Re:Please be respectful on this topic
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Working with ADHD?
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· Score: 1
Ripping up beermats is allegedly a sign of sexual frustration.
Hmmm, interesting. I rip them up even when I'm with my girlfriend.
Re:Please be respectful on this topic
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Working with ADHD?
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· Score: 1
I haven't been professionally diagnosed, but I think I may have some form of ADHD, or something related (my girlfriend thinks so too). I'm curious what symptoms have seriously affected you [and anybody else, please chime in here too if you wanna help out any curious/. readers], and what symptoms have been affectively relieved with ritalin or other meds.
Regarding why I think I have it, I notice that I have concentration problems at times and can't get myself to focus. Specifically when I've been reading or studying for awhile, sometimes I can read a sentence 4-5 times and just can't get my brain to comprehend it. Sometimes I'll drift out of conversations or classes like in a daydream and only realize I was drifting after I snap out of it.
Sometimes, though, I can focus really well, eg for an exam, for time spans of a few hours. Curiously enough, I've found through trial and error that this works specifically well if I take an exam on only 3-4 hours of sleep! I'm seriously not kidding, it seems counter-intuitive but apparently works. It's totally mind-boggling, but I've aced many of my GRE and graduate physics exams this way.
Other than that, I'm constantly playing with things when talking to someone. Totally subconciously, anything near my hands. Pens, zippers, cable adaptors (when in the lab), etc. Notably beer-bottle labels and those cardboard beer-coasters they give you in bars, I just can't stop peeling and/or ripping them to shreds. And when I realize what I'm doing I put the thing down, and subconsciously I pick it back up a few moments later and play with it again. It's really weird, and I don't know why.
Well, enough about my peculiarities. Do you find that ADHD affects your memory? Specifically your ability to remember things like appointments, etc? Every year that goes by (I'm 27) my memory seems to get worse and worse.
Anyway, I'm wondering how meds have specifically helped you, and which symptoms they've affectively cured or relieved. And side-effects that have crept in, etc. I'm also wondering if it's worth it to get a professional diagnosis.
I don't know what the guy's name was, but he always talked about a friend that you never saw named Al Schimmelfinny. Which I always thought was funny because my grandparents have a friend named Al Schimmel.
I like how he consistently threw Uncle Travelling Matte's postcards into the garbage for Gobo to pick up easily.
Massive trees to fraggles, now take it a step further to those Doozers.
I dunno, when I really rush too hard my cursive and print both look like crap. But otherwise I think my writing is okay, or at least good enough for the other person to read.
Since these kinds of essays, usually the only one that reads my writing is me, and when it's unintelligible it's usually because i tried to save time by writing quick phrases that don't make sense, not because I can't read the letters.
Cursive is useless. Am I clueless, or what exactly is the use?
Man, am I really that much older than most other slashdotters (I'm 27)? Didn't you guys have to answer essay questions and the like for your exams in history or English (or other) class?
Try writing any amount of text in 30 minutes. If you print it you have to lift your pen off the paper for each letter. it looks nice but is a pain and takes long to make it look nice. Cursive was specifically invented to allow people to write entire words without lifting the pen off the page. You have nice fluid motion that really is much nicer on your wrist and hands. And it's much faster to boot. This fact should be readily apparent to most people that have hand-written any significantly-sized composition.
As for term papers and the like, of course those will be written on computers. But for things like tests and other cases you aren't near a computer, you don't have a computer with you (at least wherever I've been). Regarding palmtops, what's faster? Cursive or writing in grafiti/ink?
Evolve or die.
Of course there's evolution. The fact that there is significantly less handwriting right now doesn't mean it still doesn't have it's use or place. But that's a whole different issue. Cursive DOES have a purpose, and that is to provide an easier way to write than 'printing'.
It is FASTER and MORE FLUID than printing is.
Anyways, my point is. Cursive is useless. I know no one who actually uses it, in a professional common manner.
And my whole point is those two statements are apples and oranges. Cursive is (or at least was) not useless. But you are correct that it is being used less and less today.
Eventually as palmtops become more ubiquitous, and if the companies can get past their IP bullshit to settle on a superior standard for handwriting technology beyond grafiti/ink (sacrifice money for betterment of society? Unlikely, but I can still dream), then perhaps that new method for representing the letters will be taught in the gradeschools.
But there are (at least for me) many many cases where I still handwrite. I am currently in the process of buying a house with my girlfriend, and when we meet with real-estate agents and sellers we need to jot notes down quickly. Cursive really is much faster than printing. Same when I take notes at the physics seminars here at my university, cursive note-taking is really much much faster than printing. and much easier on my hands.
Are you serious? How old are you? Or, more specifically, have you ever had to answer an essay question on a history or English class in school?
Try writing a few coherent paragraphs within 30 minutes, and see how much your hand hurts with printing.
Printing requires that you lift the pen/pencil off the page for each letter. That gets really annoying and hard on your hands real fast. Cursive gives you a fluent motion to write all the letters and only lift the pen between words (and dotting i's and crossing t's). That's the whole purpose of it.
I'm quite surprised you never noticed that, or perhaps you just haven't ever written by hand any significant amount of words. If you had you'd notice that cursive really is that much more efficient and easier on the hands than printing.
Now it's a whole other story whether in today's world with palmtops and laptops whether it's useful to still have cursive. But when you claim cursive has no advantags over printing, either you have some bizarre way of writing or just haven't done that much of it.
Face it, everything that has been done in the name of "the war on terror" has been nothing but a power grab to remove the rights of US citizens.
No, it's been going on much longer than that. Eg - War on Drugs, War on Communism, etc. It also seems that many around both Europe and the Arab League are slowly building up into a War against Imperialism aimed against US, etc. It's easy to have a scapegoat or whipping boy, especially for nationalistic unity and pride. There's no better way of getting some parties with differencies to be friends/allies by finding a collective common enemy. But I digress...
Anyway, I wanted to point out that my friends did a roadtrip many years ago (read before 9/11). They had long-hair and some grateful dead stickers on the car. In Utah they got pulled over by a cop for supposedly driving over the center line. He then claimed he smelled marijuana and thus had the authority to rummage through all their possessions to find any contraband.
There are always going to be power trippers and people that abuse the system, the War on Terror is really nothing new. Just the same-old scapegoat argument.
They are most likely doing very long-term integration. The GPS data, while it has an inherent noise, averages out very close to a steady value over very long-term averaging.
Regarding systematic error, they are also most likely measuring the drift of the continental plates, and would only care about the rate of change of distance (over very long time scales). So a systematic error of +/-10 feet probably doesn't matter too much.
Scientists used a similar setup at the top of Mt. Everest to determine that the peak grows upwards at a slow rate (about 1 centimeter per year, IIRC)
Don't you DARE feed that squirrel or bird, you're disrupting nature!
This statement makes me doubt the sincerity of the rest of your arguments about loving nature and respecting the wilderness and wildlife.
I have been to many national and state parks and feeding animals is universally a bad thing. The main reason is because the more you feed animals the less dependent they become on their abilities to forage and search for food, and hence can starve during the winter months.
Regarding birds and metro parks, did you ever notice that groups of birds congregate around park benches when you eat? This is a direct consequence to them getting fed by others and hoping to get fed again.
Another and more important reason, though, is that once you feed wildlife, the animals learn that those curious humanoid bipeds will tend to give them food. They start approaching humans more often to get food. And sometimes becoming agressive.
This is particularly destructive with predatory animals like bears. In some forests around here in the Northeast, for some unknown reason people feed the bears. Said bears then approach other people, sometimes agressively. What the original feeders don't know is that the park rangers must destroy bears that do this. So, if you feed bears or other agressive animals, you are actually contributing to their destruction.
This isn't just with bears, it's a common case with deer too. Have you ever seen a deer painted bright orange? This means the deer has agressively approached people before trying to get food. It's painted orange because if it happens again then the rangers have to destroy the deer.
So that's why it's important not to feed the wildlife, because you really are changing their feeding behavior. And since you were unaware of this it makes me doubt the sincerity of the rest of your comment.
I dunno, that's what I always joke about with my friends. If I was famous (at least by facial recognition) then I'd never be able to go to the local drugstore to buy preparation-H without the tabloids going crazy. Would we really want to be famous? SOme people make it sound like the end-all be-all (well, being both rich and famous that is).
Being rich certainly has some advantages, but does being famous do much else besides feed the ego?
anyway, back to the point at hand, it begs the question. does a celebrity have the right to enjoy the ability to some privacy or seclusion that the rest of us "nobodies" do?
I'm curious if Ken Adelman at least publishes aerial photographs of his own residence, along with latitude/longitude info. If he did that then he'd at least be able to take what he was dishing out.
As someone else said, the difference is between publishing a photograph of a house at xxx.xxx and yyy.yyy latitude/longitude, and publishing a photograph of a house that's specifically listed as "Barbara Streisand's house".
The answer to your question is that only the rich and famous Hollywood stars would have their names listed with the house pictures, while nobody gives a hoot about the rest of us common joes.
And, as i said in a different post, she claimed (whether true or not) her objections were specifically because stalkers (and if you were as despised as much as she was you'd have several too) can now find new and better ways onto her property and into her house.
Out of curioisity, would you then not complain if someone was motivated enough to follow you around 24-7 (using consistent aerial photographs when you're on your own or someone else's property) and publish the photos and information on a webpage?
You might say right now that you do not mind, but if you were as famous as Streisand, and even as remotely despised, and had several stalker problems (probably most stalkers out of dislike rather than infatuation), you'd most likely have problems with this.
What do you feel about the fundamentalist anti-abortionists who publish the names, addresses, phone numbers, etc of doctors that perform abortions? What about those that continue to do so even after some of these doctors have been attacked or killed?
How would you feel if everytime you bought porn or preparation-H or whenever you eyes strayed to another woman's boobs someone published that info on a website? Is this really free speech, or is it intrusive?
Suppose I see you at a supermarket and catch your credit card # (say I even have a pocket videocamera with zoom lens). And I also see you enter your PIN # at the ATM. Is it free speech to publish this info? Suppose I see what the grooves of your house keys look like, is it free speech to publish this information? What about explicit instructions to produce a working duplicate of your house keys? Suppose I photograph you in Infrared through the walls of your house, and report consistently what rooms your in and what you appear to be doing. Still free speech?
Just curious where you think the line should be drawn, if any.
I read this news story a few days ago, and one facet omitted from the/. summary was that a large part of Streisand's complaint was that the aerial photograph clearly showed hidden entrances and pathways that should have been obscured to those just wandering around the premise without the benefit of a 3-D view. She's had alot of problems with stalkers and she claims these aerial photographs give the stalkers easier access into her property than they'd have otherwise.
Another suggestion - be kind to the environment and for notes try using misprinted pages from somebody's batched printjob.
In the computer lab here, every now and then somebody tries to lpr a PDF file, which produces 50+ pages of cryptic symbols, but there is only a line of symbols along the top of the page. These misprinted pages are now useless for printing documents but great for scrap paper, taking notes, doing homeworks, etc. And there's usually plenty of batched jobs where one side of the page is entirely empty, even if the other side is fully printed.
I TA'd a physics class last year (for majors) and most of the physics majors handed in their homeworks this way. It was pretty cool. Contrasted with the anal pre-meds I TA'd the previous two years who just needed to get their physics requirements out of the way - they all used shiny new paper with intent to impress.
Also reminds me of back in undergrad one day our E&M homework was really driving us nuts so my friend printed out about 10 pages of nude women (classy, not trashy), and did his homework problems on the back sides. When he got the homework assignment back the professor wrote something like "The even pages were notably interesting!".
I agree completely! I went through 4 years of undergrad before realizing this really is the best way to stay organized.
I used to use a separate spiral notebook for each class, which eventually filled up with handouts, solutions, graded homeworks, exams, etc. and the loose papers kept falling out, etc. I tried using separate folders but stuff got too confusing fast.
3-ring binders are the best solution. Every handout goes in there, along with class notes, etc. Three-hole puncher allows me to put all letter-sized objects together in there. Rarely do I have anything that cannot be hole-punched this way. In the main department office here they have an uber 3-hole puncher that I can use in case I have a stapled 1-inch thick packet.
I have been in grad school for the past 3 years and while I'm inherently totally disorganized, my binders and notes are amazingly organized. I can (and often do) look up obscure physics problems (I'm a physics grad student) from previous classes, etc.
Now if only I could find a method to help me keep my scientific research notebooks organized and up-to-date.
The most obvious example of a naturally occurring regular pattern is pulsars
Interestingly enough, when pulsars were first discovered, some scientists thought they had to have some intelligence behind them because their rotational periods were too regular.
I can understand calculating pi to the nth point as it is used in calculations
Even the most precise calculations don't need that many digits of pi. It's amazing how fast orders of magnitude build up.
Take this extreme example. Suppose you know the radius of the galaxy (define the radius going out to the galactice halo, for instance) to arbitrary precision and your calculation of the circumference is limited only by the precision of pi. If you want to know the circumference town to 10^-15 meters (ie, about the size of an atomic nucleus). How many digits of pi are sufficient?
The radius of the Milky Way galaxy out to the galactic halo is about 65,000 light years, or about 6e20 meters. Only 36 digits of pi would be necessary!!! And this extreme example is of many orders of magnitude larger than precisions of anything that can be calculated in laboratories today. In actuality, one wouldn't really need more then 12-15 digits of pi, if even that much.
Even Gollum from the recent LOTR movies, which had some of the best acting by a CG character in a while, was difficult to believe because half the time he was on the screen, it we obvious that he was a CG character.
So then you by default don't like cartoons or anime because the characters aren't puppets?
I don't really get your premise, why is a puppet any more "real" than CG? In either case alot of work must go into making the thing look real and lifelike. Some movies have the manpower, budget, and motivation to do this (either with CG or puppetry) and others don't.
Another thing to think about is that puppetry in movies has been around for many decades BEFORE that list of movies you listed. ( Interestingly all of the movies you listed came out in the 70's and 80's (actually, I don't know Legend). How old are you? My guess is that you're in your 20's, and those movies are from your childhood where you'd be amazed at anything.) What this means is that means the technology had a chance to mature. Ever look at an old 50's sci-fi flick? the puppetry and costumes are abysmal compared to Star-Wars. And do you really think Gollum is that much worse than Jabba or his little Henson rat? IMHO, neither of those were really that believable either.
And I still don't get why CG cannot be good but puppetry is? Did you like "Who Framed Roger Rabbit"? There was no (i think) puppetery used there, most special effects were the animations (I know the scene where Roger spits out water had a water pipe 'hidden' by his animated drawing). IMHO, that movie rocked. Animation, puppetry, and CG each offer their own unique feel to add fantastic features to movies/tv. One is not necessarily better than another. They have their own features/flaws, but if done right they can be really good, or really cheesy if not done right.
How can counting the number of silicon atoms in a perfectly spherical crystal of silicon be exact? First of all, how can you make a perfect sphere of silicon.
You've just answered your own question there, and somebody also referred to these problems in a previous thread above.
If there want to do it this way wouldn't it make sense to use something inherently spherical like a Buckeyball?
Firstly, I'm not sure why the crystal must be spherically-shaped (unless it has to do with some kind of spherical-like Fermi-surface in k-space).
Secondly, buckyballs are difficult to isolate, specifically isolating just the C-60 variety.
Thirdly, and off-topic, they are NOT inherently spherical. They approach spherical but have distinct non-spherical features. If you diagonalize the Hamiltonian of C-60 molecules, at large wavelengths the energy eigenstates look like the spherical harmonics (as expected, you miss the small features). At higher energies, you can start to see non-spherical structures, though.
Volts are defined as Joules per Coulomb. Joule is a unit for energy, Coulomb is a unit of charge.
Joules are defined as kilogram * meter^2 / second^2.
(You've most likely at least heard of these units before, recall Einstein's E=mc^2 where c is velocity). In SI, all units use meters, seconds, kilograms for distance, time, and mass respectively.
Coulomb is a specific number of electrons.
The answer is another question : How would you define a standard energy?
c is a constant, of course. In fact, it's used to define the meter as how far light travels in a vacuum in 1/(299,792,458) of a second. Second is defined as the time for a certain number of vibrations of a Cesium atom to occur. As per your question of relating mass to Joules, note that high-energy physicists do this all the time. They usually refer to masses of particles as MeV/c^2. And they usually work in units where c=hbar=1, thereby making distance, time, and energy all essentially the same units (easier to do calculatins that way).
One thought that jumps to mind for a standard energy interval is the lyman alpha energy width (the jump of the electron in a hydrogen atom from n=2 to n=1 where n is the energy quantum number). Or, for mass, use a standard mass of a well-defined particle such as an electron. In fact, I'm surprised that NIST doesn't do this. It might be that isolating electrons for mass measurements are too difficult (gravity is weak), but electron mass does show up in many other calculations (specific heat of degenerate electron gases, for instance). Or isolating ultra-pure hydrogen gas and spectroscopically measuring Lyman alpha is more difficult than it seems. I guess NIST wants [relatively] easy methods for measuring these quantities.
Okay, I just found this site which answers the question. They quote
This one physical standard is still used because scientists can weigh objects very accurately. Weight standards in other countries can be adjusted to the Paris standard kilogram with an accuracy of one part per hundred million. So far, no one has figured out how to define the kilogram in any other way that can be reproduced with better accuracy than this. The 21st General Conference on Weights and Measures, meeting in October 1999, passed a resolution calling on national standards laboratories to press forward with research to "link the fundamental unit of mass to fundamental or atomic constants with a view to a future redefinition of the kilogram." The next General Conference, in 2003, will surely return to this issue.
It all boils down to ability to measure the standard units to the highest precision possible. I'm actually stunned that the mass of that bar can be weighed to that precision.
As a side note, if you can come up with a better way of measuring fundamental constants, you might win a Nobel Prize. The guys that discovered the integer quantum hall effect initially published their results as a better way to measure some of the fundamental constants.
Re:A warning to experimenters
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Build Your Own ECG
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· Score: 3, Informative
Yeah, definitely be careful. I was looking to do a quick demo of a homemade EKG to some of my physics lab students a few years ago. I was surprised that there weren't that many online resources for homemade EKG's (when all it really takes is some ultra-high input-impedance op-amps).
[FYI I did build a simple differential amp with rather high imput impedance (don't remember the numbers) but it was with the measly components I could find at rat shack and it didn't work well at all.]
While planning this I asked my father, an electronics hobbyist for the past 50+ years, about building such a circuit and he said that the main hobbyist electronics rags such as Radio Electronics and Popular Electronics (which melded a few years ago into Poptronics and then recently folded) refused to publish any EKG schematics because of the possibility of someone electrocuting themselves.
While any electronic circuit you build will put you at some finite risk, you rarely only probe these circuits when they're powered (usually just for debugging). However, heart monitors are deliberately designed to provide an electrical connection not only across your body but across the organ most susceptible to electrocution (ie, heart fibrillations).
So definitely be very careful, especially if you connect to a line-powered oscilloscope or other equipment.
Re:i have previously achieved this same illusion
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Water Flows Uphill
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· Score: 1
That's the same technique that Wurlitzer-style jukeboxes have used since the 40's in their "animated bubble tubes" for that weird upwards bubble-moving effect. Here's a pic.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmm, interesting. I rip them up even when I'm with my girlfriend.
Regarding why I think I have it, I notice that I have concentration problems at times and can't get myself to focus. Specifically when I've been reading or studying for awhile, sometimes I can read a sentence 4-5 times and just can't get my brain to comprehend it. Sometimes I'll drift out of conversations or classes like in a daydream and only realize I was drifting after I snap out of it.
Sometimes, though, I can focus really well, eg for an exam, for time spans of a few hours. Curiously enough, I've found through trial and error that this works specifically well if I take an exam on only 3-4 hours of sleep! I'm seriously not kidding, it seems counter-intuitive but apparently works. It's totally mind-boggling, but I've aced many of my GRE and graduate physics exams this way.
Other than that, I'm constantly playing with things when talking to someone. Totally subconciously, anything near my hands. Pens, zippers, cable adaptors (when in the lab), etc. Notably beer-bottle labels and those cardboard beer-coasters they give you in bars, I just can't stop peeling and/or ripping them to shreds. And when I realize what I'm doing I put the thing down, and subconsciously I pick it back up a few moments later and play with it again. It's really weird, and I don't know why.
Well, enough about my peculiarities. Do you find that ADHD affects your memory? Specifically your ability to remember things like appointments, etc? Every year that goes by (I'm 27) my memory seems to get worse and worse.
Anyway, I'm wondering how meds have specifically helped you, and which symptoms they've affectively cured or relieved. And side-effects that have crept in, etc. I'm also wondering if it's worth it to get a professional diagnosis.
Ya gotta love nanotech. It's the only competition where the goal is to exclaim "Mine is smaller than yours!"
I like how he consistently threw Uncle Travelling Matte's postcards into the garbage for Gobo to pick up easily.
Massive trees to fraggles, now take it a step further to those Doozers.
Since these kinds of essays, usually the only one that reads my writing is me, and when it's unintelligible it's usually because i tried to save time by writing quick phrases that don't make sense, not because I can't read the letters.
Man, am I really that much older than most other slashdotters (I'm 27)? Didn't you guys have to answer essay questions and the like for your exams in history or English (or other) class?
Try writing any amount of text in 30 minutes. If you print it you have to lift your pen off the paper for each letter. it looks nice but is a pain and takes long to make it look nice. Cursive was specifically invented to allow people to write entire words without lifting the pen off the page. You have nice fluid motion that really is much nicer on your wrist and hands. And it's much faster to boot. This fact should be readily apparent to most people that have hand-written any significantly-sized composition.
As for term papers and the like, of course those will be written on computers. But for things like tests and other cases you aren't near a computer, you don't have a computer with you (at least wherever I've been). Regarding palmtops, what's faster? Cursive or writing in grafiti/ink?
Evolve or die.
Of course there's evolution. The fact that there is significantly less handwriting right now doesn't mean it still doesn't have it's use or place. But that's a whole different issue. Cursive DOES have a purpose, and that is to provide an easier way to write than 'printing'. It is FASTER and MORE FLUID than printing is.
Anyways, my point is. Cursive is useless. I know no one who actually uses it, in a professional common manner.
And my whole point is those two statements are apples and oranges. Cursive is (or at least was) not useless. But you are correct that it is being used less and less today.
Eventually as palmtops become more ubiquitous, and if the companies can get past their IP bullshit to settle on a superior standard for handwriting technology beyond grafiti/ink (sacrifice money for betterment of society? Unlikely, but I can still dream), then perhaps that new method for representing the letters will be taught in the gradeschools.
But there are (at least for me) many many cases where I still handwrite. I am currently in the process of buying a house with my girlfriend, and when we meet with real-estate agents and sellers we need to jot notes down quickly. Cursive really is much faster than printing. Same when I take notes at the physics seminars here at my university, cursive note-taking is really much much faster than printing. and much easier on my hands.
Try writing a few coherent paragraphs within 30 minutes, and see how much your hand hurts with printing.
Printing requires that you lift the pen/pencil off the page for each letter. That gets really annoying and hard on your hands real fast. Cursive gives you a fluent motion to write all the letters and only lift the pen between words (and dotting i's and crossing t's). That's the whole purpose of it.
I'm quite surprised you never noticed that, or perhaps you just haven't ever written by hand any significant amount of words. If you had you'd notice that cursive really is that much more efficient and easier on the hands than printing.
Now it's a whole other story whether in today's world with palmtops and laptops whether it's useful to still have cursive. But when you claim cursive has no advantags over printing, either you have some bizarre way of writing or just haven't done that much of it.
No, it's been going on much longer than that. Eg - War on Drugs, War on Communism, etc. It also seems that many around both Europe and the Arab League are slowly building up into a War against Imperialism aimed against US, etc. It's easy to have a scapegoat or whipping boy, especially for nationalistic unity and pride. There's no better way of getting some parties with differencies to be friends/allies by finding a collective common enemy. But I digress...
Anyway, I wanted to point out that my friends did a roadtrip many years ago (read before 9/11). They had long-hair and some grateful dead stickers on the car. In Utah they got pulled over by a cop for supposedly driving over the center line. He then claimed he smelled marijuana and thus had the authority to rummage through all their possessions to find any contraband.
There are always going to be power trippers and people that abuse the system, the War on Terror is really nothing new. Just the same-old scapegoat argument.
Regarding systematic error, they are also most likely measuring the drift of the continental plates, and would only care about the rate of change of distance (over very long time scales). So a systematic error of +/-10 feet probably doesn't matter too much.
Scientists used a similar setup at the top of Mt. Everest to determine that the peak grows upwards at a slow rate (about 1 centimeter per year, IIRC)
This statement makes me doubt the sincerity of the rest of your arguments about loving nature and respecting the wilderness and wildlife.
I have been to many national and state parks and feeding animals is universally a bad thing. The main reason is because the more you feed animals the less dependent they become on their abilities to forage and search for food, and hence can starve during the winter months.
Regarding birds and metro parks, did you ever notice that groups of birds congregate around park benches when you eat? This is a direct consequence to them getting fed by others and hoping to get fed again.
Another and more important reason, though, is that once you feed wildlife, the animals learn that those curious humanoid bipeds will tend to give them food. They start approaching humans more often to get food. And sometimes becoming agressive.
This is particularly destructive with predatory animals like bears. In some forests around here in the Northeast, for some unknown reason people feed the bears. Said bears then approach other people, sometimes agressively. What the original feeders don't know is that the park rangers must destroy bears that do this. So, if you feed bears or other agressive animals, you are actually contributing to their destruction.
This isn't just with bears, it's a common case with deer too. Have you ever seen a deer painted bright orange? This means the deer has agressively approached people before trying to get food. It's painted orange because if it happens again then the rangers have to destroy the deer.
So that's why it's important not to feed the wildlife, because you really are changing their feeding behavior. And since you were unaware of this it makes me doubt the sincerity of the rest of your comment.
Being rich certainly has some advantages, but does being famous do much else besides feed the ego?
anyway, back to the point at hand, it begs the question. does a celebrity have the right to enjoy the ability to some privacy or seclusion that the rest of us "nobodies" do?
I'm curious if Ken Adelman at least publishes aerial photographs of his own residence, along with latitude/longitude info. If he did that then he'd at least be able to take what he was dishing out.
The answer to your question is that only the rich and famous Hollywood stars would have their names listed with the house pictures, while nobody gives a hoot about the rest of us common joes.
And, as i said in a different post, she claimed (whether true or not) her objections were specifically because stalkers (and if you were as despised as much as she was you'd have several too) can now find new and better ways onto her property and into her house.
What do you feel about the fundamentalist anti-abortionists who publish the names, addresses, phone numbers, etc of doctors that perform abortions? What about those that continue to do so even after some of these doctors have been attacked or killed?
How would you feel if everytime you bought porn or preparation-H or whenever you eyes strayed to another woman's boobs someone published that info on a website? Is this really free speech, or is it intrusive?
Suppose I see you at a supermarket and catch your credit card # (say I even have a pocket videocamera with zoom lens). And I also see you enter your PIN # at the ATM. Is it free speech to publish this info? Suppose I see what the grooves of your house keys look like, is it free speech to publish this information? What about explicit instructions to produce a working duplicate of your house keys? Suppose I photograph you in Infrared through the walls of your house, and report consistently what rooms your in and what you appear to be doing. Still free speech?
Just curious where you think the line should be drawn, if any.
I read this news story a few days ago, and one facet omitted from the /. summary was that a large part of Streisand's complaint was that the aerial photograph clearly showed hidden entrances and pathways that should have been obscured to those just wandering around the premise without the benefit of a 3-D view. She's had alot of problems with stalkers and she claims these aerial photographs give the stalkers easier access into her property than they'd have otherwise.
In the computer lab here, every now and then somebody tries to lpr a PDF file, which produces 50+ pages of cryptic symbols, but there is only a line of symbols along the top of the page. These misprinted pages are now useless for printing documents but great for scrap paper, taking notes, doing homeworks, etc. And there's usually plenty of batched jobs where one side of the page is entirely empty, even if the other side is fully printed.
I TA'd a physics class last year (for majors) and most of the physics majors handed in their homeworks this way. It was pretty cool. Contrasted with the anal pre-meds I TA'd the previous two years who just needed to get their physics requirements out of the way - they all used shiny new paper with intent to impress.
Also reminds me of back in undergrad one day our E&M homework was really driving us nuts so my friend printed out about 10 pages of nude women (classy, not trashy), and did his homework problems on the back sides. When he got the homework assignment back the professor wrote something like "The even pages were notably interesting!".
I used to use a separate spiral notebook for each class, which eventually filled up with handouts, solutions, graded homeworks, exams, etc. and the loose papers kept falling out, etc. I tried using separate folders but stuff got too confusing fast.
3-ring binders are the best solution. Every handout goes in there, along with class notes, etc. Three-hole puncher allows me to put all letter-sized objects together in there. Rarely do I have anything that cannot be hole-punched this way. In the main department office here they have an uber 3-hole puncher that I can use in case I have a stapled 1-inch thick packet.
I have been in grad school for the past 3 years and while I'm inherently totally disorganized, my binders and notes are amazingly organized. I can (and often do) look up obscure physics problems (I'm a physics grad student) from previous classes, etc.
Now if only I could find a method to help me keep my scientific research notebooks organized and up-to-date.
Interestingly enough, when pulsars were first discovered, some scientists thought they had to have some intelligence behind them because their rotational periods were too regular.
Even the most precise calculations don't need that many digits of pi. It's amazing how fast orders of magnitude build up.
Take this extreme example. Suppose you know the radius of the galaxy (define the radius going out to the galactice halo, for instance) to arbitrary precision and your calculation of the circumference is limited only by the precision of pi. If you want to know the circumference town to 10^-15 meters (ie, about the size of an atomic nucleus). How many digits of pi are sufficient?
The radius of the Milky Way galaxy out to the galactic halo is about 65,000 light years, or about 6e20 meters. Only 36 digits of pi would be necessary!!! And this extreme example is of many orders of magnitude larger than precisions of anything that can be calculated in laboratories today. In actuality, one wouldn't really need more then 12-15 digits of pi, if even that much.
So then you by default don't like cartoons or anime because the characters aren't puppets?
I don't really get your premise, why is a puppet any more "real" than CG? In either case alot of work must go into making the thing look real and lifelike. Some movies have the manpower, budget, and motivation to do this (either with CG or puppetry) and others don't.
Another thing to think about is that puppetry in movies has been around for many decades BEFORE that list of movies you listed. ( Interestingly all of the movies you listed came out in the 70's and 80's (actually, I don't know Legend). How old are you? My guess is that you're in your 20's, and those movies are from your childhood where you'd be amazed at anything.) What this means is that means the technology had a chance to mature. Ever look at an old 50's sci-fi flick? the puppetry and costumes are abysmal compared to Star-Wars. And do you really think Gollum is that much worse than Jabba or his little Henson rat? IMHO, neither of those were really that believable either.
And I still don't get why CG cannot be good but puppetry is? Did you like "Who Framed Roger Rabbit"? There was no (i think) puppetery used there, most special effects were the animations (I know the scene where Roger spits out water had a water pipe 'hidden' by his animated drawing). IMHO, that movie rocked. Animation, puppetry, and CG each offer their own unique feel to add fantastic features to movies/tv. One is not necessarily better than another. They have their own features/flaws, but if done right they can be really good, or really cheesy if not done right.
You've just answered your own question there, and somebody also referred to these problems in a previous thread above.
If there want to do it this way wouldn't it make sense to use something inherently spherical like a Buckeyball?
Firstly, I'm not sure why the crystal must be spherically-shaped (unless it has to do with some kind of spherical-like Fermi-surface in k-space).
Secondly, buckyballs are difficult to isolate, specifically isolating just the C-60 variety.
Thirdly, and off-topic, they are NOT inherently spherical. They approach spherical but have distinct non-spherical features. If you diagonalize the Hamiltonian of C-60 molecules, at large wavelengths the energy eigenstates look like the spherical harmonics (as expected, you miss the small features). At higher energies, you can start to see non-spherical structures, though.
Joules are defined as kilogram * meter^2 / second^2. (You've most likely at least heard of these units before, recall Einstein's E=mc^2 where c is velocity). In SI, all units use meters, seconds, kilograms for distance, time, and mass respectively. Coulomb is a specific number of electrons.
c is a constant, of course. In fact, it's used to define the meter as how far light travels in a vacuum in 1/(299,792,458) of a second. Second is defined as the time for a certain number of vibrations of a Cesium atom to occur. As per your question of relating mass to Joules, note that high-energy physicists do this all the time. They usually refer to masses of particles as MeV/c^2. And they usually work in units where c=hbar=1, thereby making distance, time, and energy all essentially the same units (easier to do calculatins that way).
One thought that jumps to mind for a standard energy interval is the lyman alpha energy width (the jump of the electron in a hydrogen atom from n=2 to n=1 where n is the energy quantum number). Or, for mass, use a standard mass of a well-defined particle such as an electron. In fact, I'm surprised that NIST doesn't do this. It might be that isolating electrons for mass measurements are too difficult (gravity is weak), but electron mass does show up in many other calculations (specific heat of degenerate electron gases, for instance). Or isolating ultra-pure hydrogen gas and spectroscopically measuring Lyman alpha is more difficult than it seems. I guess NIST wants [relatively] easy methods for measuring these quantities.
Okay, I just found this site which answers the question. They quote
It all boils down to ability to measure the standard units to the highest precision possible. I'm actually stunned that the mass of that bar can be weighed to that precision.
As a side note, if you can come up with a better way of measuring fundamental constants, you might win a Nobel Prize. The guys that discovered the integer quantum hall effect initially published their results as a better way to measure some of the fundamental constants.
While planning this I asked my father, an electronics hobbyist for the past 50+ years, about building such a circuit and he said that the main hobbyist electronics rags such as Radio Electronics and Popular Electronics (which melded a few years ago into Poptronics and then recently folded) refused to publish any EKG schematics because of the possibility of someone electrocuting themselves.
While any electronic circuit you build will put you at some finite risk, you rarely only probe these circuits when they're powered (usually just for debugging). However, heart monitors are deliberately designed to provide an electrical connection not only across your body but across the organ most susceptible to electrocution (ie, heart fibrillations).
So definitely be very careful, especially if you connect to a line-powered oscilloscope or other equipment.
That's the same technique that Wurlitzer-style jukeboxes have used since the 40's in their "animated bubble tubes" for that weird upwards bubble-moving effect. Here's a pic.