WORLD SOFTWARE FEDERATION'S OPEN SOURCE WARS, see Son of Java take on the Mighty Herd of Penguins in a STEEL CAGE GRUDGE MATCH!
Watch as the up and coming challenger ROARS its defiance and CHARGES! Watch as the hoard of cute little defenders mass together TRANSFORMER-LIKE into the implacable foe we know and love!
Will OpenSolaris be able to take the away the WSF crown away from Tux?
Will the Penguin bide its time and then DESTROY the challenger with righteousness like it did with last week's challenger SCO?
Will the lumbering, slumbering giant from Redmond wake up and SPEW OLD CODE to join the fight or will it continue to snooze and pretend NOT TO NOTICE?
SATURDAYsaturday, see the UNMOVABLE FORCE take on the UNSTOPPABLE OBJECT at the OPEN SOFTWARE WARS from the WSF, where YOU the VIEWER are in... connnTROOOLLLLLLLL.........
(Offer not valid in any country according to Microsoft; side effects may include multiple reformattings, several competing discussion groups, too many vaporware announcements on Slashdot, flamewars, and paying different prices for different versions of free software; for external use only, your mileage may vary, do not taunt Happy Fun Ball).
> I can't say I blame them. TFA was so light on actual details that the old equipment could > include a rat on a wheel, for all we know.
On the second, point taken. If anyone were really interested they could either locate or request the information. With that in hand they might actually be able to suggest a reasonable upgrade path, as well as open up a career opportunity for themselves. At the very least they'd learn something.
But they don't. They only criticize what they don't understand and make no effort nor have any intention to of doing so. For that, I do blame them.
I don't think it's at all improper to anthromorphize the little widgets and turn them into heroes. We need all the heroes we can get. Just as we'll need to expand our definition of life so we know it when we find it, we need to expand our definition of worth as individuals so we know them when we create them. I think we'll find we create them in our minds, and so already have.
I say, point them at each other and let them try to meet up. It's probably an impossible task and they'll probably die trying. But they'll die trying, and that's what heroes often do. It would serve to make us think along those lines about ourselves. We need more heroes, and heroes start out as just one of us. If they'll just try, it will give people reason to hope and to dream. We need those more than we need the science that results from the effort.
And who knows? They might just make it, or at least look like they might. Imagine the effect on people. Some would probably even start to call for a Mars mission to rescue the heroes and bring them home. I think that's at least as good a reason to go as any other.
"Why do so many nerds seem to lean toward the Libertarian end of the spectrum?"
Very few of anyone, nerds or not, lean towards the Libertarian end of the spectrum. This may be due to most people catching onto the inherent contradiction in thinking that (a) many people think like they do and (b) many people ought to think like they do. A CATO article about the 2004 and 2006 elections makes lots of noise about numbers like 10% and 20% for all kinds of reasons they seem to enjoy, before finally admitting a Rassmusen poll showed the real numbers to be about 2%. If the numbers varied as widely as CATO claimed for the various reasons given, the error bar would be so large as to make it all meaningless. I think this is the case.
The CATO article even tried to claim Jon Stewart for their own: "In a revealing exchange, Jon Stewart recently hosted neoconservative Bill Kristol of the Weekly Standard on the Daily Show, often considered the de facto television news program for younger viewers. Kristol called Stewart an "Upper West Side liberal." To which Stewart quickly responded, "No, I'm a downtown libertarian."
I am reminded of Jon Stewart's commercial of a few years back, talking about people getting their news from The Daily Show. He ended the commercial by yelling "DON'T DO THAT. WE MAKE IT UP." He's a comedian. His show is on Comedy Central. File this as an example under the "they think people think like they do" part of the problem, along with CATO's over-confidence in badly done statistics.
I suspect another error in thinking, that of "if you criticize, you must disagree" has kicked in by now. Nothing I've said indicates my own political position. I've found many Libertarians to be particularly susceptible to this problem despite their claim to individualism in thinking. It makes Libertarianism look for all the world like a dogma of open mindedness. Still, that's way more fun than the dogma of narrow mindedness most others seem to fall into.
When someone says "Why don't they just", it usually means they have no idea how it's being done, and is just taking that opportunity to show what they know, even though they have no idea if it's applicable.
When someone says "Why don't we just", they're probably working on the project and know what they're talking about.
If they could just, they probably would have justed a long time ago. These are, after all, the people who rebuilt the receiver scheduled to receive the Apollo 11 LEM and EVA transmissions in just 12 hours, after it caught fire 1 day into the mission. It was NASA's call not to use them due to the problem, but they could have done it because they know very well what they're doing and how to do it.
> Thankyou, I always forget her name as well as other details. That peice really is worthy > of Burke, the thought even occured to me before I read the last line.
My wife made the same observation as I was preparing to submit it. The last line was hidden in the editing window. The construction was my own, but my source of information and inspiration was David Bodanis's "E=mc^2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation". A very good science and technology history book in the spirit of Burke's work, and with attention to detail equal to Collins and Pinch's "The Golem" and "The Golem Unleashed". I'd just been rereading it when this thread popped up.
I hope it was clear enough that my comments about CBC were intended to be humorous, though they came from actual events. I agree that CBC is a pretty good news source. They've replaced BBC on my list of realiable and minimally biased reporting.
First, an aside: "self-introspection" is redundant. What's the alternative? Introspection of another? That makes no sense. Also, introspection is a component of consciousness. There is no way to determine another person is conscious (as opposed to a completely stimulus-response programmed "zombie"), much less a robot. Without consciousness, the appropriate term is "feedback mechanism".
That said, the device in TFA is not novel, nor is it as simple as previous designs. Far simpler microbots have been built with no programming, simply feedback of voltage fluctuations in sensors on the legs, built with 12 to 20 transistor driving motors with quasi-periodic oscillators. They not only learned to walk on their own, but some learned multiple gaits, and some "species" developed similarities in behavior. The ones I've seen were developed at Los Alamos by Brosl Hasslacher (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brosl_Hasslacher) and shown at Santa Fe Institute in 1999. This article is not about Hasslacher, but is someone from Los Alamos who developed similar devices in the same time frame: http://www.cnn.com/TECH/science/9804/30/t_t/robots / Also, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Tilden
I believe this device holds the record for minimal design in a robot that learns to walk on its own with no prior programming; four transistors driving Tilden's BEAM design: http://www.seattlerobotics.org/encoder/200205/anco b.htm
All these devices depend on feedback of voltage from the leg drivers as it changes due to reduced resistance from increasingly successful attempts at locomotion. There is no "introspection" involved.
The Russians first said it was their idea not to participate:
RIA Novosti, 25.05.2007 "No plans to join NASA lunar program - Russian space agency"
Five days later BBC said Interfax carried the claim that the US turned them down:
BBC News, 30.04.2007 "NASA 'rejects Russia Moon help'"
The same day NASA said it didn't turn down Russia because it never got an offer:
New Scientist Space, 30.04.2007 "NASA denies that it has received any proposal from Russia to conduct joint moon activities, despite media reports to the contrary."
Four months later CBC ignores NASA, quotes Interfax, and credits RIA Novosti:
CBC News, 31.08.2007 "Spurned by NASA, Russia plans its own moon base"
Not content to sit still with this mere confusion, CBC includes in their article a graphic from AP with a caption that contradicts the "spurned" claim:
"NASA has said it will establish an international base camp on one of the moon's poles"
Did Russia misread this, leading them to send a mission to the north pole to claim it for themselves? Or was that just one more piece in this grand conspiracy to drive the Canadians slowly crazy, and to see if we could get them to send people to the north pole?
I suspect the following accounting (also 30.04.2007) to be as accurate as any of the others:
"A reporter from TheSpoof.com was sent forthwith to find out why but no one at NASA was willing to discuss the issue. All he could glean was that they would be taking a replica of the original Moon Lander with them, presumably for some kind of celebration.
After our intrepid reporter arrived back to TheSpoof.com offices, he was contacted by someone who wouldn't leave their name but simply stated that "there are no plans to take a replica Moon Lander as there is already one up there"
Mr Perminov said "personally, I think they do not want us to get to the Moon first, because they don't want us to find out that they didn't really get there in 1969 and that the whole thing was filmed on a sound stage in Nevada"
I was involved in SFWA's early organizing of what eventually became the ePiracy Committee. They were a very forward thinking bunch and worked very hard to properly protect the works of their members. I did by hand (well, by Forte Agent and WinTrack FTP and web site mirroring) what Burt's program does. Out of 14,000+ hits I had no false positives. That was because I actually looked at what I was doing. It's pretty apparent Burt isn't.
I sincerely hope he is doing this on his own, otherwise the ePiracy Committee is in the process of sabotaging the second part of their stated purpose: "The purpose of SFWA's ePiracy Committee is to minimize the harms from piracy while maximizing respect for our customers." Acting like a street gang is not going to look like respect to any customers.
What makes this all the more mystifying is the fact that SFWA had some very good legal advisers. In fact, they wrote some fairly detailed copyright/anti-piracy/DMCA articles which are still on SFWA's web site. Burt isn't following his own organization's instructions. If he doesn't straighten out he's going to run into a hell of a liability problem, and it won't be just him that has to pay for it.
Grades count for getting into higher education. If someone with inflated grades gets there and can't handle it, they'll drop or get dropped. Grades count very little when it comes to getting job, and even good grades won't save your job if you're a fuck up.
Compare it to womens' dress sizes. As more women became obese, they changed the sizes so they wou'd "seem" smaller and make the women feel better. It hasn't worked. Those women are still obese and the label on their dresses hasn't made a difference.
Ask for more work. If you're bored, that solves it. If you're underpaid, this is the most likely way to get raises. Most importantly, learn how to do your boss's job. On one hand, you cab sit in for him or help him out when he's overloaded. On the other hand. sooner or later he'll probably be moving up or moving out and if you already know the job, you're most likely to get it and the money to go with it. It also helps to find things that need doing that nobody's working on, do them, and let it be known after the fact.
I've got an Masters in Health care Administration. That's an MBA for people who run hospitals and such. If, say, doctors were to be measured for work done, it'd be my job to do it. I'm trained in human resources and management stuff. Doctors are not. Doctors (a) maintain peoples' health, and (b) fix peoples' health problems. The latter is very unpredictable in number and severity the former somewhat like that. In any case, doctors are busy people, and shouldn't have their time wasted when there's sick people that need care.
If I were to do it, it'd be in aggregate. I'd look at how many people were seen for recurring care, and for acute care, and look at how many people were needed to care for them in each case, over the course of a year. I'd go as far as quarterly if forced to, but no less. I'd use statistical testing to compare one time window for another, and that'd require a large sample of task counting. Finally, I'd make the point early, often, and forcefully, that quality of care is more important than anything like task accomplishment in a medical setting, and I'd compare those numbers to patient reports of satisfaction or dissatisfaction in order to give an answer that was in essence how GOOD the care was that's being provided, and wait time (something I can quantify by going around asking people) would figure into it heavily. Health care is about quality of life, not quantity of life, and I'd dare anyone to try to counter that. Some would, of course, but I'd tell them they're idiots and stand my ground.
But the point is *I* would do it. I'm trained in it as an HR and admin person. Figure the odds on getting doctors to do it. They'd rightly scream about having to do bean counting work when they have patients to see.
You do quality work too. It's your job to keep your users' machines and pipes healthy and happy, both through maintenance (which varies somewhat with time and can't be easily quantified) and fixing problems that crop up (which can't be predicted and therefore quantified except in counting them after the fact).
Make him do it. You're a "computer person". Since when are you qualified to do human resources work? He's the bean counter, he should be the one to come up with it. Complain to management that he's shoving his work off on you and causing you to spend time doing that instead of your own work. In fact, he's not acting like he's a qualified bean counter if he doesn't know that. Either he's dragging his feet and making you carry him, or he's not a person-bean counter but just a money-bean counter and shouldn't be a person manager. Take that above him, repeatedly and vocally, and complain that even doing THAT is taking you away from your work.
And if management doesn't agree with you, start keeping very detailed records about tasks done minute by minute during the day, and turn it in weekly. Include statements about how much time you're spending doing that and other stuff like meetings that aren't directly related to keeping your iron clean and oiled. And complain about that. Include in the complaints the needs for more people because you're accomplishing less with having to do this administrative work. THAT is an answer they can get a measurement handle on.
And if he should come up with it, complain that he's expecting you to handle unpredictable problems on a schedule, and must therefore be in need of an anal craniotomy. Either that or you're going to need a LOT of new hardware as well as people so that you have less problems to fix and therefore more time to spend doing his job. That's another thing they can measure... money for stuff.
I've gotten shit from doctors asked to do this (NOT my idea; I'd never ask). I've taught medical students not to put up with it. You shouldn't either, and you should report to upper management anyone who's refusing to do their job, even, no ESPECIALLY if it's your immediate supervisor and he's trained to do that while you are not.
Scream, and don't stop until they make this problem go away so
... that people were ever against euthanasia. If all those old people were ever to accumulate the hospital industry would collapse. Maybe that's why they called them "boomers".
> OTOH: 100 or so years after the Principa was published a (French?) woman of noble > birth corrected Newton's kinetic energy equation by emprical means (ie: dropped > steel balls into clay and mesured the craters).
You're thinking of Emilie du Chatelet, paramour of Voltaire. I don't know how noble, but her family lived in a 30 room apartment overlooking Tuileries gardens in Paris. Certainly rich by birth, and married to a rich French military officer who conveniently left on a polar expedition.
And you're not quite correct about what she did; it was much better than that. The dropped ball and clay experiment was done by Willem 'sGravesande in the Netherlands, but he didn't have the theoretical background to understand what he had -- the craters got deeper with the square of the height (== energy). Liebniz had previously specified that energy should increase with the square of velocity, but that was somewhere between intuition, anti-Newtonian leanings (Newton got credit for calculus rather than he; Newton was pushing for mass times velocity, no square) and fortuitous guesswork. He didn't have the practical sense to develop a means to test it (or perhaps thought that beneath him). What du Chatelet did was put the two together and show the precise relationship between energy, mass and velocity that was supported by the data: E = mv^2.
Smiling Uncle Albert had it half written for him. What he plugged in was c for the Latin celeritas (rapidity), which he showed to have a limit of the speed of light, and that the E and m then equated completely and were thus interchangeable through it. Had she had the verification of Roemer's measurement of the speed of light to work with (said verification was just a few years old and not widely accepted yet) and had more time to work on it (she died from an infection after giving birth) she might have made progress towards that herself.
If she had done so, Poincare probably would have grasped the significance of his "theory of relativity" (Uncle A. never used that term until well after it became popularized, but Poincare used it explicitly in his own) and formulated the famous equation himself. He was, after all, right on the verge of it, and refused to talk about Ol' Al forever more because he failed to get all the way there first. It riled him no end, until the end of his days. Had he been younger and the age earlier, he might have challenged the young Bavarian Jew to a duel. A duel such as Francois-Marie Arouet threatened against a certain French nobleman, which resulted in his expulsion from France to England, where he learned of Newton and his work, which he brought back to France, along with his nom de plume, Voltaire. Or the duel (fencing match, actually) in which Jacques de Brun, the head of the King's bodyguards, was bested by a 16 year old girl named Emilie de Breteuil, as such was her family's name when they lived above Paris's Tuileries gardens.
If this was Connections, and I were James Burke, I'd be making a lot more money than what I'm getting for having written this. I am, however, every bit as pretty as Burke on camera, which is to say not at all.
> Einstein trumped Newton with a more complex theory
The CEO reminded me that Newton only described, and admitted he didn't know how it worked, but Einstein explained which led to testable hypotheses. Thus the former was not much of a theory if at all by the definition, whereas the latter is a very good example of a theory.
I had no idea she paid that much attention to my caffinated breakfast table rants. Obviously I don't.
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They allow the connection. Then after 30 seconds they cut it, which delays it. Infinitely. Unless you reconnect, then it does the same thing. If you're willing to force a reconnect every 30 seconds (or have a client that can auto-reconnect -- client authors take note) you can complete a download.
I checked the "delay" after the 30 seconds on then cutoff, and after 2.5 hours it hadn't reconnected itself, so the "infinitely" is an assumption. But 30 seconds on and then more than 2.5 hours off makes even a small transfer take so long as to make it untenable to attempt, and thus equal to infinite.
The human brain uses 100% of itself 100% of the time. The content of thoughts, perceptions and memories are processed by collections of cells called Hebbian Cellular Assemblies. The content of these, and the binding of them, are alway active.
I'm glad to see someone has finally replicated Donald O. Hebb's 1939 work.
Next, hopefully someone will discovery neurons.
Yes, it's an OA mistake, or at least they're responsible for making sure Ingenta et al. do it right. They contract out distribution to Ingenta and others. OA specifies which should get charged how much for which things. Thus, OA is responsible for the mistake pictured. And thus the OA admin for open access is the proper contact because he/they are to see to it that the contracted distributors are doing it properly. Or, it may be OA's failure to notify Ingenta et al. that this is not a pay-for journal and article (Ingenta, after all, does not read what they distribute because they don't have enough people or time). If so, OA is still the correct contact to get it fixed.
Did you or did you not contact the OA admin for open access at the email address I gave, and if so, when, and what was the response?
I'll backtrack on one thing. Diazepam is very short acting. Since it's going to take a while to get this fixed, I recommend clonazepam.
The reported science and media coverage was bad. But not as bad as many more, present outlet included.
Having grunt writers cover science stories from press releases rather than having science editors or at least science trained journalists cover makes it worse to print the resulting bilge rather than just leave it out. Invariably the under-, mis- and non-trained end up writing to the formula that makes it look like ever result reported is a breakthrough that nobody's ever seen before, which is almost never the case. Almost all are just another step built on many previous that showed the same thing, just maybe not in this particular fashion.
I don't give a genus Rattus's posterior extremity reflecting lower frequency visible EM radiation how much science they actually know, they can well learn how to accurately report the science and where it fits into the history of relevant research.
If Alan Boyle ever leaves MSNBC, I hope he gets a post at a university training both science and journalism students how to report to the public accurately and without the bogus sensationalizing. I'll travel to where ever and sign up for his first class.
Maybe that kind of position would give you the time to finish your book, Alan.
Slap a filter on all your web sites and torrent trackers that keep Comcast customers out.
Give the reasons that all the bogus resets cause wasted connections and time and deny legitimate users from using the service effectively.
That's just the technical end. No effective net changing strategy will work on only that basis. It requires social fixes also.
Notify Comacst customers what's happening and why. Tell them the action is against Comcast, not them, that you're sorry for them, but have no other choice due to Comcast's actions. Tell them to contact Comcast to tell them to either remove the block or they'll change services or call a class action suit.
The Comcast users become collateral damage. It's a sad thing, but it's what happens sometimes. If it's presented to them in the right way, they'll become and loyal and effective allies.
It's worked before. Against Worldcom/UUNet, PSINet, the pipe into India via their country's long distance, network and satellite company affecting 90% of India, and others. It was called the Usenet Death Penalty. Look it up. It made news stories all over the world. The biggest, against Worldcom, was launched on a Friday evening so they couldn't react until Monday, and by Thursday afternoon John Sidgemore made them change their corporate policy to cut off their downstreams that were major spam sources (which was the reason all these were done). In all cases I/we got many emails from effected customers decrying the need for this, but supporting the action and us, most of them promising to step up complaints against the company involved.
A key is to get individuals participating in doing this based on a publicized suggestions from someone who doesn't participate. That makes the people doing it a temporary autonomous group, not an official body or organized group with a membership or leadership. The result of that is each individual has to be pursued one by one, and they can just drop off if and when they need to, and come back on at another point. Best way is to set aside a few people who aren't participating themselvess, but are holding forth the whys and wherefores, and acting as contacts for the affected users, the press, and inevitably the company.
It works, oh my yes. Combine technical and social tactics, and you'll have them by the nadgers. As big and bullying and rich and litigious as the companies are, they all rely on a user base. When that base threatens to jump ship, they listen and things get done.
The 70% to 80% figure doesn't hold water. The same was said about the increase in traffic on usenet binaries groups, and that was fought off in some cases and gave rise to companies advertising specifically to provide them in others. There's nothing in their TOS that says what sort of programs the users can and can't use, just as when they decided to start dropping and blocking alt.binaries.*. There's stuff about illegal activities which is good and for a good reason, but it's up to the company to prove that's going on. If they don't, forcing their customers to drop P2P connections regardless of content is denial of service, and that's illegal. Since their doing it to people who are paying them to provide the service their denying, it's also fraud. With those points made to the media prior to and during the action, and with some affected but supporting Comcast members having their word in, it'd be damn hard for Comcast to defend itself without looking like thugs, and if they don't defend themselves they look like hypocritical and greedy thieves.
I'm serious. This works a charm. Set up and laid out properly, its the perfect media fodder to garner support -- the little guys inside and out fighting the awful corporate ogre to take back the net. And, it stirs up righteousness more of the affected users, bring them on board, and it's enormous fun for those doing the actual fighting against the suits.
Not planned and executed properly, it falls apart when the press is able to make the action look like a blackmail attempt. P
Nucleic Acids Research is an open journal, which charges the authors a publication fee. It's supposed to be free for reading by their own statement. Thus, this is not some special case of open access submission to a regular journal. The charges window is from OA's regular, pay-for-access journals. It's obviously a simple mistake by OA's web site. Write email to AO's admin for access at openaccess@oxfordjournals.org and let them know, then give them adequate time to fix it. Journals, even open access, even web-based, are not fast action organizations and OA is, in my experience, one of the slower ones.
As for a claim of "my" article from one of a dozen or so authors (the complaint being about 6th or 8th among them) as well as the complaint about not being able to read it (you've got a copy, don't you?) instead of the more accurate "charge being applied to OUR open access article on THEIR open access journal web site", criminy, take a trank and some deep breaths. You're having a tantrum and it's making you spout extravagant and incorrect claims. It took me all of 5 minutes, including reading the blog posts, to find the contact point for OA's open access admin. Contact the right people and let them fix it.
FWIW, NIH has been working to get any publication supported by NIH funding to be made available for free (at least to US sites, as having been supported by US tax money) via National Library of Medicine's PubMed (nee MEDLINE), no matter what journal it's in. NASA has had good luck making their stuff available through their own channels since they won't sign over copyright to journals because they're publicly supported, and NIH is following their example through their own distribution system. And that's working with copyright snatching pay-for journals. Open access journals are already open, and I haven't had this problem with non-OA open pubs, so it's obvious this is simply a bug in the OA system. It happens. They're not evil ogres out to steal "your" pub.
It might go faster if the first author made the contact with OA, but I doubt it since I doubt they intended for this to happen.
I have a spell checker that's extensable. It's in AppleWorks. I put in all the commands and some commonly used variables and arguments like D$ = CHR$(4) from AppleSoft BASIC. Works great. It'd do assembly too if I put in the 6502/65816 op codes.
As for "I don't want a text spell checker, I want a programming-language-aware spell checker", put down the bong and get away from the keyboard for a while. All spell checkers check text no matter what the content, as long as it's made aware of the text to be tested (ie. can be extended via typed additions, linked text files containing the terms, or extended by asking if terms from proven programs that are marked wrong really are and asks if you want to add it to the dictionary). If you're doing your editing in an unextensable closed and proprietary editing routine built into a programming software package rather than linking to an external editor, you're hosed; stop it.
I don't see anything in TwholeFA that says anything about "modern" tuning as opposed to non-modern. The choice of A is arbitrary. Until this is replicated using different notes as the target, they've got too much confluence of musical memory and their theoretical genetics to do more than use the conclusions as the basis for more work. (And what good grant-using researcher doesn't; a PNAS publication makes that very easy for them).
The use of "none were musically naive" is a poor operational definition because it's too vague. Better to use "professionally trained performers with X years performance experience". Those with a lot of listening exposure and only enough performance experience (even if just by themselves) makes it likely that those with true AP and those with relative pitch (RP; being able to tell a pitch compared to another) are mixed together. The latter can have an extensive musical memory and be able to compare a presented tone with a song in memory that they know is in a certain key. They may well have done so, because they included at least one subject with skewed scores that were very consistent in their skewing (always one sharp off) as an AP subject.
The memory problem will probably also come out if they replicate this (as they suggest) with people from other cultures. Those who come from cultures with tonal based languages are going to have a very good tonal memory and discrimination from any given starting note and so good RP.
I'm highly suspect of a 44% sample of AP. I used the more rigorous definition of musical experience in brain imaging experiments and had about 15% true AP among them. Many of those claiming AP had good RP, and their EEG showed more memory than auditory activation, just as those claiming and having only RP. I'm also suspect of getting the same results from sinusoidal tones vs. piano tones. The latter has multiple overtones, providing multiple cues for the pitch. I used only sinusoidal for that reason.
Having the tones presented via web transmission gives no control over the actual output. Despite having as little as 0.01% total harmonic distortion in the amplifiers, output devices such as speakers and headphone or ear buds have around 1% to 3% THD, all of the different kinds having different harmonic distortion profiles.
Their description of aging causing "sharping" due to hair cell stiffening with age is very good. But the possibility remains that the documented time distortion due to perceptual slowing with age can be involved. That needs prying apart with other perceptual testing for time distortion per subject. A longitudinal study with the same "true" AP subjects decades later would be wonderful for the aging/sharpening problem, but figure the odds.
All that aside, good AP and RP probably have the same genetic source for auditory perception (minus auditory memory). I think they're on to something.
Either:
Private space start ups will successfully sell and launch tourists then branch out into exploration projects intended to lead to colonization, or
Governments will allow them to develop to the point where it can let them think they're competing with Big Aerospace, offer them 10% of what it pays its corporate welfare favorite children, then have them merged and absorbed into those corporations to provide the equivalent of generic brand launch systems for resale to customers who couldn't otherwise afford it.
Then:
On the first weekend in October 2057 the last three living members of the National Association of Rocketry will meet up at the annual Homer Hickam And The Rocket Boys book signing and barbeque in Coalwood, West Virginia to fly some model rockets and brag about their massive knowledge of widely known (though incorrect) tricks for optimizing drag reduction and nostalgically misremembered trivia from space history, as all 200 citizens of Coalwood try to sell hamburgers and snow cones to the 15 tourists who've shown up to listen to the old farts and gawk at the Homer-shaped robot purchased with funds from the West Virginia Tourism Council, autographing paperback books and DVDs of "October Sky", while the Chinese Ministry of Smiling and Showing Off Our Glorious Technology for Public Relations Purposes launches a Soviet R-7 shaped Long March IX to orbit a Sputnik replica carrying a sample of Burt Rutan's ashes purchased on eBay from one of the 17 of trillionaire His Honorary Majesty Lord Sir Richard Branson's clones.
I intend to be one of those three.
[To be read in that barely restrained anticipatory baritone half-growl so favored by TV and movie ad voice-overs]:
SATURDAYsaturday, at the WORLD SOFTWARE FEDERATION'S OPEN SOURCE WARS, see Son of Java take on the Mighty Herd of Penguins in a STEEL CAGE GRUDGE MATCH!
Watch as the up and coming challenger ROARS its defiance and CHARGES! Watch as the hoard of cute little defenders mass together TRANSFORMER-LIKE into the implacable foe we know and love!
Will OpenSolaris be able to take the away the WSF crown away from Tux?
Will the Penguin bide its time and then DESTROY the challenger with righteousness like it did with last week's challenger SCO?
Will the lumbering, slumbering giant from Redmond wake up and SPEW OLD CODE to join the fight or will it continue to snooze and pretend NOT TO NOTICE?
SATURDAYsaturday, see the UNMOVABLE FORCE take on the UNSTOPPABLE OBJECT at the OPEN SOFTWARE WARS from the WSF, where YOU the VIEWER are in... connnTROOOLLLLLLLL.........
(Offer not valid in any country according to Microsoft; side effects may include multiple reformattings, several competing discussion groups, too many vaporware announcements on Slashdot, flamewars, and paying different prices for different versions of free software; for external use only, your mileage may vary, do not taunt Happy Fun Ball).
> I can't say I blame them. TFA was so light on actual details that the old equipment could
> include a rat on a wheel, for all we know.
On the second, point taken. If anyone were really interested they could either locate or request the information. With that in hand they might actually be able to suggest a reasonable upgrade path, as well as open up a career opportunity for themselves. At the very least they'd learn something.
But they don't. They only criticize what they don't understand and make no effort nor have any intention to of doing so. For that, I do blame them.
I don't think it's at all improper to anthromorphize the little widgets and turn them into heroes. We need all the heroes we can get. Just as we'll need to expand our definition of life so we know it when we find it, we need to expand our definition of worth as individuals so we know them when we create them. I think we'll find we create them in our minds, and so already have.
I say, point them at each other and let them try to meet up. It's probably an impossible task and they'll probably die trying. But they'll die trying, and that's what heroes often do. It would serve to make us think along those lines about ourselves. We need more heroes, and heroes start out as just one of us. If they'll just try, it will give people reason to hope and to dream. We need those more than we need the science that results from the effort.
And who knows? They might just make it, or at least look like they might. Imagine the effect on people. Some would probably even start to call for a Mars mission to rescue the heroes and bring them home. I think that's at least as good a reason to go as any other.
"Why do so many nerds seem to lean toward the Libertarian end of the spectrum?"
Very few of anyone, nerds or not, lean towards the Libertarian end of the spectrum. This may be due to most people catching onto the inherent contradiction in thinking that (a) many people think like they do and (b) many people ought to think like they do. A CATO article about the 2004 and 2006 elections makes lots of noise about numbers like 10% and 20% for all kinds of reasons they seem to enjoy, before finally admitting a Rassmusen poll showed the real numbers to be about 2%. If the numbers varied as widely as CATO claimed for the various reasons given, the error bar would be so large as to make it all meaningless. I think this is the case.
The CATO article even tried to claim Jon Stewart for their own: "In a revealing exchange, Jon Stewart recently hosted neoconservative Bill Kristol of the Weekly Standard on the Daily Show, often considered the de facto television news program for younger viewers. Kristol called Stewart an "Upper West Side liberal." To which Stewart quickly responded, "No, I'm a downtown libertarian."
I am reminded of Jon Stewart's commercial of a few years back, talking about people getting their news from The Daily Show. He ended the commercial by yelling "DON'T DO THAT. WE MAKE IT UP." He's a comedian. His show is on Comedy Central. File this as an example under the "they think people think like they do" part of the problem, along with CATO's over-confidence in badly done statistics.
I suspect another error in thinking, that of "if you criticize, you must disagree" has kicked in by now. Nothing I've said indicates my own political position. I've found many Libertarians to be particularly susceptible to this problem despite their claim to individualism in thinking. It makes Libertarianism look for all the world like a dogma of open mindedness. Still, that's way more fun than the dogma of narrow mindedness most others seem to fall into.
When someone says "Why don't they just", it usually means they have no idea how it's being done, and is just taking that opportunity to show what they know, even though they have no idea if it's applicable.
When someone says "Why don't we just", they're probably working on the project and know what they're talking about.
If they could just, they probably would have justed a long time ago. These are, after all, the people who rebuilt the receiver scheduled to receive the Apollo 11 LEM and EVA transmissions in just 12 hours, after it caught fire 1 day into the mission. It was NASA's call not to use them due to the problem, but they could have done it because they know very well what they're doing and how to do it.
> Thankyou, I always forget her name as well as other details. That peice really is worthy
> of Burke, the thought even occured to me before I read the last line.
My wife made the same observation as I was preparing to submit it. The last line was hidden in the editing window. The construction was my own, but my source of information and inspiration was David Bodanis's "E=mc^2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation". A very good science and technology history book in the spirit of Burke's work, and with attention to detail equal to Collins and Pinch's "The Golem" and "The Golem Unleashed". I'd just been rereading it when this thread popped up.
I hope it was clear enough that my comments about CBC were intended to be humorous, though they came from actual events. I agree that CBC is a pretty good news source. They've replaced BBC on my list of realiable and minimally biased reporting.
First, an aside: "self-introspection" is redundant. What's the alternative? Introspection of another? That makes no sense. Also, introspection is a component of consciousness. There is no way to determine another person is conscious (as opposed to a completely stimulus-response programmed "zombie"), much less a robot. Without consciousness, the appropriate term is "feedback mechanism".
s / Also, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Tilden
o b.htm
That said, the device in TFA is not novel, nor is it as simple as previous designs. Far simpler microbots have been built with no programming, simply feedback of voltage fluctuations in sensors on the legs, built with 12 to 20 transistor driving motors with quasi-periodic oscillators. They not only learned to walk on their own, but some learned multiple gaits, and some "species" developed similarities in behavior. The ones I've seen were developed at Los Alamos by Brosl Hasslacher (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brosl_Hasslacher) and shown at Santa Fe Institute in 1999. This article is not about Hasslacher, but is someone from Los Alamos who developed similar devices in the same time frame: http://www.cnn.com/TECH/science/9804/30/t_t/robot
I believe this device holds the record for minimal design in a robot that learns to walk on its own with no prior programming; four transistors driving Tilden's BEAM design: http://www.seattlerobotics.org/encoder/200205/anc
All these devices depend on feedback of voltage from the leg drivers as it changes due to reduced resistance from increasingly successful attempts at locomotion. There is no "introspection" involved.
The Russians first said it was their idea not to participate:
RIA Novosti, 25.05.2007
"No plans to join NASA lunar program - Russian space agency"
Five days later BBC said Interfax carried the claim that the US turned them down:
BBC News, 30.04.2007
"NASA 'rejects Russia Moon help'"
The same day NASA said it didn't turn down Russia because it never got an offer:
New Scientist Space, 30.04.2007
"NASA denies that it has received any proposal from Russia to conduct joint moon activities, despite media reports to the contrary."
Four months later CBC ignores NASA, quotes Interfax, and credits RIA Novosti:
CBC News, 31.08.2007
"Spurned by NASA, Russia plans its own moon base"
Not content to sit still with this mere confusion, CBC includes in their article a graphic from AP with a caption that contradicts the "spurned" claim:
"NASA has said it will establish an international base camp on one of the moon's poles"
Did Russia misread this, leading them to send a mission to the north pole to claim it for themselves? Or was that just one more piece in this grand conspiracy to drive the Canadians slowly crazy, and to see if we could get them to send people to the north pole?
I suspect the following accounting (also 30.04.2007) to be as accurate as any of the others:
"A reporter from TheSpoof.com was sent forthwith to find out why but no one at NASA was willing to discuss the issue. All he could glean was that they would be taking a replica of the original Moon Lander with them, presumably for some kind of celebration.
After our intrepid reporter arrived back to TheSpoof.com offices, he was contacted by someone who wouldn't leave their name but simply stated that "there are no plans to take a replica Moon Lander as there is already one up there"
Mr Perminov said "personally, I think they do not want us to get to the Moon first, because they don't want us to find out that they didn't really get there in 1969 and that the whole thing was filmed on a sound stage in Nevada"
I was involved in SFWA's early organizing of what eventually became the ePiracy Committee. They were a very forward thinking bunch and worked very hard to properly protect the works of their members. I did by hand (well, by Forte Agent and WinTrack FTP and web site mirroring) what Burt's program does. Out of 14,000+ hits I had no false positives. That was because I actually looked at what I was doing. It's pretty apparent Burt isn't.
I sincerely hope he is doing this on his own, otherwise the ePiracy Committee is in the process of sabotaging the second part of their stated purpose: "The purpose of SFWA's ePiracy Committee is to minimize the harms from piracy while maximizing respect for our customers." Acting like a street gang is not going to look like respect to any customers.
What makes this all the more mystifying is the fact that SFWA had some very good legal advisers. In fact, they wrote some fairly detailed copyright/anti-piracy/DMCA articles which are still on SFWA's web site. Burt isn't following his own organization's instructions. If he doesn't straighten out he's going to run into a hell of a liability problem, and it won't be just him that has to pay for it.
Grades count for getting into higher education. If someone with inflated grades gets there and can't handle it, they'll drop or get dropped. Grades count very little when it comes to getting job, and even good grades won't save your job if you're a fuck up.
Compare it to womens' dress sizes. As more women became obese, they changed the sizes so they wou'd "seem" smaller and make the women feel better. It hasn't worked. Those women are still obese and the label on their dresses hasn't made a difference.
Ask for more work. If you're bored, that solves it. If you're underpaid, this is the most likely way to get raises. Most importantly, learn how to do your boss's job. On one hand, you cab sit in for him or help him out when he's overloaded. On the other hand. sooner or later he'll probably be moving up or moving out and if you already know the job, you're most likely to get it and the money to go with it. It also helps to find things that need doing that nobody's working on, do them, and let it be known after the fact.
I've got an Masters in Health care Administration. That's an MBA for people who run hospitals and such. If, say, doctors were to be measured for work done, it'd be my job to do it. I'm trained in human resources and management stuff. Doctors are not. Doctors (a) maintain peoples' health, and (b) fix peoples' health problems. The latter is very unpredictable in number and severity the former somewhat like that. In any case, doctors are busy people, and shouldn't have their time wasted when there's sick people that need care.
... money for stuff.
If I were to do it, it'd be in aggregate. I'd look at how many people were seen for recurring care, and for acute care, and look at how many people were needed to care for them in each case, over the course of a year. I'd go as far as quarterly if forced to, but no less. I'd use statistical testing to compare one time window for another, and that'd require a large sample of task counting. Finally, I'd make the point early, often, and forcefully, that quality of care is more important than anything like task accomplishment in a medical setting, and I'd compare those numbers to patient reports of satisfaction or dissatisfaction in order to give an answer that was in essence how GOOD the care was that's being provided, and wait time (something I can quantify by going around asking people) would figure into it heavily. Health care is about quality of life, not quantity of life, and I'd dare anyone to try to counter that. Some would, of course, but I'd tell them they're idiots and stand my ground.
But the point is *I* would do it. I'm trained in it as an HR and admin person. Figure the odds on getting doctors to do it. They'd rightly scream about having to do bean counting work when they have patients to see.
You do quality work too. It's your job to keep your users' machines and pipes healthy and happy, both through maintenance (which varies somewhat with time and can't be easily quantified) and fixing problems that crop up (which can't be predicted and therefore quantified except in counting them after the fact).
Make him do it. You're a "computer person". Since when are you qualified to do human resources work? He's the bean counter, he should be the one to come up with it. Complain to management that he's shoving his work off on you and causing you to spend time doing that instead of your own work. In fact, he's not acting like he's a qualified bean counter if he doesn't know that. Either he's dragging his feet and making you carry him, or he's not a person-bean counter but just a money-bean counter and shouldn't be a person manager. Take that above him, repeatedly and vocally, and complain that even doing THAT is taking you away from your work.
And if management doesn't agree with you, start keeping very detailed records about tasks done minute by minute during the day, and turn it in weekly. Include statements about how much time you're spending doing that and other stuff like meetings that aren't directly related to keeping your iron clean and oiled. And complain about that. Include in the complaints the needs for more people because you're accomplishing less with having to do this administrative work. THAT is an answer they can get a measurement handle on.
And if he should come up with it, complain that he's expecting you to handle unpredictable problems on a schedule, and must therefore be in need of an anal craniotomy. Either that or you're going to need a LOT of new hardware as well as people so that you have less problems to fix and therefore more time to spend doing his job. That's another thing they can measure
I've gotten shit from doctors asked to do this (NOT my idea; I'd never ask). I've taught medical students not to put up with it. You shouldn't either, and you should report to upper management anyone who's refusing to do their job, even, no ESPECIALLY if it's your immediate supervisor and he's trained to do that while you are not.
Scream, and don't stop until they make this problem go away so
... that people were ever against euthanasia. If all those old people were ever to accumulate the hospital industry would collapse. Maybe that's why they called them "boomers".
> OTOH: 100 or so years after the Principa was published a (French?) woman of noble
> birth corrected Newton's kinetic energy equation by emprical means (ie: dropped
> steel balls into clay and mesured the craters).
You're thinking of Emilie du Chatelet, paramour of Voltaire. I don't know how noble, but her family lived in a 30 room apartment overlooking Tuileries gardens in Paris. Certainly rich by birth, and married to a rich French military officer who conveniently left on a polar expedition.
And you're not quite correct about what she did; it was much better than that. The dropped ball and clay experiment was done by Willem 'sGravesande in the Netherlands, but he didn't have the theoretical background to understand what he had -- the craters got deeper with the square of the height (== energy). Liebniz had previously specified that energy should increase with the square of velocity, but that was somewhere between intuition, anti-Newtonian leanings (Newton got credit for calculus rather than he; Newton was pushing for mass times velocity, no square) and fortuitous guesswork. He didn't have the practical sense to develop a means to test it (or perhaps thought that beneath him). What du Chatelet did was put the two together and show the precise relationship between energy, mass and velocity that was supported by the data: E = mv^2.
Smiling Uncle Albert had it half written for him. What he plugged in was c for the Latin celeritas (rapidity), which he showed to have a limit of the speed of light, and that the E and m then equated completely and were thus interchangeable through it. Had she had the verification of Roemer's measurement of the speed of light to work with (said verification was just a few years old and not widely accepted yet) and had more time to work on it (she died from an infection after giving birth) she might have made progress towards that herself.
If she had done so, Poincare probably would have grasped the significance of his "theory of relativity" (Uncle A. never used that term until well after it became popularized, but Poincare used it explicitly in his own) and formulated the famous equation himself. He was, after all, right on the verge of it, and refused to talk about Ol' Al forever more because he failed to get all the way there first. It riled him no end, until the end of his days. Had he been younger and the age earlier, he might have challenged the young Bavarian Jew to a duel. A duel such as Francois-Marie Arouet threatened against a certain French nobleman, which resulted in his expulsion from France to England, where he learned of Newton and his work, which he brought back to France, along with his nom de plume, Voltaire. Or the duel (fencing match, actually) in which Jacques de Brun, the head of the King's bodyguards, was bested by a 16 year old girl named Emilie de Breteuil, as such was her family's name when they lived above Paris's Tuileries gardens.
If this was Connections, and I were James Burke, I'd be making a lot more money than what I'm getting for having written this. I am, however, every bit as pretty as Burke on camera, which is to say not at all.
> Einstein trumped Newton with a more complex theory
The CEO reminded me that Newton only described, and admitted he didn't know how it worked, but Einstein explained which led to testable hypotheses. Thus the former was not much of a theory if at all by the definition, whereas the latter is a very good example of a theory.
I had no idea she paid that much attention to my caffinated breakfast table rants. Obviously I don't.