Just an addendum: *some* of the articles on more serious topics are fairlyinformative too. A good rule of thumb is that if an article is in the featured articles list, it is usually worth reading.
You know that a Wikipedia edit war is interesting when its history page has a line like this:
(cur) (last) 17:03, 13 Dec 2004 JamesMLane (rm "first rate nutter" to forestall objections from genuine first-rate nutters who consider Sollog second-rate)
Re:Strange.
on
Dry Quicksand
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The experiment described in the article is interesting in one particular aspect: the air was puffed and then stopped, leaving the sand far from its minimum-energy state, but at rest. At the other extreme, you have fludized beds used in industry (fluidized bed reactors, fluidized columns for heat and mass transfer, fluidized bed filters, some other applications), all of which are continuously fluidized, and are modeled better as liquids than solid particles. I wonder if the research described could have any industrial applications. Particle size classification by pulse fluidization?
You may be right. Take this test for instance: http://www.politicalcompass.org/. (No I don't run that site, nor do I claim that it is necessarily accurate. I merely claim it is one way to represent political thinking and it may be useful). Now where would the current Chinese government fall in that graph? Probably in the low-positive-x, high-positive-y range?
For some governments, it is better to separate their administrative policies from their economic policies. China for instance has had economic reforms for about 20 years, and it's now capitalist in all but name. Its administration is still (for want of a better word) totalitarian (by which I mean that the government tends to control, or want to control, every aspect of its citizens' lives), but it can't fairly be called Communist.
On an sidenote, we may now ponder about whether introduction of Capitalism makes a country progress faster than introduction of Democracy, and whether they both go towards the same point in the politico-economic XY-plane, just along different paths.
I wasn't trying to attack your earlier point about smart people having more kids. I was thinking along the lines of constraints like finite resources and population increase etc. I mean, when we encourage one section of the population to breed, most of the global effort against overpopulation takes a hit. Sooner or later, someone will bring up the Shockley solution seriously.
For instance, India will face this "smart population vs dumb population" question next year, when the election constituencies are redrawn to reflect the population distribution. (Search Google for (india "delimitation commission") (without the parentheses) if you're interested. The current commission is supposed to report sometime in mid-2005.). It happens that some states in India have been very good at controlling their populations, but other state populations are still rising fast (and pulling the total with them). The side-effect of the constituency redrawing is that the states which do achieve low population growth are penalized by having their representation in Parliament reduced. (This has not been the case since 1976, when the Supreme Court froze all re-delimitations until 2000, but the latest delimitation is now well under way). There are only two ways in which this trend could be stopped: 1) If the "smart" states had more kids; 2) If the "dumb" states had less. Since this is India (with its strong accent on reducing total population), the first is not an option. It leads very quickly to the second being passionately advocated, in the form of "Why not force a compulsory sterilization after the second kid", moving on to "No reproduction for illiterates" and other related forms. (Yes I've personally been part of discussions like these). (BTW, targeting other states is still not as bad as blanket-targeting religions and/or communities for population growth).
I would imagine that with the world population exhibiting similar trends (http://esa.un.org/unpp/, using the medium variant throughout), similar sentiments would be expressed globally.
I wasn't attacking you personally for the concept that smart people should have more kids. I was merely pointing out that it often leads to the other strategy being preferentially chosen, especially where there is pressure to reduce overall population.
if you think that AI is going to be good enough to have computers acting as soldiers any time soon then you either have a really unrealistic view of AI develop or you have an incredibly disrespect for what it takes to be a soldier. Added to that no one is going to trust intelligent robots with guns for a very long time.
Just curious - isn't whiplash caused when the vehicle behind you rams into you at high speed and your head jerks backwards? Can whiplash be caused by a front-end collision and your head jerking forwards? Won't the seatbelt/airbag combination prevent this?
1. What *is* the correct plural of "semicolon"? Is it "semicolons" or "semicola"? I have seen the latter in various technical literature but not in any grammar books. (In all the technical literature, the writers were *not* being facetious). Instant poll: Is "semicola" likely to become part of mainstream usage soon?
2. If you're Australian, you can have much more fun with unwanted commas with the phrase "Eats roots, shoots and leaves".
Did you see this link at the bottom of the main article? How bad would the job of that contraption's test-pilot be?
Re:Better than a Volcano
on
Hacking Vodka
·
· Score: 1
they should have just taken some anhydrous ethanol. Back when I was in school, we used to order it by the 5-gallon tub ($20.99!), and since it was USP-grade, it was technically safe to drink...nobody ever noticed a liter gone here or there.
I notice that your username is an interesting coincidence.
For some reason that statement reminded me of the theory (urban legend?) about Domino's being able to predict major events based on their pizza orders to the Pentagon and the White House.
Try Googling for some combination of "Domino's pizza pentagon desert.storm" without the quotes. Here's a sample: (emphasis mine)
Earlier this year we reported that Domino's Pizza claims it can predict when the government is about to undertake some sort of major activity based upon the increase in pizza deliveries to the Pentagon and the White House. Pizza orders increased substantially just prior to troop deployments to Grenada, Panama, and the Middle East. According to The Washington Times of August 21, 1991, during the early hours of the abortive Kremlin coup in August, Domino's "Pizza Meter" registered 102 deliveries to the Pentagon, breaking the Gulf War record by one; the White House ordered 52 pizzas, breaking its Gulf War record by seven. The CIA, by contrast, learned its OPSEC lesson: There were only two orders, and they were quickly cancelled.[9,10]
(deliberately not linked since that site is slow as hell and uses dynamic content. Remove spaces inserted by Slashcode). I was unfortunately unable to find the diagram on the original website, NationStates, the website that came up with the scheme.
The quick summary for the lazy is pasted from the NationStates FAQ:
NationStates has three main scales: personal, economic, and political. In each case, you can be authoritarian (moral, or restrictive) or libertarian (liberal, or laissez-faire). For example, someone with left-wing politics might want high levels of personal freedom (e.g. no drug laws, gay rights), low levels of economic freedom (e.g. taxes, welfare), and average levels of political freedom (e.g. compulsory voting at elections). A libertarian might prefer high levels of freedom on all scales. An authoritarian might want the opposite.
Whether this constitutes a good model of political thought or not...you decide for yourself.
Knowing the RIAA's history, they'd probably claim that it was equivalent to playing millions of MP3s at consumer PC speeds.:-)
Re:You don't have to begin to imagine
on
Cray XT-3 Ships
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
More interesting is this spec:
Acoustical Noise Level: 75 dBa at 3.3 ft (1.0 m)
For comparison, that's roughly the same as an average vacuum cleaner when you're operating it, or maybe a good-sized pickup truck passing you in the next lane.
And remember, this value is *per cabinet*. You have to do a weighted sum over all the cabinets in an installation to get a true dB level. I wonder whether the maintenance people will have to use noise-level exposure limits for this baby.
And here I was, complaining about the quiet whine of my PC's fan.
No it doesn't. It's not Pascal's triangle. It's Sierpinski's triangle. Pascal's triangle is such that the ith row gives the binomial coefficients for the expansion of (a+b)^i. Sierpinski's triangle is a made by drawing a triangle and recursively joining the midpoints of its sides. Pascal's triangle is chiefly an algebraic entity. Sierpinski's triangle is chiefly a geometric/fractal entity.
Well, to be fair to the Slashdot editors, it's not *really* a dupe - this service is offered by a different company. But how different and original can you get with posthumous email services?
If he were to realize what was going on, I'd imagine he'd immediately make that change.
Good point. So I wondered why he isn't changing it. And I found that www.whoot.org resolves to 213-152-53-77.dsl.eclipse.net.uk, and realized the guy is probably fast asleep. The story was posted at 2200 EST, so that was 0300 GMT. He might sleep in on Saturday morning. Might it be a good idea for Slashdot if stories linking to personal websites and small companies were posted only when the site owners were likely to be awake and in a position to reconfigure their site if necessary?
Nreuuoms pmeeononnhs peossss uiapocmltecnd etaaoilxnpn; nwttdtsniinoahg, the pdseuo-snfiiiectc spssliiimm is not snfiiiectc and eieecndvs are oetfn mdanleiisg.
Translation:
Numerous phenomenons possess uncomplicated explanation; notwithstanding, the pseudo-scientific simplisism is not scientific and evidences are often misleading.
Dermatoglyphics is tied for lead with Uncopyrightable at 15 unique letters. The dictionary I use (YAWL (Scroll down a screen)) does not have any longer words with non-repeating letters.
Slashdot Mirror
Just an addendum: *some* of the articles on more serious topics are fairly informative too. A good rule of thumb is that if an article is in the featured articles list, it is usually worth reading.
You know that a Wikipedia edit war is interesting when its history page has a line like this:
(cur) (last) 17:03, 13 Dec 2004 JamesMLane (rm "first rate nutter" to forestall objections from genuine first-rate nutters who consider Sollog second-rate)
The experiment described in the article is interesting in one particular aspect: the air was puffed and then stopped, leaving the sand far from its minimum-energy state, but at rest. At the other extreme, you have fludized beds used in industry (fluidized bed reactors, fluidized columns for heat and mass transfer, fluidized bed filters, some other applications), all of which are continuously fluidized, and are modeled better as liquids than solid particles. I wonder if the research described could have any industrial applications. Particle size classification by pulse fluidization?
You may be right. Take this test for instance: http://www.politicalcompass.org/. (No I don't run that site, nor do I claim that it is necessarily accurate. I merely claim it is one way to represent political thinking and it may be useful). Now where would the current Chinese government fall in that graph? Probably in the low-positive-x, high-positive-y range?
For some governments, it is better to separate their administrative policies from their economic policies. China for instance has had economic reforms for about 20 years, and it's now capitalist in all but name. Its administration is still (for want of a better word) totalitarian (by which I mean that the government tends to control, or want to control, every aspect of its citizens' lives), but it can't fairly be called Communist.
On an sidenote, we may now ponder about whether introduction of Capitalism makes a country progress faster than introduction of Democracy, and whether they both go towards the same point in the politico-economic XY-plane, just along different paths.
From the submitted story:
:-)
On the one hand this could mean the indroduction of an administrator with an engineering background (O'Keefe is an MPA)
This indroduction process sounds painful, and I don't know what O'Keefe has to do with MPA.
Won't somebody please proofread story submissions for the sake of the kids?
Type in g. Then type o. Then type o again. And again. Keep typing o's... Look what happens :-)
:-)
Found something similar with "lololol" (my pet peeve in IM communication).
I wasn't trying to attack your earlier point about smart people having more kids. I was thinking along the lines of constraints like finite resources and population increase etc. I mean, when we encourage one section of the population to breed, most of the global effort against overpopulation takes a hit. Sooner or later, someone will bring up the Shockley solution seriously.
For instance, India will face this "smart population vs dumb population" question next year, when the election constituencies are redrawn to reflect the population distribution. (Search Google for (india "delimitation commission") (without the parentheses) if you're interested. The current commission is supposed to report sometime in mid-2005.). It happens that some states in India have been very good at controlling their populations, but other state populations are still rising fast (and pulling the total with them). The side-effect of the constituency redrawing is that the states which do achieve low population growth are penalized by having their representation in Parliament reduced. (This has not been the case since 1976, when the Supreme Court froze all re-delimitations until 2000, but the latest delimitation is now well under way). There are only two ways in which this trend could be stopped: 1) If the "smart" states had more kids; 2) If the "dumb" states had less. Since this is India (with its strong accent on reducing total population), the first is not an option. It leads very quickly to the second being passionately advocated, in the form of "Why not force a compulsory sterilization after the second kid", moving on to "No reproduction for illiterates" and other related forms. (Yes I've personally been part of discussions like these). (BTW, targeting other states is still not as bad as blanket-targeting religions and/or communities for population growth).
I would imagine that with the world population exhibiting similar trends (http://esa.un.org/unpp/, using the medium variant throughout), similar sentiments would be expressed globally.
I wasn't attacking you personally for the concept that smart people should have more kids. I was merely pointing out that it often leads to the other strategy being preferentially chosen, especially where there is pressure to reduce overall population.
I see your point, but it's a short and slippery slope from there to sterilizing the dumb and uneducated people (refer William Shockley et al).
if you think that AI is going to be good enough to have computers acting as soldiers any time soon then you either have a really unrealistic view of AI develop or you have an incredibly disrespect for what it takes to be a soldier. Added to that no one is going to trust intelligent robots with guns for a very long time.
And within 100 minutes of that comment, we have this story: Military Robots Get Machine Guns. All right. Who's the wise guy?
Whiplash Injuries
simulate a front-end collision.
Just curious - isn't whiplash caused when the vehicle behind you rams into you at high speed and your head jerks backwards? Can whiplash be caused by a front-end collision and your head jerking forwards? Won't the seatbelt/airbag combination prevent this?
Two things:
1. What *is* the correct plural of "semicolon"? Is it "semicolons" or "semicola"? I have seen the latter in various technical literature but not in any grammar books. (In all the technical literature, the writers were *not* being facetious). Instant poll: Is "semicola" likely to become part of mainstream usage soon?
2. If you're Australian, you can have much more fun with unwanted commas with the phrase "Eats roots, shoots and leaves".
Did you see this link at the bottom of the main article? How bad would the job of that contraption's test-pilot be?
they should have just taken some anhydrous ethanol. Back when I was in school, we used to order it by the 5-gallon tub ($20.99!), and since it was USP-grade, it was technically safe to drink...nobody ever noticed a liter gone here or there.
I notice that your username is an interesting coincidence.
If pop tart sales go up, head for high ground?
For some reason that statement reminded me of the theory (urban legend?) about Domino's being able to predict major events based on their pizza orders to the Pentagon and the White House.
Try Googling for some combination of "Domino's pizza pentagon desert.storm" without the quotes. Here's a sample: (emphasis mine)
Earlier this year we reported that Domino's Pizza claims it can predict when the government is about to undertake some sort of major activity based upon the increase in pizza deliveries to the Pentagon and the White House. Pizza orders increased substantially just prior to troop deployments to Grenada, Panama, and the Middle East.
According to The Washington Times of August 21, 1991, during the early hours of the abortive Kremlin coup in August, Domino's "Pizza Meter" registered 102 deliveries to the Pentagon, breaking the Gulf War record by one; the White House ordered 52 pizzas, breaking its Gulf War record by seven.
The CIA, by contrast, learned its OPSEC lesson: There were only two orders, and they were quickly cancelled.[9,10]
and I don't think two dimensions are enough, you can't (usefully) reduce every issue to a binary problem.
n smap
Presto! Here you go with a three-dimensional ternary problem:
http://preditor.is-a-geek.net/viewsite.php?spage=
(deliberately not linked since that site is slow as hell and uses dynamic content. Remove spaces inserted by Slashcode). I was unfortunately unable to find the diagram on the original website, NationStates, the website that came up with the scheme.
The quick summary for the lazy is pasted from the NationStates FAQ:
NationStates has three main scales: personal, economic, and political. In each case, you can be authoritarian (moral, or restrictive) or libertarian (liberal, or laissez-faire). For example, someone with left-wing politics might want high levels of personal freedom (e.g. no drug laws, gay rights), low levels of economic freedom (e.g. taxes, welfare), and average levels of political freedom (e.g. compulsory voting at elections). A libertarian might prefer high levels of freedom on all scales. An authoritarian might want the opposite.
Whether this constitutes a good model of political thought or not...you decide for yourself.
They played one illicit mp3 at 70 teraflops.
:-)
Knowing the RIAA's history, they'd probably claim that it was equivalent to playing millions of MP3s at consumer PC speeds.
More interesting is this spec:
Acoustical Noise Level: 75 dBa at 3.3 ft (1.0 m)
For comparison, that's roughly the same as an average vacuum cleaner when you're operating it, or maybe a good-sized pickup truck passing you in the next lane.
And remember, this value is *per cabinet*. You have to do a weighted sum over all the cabinets in an installation to get a true dB level. I wonder whether the maintenance people will have to use noise-level exposure limits for this baby.
And here I was, complaining about the quiet whine of my PC's fan.
There should be a two wheels Segway, but powered by a human
Isn't that called an electric bicycle?
It displays Pascals triangle.
No it doesn't. It's not Pascal's triangle. It's Sierpinski's triangle. Pascal's triangle is such that the ith row gives the binomial coefficients for the expansion of (a+b)^i. Sierpinski's triangle is a made by drawing a triangle and recursively joining the midpoints of its sides. Pascal's triangle is chiefly an algebraic entity. Sierpinski's triangle is chiefly a geometric/fractal entity.
I smell spam from the grave
What a coincidence! I smell a dupe from the past!
Well, to be fair to the Slashdot editors, it's not *really* a dupe - this service is offered by a different company. But how different and original can you get with posthumous email services?
Parent post mangled the quote somewhat.
Here's the original quote (RealVideo) in all its glory.
For those who cannot play RealVideo (hey, I don't own that site!),
here is the transcript (scroll down to the bottom of the page).
If he were to realize what was going on, I'd imagine he'd immediately make that change.
Good point. So I wondered why he isn't changing it. And I found that www.whoot.org resolves to 213-152-53-77.dsl.eclipse.net.uk, and realized the guy is probably fast asleep. The story was posted at 2200 EST, so that was 0300 GMT. He might sleep in on Saturday morning. Might it be a good idea for Slashdot if stories linking to personal websites and small companies were posted only when the site owners were likely to be awake and in a position to reconfigure their site if necessary?
Oh yeah? Try this on for size:
Nreuuoms pmeeononnhs peossss uiapocmltecnd etaaoilxnpn; nwttdtsniinoahg, the pdseuo-snfiiiectc spssliiimm is not snfiiiectc and eieecndvs are oetfn mdanleiisg.
Translation:
Numerous phenomenons possess uncomplicated explanation; notwithstanding, the pseudo-scientific simplisism is not scientific and evidences are often misleading.
Dermatoglyphics is tied for lead with Uncopyrightable at 15 unique letters. The dictionary I use (YAWL (Scroll down a screen)) does not have any longer words with non-repeating letters.