So, I'm a Democrat, but I'm actually not that impressed by Obama's speaking. It's full of verbal junk ("uh," "umm," etc). This is especially true when he has to ad-lib, but it even creeps into his canned speeches.
I saw the guy speak in public. I was expecting to be impressed, since everyone else was in awe of him. I left with the feeling that I'd just witnessed a song-and-dance and little else. This was at college, and whereas when other candidates gave speeches they'd also answer questions afterward, Obama was just whisked in by his security people, gave a speech, and was whisked out, as though he couldn't be trusted to do anything but recite a speech that his scriptwriter had prepared and that he had memorized. And it's the same thing that I see, now, when I watch him on TV.
I think the key advantage Obama has is that he knows how to use his voice. Hillary, for instance, I thought really did an overall better job delivering her speeches. But she did have a problem, and that was the sound of her voice: She was shrill.
And don't get me started about content: Obama's rhetoric sounds incredibly hollow to me. Tell me what you're going to try to do and how you think you might be able to do it, and use some goddamn specifics, because otherwise I don't know what I'm voting for. Don't just keep giving me pep talks!!
Obama may have won my support anyway by selecting Biden as his running-mate: Now there's a guy who knows what the hell he's doing. Listen to Biden's speeches from earlier in the campaign, when he was running; they actually have content and demonstrate expertise.
However, it's not without reservations. I refuse to vote for a Republican (their platform is all wrong.), but I also can't shake the feeling that Obama is an empty suit (does he even have a platform?*).
(* Now I know there will be people who say, "Look at Obama's website." But for me, it really doesn't inspire confidence. There's very little that's concrete in those PDFs.)
Trust me, this will in no way cheapen a Stanford degree. In fact, it will only generate more publicity for the school, and so increase its prestige (a little. It's up there to begin with.)
(IANAWSIAW = I am not affiliated with Stanford in any way.)
Stanford offers many, many more formats than just Silverlight; e.g., MP4 torrents (which you can certainly play in Linux!). See my previous post, or TFA.
Apart from being a little shinier, the new forum system has a bunch of real problems:
1. It's slow to expand messages. It used to be that you'd load the page, and all the posts would be there. Now you need to click "expand" and wait two minutes in order to read a post.
2. You can't search. It used to be that I could find a post I wanted to refer to by typing a word or phrase I remembered from it into Firefox's search bar. This no longer works.
3. It's slow to post messages. Why this is I have no idea, but it takes easily 10x longer with the new system to post a message.
4. It "hangs" Firefox if you load multiple Slashdot stories simultaneously in different tabs. Of course, Firefox isn't actually stuck in any sort of infinite loop. It just stops being responsive because it has to run god-knows-how-many lines of Javascript before it will actually do anything (and my guess is that there are some sort of race conditions between the tabs exacerbating things.)
(And I'm sure this is not even a comprehensive list.)
You mean take it back to the times of heavily taxed and regulated Monarchies?
You have this misguided idea that governments and businesses are fundamentally different.
"Yes!" you might respond; "the monarch compels you to pay taxes by force of arms, but the CEO does no such thing!" But I will tell you why the CEO does no such thing: Because the monarch, with his swords, will not let him.;-)
Next: You need to take a step back and think about what preceded the monarch: Warlords, fighting each other, competing. The monarch is just a warlord with a monopoly -- a situation that the "free market" of warriors either allowed to happen, or could not prevent.
What conclusions do you come to if you do not draw this false distinction between corporations and governments?
------
Finally, I'll respond to your signature, because it's so juicy:
Name one time government did any good.
and, if you'll allow me the liberty, I'll paraphrase it a little bit:
You didn't mention particulates. Diesels produce lots of them, and their level correlates closely with levels of childhood asthma.
Hmmm... yes. That's a real problem. It seems that it has been mostly addressed by now with filters, but those don't exist on trucks (why we have worse emissions standards for trucks than for cars in the U.S., I do not understand.)
Come to think of it, I wasn't sure why diesels produced more soot, but it seems that it is because fuel-air mixing is not as complete in diesels as in spark-ignition engines (since fuel is injected instead of pre-mixed before or during the compression stroke). This leaves me wondering why it is that gasoline engines eject more unburnt hydrocarbons (I'm starting to think that my earlier understanding is a bit simplistic). So if anyone has insights here I'd appreciate them!
But seriously, since you seem to know about such things, let me ask you:
lol!:-) I'm no expect -- certainly no car buff. I just like thermodynamics (It seems important and timely, given the relevance of energy in our lives, right?). That, and for this particular question -- diesel vs. gasoline -- I've done a little reading. But don't ask me about, say, valve timing!
wouldn't adding a supercharger onto a normal gasoline engine increase its practical efficiency?
I'm not sure about this one. But I'm curious so I'll do a little research...
To begin, I think that the answer depends on whether there's an intercooler. When there's an intercooler, your engine does all this work to put energy into the working fluid (air) using the supercharger (which you can model as isentropic compression), and then you just radiate a bunch of that energy away as heat with your intercooler (which you can model as isovolumetric cooling). Basically this increases the engine's effective volume at the cost of increased load on the engine. This is apparently a net win in power -- we know as much from experience -- but it seems intuitive to me that this would always be a loss in efficiency.
Without intercooling, I think things get more complicated and the answer becomes, "maybe" because then the pressure at which you're operating is increased, and it would seem that at least some of the energy that you put into the air with the supercharger can be extracted again in the expansion stroke since it's never radiated away. There's a nice thermodynamic model for what's going on here (though I really wish p. 517-521 were included). It seems to say that there are unrecoverable losses that result from supercharging even without intercooling. However, this source seems to indicate that supercharging (without intercooling, it appears, but I'm not sure) can increase the overall efficiency of an engine.
To really understand what's going on, it seems that what you'd want to do is go through a real thermodynamic analysis of the supercharger+Otto cycle combination, which I've never had to.
Returning finally to common sense: It seems to me that if you're after efficiency, you wouldn't want to consider superchargers at all, even if they might(?) sometimes be a net win, since turbochargers exist -- and turbochargers are definitely more efficient than superchargers since they also harvest energy from the exhaust gas.
Dude, you've got it all wrong. If you want an insane amount of off-the-line torque, you want an electric motor. Compare the torque curves for an electric motor and a diesel engine, and you'll see that electric motors have much, much more desirable characteristics!
I was on a team that built a hybrid-electric race car in college. The thing was like a rocket off the line. It beat the pants off of Porches.
Yep! Also, I want to stress that real diesel engines are actually more efficient than gasoline engines, because the compression ratios are so much higher. So it's not really that diesels are dirtier, but rather that the US looks at different pollutants than European countries do.
The two pollutants that diesels have issues with are (1) sulfur dioxide (SO2), and (2) nitrogen oxides (NOx); both cause acid rain. The SO2 is the result of burning high-sulfur fuels, so switching to ULSD, as Andy noted, will solve this problem. NOx, however, is more problematic: These oxides are created unavoidably from the reaction of atmospheric oxygen with nitrogen in the high pressures and temperatures experienced inside diesel engines (the very same factors that make diesels more efficient).
In contrast, gasoline engines tend to produce little sulfur dioxide since they burn low-sulfur gasoline. And since the pressures and temperatures inside them are lower, there's much less NOx production. But for the same reason (lower pressures and temperatures), combustion is not as complete as in diesels, so they tend to release more unburnt hydrocarbons into the atmosphere. These cause photochemical smog, and are powerful greenhouse gasses.
Now, this is where regulatory differences come in: In European countries, NOx emission requirements are not as strict, but hydrocarbon requirements are stricter, whereas in the US it's the reverse. So it's easier for diesel engines to meet requirements in Europe, and for gasoline engines to meet requirements in the US.
One solution to the NOx problem for diesel engines is to treat exhaust with urea. European companies distribute an aqueous urea solution as "AdBlue" -- presumably to avoid the urinary connotations of the "real" chemical name -- and it is available at gas stations. This is a little problematic in that now you have two chemicals that you consume while driving (fuel and urea) instead of just one, and we don't have an AdBlue distribution network in the US, but it does work.
So, that's it for the practical side of things. But before I finish up I want to throw in one theoretical note... I kept saying that diesels are more efficient -- and they are. But the thermodynamic cycle that they use (the "Diesel cycle," obviously enough) is actually not as efficient, fundamentally, as that used by gasoline engines (the Otto Cycle), for the same compression ratios. But diesel engines use compression ratios that are so much higher that they're more efficient anyway (to achieve the same compression ratios in a spark-ignition engine would require harder-to-ignite fuels, like some sort of hypothetical really-high-octane gasoline). So in practice, diesels are the most efficient internal combustion engines.
My suggestion was going to be for a commutative group together with a second binary operation satisfying associative and distributive properties. I'm sure you can think of lots of binary operations you'd like to do with your wife, or in a group.
FYI, this is a very common mistake in English, and loathe though I am to be a vocabulary Nazi, I think pointing it out here might benefit other Slashdot readers:
The verb "to peruse" means to read thoroughly and slowly. It does not mean "to skim" -- quite the opposite!
(Unfortunately, it seems that even the OED is giving up this fight, so maybe I should too.)
If they run unix they already have SSH, setting user's shells to scponly is pretty trivial (they must already set their shells to something like/bin/false or ftponly).
Is it just me, or is this a dirty hack? This is not a criticism of your suggestion -- currently that's simply how it's done -- but why on earth do we, for transferring files, use a program that provides shell access, and then try to "break" that program enough with a weird configuration that certain features don't work? Why are file transfer and shell access tied together at all?
This approach is not even reliable! If you're trying to restrict people to a certain directory, you either need chroot -- which the user can probably break out of if he's really determined -- or, you need to have very, very carefully set all of your file permissions everywhere -- and this seems to be bad engineering practice to me, as it requires a correct "global" configuration (correct permissions everywhere) to achieve a "local" result (restriction to a certain directory).
There are other doors that probably get left open as well when you do it this way. You meant to give the user the ability to manipulate files, but you've probably also inadvertently given him the ability to port forward (you don't need a shell for this). Did you really mean to give all of your users SOCKS proxies that they could do whatever they wanted with? What if they use them to download copyrighted MP3s and get busted by the RIAA, or child pornography and get busted by the FBI? Sure, you probably won't be liable in the end, but do you really want to be in that legal mess at all?
(Luckily, newer versions of SSHd are starting to provide some more per-user config options which solve some of these problems. But it still seems to me that this is risky territory to enter just to to provide the ability to transfer files.)
Oh, and what's with the link to the paper on differences in g between black and white populations? As in, what's your point; what does it have to do with E.Q.? The only connection I could see with our conversation would be if E.Q. were different between black and white populations, but I see nothing of the sort mentioned in the page you linked to -- so I must have entirely missed whatever point it was you were trying to make.
A sperm whale has a brain mass of 7.8kg [wikipedia.org], about 6 times ours. They are, however, between 25 and 55 Mg, which is far greater than six times our own mass. Hence, we are smarter.
"Hence" we are smarter?
The word "hence" implies a causal link, but I don't see any. You say,
With a larger body, you need a bigger brain to pull off the same feats
but this is awfully weak as explanations go (I'm sure you agree). So I'm still left thinking that E.Q. is a circular definition: We believe that we are smartest, so we looked for a plausible function that "happens" to make us win.
Actually it's the ratio of brain to body mass [wikipedia.org] that really matters
This, I have never believed. What should body size have to do with intelligence, and why should bigger be worse? Midgets have full-size heads; are they smarter than 6 ft. adults?
If you ask me, the significance of EQ is simply that it's a quantitative measure that humans happen to win.
All this talk of "skills" is bogus. Anybody who's a halfway decent programmer can be up and running with any language in under a week.
Seriously. Computer programming is computer programming. There are a few different philosophies for how to write code, but beyond that all the rest is syntax.
Ditto, same here. I've forgotten to remove my Swiss army knife from my keychain as well in the past, and it has just gone through the x-ray machine along with my loose change without a problem.
Of course, on other occasions I've noticed TSA agents inspecting my keys (luckily, I'd remembered to leave the knife at home those times), so I wouldn't count on being able to travel with my knife.
Ah, you mean how engineers steal physicists' research papers and make money off of their ideas? Then yes literally, engineers are indeed "behind" physicists, screwing them over.
I hope you don't really believe that.
For starters, the myth that mathematicians have ideas, which physicists steal, which engineers steal, is bogus. There's feedback in all directions. Since the way in which ideas percolate from math through physics into engineering is often talked about, I'll only talk about the reverse process. Thermodynamics, arguably the most fundamental of physical theories, was developed in the study of how to engineer better steam engines. Calculus was invented in the study of mechanics. Vector calc, likewise, came from the study of fluid flows. And in the particular example of this paper, Andrew Viterbi was in fact an electrical engineer. In fact, we are slowly recognizing that information theory -- closely related to this algorithm -- may give fundamental insights into the nature of the universe, and it was developed by Shannon, also an E.E. (Of course, Shannon was inspired partly by Gibbs, a physicist, so, again, there is no one source; there are only feedback loops.)
There's a place for everyone here, and we've got smart people in all the disciplines. We can all get along!
Usually they're the shallow ones whose beauty is quite literally only skin deep.
Indeed. You can't really know what kind of woman you've got until you remove the dermis [I recommend a potato peeler for this, along with suitable restraints (duct tape is surprisingly effective)].
They'll try to scream (a ball gag helps here, by the way), but what else can you expect? Nobody ever said true love was easy.
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go write a filesystem for Linux.
Actually, Ronald Reagan really was a fundamentalist Christian. He believed all kinds of crazy stuff. Apparently, he was once given a very nice house, as a gift (!) --- and wouldn't move into it until he'd successfully lobbied to have the street numbering changed, simply because the address happened to be "666."
There's more than just that. There's a scary kind of millenarian eschatology running around. E.g., the Left Behind series of books.
It's also a reason for the religious right's interesting alliance with the Israeli lobby -- a link that didn't use to exist (historically, there has actually been anti-Semetism, so this is an interesting flip). They believe, quite literally, that Jews will be singled out at the end time as special and spared (at which time they will accept Jesus as their savior.)
Slashdot Mirror
So, I'm a Democrat, but I'm actually not that impressed by Obama's speaking. It's full of verbal junk ("uh," "umm," etc). This is especially true when he has to ad-lib, but it even creeps into his canned speeches.
I saw the guy speak in public. I was expecting to be impressed, since everyone else was in awe of him. I left with the feeling that I'd just witnessed a song-and-dance and little else. This was at college, and whereas when other candidates gave speeches they'd also answer questions afterward, Obama was just whisked in by his security people, gave a speech, and was whisked out, as though he couldn't be trusted to do anything but recite a speech that his scriptwriter had prepared and that he had memorized. And it's the same thing that I see, now, when I watch him on TV.
I think the key advantage Obama has is that he knows how to use his voice. Hillary, for instance, I thought really did an overall better job delivering her speeches. But she did have a problem, and that was the sound of her voice: She was shrill.
And don't get me started about content: Obama's rhetoric sounds incredibly hollow to me. Tell me what you're going to try to do and how you think you might be able to do it, and use some goddamn specifics, because otherwise I don't know what I'm voting for. Don't just keep giving me pep talks!!
Obama may have won my support anyway by selecting Biden as his running-mate: Now there's a guy who knows what the hell he's doing. Listen to Biden's speeches from earlier in the campaign, when he was running; they actually have content and demonstrate expertise.
However, it's not without reservations. I refuse to vote for a Republican (their platform is all wrong.), but I also can't shake the feeling that Obama is an empty suit (does he even have a platform?*).
(* Now I know there will be people who say, "Look at Obama's website." But for me, it really doesn't inspire confidence. There's very little that's concrete in those PDFs.)
Hello? Are you his unpleasant ex-wife?
Trust me, this will in no way cheapen a Stanford degree. In fact, it will only generate more publicity for the school, and so increase its prestige (a little. It's up there to begin with.)
(IANAWSIAW = I am not affiliated with Stanford in any way.)
Stanford offers many, many more formats than just Silverlight; e.g., MP4 torrents (which you can certainly play in Linux!). See my previous post, or TFA.
Just a few lines lower on any page, there are links to view the same video in other formats including,
1. Youtube
2. iTunes
3. Vyew
4. WMV Torrent
5. MP4 Torrent
for instance, this MP4 torrent available from this page.
I agree!
Apart from being a little shinier, the new forum system has a bunch of real problems:
1. It's slow to expand messages. It used to be that you'd load the page, and all the posts would be there. Now you need to click "expand" and wait two minutes in order to read a post.
2. You can't search. It used to be that I could find a post I wanted to refer to by typing a word or phrase I remembered from it into Firefox's search bar. This no longer works.
3. It's slow to post messages. Why this is I have no idea, but it takes easily 10x longer with the new system to post a message.
4. It "hangs" Firefox if you load multiple Slashdot stories simultaneously in different tabs. Of course, Firefox isn't actually stuck in any sort of infinite loop. It just stops being responsive because it has to run god-knows-how-many lines of Javascript before it will actually do anything (and my guess is that there are some sort of race conditions between the tabs exacerbating things.)
(And I'm sure this is not even a comprehensive list.)
Seriously: Whatever happened to HTML 4.0?
You mean take it back to the times of heavily taxed and regulated Monarchies?
You have this misguided idea that governments and businesses are fundamentally different.
"Yes!" you might respond; "the monarch compels you to pay taxes by force of arms, but the CEO does no such thing!" But I will tell you why the CEO does no such thing: Because the monarch, with his swords, will not let him. ;-)
Next: You need to take a step back and think about what preceded the monarch: Warlords, fighting each other, competing. The monarch is just a warlord with a monopoly -- a situation that the "free market" of warriors either allowed to happen, or could not prevent.
What conclusions do you come to if you do not draw this false distinction between corporations and governments?
------
Finally, I'll respond to your signature, because it's so juicy:
Name one time government did any good.
and, if you'll allow me the liberty, I'll paraphrase it a little bit:
What have the Romans ever done for us?
You didn't mention particulates. Diesels produce lots of them, and their level correlates closely with levels of childhood asthma.
Hmmm... yes. That's a real problem. It seems that it has been mostly addressed by now with filters, but those don't exist on trucks (why we have worse emissions standards for trucks than for cars in the U.S., I do not understand.)
Come to think of it, I wasn't sure why diesels produced more soot, but it seems that it is because fuel-air mixing is not as complete in diesels as in spark-ignition engines (since fuel is injected instead of pre-mixed before or during the compression stroke). This leaves me wondering why it is that gasoline engines eject more unburnt hydrocarbons (I'm starting to think that my earlier understanding is a bit simplistic). So if anyone has insights here I'd appreciate them!
But seriously, since you seem to know about such things, let me ask you:
lol! :-) I'm no expect -- certainly no car buff. I just like thermodynamics (It seems important and timely, given the relevance of energy in our lives, right?). That, and for this particular question -- diesel vs. gasoline -- I've done a little reading. But don't ask me about, say, valve timing!
wouldn't adding a supercharger onto a normal gasoline engine increase its practical efficiency?
I'm not sure about this one. But I'm curious so I'll do a little research...
To begin, I think that the answer depends on whether there's an intercooler. When there's an intercooler, your engine does all this work to put energy into the working fluid (air) using the supercharger (which you can model as isentropic compression), and then you just radiate a bunch of that energy away as heat with your intercooler (which you can model as isovolumetric cooling). Basically this increases the engine's effective volume at the cost of increased load on the engine. This is apparently a net win in power -- we know as much from experience -- but it seems intuitive to me that this would always be a loss in efficiency.
Without intercooling, I think things get more complicated and the answer becomes, "maybe" because then the pressure at which you're operating is increased, and it would seem that at least some of the energy that you put into the air with the supercharger can be extracted again in the expansion stroke since it's never radiated away. There's a nice thermodynamic model for what's going on here (though I really wish p. 517-521 were included). It seems to say that there are unrecoverable losses that result from supercharging even without intercooling. However, this source seems to indicate that supercharging (without intercooling, it appears, but I'm not sure) can increase the overall efficiency of an engine.
To really understand what's going on, it seems that what you'd want to do is go through a real thermodynamic analysis of the supercharger+Otto cycle combination, which I've never had to.
Returning finally to common sense: It seems to me that if you're after efficiency, you wouldn't want to consider superchargers at all, even if they might(?) sometimes be a net win, since turbochargers exist -- and turbochargers are definitely more efficient than superchargers since they also harvest energy from the exhaust gas.
Don't ask for a hybrid truck.
Dude, you've got it all wrong. If you want an insane amount of off-the-line torque, you want an electric motor. Compare the torque curves for an electric motor and a diesel engine, and you'll see that electric motors have much, much more desirable characteristics!
I was on a team that built a hybrid-electric race car in college. The thing was like a rocket off the line. It beat the pants off of Porches.
See my sibling AC's post as well.
Yep! Also, I want to stress that real diesel engines are actually more efficient than gasoline engines, because the compression ratios are so much higher. So it's not really that diesels are dirtier, but rather that the US looks at different pollutants than European countries do.
The two pollutants that diesels have issues with are (1) sulfur dioxide (SO2), and (2) nitrogen oxides (NOx); both cause acid rain. The SO2 is the result of burning high-sulfur fuels, so switching to ULSD, as Andy noted, will solve this problem. NOx, however, is more problematic: These oxides are created unavoidably from the reaction of atmospheric oxygen with nitrogen in the high pressures and temperatures experienced inside diesel engines (the very same factors that make diesels more efficient).
In contrast, gasoline engines tend to produce little sulfur dioxide since they burn low-sulfur gasoline. And since the pressures and temperatures inside them are lower, there's much less NOx production. But for the same reason (lower pressures and temperatures), combustion is not as complete as in diesels, so they tend to release more unburnt hydrocarbons into the atmosphere. These cause photochemical smog, and are powerful greenhouse gasses.
Now, this is where regulatory differences come in: In European countries, NOx emission requirements are not as strict, but hydrocarbon requirements are stricter, whereas in the US it's the reverse. So it's easier for diesel engines to meet requirements in Europe, and for gasoline engines to meet requirements in the US.
One solution to the NOx problem for diesel engines is to treat exhaust with urea. European companies distribute an aqueous urea solution as "AdBlue" -- presumably to avoid the urinary connotations of the "real" chemical name -- and it is available at gas stations. This is a little problematic in that now you have two chemicals that you consume while driving (fuel and urea) instead of just one, and we don't have an AdBlue distribution network in the US, but it does work.
So, that's it for the practical side of things. But before I finish up I want to throw in one theoretical note... I kept saying that diesels are more efficient -- and they are. But the thermodynamic cycle that they use (the "Diesel cycle," obviously enough) is actually not as efficient, fundamentally, as that used by gasoline engines (the Otto Cycle), for the same compression ratios. But diesel engines use compression ratios that are so much higher that they're more efficient anyway (to achieve the same compression ratios in a spark-ignition engine would require harder-to-ignite fuels, like some sort of hypothetical really-high-octane gasoline). So in practice, diesels are the most efficient internal combustion engines.
My suggestion was going to be for a commutative group together with a second binary operation satisfying associative and distributive properties. I'm sure you can think of lots of binary operations you'd like to do with your wife, or in a group.
Actually, this one's better.
Of course you do, you're a fucking racist.
Isn't everybody?
Long Run and LongRun2 technologies
Sounds like the names of Chinese missiles...
I gave TFA a quick perusal
FYI, this is a very common mistake in English, and loathe though I am to be a vocabulary Nazi, I think pointing it out here might benefit other Slashdot readers:
The verb "to peruse" means to read thoroughly and slowly. It does not mean "to skim" -- quite the opposite!
(Unfortunately, it seems that even the OED is giving up this fight, so maybe I should too.)
That's it for this post. Cheers!
If they run unix they already have SSH, setting user's shells to scponly is pretty trivial (they must already set their shells to something like /bin/false or ftponly).
Is it just me, or is this a dirty hack? This is not a criticism of your suggestion -- currently that's simply how it's done -- but why on earth do we, for transferring files, use a program that provides shell access, and then try to "break" that program enough with a weird configuration that certain features don't work? Why are file transfer and shell access tied together at all?
This approach is not even reliable! If you're trying to restrict people to a certain directory, you either need chroot -- which the user can probably break out of if he's really determined -- or, you need to have very, very carefully set all of your file permissions everywhere -- and this seems to be bad engineering practice to me, as it requires a correct "global" configuration (correct permissions everywhere) to achieve a "local" result (restriction to a certain directory).
There are other doors that probably get left open as well when you do it this way. You meant to give the user the ability to manipulate files, but you've probably also inadvertently given him the ability to port forward (you don't need a shell for this). Did you really mean to give all of your users SOCKS proxies that they could do whatever they wanted with? What if they use them to download copyrighted MP3s and get busted by the RIAA, or child pornography and get busted by the FBI? Sure, you probably won't be liable in the end, but do you really want to be in that legal mess at all?
(Luckily, newer versions of SSHd are starting to provide some more per-user config options which solve some of these problems. But it still seems to me that this is risky territory to enter just to to provide the ability to transfer files.)
Oh, and what's with the link to the paper on differences in g between black and white populations? As in, what's your point; what does it have to do with E.Q.? The only connection I could see with our conversation would be if E.Q. were different between black and white populations, but I see nothing of the sort mentioned in the page you linked to -- so I must have entirely missed whatever point it was you were trying to make.
A sperm whale has a brain mass of 7.8kg [wikipedia.org], about 6 times ours. They are, however, between 25 and 55 Mg, which is far greater than six times our own mass. Hence, we are smarter.
"Hence" we are smarter?
The word "hence" implies a causal link, but I don't see any. You say,
With a larger body, you need a bigger brain to pull off the same feats
but this is awfully weak as explanations go (I'm sure you agree). So I'm still left thinking that E.Q. is a circular definition: We believe that we are smartest, so we looked for a plausible function that "happens" to make us win.
The problem is, there's actually evidence that E.Q. is not a good predictor of intelligence. At least among primates, Overall Brain Size, and Not Encephalization Quotient, Best Predicts Cognitive Ability across Non-Human Primates.
Actually it's the ratio of brain to body mass [wikipedia.org] that really matters
This, I have never believed. What should body size have to do with intelligence, and why should bigger be worse? Midgets have full-size heads; are they smarter than 6 ft. adults?
If you ask me, the significance of EQ is simply that it's a quantitative measure that humans happen to win.
All this talk of "skills" is bogus. Anybody who's a halfway decent programmer can be up and running with any language in under a week.
Seriously. Computer programming is computer programming. There are a few different philosophies for how to write code, but beyond that all the rest is syntax.
on my key chain
Ditto, same here. I've forgotten to remove my Swiss army knife from my keychain as well in the past, and it has just gone through the x-ray machine along with my loose change without a problem.
Of course, on other occasions I've noticed TSA agents inspecting my keys (luckily, I'd remembered to leave the knife at home those times), so I wouldn't count on being able to travel with my knife.
Ah, you mean how engineers steal physicists' research papers and make money off of their ideas? Then yes literally, engineers are indeed "behind" physicists, screwing them over.
I hope you don't really believe that.
For starters, the myth that mathematicians have ideas, which physicists steal, which engineers steal, is bogus. There's feedback in all directions. Since the way in which ideas percolate from math through physics into engineering is often talked about, I'll only talk about the reverse process. Thermodynamics, arguably the most fundamental of physical theories, was developed in the study of how to engineer better steam engines. Calculus was invented in the study of mechanics. Vector calc, likewise, came from the study of fluid flows. And in the particular example of this paper, Andrew Viterbi was in fact an electrical engineer. In fact, we are slowly recognizing that information theory -- closely related to this algorithm -- may give fundamental insights into the nature of the universe, and it was developed by Shannon, also an E.E. (Of course, Shannon was inspired partly by Gibbs, a physicist, so, again, there is no one source; there are only feedback loops.)
There's a place for everyone here, and we've got smart people in all the disciplines. We can all get along!
Usually they're the shallow ones whose beauty is quite literally only skin deep.
Indeed. You can't really know what kind of woman you've got until you remove the dermis [I recommend a potato peeler for this, along with suitable restraints (duct tape is surprisingly effective)].
They'll try to scream (a ball gag helps here, by the way), but what else can you expect? Nobody ever said true love was easy.
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go write a filesystem for Linux.
Actually, Ronald Reagan really was a fundamentalist Christian. He believed all kinds of crazy stuff. Apparently, he was once given a very nice house, as a gift (!) --- and wouldn't move into it until he'd successfully lobbied to have the street numbering changed, simply because the address happened to be "666."
There's more than just that. There's a scary kind of millenarian eschatology running around. E.g., the Left Behind series of books.
It's also a reason for the religious right's interesting alliance with the Israeli lobby -- a link that didn't use to exist (historically, there has actually been anti-Semetism, so this is an interesting flip). They believe, quite literally, that Jews will be singled out at the end time as special and spared (at which time they will accept Jesus as their savior.)