Betelgeuse - a red giant...to minimise the effects of UV exposure.
On the other hand, a red giant is considerably cooler than a yellow star like the sun, and emits much less of its energy in the UV range. Of course, the total energy output of Betelgeuse is so high that even with this smaller fraction in the UV range, it probably can still cause a serious burn.
James Earl Jones didn't 'play' Darth Vader, either. However, he did a nice job as Vader's voice
The man in the Vader costume was actually David Prowse. He spoke all of Vader's lines, and apparently did not know he would be dubbed over by James Earl Jones until the premiere. Of course, that last part might just be an urban legend.
The current plan is to throw Neptune in the black hole as an appeasement...A perfectly good chance to make a Uranus joke
Aaaaargh! My eyes! My eyes! Did you have to say "black hole" and "Uranus" in the same sentence? Man, if you want to say "goatse", please say so openly, not in some twisted way that sneaks past my mental defences.
And these are the ones who are capable of changing the world, who are capable of doing radical things, who can think outside the box. However, these very people are socially so inept
I contemplated your post for a day before deciding to respond. I've had this idea for a while now that individual humans are not the functional unit anymore. It's become society vs society. As long as the individual is contributing to society in some way, he/she is accepted. Geeks and Nerds contribute directly through innovation. Less capable people contribute indirectly through their offspring, on the chance that some of them may in turn become Geeks or Nerds.
Think of a colony of ants. There is only one "queen" whose sole task is to lay eggs. Nobody else is capable of reproduction, but the workers keep the colony alive. Thus individuals die out without reproducing but the colony survives. Of course ants are an extreme example with only one reproducer per colony. Make that a few reproducers per society and pit societies against each other. You've now got humans in the present day.
Maybe that's why it hardly raises eyebrows these days when someone decides not to have kids. In my grandparents' time, it was considered unthinkable (evil, deviant, freakish...). Think of it in a slightly different light, and you now get the reason why homosexuality is considered perfectly normal. The fitness function has become "what do you contribute to society", not "what do you do to ensure the survival of your genes".
OK first off that's "caste" not "cast". But the main point that prompted this reply is that caste is not relevant in this issue of outsourcing. It's true that caste still plays a huge role in rural (== backward) areas, but those areas have nothing whatsoever to do with India's recent economic trend. All the jobs and all the development is in urban areas, especially these five cities: Bangalore, Madras, Hyderabad, Bombay and New Delhi. All the job growth is in the private sector which as a rule does NOT bother about caste or religion or anything other than performance metrics.
Now the way it works is that a tribe of 20-somethings suddenly earn more than their parents put together, and thus the standard (and cost) of living goes up. This in turn leads to higher wages being demanded by servants, chauffers, sweepers...in urban areas.
So really, most people's standards of living have risen in the urban areas, irrespective of caste. Similarly, the standard of living has stayed the same or fallen in rural areas, again irrespective of caste. Maybe not entirely in the rural areas, but
And anyway, India has a bigger problem with reverse discrimination than casteism today. Someone decided that the best way to redress centuries of injustice to lower castes was to give them heaps of college degrees/diplomas on the sole weight of their birth and irrespective of their academic performance (or lack thereof). This started in the early 1990s. And from what I hear, a "high caste" indivudual has to slog his ass off to get into college or get a government job, while the "lower caste" members are being given free handouts.
India has been lucky so far - the past 10 years, most of the new workers (== mainly people who were admitted into college & graduated on the basis of their low caste), particularly engineering graduates, have been absorbed into call centers and software development, irrespective of what branch of engineering they specialized in. Face it, you really cannot screw up something in software. So you release a product riddled with holes. So what? Microsoft made a business model out of it. The longer-term threat to India is if for some reason the IT market weakens and some of these morons go back to the field they graduated in. Heaven forbid if that happens to be Civil or Chemical or Nuclear Engineering. I shouldn't be surprised if they have dam collapses and Bhopal-type industrial disasters, leave alone nuclear accidents.
From the article: The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Denver, seeks class-action status to represent an estimated 1 million people who ordered the products in response to advertisements on television, radio and spam e-mail.
I'd like to know how they arrived at this estimate of 1 million customers. How are the damages (after the lawyers' fee) to be distributed? Equally among all these people? How did the plaintiff learn their identities?
Definition of analog: "Of, relating to, or being a device in which data are represented by continuously variable, measurable, physical quantities, such as length, width, voltage, or pressure."
I submit that just because a watch has moving hands does not make it analog. Many moving-hand type watches keep time by using quartz crystals. Guess what? They count the number of vibrations of the crystal and tick one second every 32768 oscillations. Since they count, they are, by definition, digital.
True analog watches are ones that you usually wind up every day, the ones that have springs and weights inside to oscillate naturally every second, without any circuits to count the number of oscillations.
It is (at least) theoretically possible to hook up an LCD to a spring-weight mechanism; that would still be analog. But anything with quartz crystals and 15 half-adder circuits must necessarily be digital.
My sympathies. India has a similar problem: body temperature in Fahrenheit, environment temperature in Celsius, distances and speeds in km and km/h, and height of a person in feet and inches BUT heights of buildings in metres! The worst part is that there apparently is no official agency that mandated this weird choice, so there's no one to blame!
the concept of the meter was soon replaced for practical purposes with a platinum bar. All subsequent definitions of the meter have been improved replicas of that platinum bar
Doesn't stop the sale of knives, nor does it leave the knife company in legal trouble because someone used it improperly.
Sigh...in an ideal world maybe...
In the real world however, everyone from gun makers to video game sellers to heavy metal bands get sued and/or attacked everytime some teenager shoots someone else. So yeah, in the real world, looks like all you need is a juicy target to use as a scapegoat, never mind whether they really are responsible or not.
Cheese is milk that's been curdled with rennin right? Well most cheeses anyway. Rennin's an enzyme that we get from the stomachs of calves. Might be a connection there.
The only fried cheese that I've smelled is Indian paneer, which is rennin-free. It smells bland, unless the oil is overheated in which case it smells slightly burnt.
Disclaimer: I'm not a biochemist or a biologist or a food scientist. Just spinning theories.
I wonder if anyone has done a statistical analysis of spelling errors in emails by American youth. Talk about undetectable ways to hide a message in plain text!
You might want to read Last Bus To Woodstock by Colin Dexter. It's an Inspector Morse story, and one of the minor incidents involves a boring business letter with really bad spelling. It's the sort of stuff that makes you think "What a bad company they must be if they don't bother with spellings". But then our hero sees that the spelling errors were a little too common. And the misspelled letters spell out a message.
I tried doing something similar in college with a spam mail. My method was basically to search for the first occurrence of the first plaintext letter in the spam, and misspell that word at that point. For instance, if the first letter of my plaintext message was "E", and the first occurrence in the spam letter occurred in the word "increase", then it would be misspelled as "incrxase" (x is anything other than E, such that incrxase is not a dictionay word). I even tried making the errors believable based on position of letters on a keyboard: substituting W for E is OK, substituting P for E is not. Search for the next occurrence in the spam mail of the second plaintext letter and repeat. You're in trouble if your plaintext message contains several rare letters.
I was able to encrypt and decrypt short messages reliably. Long messages required really long spam mails. Unfortunately most of those "spam" mails were deleted by my spam filters!:-(
You're right. 55 was a bad example to take. I got confused by "pachaas == 50; panch == 5; pachpan == 55; therefore pach == 50 && pan == 5". I stand corrected.
It's big-endian for larger numbers "160 == ek sau saath" etc. Which makes it middle-endian overall. There are exceptions to the "next number minus one" rule - 99 for instance is "ninyaanabe". And I've never found a good reason for the expresisons for "3.5" (sade teen), "3.25" (sava teen) and "3.75" (poune CHAR). The closest analogy I can think of is in time - "Quarter past", "Quarter to" etc.
Hindi:
5 = paanch;
50 = pachaas;
55 = pachpan.
Basically, the word itself changes (it's not a simple concatenation like "fifty" + "five" = "fifty-five"). However, the roots (pach = 50, pan = 5) follow the same order as in English, the opposite of most European examples you gave above.
Hmm...interesting. Why does this variation exist within the same family of Indo-European languages?
And the reason for that is that the numerals commonly called "Arabic numerals" were actually developed in India (including the concept of zero), where they DID write left-to-right. Arab scholars adopted the system as it was, which resulted in Arabic words and sentences being written right-to-left and numbers left-to-right. All Indian languages (at least the ones that have written forms) are written left-to-right.
"PowerPoint makes you dumb"
on
The Year In Ideas
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
original article
Seriously, amen to that. I'm an engineer, and I see similar examples everyday - decisions being made (and grants being awarded) on the basis of who has the flashier slides. I think we have finally brought Attention Deficit Disorder to the corporate level.
Eight here too. In fact when I first heard of the problem (when I was 10 I think), it specified 8 disks. Never occurred to me to solve for a smaller problem first. It took me some 14 months to find a solution for the 8-disk problem by myself. Man, those were the days! I used playing cards instead of disks, and everybody around me thought I was playing some weird form of Solitaire. Sigh.
Yes, I'm still single. Why do you ask?
Drug development is hideously expensive -- without some hope of a billion dollar blockbuster payoff, companies aren't going to invest anything in open-access pharmaceuticals.
I agree with that sentiment, however there is a caveat. That statement is perfectly valid for (say) Lilly or Hoechst or Pfizer or most pharma companies in the developed world. A pharma company in a developing country (like Cipla) often has an additional commitment: to spread the benefits as far as possible. It's not always true, but it *is* a major motivating factor. An Indian pharma company stands more to gain from the general Indian public with "Eradicated X in India" than anything they can gain from their stockholders with "Made a huge profit in eradicating X".
My point is that there do exist motivating factors in addition to money, depending on the local society. That said, I agree with the sentiment of your post.
This reply is somewhat offtopic, but you might want to read a different interpretation of the "shoulders of giants" line. Apparently Newton wrote that to a very short man who was apparently trying to steal credit for Newton's inventions. What Newton meant by the line is something like "I did all that by standing on the shoulders of *giants*, not a midget like you". I don't know if that is what he really meant, but it makes interesting reading anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Betelgeuse - a red giant...to minimise the effects of UV exposure.
On the other hand, a red giant is considerably cooler than a yellow star like the sun, and emits much less of its energy in the UV range.
Of course, the total energy output of Betelgeuse is so high that even with this smaller fraction in the UV range, it probably can still cause a serious burn.
Astronomers - please correct this as needed.
James Earl Jones didn't 'play' Darth Vader, either. However, he did a nice job as Vader's voice
The man in the Vader costume was actually David Prowse.
He spoke all of Vader's lines, and apparently did not know he would be dubbed over by James Earl Jones until the premiere.
Of course, that last part might just be an urban legend.
The current plan is to throw Neptune in the black hole as an appeasement...A perfectly good chance to make a Uranus joke
Aaaaargh! My eyes! My eyes! Did you have to say "black hole" and "Uranus" in the same sentence? Man, if you want to say "goatse", please say so openly, not in some twisted way that sneaks past my mental defences.
He coined the phrase "Open Source".
Minor nitpick - it wasn't ESR, it was Chris Peterson. Says so right here.
And these are the ones who are capable of changing the world, who are capable of doing radical things, who can think outside the box. However, these very people are socially so inept
I contemplated your post for a day before deciding to respond. I've had this idea for a while now that individual humans are not the functional unit anymore. It's become society vs society. As long as the individual is contributing to society in some way, he/she is accepted. Geeks and Nerds contribute directly through innovation. Less capable people contribute indirectly through their offspring, on the chance that some of them may in turn become Geeks or Nerds.
Think of a colony of ants. There is only one "queen" whose sole task is to lay eggs. Nobody else is capable of reproduction, but the workers keep the colony alive. Thus individuals die out without reproducing but the colony survives. Of course ants are an extreme example with only one reproducer per colony. Make that a few reproducers per society and pit societies against each other. You've now got humans in the present day.
Maybe that's why it hardly raises eyebrows these days when someone decides not to have kids. In my grandparents' time, it was considered unthinkable (evil, deviant, freakish...). Think of it in a slightly different light, and you now get the reason why homosexuality is considered perfectly normal. The fitness function has become "what do you contribute to society", not "what do you do to ensure the survival of your genes".
India has a cast system
OK first off that's "caste" not "cast". But the main point that prompted this reply is that caste is not relevant in this issue of outsourcing. It's true that caste still plays a huge role in rural (== backward) areas, but those areas have nothing whatsoever to do with India's recent economic trend. All the jobs and all the development is in urban areas, especially these five cities: Bangalore, Madras, Hyderabad, Bombay and New Delhi. All the job growth is in the private sector which as a rule does NOT bother about caste or religion or anything other than performance metrics.
Now the way it works is that a tribe of 20-somethings suddenly earn more than their parents put together, and thus the standard (and cost) of living goes up. This in turn leads to higher wages being demanded by servants, chauffers, sweepers...in urban areas.
So really, most people's standards of living have risen in the urban areas, irrespective of caste. Similarly, the standard of living has stayed the same or fallen in rural areas, again irrespective of caste. Maybe not entirely in the rural areas, but
And anyway, India has a bigger problem with reverse discrimination than casteism today. Someone decided that the best way to redress centuries of injustice to lower castes was to give them heaps of college degrees/diplomas on the sole weight of their birth and irrespective of their academic performance (or lack thereof). This started in the early 1990s. And from what I hear, a "high caste" indivudual has to slog his ass off to get into college or get a government job, while the "lower caste" members are being given free handouts.
India has been lucky so far - the past 10 years, most of the new workers (== mainly people who were admitted into college & graduated on the basis of their low caste), particularly engineering graduates, have been absorbed into call centers and software development, irrespective of what branch of engineering they specialized in. Face it, you really cannot screw up something in software. So you release a product riddled with holes. So what? Microsoft made a business model out of it. The longer-term threat to India is if for some reason the IT market weakens and some of these morons go back to the field they graduated in. Heaven forbid if that happens to be Civil or Chemical or Nuclear Engineering. I shouldn't be surprised if they have dam collapses and Bhopal-type industrial disasters, leave alone nuclear accidents.
Shouldn't that actually be "two divided by NINE"?
:-)
10x = x + 2
9x = 2
You still have reason to be offended though!
From the article:
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Denver, seeks class-action status to represent an estimated 1 million people who ordered the products in response to advertisements on television, radio and spam e-mail.
I'd like to know how they arrived at this estimate of 1 million customers. How are the damages (after the lawyers' fee) to be distributed? Equally among all these people? How did the plaintiff learn their identities?
Universal Standard Disclaimers.
Yeah, yeah I know they are not the same as TOS, but they're still a good read!
This is what happened when I visited that Geocities page:
/ script>
VirusScan Message: Virus Alert!
Date and Time: blah blah blah
Pathname: blah blah blah
Detected As: Bt.ow/btg
State: Deleted
These two lines in the HTML source are responsible:
<script>var d='spth.de.vu';</script>
<script src="http://68698685.statistiq.com/68698685.js"><
Anyway, just a friendly warning to those on Windows machines without any antivirus program: Don't visit the site!
Definition of analog: "Of, relating to, or being a device in which data are represented by continuously variable, measurable, physical quantities, such as length, width, voltage, or pressure."
I submit that just because a watch has moving hands does not make it analog. Many moving-hand type watches keep time by using quartz crystals. Guess what? They count the number of vibrations of the crystal and tick one second every 32768 oscillations. Since they count, they are, by definition, digital.
True analog watches are ones that you usually wind up every day, the ones that have springs and weights inside to oscillate naturally every second, without any circuits to count the number of oscillations.
It is (at least) theoretically possible to hook up an LCD to a spring-weight mechanism; that would still be analog. But anything with quartz crystals and 15 half-adder circuits must necessarily be digital.
My sympathies. India has a similar problem: body temperature in Fahrenheit, environment temperature in Celsius, distances and speeds in km and km/h, and height of a person in feet and inches BUT heights of buildings in metres! The worst part is that there apparently is no official agency that mandated this weird choice, so there's no one to blame!
the concept of the meter was soon replaced for practical purposes with a platinum bar. All subsequent definitions of the meter have been improved replicas of that platinum bar
WRONG!
Straight from the horse's mouth: definition of the metre ; evolution of the standard and practical implementation.
They still have the platinum-iridium bar though, but it hasn't been used to set standards for the last 43 years.
Doesn't stop the sale of knives, nor does it leave the knife company in legal trouble because someone used it improperly.
Sigh...in an ideal world maybe...
In the real world however, everyone from gun makers to video game sellers to heavy metal bands get sued and/or attacked everytime some teenager shoots someone else. So yeah, in the real world, looks like all you need is a juicy target to use as a scapegoat, never mind whether they really are responsible or not.
It's not very logical, but it's what happens.
User Friendly did a story on this a while back. Here's the link to one of the cartoons in the storyline. Also see this.
it smells like someone evicerated a cow's bowels
Cheese is milk that's been curdled with rennin right? Well most cheeses anyway. Rennin's an enzyme that we get from the stomachs of calves. Might be a connection there.
The only fried cheese that I've smelled is Indian paneer, which is rennin-free. It smells bland, unless the oil is overheated in which case it smells slightly burnt.
Disclaimer: I'm not a biochemist or a biologist or a food scientist. Just spinning theories.
I wonder if anyone has done a statistical analysis of spelling errors in emails by American youth. Talk about undetectable ways to hide a message in plain text!
:-(
You might want to read Last Bus To Woodstock by Colin Dexter. It's an Inspector Morse story, and one of the minor incidents involves a boring business letter with really bad spelling. It's the sort of stuff that makes you think "What a bad company they must be if they don't bother with spellings". But then our hero sees that the spelling errors were a little too common. And the misspelled letters spell out a message.
I tried doing something similar in college with a spam mail. My method was basically to search for the first occurrence of the first plaintext letter in the spam, and misspell that word at that point. For instance, if the first letter of my plaintext message was "E", and the first occurrence in the spam letter occurred in the word "increase", then it would be misspelled as "incrxase" (x is anything other than E, such that incrxase is not a dictionay word). I even tried making the errors believable based on position of letters on a keyboard: substituting W for E is OK, substituting P for E is not. Search for the next occurrence in the spam mail of the second plaintext letter and repeat. You're in trouble if your plaintext message contains several rare letters.
I was able to encrypt and decrypt short messages reliably. Long messages required really long spam mails. Unfortunately most of those "spam" mails were deleted by my spam filters!
Amen!
You might want to read this page (search the page for "telnet" and "GIF").
You're right. 55 was a bad example to take. I got confused by "pachaas == 50; panch == 5; pachpan == 55; therefore pach == 50 && pan == 5". I stand corrected.
It's big-endian for larger numbers "160 == ek sau saath" etc. Which makes it middle-endian overall. There are exceptions to the "next number minus one" rule - 99 for instance is "ninyaanabe". And I've never found a good reason for the expresisons for "3.5" (sade teen), "3.25" (sava teen) and "3.75" (poune CHAR). The closest analogy I can think of is in time - "Quarter past", "Quarter to" etc.
Hindi: 5 = paanch; 50 = pachaas; 55 = pachpan.
Basically, the word itself changes (it's not a simple concatenation like "fifty" + "five" = "fifty-five"). However, the roots (pach = 50, pan = 5) follow the same order as in English, the opposite of most European examples you gave above.
Hmm...interesting. Why does this variation exist within the same family of Indo-European languages?
And the reason for that is that the numerals commonly called "Arabic numerals" were actually developed in India (including the concept of zero), where they DID write left-to-right. Arab scholars adopted the system as it was, which resulted in Arabic words and sentences being written right-to-left and numbers left-to-right. All Indian languages (at least the ones that have written forms) are written left-to-right.
original article
Seriously, amen to that. I'm an engineer, and I see similar examples everyday - decisions being made (and grants being awarded) on the basis of who has the flashier slides. I think we have finally brought Attention Deficit Disorder to the corporate level.
Eight here too. In fact when I first heard of the problem (when I was 10 I think), it specified 8 disks. Never occurred to me to solve for a smaller problem first. It took me some 14 months to find a solution for the 8-disk problem by myself. Man, those were the days! I used playing cards instead of disks, and everybody around me thought I was playing some weird form of Solitaire. Sigh.
Yes, I'm still single. Why do you ask?
Drug development is hideously expensive -- without some hope of a billion dollar blockbuster payoff, companies aren't going to invest anything in open-access pharmaceuticals.
I agree with that sentiment, however there is a caveat. That statement is perfectly valid for (say) Lilly or Hoechst or Pfizer or most pharma companies in the developed world. A pharma company in a developing country (like Cipla) often has an additional commitment: to spread the benefits as far as possible. It's not always true, but it *is* a major motivating factor. An Indian pharma company stands more to gain from the general Indian public with "Eradicated X in India" than anything they can gain from their stockholders with "Made a huge profit in eradicating X". My point is that there do exist motivating factors in addition to money, depending on the local society. That said, I agree with the sentiment of your post.
This reply is somewhat offtopic, but you might want to read a different interpretation of the "shoulders of giants" line. Apparently Newton wrote that to a very short man who was apparently trying to steal credit for Newton's inventions. What Newton meant by the line is something like "I did all that by standing on the shoulders of *giants*, not a midget like you". I don't know if that is what he really meant, but it makes interesting reading anyway.