40 unbroken, consecutive, full-range (chest touches the floor) pushups is really a fairly high bar athletically, probably on the order of top ~1% of the total population
The study indicates this corresponds to the top ~10% of firefighters, a group who on a whole are already known to be in vastly better shape than most of the population. This corresponds with my own anecdotal observations -- at my local crossfit gym, we test for max pushups once a year or so, mostly for fun. 40+ unbroken pushups easily corresponds to the top ~5% of that self-selected high fitness crowd as well.
That's great and all... but in my experience, effectively nobody uses Skype.
I have a Skype contact list of ~250 people, and in most weeks the number of other people I see signed in and actually active is zero.
My belief is that this started when Microsoft made the decision at some point to obscure the 'online' status, such that even people who haven't signed in to their account in months or years appear "online but away". If everyone consistently thinks their friends are online but have just stepped away -- when in fact the messages are never going to reach them -- the service becomes devalued. This self-perpetuates for a while, until you get where we are today -- nobody uses it.
A big part of the success of such books is that most of the people that read them only read fashionable books. They've not read anything that's genuinely good, so they can't tell how bad they are. Since they don't know any better and have enjoyed the plot, they'll rave about the book, which perpetuates the myth that it's a "good" book. It's highly unlikely that they will expand their reading to any decent authors; at best they will read other books by the same author, keeping them away from genuinely good reading material.
This is one of the most insightful sentiments expressed in this thread...
Stranded with only a hatchet, a pan, some fishing gear, a warm coat & "snow pants" I soon realized I needed shelter to survive the -40 degree nights so I built a suitable shelter in the lee of a tree. After nearly being caught in a storm too far from shelter, I stayed until Spring.
Curious: were you really stranded in the Canadian wilderness with a hatchet? If so, that's incredibly interesting and impressive and I, too, thank you for sharing.
I hope I'm not the only one who picked up some strong Hatchet / Brian's Winter vibes from your story:-)
> Sometimes I wish it could behave more like running a remote X application without having to bring up the entire desktop, but other than I'm a convert.
It can! NX can integrate remote windows into your local environment in the same way that an app launched via 'ssh -X' does, rather than a full remote desktop via (like a VNC session).
Bring up the configuration window. Under the 'Desktop' settings, rather than choosing KDE, GNOME, XDM, etc, click 'Settings' and select the "Floating windows" radio option rather than "New virtual desktop".
Launch a new session (you can't resume your old one and have this setting apply itself), and you have smoothly integrated remote application windows into your local environment.
This is how introductory (freshman/sophomore-level) classes are taught at almost every mid-to-large size university. There are simply too many students taking these classes to do it any other way. At Georgia Tech, for instance, every undergraduate student (management and business majors included) are required to take Calculus 1-2 and Physics 1-2. At GT, that's about 1500 students per semester that have to take those classes.
During these classes, the professors lecture (aka teach), and you're expected to either learn it then or to do something we call "studying" until you understand the material.
I'm not saying it's right or wrong, it's simply the only feasible way to have that many students take the classes from a qualified instructor (professor). There would be even more bitching and moaning if it were Teaching Assistants actually in charge of the class, rather than just the recitations.
I can not think of a single class I took at GT where the lecturer (even in the large undergrad classes) simply droned on and on without making a good effort at explaining the material in a way that someone unfamiliar with it (a student) would understand. The vast majority of professors/lecturers were interesting and engaging. Furthermore, virtually every class in my major (and all junior-level classes and beyond) that I took had class sizes less than 50, and most were under 30.
It's not like high school, where during Math class the teacher would say to everyone "ok, now work this problem and I'll come walk around and watch over your shoulders!". You're not going to be able to absorb and internalize all the material just from sitting and listening/participating in class. You don't work problems during lecture; lecture is for presenting you with the material, and it's then your responsibility to make sure you understand what you were taught. Professors assume you are mature and capable of determining if you need to do extra work outside of class or not. To this end, most instructors don't assign mandatory problem-sets to babysit your learning, though many do offer suggestions of problems to work outside of class.
Take some fucking initiative. At a university, you have to actually spend some time and study if you want to succeed.
> Now maybe this is by intent - maybe the idea is to weed out everyone who isn't smart enough to learn the core material on their own.
To address your concern more directly: yes; to a degree, that is one of the many purposes of a college degree. You're not going to be able to scrape by in any technical field based solely on what you learned in school; you have to be constantly learning. Universities teach you a base level of information relevant to your field, but perhaps more importantly: they certify that you're capable of quickly learning and understanding complicated material.
...random texts once a week waking me up at 3am indicating that:
"This is a test of the local emergency cell phone text system. This is only a test. If this had been an actual emergency, hopefully you haven't disabled text alerts in the middle of the night after receiving all our obnoxious tests."
The devices TFA references are based on the Peltier effect which pumps heat from one side of the device to the other. When the direction of current flow through the device is reversed, the direction of heat transfer is also reversed.
Moving heat away from one location is more commonly referred to as 'cooling', so a single device integrated in the controller would be able to both heat and cool the surface of the controller depending on the polarity of the applied current.
It's likely something like a tuning fork or MEMS (microelectromechanical Sensor) gyroscope, which are generically referred to as vibrating structure gyroscopes. It's nothing like the big clunking rotating toy; they come on teeny-tiny surface mount devices that cost about $10 in small quantites.
The Wii MotionPlus controllers use something similar.
The physical principle is very simple: a vibrating object tends to keep vibrating in the same plane as its support is rotated. It is therefore much simpler and cheaper than is a conventional rotating gyroscope of similar accuracy.
As a child, I had nightmares about the giant rifts dramatically opening in the ground like they did in the Land Before Time movie. I had since convinced myself this was unlikely to happen, and assuaged my fears.
Thanks a lot, "Researchers at the University of Rochester"...
This is the first time this technology has been available to the general public, though, if I'm not mistaken (and I probably am).
Though not free, IIRC Photoshop Elements has been able to do this for at least a couple years now, and it does it offline.
The recognition isn't perfect and requires a bit of training, but it did an acceptable job of tagging the pictures of me and my friends from our travels in Europe a few summers ago.
I do know a bit about microprocessor design (not async design, but it's still applicable), and that's exactly what I was going to say.
Hell, with that same system you could have your processor constantly running at maximum possible performance for your allotted temperature. Exciting stuff!
I made something similar to the powerglove thing for an embedded systems design class recently.
We had an 'enable' button on the glove so that the cursor only moved when it was being held. Ours worked by detecting gravitation acceleration (tilt) as opposed to a gyroscope, but it was still pretty damn cool, and much more 'homebrew' than simply pulling apart a gyration mouse and hacking it onto a powerglove.
Graspr. Warning: big pictures. There are also videos on the 'report' page.
I've had to deal with a similar situation with a friend, except slightly modified where we were both 'hardcore' gamers. There was a time when our skill was rougly equal, with me winning more often than not. Then something kicked in and he got amazingly good. (as an aside, I don't "just suck". Other than he, I'm still arguably the best UT99 or UT2k4 player I know, and I go to an engineering school and live with 7 other guys, all of whom play the game)
He liked to play 1on1 deathmatch, and our 1on1 rounds would often devolve into a game which essentially amounted to: can I kill myself before he can?
In maps where it was an option, I would insist upon falling off an edge, or some other unusual form of death (just switching to the impact hammer and shooting the ground didn't make for a very enjoyable time...) I would, of course, have to defend myself along the way by shooting back, but that rarely resulted in a kill, since killing him was no longer even my primary objective.
We also had various other odd ways of playing the game. We'd each stand at opposite ends of a long hall with shock rifles and play "baseball". "Pitch" a ball of secondary fire and the other had to hit it.
Granted, these methods of gaming aren't likely to appeal to many, but we sure had a hell of a time with it.
Re:Change your habits, change anything.
on
Preventing RSI?
·
· Score: 1
Taking advil for RSI wrist pain is about a lot more than 'masking the pain'. The ibuprofen, most importantly, reduces inflammation.
If your tendons remain inflamed / irritated, anything you do is going to further aggervate that, making it 1) hurt worse and 2) not heal. If you take some sort of anti-inflammation medicine when you start feeling pain and consciously change your habits, your tendons have a better chance to heal rather than remain inflammed indefinitely, which can lead to more permanent damage.
Verizon hopes to reduce these costs significantly in 2006. Specifically, it plans to cut the cost of laying new fiber in neighborhoods to $890 per home and reduce the cost of home installation to $715 per home
TFA cites those costs for 2005 as $1,200 and $1,400 respectively.
How exactly is this a profitable business venture when their optimisitc goal is to spend over $1,600 per household for installation of a service that they sell for $40/month, with relatively little commitment to stay with the service?
Of course the real problem is the acceptability of divorce... if it was looked down on more, marriage might be taken more seriously.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with "divorce", per se. It's getting divorced once you have kids involved that is a problem.
It could certainly be argued that a large contributing factor to the high divorce rate is the [Christian] church's insistence upon marriage before sex. This has almost undoubtedly rushed many people into marriage who just don't want to wait any longer and believe they are doing the 'right thing'.
If people were "allowed" to take more time to come to a decision/realization about a relationship as opposed to the omg-I-can't-stand-it-anymore-lets-get-married-so-w e-can-have-sex rationale that many people succomb to, I think there would be far few marital problems, at least in the US.
Now, before you start saying, "but that's how it was back in the good ol' days and it worked just fine!"... no, it's not. Contrary to popular belief, sex before marriage certainly wasn't looked down 'back in the day'. In US colonial times, specifically (which I believe sufficiently qualifies as 'back in the day') it was remaining unwed after getting pregnant that was looked down upon -- if not all-but-forbidden.
Unfortunately, I would argue, we have gotten away from that social mandate, as well. We have absolutely no social, ethical, or moral responsibility to remain married to someone when it "just isn't working out".
However, the exact opposite is true once there are kids that depend on you.
I believe the parent meant "X" as a variable to stand for whatever package he hoped to install, as opposed to X-Windows. And I can't tell if you knew that or not:)
By the way.... I speak from experience on a small server I ran for my friends and myself. I got tired of tweaking things for them, setup some extra permissions for the ones I thought I could trust, and regretted that decision for the next several days.
Allowing root access on a knowledgeable user's local machine is one thing, but multiple arbitrary people with root on your main cluster is entirely another matter. There are simply far too many chances of one of them "accidentally" doing something they didn't mean to and borking the system. That's definitely not an issue you want to deal with.
And even allowing chmod, mv, etc via sudo can be dangerous. Someone accidentally issuing a "sudo chmod 777 -R / ", having meant to type "./" for everything below their current directory, isn't going to be good for your system health and is going to be somewhat of a pain to recover from, even if you do know who screwed things up.
To be perfectly honest, it MIGHT take you 5 minutes to compile this on an 800 MHz machine. Just download the sources and give it a try -- I promise, it really isn't all that difficult and will be a good learning experience for you.
The README file should have plenty detailed instructions on the series of commands you need to type to get GAIM compiled and installed.
Slashdot Mirror
I question how they can possibly determine whether the pictures are "shared without permission", but at least this is better than their previous "send us your nudes and we won't let anyone else see them ... you can trust me babe, I swear" program.
40 unbroken, consecutive, full-range (chest touches the floor) pushups is really a fairly high bar athletically, probably on the order of top ~1% of the total population
The study indicates this corresponds to the top ~10% of firefighters, a group who on a whole are already known to be in vastly better shape than most of the population. This corresponds with my own anecdotal observations -- at my local crossfit gym, we test for max pushups once a year or so, mostly for fun. 40+ unbroken pushups easily corresponds to the top ~5% of that self-selected high fitness crowd as well.
That's great and all... but in my experience, effectively nobody uses Skype.
I have a Skype contact list of ~250 people, and in most weeks the number of other people I see signed in and actually active is zero.
My belief is that this started when Microsoft made the decision at some point to obscure the 'online' status, such that even people who haven't signed in to their account in months or years appear "online but away". If everyone consistently thinks their friends are online but have just stepped away -- when in fact the messages are never going to reach them -- the service becomes devalued. This self-perpetuates for a while, until you get where we are today -- nobody uses it.
Since the summary is full of links not-to-TFA, this might be useful:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/03/science/applying-new-rigor-in-studying-education.html?pagewanted=all
A big part of the success of such books is that most of the people that read them only read fashionable books. They've not read anything that's genuinely good, so they can't tell how bad they are. Since they don't know any better and have enjoyed the plot, they'll rave about the book, which perpetuates the myth that it's a "good" book. It's highly unlikely that they will expand their reading to any decent authors; at best they will read other books by the same author, keeping them away from genuinely good reading material.
This is one of the most insightful sentiments expressed in this thread...
In the search box, type, "from:SendersNameOrEmailAddress"
The results are still threaded, but unless you have multiple overlapping email threads with a single contact, this shouldn't be a problem.
Re-responding as logged-in user....
Stranded with only a hatchet, a pan, some fishing gear, a warm coat & "snow pants" I soon realized I needed shelter to survive the -40 degree nights so I built a suitable shelter in the lee of a tree. After nearly being caught in a storm too far from shelter, I stayed until Spring.
Curious: were you really stranded in the Canadian wilderness with a hatchet? If so, that's incredibly interesting and impressive and I, too, thank you for sharing.
I hope I'm not the only one who picked up some strong Hatchet / Brian's Winter vibes from your story :-)
It can! NX can integrate remote windows into your local environment in the same way that an app launched via 'ssh -X' does, rather than a full remote desktop via (like a VNC session).
Bring up the configuration window. Under the 'Desktop' settings, rather than choosing KDE, GNOME, XDM, etc, click 'Settings' and select the "Floating windows" radio option rather than "New virtual desktop".
Launch a new session (you can't resume your old one and have this setting apply itself), and you have smoothly integrated remote application windows into your local environment.
This is how introductory (freshman/sophomore-level) classes are taught at almost every mid-to-large size university. There are simply too many students taking these classes to do it any other way. At Georgia Tech, for instance, every undergraduate student (management and business majors included) are required to take Calculus 1-2 and Physics 1-2. At GT, that's about 1500 students per semester that have to take those classes.
During these classes, the professors lecture (aka teach), and you're expected to either learn it then or to do something we call "studying" until you understand the material.
I'm not saying it's right or wrong, it's simply the only feasible way to have that many students take the classes from a qualified instructor (professor). There would be even more bitching and moaning if it were Teaching Assistants actually in charge of the class, rather than just the recitations.
I can not think of a single class I took at GT where the lecturer (even in the large undergrad classes) simply droned on and on without making a good effort at explaining the material in a way that someone unfamiliar with it (a student) would understand. The vast majority of professors/lecturers were interesting and engaging. Furthermore, virtually every class in my major (and all junior-level classes and beyond) that I took had class sizes less than 50, and most were under 30.
It's not like high school, where during Math class the teacher would say to everyone "ok, now work this problem and I'll come walk around and watch over your shoulders!". You're not going to be able to absorb and internalize all the material just from sitting and listening/participating in class. You don't work problems during lecture; lecture is for presenting you with the material, and it's then your responsibility to make sure you understand what you were taught. Professors assume you are mature and capable of determining if you need to do extra work outside of class or not. To this end, most instructors don't assign mandatory problem-sets to babysit your learning, though many do offer suggestions of problems to work outside of class.
Take some fucking initiative. At a university, you have to actually spend some time and study if you want to succeed.
> Now maybe this is by intent - maybe the idea is to weed out everyone who isn't smart enough to learn the core material on their own.
To address your concern more directly: yes; to a degree, that is one of the many purposes of a college degree. You're not going to be able to scrape by in any technical field based solely on what you learned in school; you have to be constantly learning. Universities teach you a base level of information relevant to your field, but perhaps more importantly: they certify that you're capable of quickly learning and understanding complicated material.
"This is a test of the local emergency cell phone text system. This is only a test. If this had been an actual emergency, hopefully you haven't disabled text alerts in the middle of the night after receiving all our obnoxious tests."
The devices TFA references are based on the Peltier effect which pumps heat from one side of the device to the other. When the direction of current flow through the device is reversed, the direction of heat transfer is also reversed.
Moving heat away from one location is more commonly referred to as 'cooling', so a single device integrated in the controller would be able to both heat and cool the surface of the controller depending on the polarity of the applied current.
http://xkcd.com/723/
The Wii MotionPlus controllers use something similar.
From Wikipedia:
The physical principle is very simple: a vibrating object tends to keep vibrating in the same plane as its support is rotated. It is therefore much simpler and cheaper than is a conventional rotating gyroscope of similar accuracy.
As a child, I had nightmares about the giant rifts dramatically opening in the ground like they did in the Land Before Time movie. I had since convinced myself this was unlikely to happen, and assuaged my fears.
Thanks a lot, "Researchers at the University of Rochester"...
This is the first time this technology has been available to the general public, though, if I'm not mistaken (and I probably am).
Though not free, IIRC Photoshop Elements has been able to do this for at least a couple years now, and it does it offline.
The recognition isn't perfect and requires a bit of training, but it did an acceptable job of tagging the pictures of me and my friends from our travels in Europe a few summers ago.
Hell, with that same system you could have your processor constantly running at maximum possible performance for your allotted temperature. Exciting stuff!
We had an 'enable' button on the glove so that the cursor only moved when it was being held. Ours worked by detecting gravitation acceleration (tilt) as opposed to a gyroscope, but it was still pretty damn cool, and much more 'homebrew' than simply pulling apart a gyration mouse and hacking it onto a powerglove.
Graspr. Warning: big pictures. There are also videos on the 'report' page.
He liked to play 1on1 deathmatch, and our 1on1 rounds would often devolve into a game which essentially amounted to: can I kill myself before he can?
In maps where it was an option, I would insist upon falling off an edge, or some other unusual form of death (just switching to the impact hammer and shooting the ground didn't make for a very enjoyable time...) I would, of course, have to defend myself along the way by shooting back, but that rarely resulted in a kill, since killing him was no longer even my primary objective.
We also had various other odd ways of playing the game. We'd each stand at opposite ends of a long hall with shock rifles and play "baseball". "Pitch" a ball of secondary fire and the other had to hit it.
Granted, these methods of gaming aren't likely to appeal to many, but we sure had a hell of a time with it.
If your tendons remain inflamed / irritated, anything you do is going to further aggervate that, making it 1) hurt worse and 2) not heal. If you take some sort of anti-inflammation medicine when you start feeling pain and consciously change your habits, your tendons have a better chance to heal rather than remain inflammed indefinitely, which can lead to more permanent damage.
TFA cites those costs for 2005 as $1,200 and $1,400 respectively.
How exactly is this a profitable business venture when their optimisitc goal is to spend over $1,600 per household for installation of a service that they sell for $40/month, with relatively little commitment to stay with the service?
There's absolutely nothing wrong with "divorce", per se. It's getting divorced once you have kids involved that is a problem.
It could certainly be argued that a large contributing factor to the high divorce rate is the [Christian] church's insistence upon marriage before sex. This has almost undoubtedly rushed many people into marriage who just don't want to wait any longer and believe they are doing the 'right thing'.
If people were "allowed" to take more time to come to a decision/realization about a relationship as opposed to the omg-I-can't-stand-it-anymore-lets-get-married-so-w e-can-have-sex rationale that many people succomb to, I think there would be far few marital problems, at least in the US.
Now, before you start saying, "but that's how it was back in the good ol' days and it worked just fine!" ... no, it's not. Contrary to popular belief, sex before marriage certainly wasn't looked down 'back in the day'. In US colonial times, specifically (which I believe sufficiently qualifies as 'back in the day') it was remaining unwed after getting pregnant that was looked down upon -- if not all-but-forbidden.
Unfortunately, I would argue, we have gotten away from that social mandate, as well. We have absolutely no social, ethical, or moral responsibility to remain married to someone when it "just isn't working out".
However, the exact opposite is true once there are kids that depend on you.
I believe the parent meant "X" as a variable to stand for whatever package he hoped to install, as opposed to X-Windows. And I can't tell if you knew that or not :)
By the way .... I speak from experience on a small server I ran for my friends and myself. I got tired of tweaking things for them, setup some extra permissions for the ones I thought I could trust, and regretted that decision for the next several days.
And even allowing chmod, mv, etc via sudo can be dangerous. Someone accidentally issuing a "sudo chmod 777 -R / ", having meant to type "./" for everything below their current directory, isn't going to be good for your system health and is going to be somewhat of a pain to recover from, even if you do know who screwed things up.
The README file should have plenty detailed instructions on the series of commands you need to type to get GAIM compiled and installed.
Good luck!