This is especially true in an area like robotics (my field) where terms like innovative and groundbreaking get thrown around a lot. When really, it's just a rehash of an idea used in another discipline applied to robotics.
Yeah, I know the feeling.
Even great, celebrated, actually-(somewhat)-useful ideas turn out to be simple applications of other ones. Take the Kalman Filter. If you come at it from a least-squares point of view and focus on the word "optimal" -- as it was first explained -- it sounds extremely impressive. But if you explain what a Bayes Filter is (after which people say, "ok, that's simple enough"), and then specialize it to Gaussian noise and linear systems (again to the reaction "ok, that's easy"), you've just got a straightforward homework problem you can solve by completing a square, at which point you've arrived at the same filter by a process that makes it look a great deal less earth-shattering.
I just feel bad for the poor undergrads, who've been fed so much hype they don't know what's real and what's not. They come in saying they want to study robotics and going on about "emergent behaviors" and "neural networks" as I slowly shake my head and try to undo the damage wrought by a thousand assistant professors of the 1990s scrambling for grant money and tenure.
So, I'm the first to call out academic research as pointless. But I don't think this is.
Imagine two methods of moving an object back and forth.
The first is a playground swing. It can't power itself, but, by kicking it occasionally, you can get it to start swinging, and, once you do, you only need to put in a little extra power to keep that going.
The second is a little cart with powered wheels. It can drive forwards and backwards, and there's nothing to stop you from just driving it rapidly forwards and backwards over and over.
Which is more efficient?
The idea, making an analogy, is that a leg design like this is to walking, as a playground swing is to moving an object back and forth. One way to pump in energy is to make it walk downhill. But another would be to start adding some self-powering capability. I agree with you insofar as I would like to see that happen. Where we disagree, I think, is just in that I'm not dismissing the passive, mechanical side of the work, because I think it's an important part of making that happen.
I'll also acknowledge that passive walkers are not themselves new. But this is one of the better-executed ones I've seen.
While I respect their accomplishment, I agree, I wouldn't call it "groundbreaking." Of course, very little academic research actually is.
The same goes for other areas of society. Gutenberg wasn't the first to use movable type; Columbus wasn't the first European to make it to the New World; Taylor and MacLaurin weren't the first to use their eponymous expansions; Jacobi, it turns out, scooped the Hungarian Algorithm (but his manuscript was lost until recently); the Ming dynasty had clocks with mechanical escapements;...
It's not just about being first. It's also about timing and execution. Just look at the iPod.
All of which is to say, that incrementalism is OK. Are passive walkers fundamentally new? No. But I'll give these guys a little credit anyway.
You're missing the point. The idea is that, because it walks passively, you only need to pump in a little extra energy to make it keep walking. Compare this with systems like the Honda Asimo, which don't really walk dynamically, never really build up any momentum, and need to expend a lot of energy just to continue taking steps.
Passive walkers are not entirely new. A tinker-toy passive walker was famous in the robotics community in the early '00s. But this one looks more refined.
Next, I want to see more effort going into powering these things in a way that meshes nicely with the idea of them walking passively. The closest stuff I've seen to that would be Boston Dynamics and MABEL.
Sure, you need to work hard in college. But it's also a once-in-a-lifetime to do things that, once you leave, it becomes much, much harder to do. You say the male/female ratio is unimportant? You say you don't care about social aspects? I suggest you reconsider.
I'm not saying you need to become a binge drinker or a man-slut. But there's only one time in your life when you'll be able to date college-age girls respectably, and you don't want to waste it. If that sounds superficial, it's not entirely. As you get older, you'll find that people close up; they build walls; they get harder and harder to connect with. (Plus, college, unlike the real world, has admissions criteria.) You will never get closer to people than during college, and that's worth a lot. It's a learning experience for both of you, and without it you'll have lived quite a bit less.
It's not unusual for students to travel, learn languages, see the world. For adults, this is discouraged. Once you get a job, you will get two or three weeks vacation annually. That's it. And time off on your resume is hard to explain. Don't waste your youth. You won't have the same socially-acceptable opportunities for exploration. Ever again.
Sometimes I think that the purpose of life is to collect stories. How many stories will you have by the time you graduate?
Connect with people. Travel. Learn a second language (You like engineering. German? Chinese?). Join organizations (Formula SAE, which builds racecars, is a good one) Become a well-rounded person. Don't waste opportunities, and don't fear failure. Just go out and do a bunch of stuff. Your 25-year-old self will have fewer regrets.
You're responding to the summary. The article at ScienceNews has a different flavor.
This hypothesis builds on a previous idea that, after disease-resistant Europeans met native populations, diseases spread throughout the New World in simultaneous epidemics. There is evidence for this, including a pattern of entire New World civilizations, far inland from where Europeans settled, collapsing within a generation of their earliest arrivals. For a comparison, the Plague in Europe is known to have killed between 30% and 60% of the European population, and this is thought to have been much worse.
As the native population dropped, so too did the demand for food and consequently arable land, and as a result there was an abrupt decrease in slash-and-burn clearing of forests. The hypothesis here is that the resulting re-forestation sucked CO2 out of the air and caused cooling.
One of the confusing things about this article is that it doesn't fit the popular narrative, and "good" and "bad" are all mixed up. First, the major culprit here is not European guns -- though they effected terrible things later in history -- but European germs, for which Europeans themselves are not responsible per-se, so "good" and "bad" are complicated here. Second, we usually think of reforestation and CO2 sequestration as a "good" thing, yet here it caused too much cooling (for human populations in Europe). And finally, we usually think of Native Americans as being stewards of forests, and Europeans as being their destroyers, yet here, inadvertently, it was Europeans who caused the forests. You see how none of this matches the popular narrative?
I did a little digging on this subject, because the picture painted by the article you cited contained some confusing conclusions, which seem to stem from misunderstanding the sources they cite (see the footnotes at the bottom of the salem-news article). At the end of this digging, I shared some of the article's concerns, but for different reasons.
Yes, it does appear that a company called Epicyte is producing a variety of corn that contains antibodies that latch onto sperm. The leap was the conclusion that people would become infertile by eating the corn. That seems not to be the case. Rather, the corn is used to produce a topical spermicide. The motivation is presumably that a gel containing antibodies that specifically and only target sperm will cause fewer problems than today's more toxic chemical spermicides, which cause irritation of the skin and mucous membranes. The corn here is grown not as a food crop, but as a pharmaceutical crop that is processed to produce the spermicide.
I do understand that there are two causes for concern here. The first is that, unless the modified corn is grown under extremely strict conditions, there is the probability that it will cross-pollinate with other corn, and the gene will escape into the wild. In that way, it could find its way into food crops. The second is the concern raised by the Slashdot article here that food rNA can enter the bloodstream. Put together, these do raise the possibility that these genes could accidentally get into women's bloodstreams, where it seems conceivable that it could cause them to produce some of these antibodies. The causal chain is not nearly so direct as is implied by the salem-news article (one gets the feeling that any degree of truth to it got there by accident), but it is enough to cause some legitimate concern.
If the rNA responsible for producing these antibodies did enter women's bloodstreams in this way, one wonders what the effect would be. Presumably, if it does cause infertility, the effect would be short-lived, because rNA in the blood doesn't last long (or, this is my understanding, at any rate). If this is the case, if the infertility effect is strong enough, and if this rNA can be produced in a way that doesn't cause it to accdentally enter food crops, then this would actually be a wonderful thing, because we need good alternatives to hormonal birth control; it can be pretty hard on women's bodies. But those are a lot of "if"s.
The second leap in the article was the confusion of that genetically-modified corn with other strains of genetically-modified corn, which are intended to be higher-yield (e.g., pesticide-resistant, etc), that are being pushed in Africa. I do believe that there is something sinister about this, but it is not some plot to quietly sterilize Africans. Rather, because this corn does not produce viable seeds, farmers are made dependent on Monsanto et al for seeds each year. I also view the overuse of pesticide encouraged by these crops to be bad thing. But they're not feeding contraceptive corn to people.
I wish there were more critical articles by real experts on issues like this. Too often, it feels like everyone is either a well-intentioned but ignorant hippy, or a willfully-blind corporate shill, and we're left to sort through the half-truths.
The summary uses the phrase, "Perusing through the documents." First off, you don't "peruse through" a document; you simply "peruse" it. Secondly, the use of "through" implies that the author has used "peruse" as a substitute for "skim" -- because you can "skim through" documents -- and this is doubly wrong, because "peruse" has exactly the opposite meaning from "skim;" it means "to read through with thoroughness or care." You'd peruse a legal document. You probably wouldn't peruse a magazine.
It also may sound like I'm being a dirty proscriptivist here, but that's not the point. "Improper" grammar can be ok so long as it communicates unambiguously. The problem with "peruse" is that, if half the population thinks it means one thing, and the other half thinks it means exactly the opposite, then the word is useless. It's so commonly misused that I avoid it altogether; even if I use it correctly, about half my readers will misunderstand me.
Earlier GNOMES and KDEs imitated Windows. One thing Windows did right was the Taskbar. It is, in all seriousness, an extremely good metaphor. It separates the acts of launching programs from managing which ones are running, because, dammit, those are different things.
OSX, with its Dock, conflates launching a program with looking at a window that it has opened. The implicit metaphor is that all programs are always "running," and that the messy details of actually starting a process should be wrapped up by the operating system so that we don't need to think about it. Then, multitasking within a program falls to the program itself. Everybody ends up implementing their own tabs.
Android does the same thing as OSX. All "apps" are always "running," more-or-less, from a GUI point of view. Under-the-hood, they obviously are not; they have to restore themselves from saved state. But this varies from program to program, and is one of the reasons Android has an inconsistent user experience. Given an unfamiliar program, you don't know at first when you're quitting it, and when you're leaving it running in the background.
Now, Gnome3 appears also to falling into the OSX camp.
What Torvalds seems to prefer, in KDE3.5, Gnome2, and now XFCE, is a more Windows-like metaphor for multitasking. I'm with him. I think that's one thing Windows did right.
Personally, I think KDE 3.5 was the height of full-featured Linux desktop environments, and it's degraded into so much juvenile bullshit ever since. Now, just give me something lightweight that uses a reasonable multitasking paradigm and gets out of the way. XFCE fits the bill.
Indeed, the summary makes it sounds like "SLAM" is the name of a piece of software developed by NASA, when really it's a generic acronym describing an entire field of research. Terrible summary.
(And the Kalman filter is so overhyped and misunderstood, it has begun to get on my nerves. It's Bayes Rule for the special case of a linear system and Gaussian probability densities, applied over and over. That's it. People get so wrapped up in its "optimality" that they forget what it actually is. I wonder, how many people even bother to actually use empirically-measured noise covariances in their Kalman filters (in which case, what is its optimality worth?)).
I think it'd just be a motor with a feedback loop to keep the back-emf (and hence the speed) constant, used to drive the hands. Or an analog oscillator with a "tick" circuit, though now you almost have a digital watch (is the LM555 an analog or a digital IC? A little of both...). But then, true mechanical watches, with their escapement mechanisms, seem almost "digital" in this respect as well. And if you're going to go through that trouble, why not use a quartz crystal (at which point you've arrived at a Timex). I imagine there are thousands of amusing ways to build a (probably not very precise) watch.
This really isn't much of a surprise. The Steam-punk genre is quite popular with the 20-40 crowd.
Nah, steampunk is a faux-Victorian genre loved almost exclusively by the irredeemably nerdy. This, like the straight-razor comeback, is more "Mad Men" '60s (or even '40s) nostalgia; it's people borrowing symbols from a time when "men were men" -- a way for men to assert their masculinity in a way that they see as intelligent and sophisticated, rather than uncultured or brutish. Since, for a while in the 90s, the latter seemed to be the only conception of masculinity being promulgated, I appreciate the trend, albeit with reservations.
your options pretty much break down into "javascript" or "assorted architecturally superior; but single-platform and/or deeply fucked in the code quality plugins".
You'd think Java would be filling this role, but it isn't.
On Windows, Sumatra is the fastest, and by far the best for use with pdflatex. Its printing is poor, so on those occasions when you actually want to print a PDF you probably want Foxit.
It is worth noting that the Greek word for governor is k u ße r n a n . In 1947, Norbert Wiener at MIT was searching for a name for his new discipline of automata theory- control and communication in man and machine. In investigating the flyball governor of Watt, he investigated also the etymology of the word k u ße r n a n and came across the Greek word for steersman, k u ße r n t V . Thus, he selected the name cybernetics for his fledgling field.
Yeah, SG:U, Atlantis, and Caprica are supposed to be examples of good sci-fi? Sure, they're better than Sharktopus or Ghost Hunters, but stellar they are not... The only reason anybody watched any of them is that they got hooked by their predecessors. I've begun to think, each time I hear an outcry from sci-fi fans when a show is canceled, that it's really just familiarity they're missing -- that these are sad, novelty-avoiding people, who desperately cling to whatever escape from reality is given them no matter how mediocre...
The size of and number of computer monitors you have is an indicator of your prestige. People don't demand extra monitors because it'll make them more productive. Sure, they'll make excuses -- "This way I can have my email AND Excel open at the same time" -- but really it's just the tech variant of wanting the corner office. I don't think the politics of workstations are as dramatic as those of monitors -- Monitors are showier -- but deep down I'm sure it's pretty similar.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I'm with you there.
Robot (n): Any machine we choose to anthropomorphize.
Can you come up with a better definition? I think that one's the truth.
This is especially true in an area like robotics (my field) where terms like innovative and groundbreaking get thrown around a lot. When really, it's just a rehash of an idea used in another discipline applied to robotics.
Yeah, I know the feeling.
Even great, celebrated, actually-(somewhat)-useful ideas turn out to be simple applications of other ones. Take the Kalman Filter. If you come at it from a least-squares point of view and focus on the word "optimal" -- as it was first explained -- it sounds extremely impressive. But if you explain what a Bayes Filter is (after which people say, "ok, that's simple enough"), and then specialize it to Gaussian noise and linear systems (again to the reaction "ok, that's easy"), you've just got a straightforward homework problem you can solve by completing a square, at which point you've arrived at the same filter by a process that makes it look a great deal less earth-shattering.
I just feel bad for the poor undergrads, who've been fed so much hype they don't know what's real and what's not. They come in saying they want to study robotics and going on about "emergent behaviors" and "neural networks" as I slowly shake my head and try to undo the damage wrought by a thousand assistant professors of the 1990s scrambling for grant money and tenure.
So, I'm the first to call out academic research as pointless. But I don't think this is.
Imagine two methods of moving an object back and forth.
The first is a playground swing. It can't power itself, but, by kicking it occasionally, you can get it to start swinging, and, once you do, you only need to put in a little extra power to keep that going.
The second is a little cart with powered wheels. It can drive forwards and backwards, and there's nothing to stop you from just driving it rapidly forwards and backwards over and over.
Which is more efficient?
The idea, making an analogy, is that a leg design like this is to walking, as a playground swing is to moving an object back and forth. One way to pump in energy is to make it walk downhill. But another would be to start adding some self-powering capability. I agree with you insofar as I would like to see that happen. Where we disagree, I think, is just in that I'm not dismissing the passive, mechanical side of the work, because I think it's an important part of making that happen.
I'll also acknowledge that passive walkers are not themselves new. But this is one of the better-executed ones I've seen.
While I respect their accomplishment, I agree, I wouldn't call it "groundbreaking." Of course, very little academic research actually is.
The same goes for other areas of society. Gutenberg wasn't the first to use movable type; Columbus wasn't the first European to make it to the New World; Taylor and MacLaurin weren't the first to use their eponymous expansions; Jacobi, it turns out, scooped the Hungarian Algorithm (but his manuscript was lost until recently); the Ming dynasty had clocks with mechanical escapements;...
It's not just about being first. It's also about timing and execution. Just look at the iPod.
All of which is to say, that incrementalism is OK. Are passive walkers fundamentally new? No. But I'll give these guys a little credit anyway.
You're missing the point. The idea is that, because it walks passively, you only need to pump in a little extra energy to make it keep walking. Compare this with systems like the Honda Asimo, which don't really walk dynamically, never really build up any momentum, and need to expend a lot of energy just to continue taking steps.
Passive walkers are not entirely new. A tinker-toy passive walker was famous in the robotics community in the early '00s. But this one looks more refined.
Next, I want to see more effort going into powering these things in a way that meshes nicely with the idea of them walking passively. The closest stuff I've seen to that would be Boston Dynamics and MABEL.
Seconded.
Sure, you need to work hard in college. But it's also a once-in-a-lifetime to do things that, once you leave, it becomes much, much harder to do. You say the male/female ratio is unimportant? You say you don't care about social aspects? I suggest you reconsider.
I'm not saying you need to become a binge drinker or a man-slut. But there's only one time in your life when you'll be able to date college-age girls respectably, and you don't want to waste it. If that sounds superficial, it's not entirely. As you get older, you'll find that people close up; they build walls; they get harder and harder to connect with. (Plus, college, unlike the real world, has admissions criteria.) You will never get closer to people than during college, and that's worth a lot. It's a learning experience for both of you, and without it you'll have lived quite a bit less.
It's not unusual for students to travel, learn languages, see the world. For adults, this is discouraged. Once you get a job, you will get two or three weeks vacation annually. That's it. And time off on your resume is hard to explain. Don't waste your youth. You won't have the same socially-acceptable opportunities for exploration. Ever again.
Sometimes I think that the purpose of life is to collect stories. How many stories will you have by the time you graduate?
Connect with people. Travel. Learn a second language (You like engineering. German? Chinese?). Join organizations (Formula SAE, which builds racecars, is a good one) Become a well-rounded person. Don't waste opportunities, and don't fear failure. Just go out and do a bunch of stuff. Your 25-year-old self will have fewer regrets.
You're responding to the summary. The article at ScienceNews has a different flavor.
This hypothesis builds on a previous idea that, after disease-resistant Europeans met native populations, diseases spread throughout the New World in simultaneous epidemics. There is evidence for this, including a pattern of entire New World civilizations, far inland from where Europeans settled, collapsing within a generation of their earliest arrivals. For a comparison, the Plague in Europe is known to have killed between 30% and 60% of the European population, and this is thought to have been much worse.
As the native population dropped, so too did the demand for food and consequently arable land, and as a result there was an abrupt decrease in slash-and-burn clearing of forests. The hypothesis here is that the resulting re-forestation sucked CO2 out of the air and caused cooling.
One of the confusing things about this article is that it doesn't fit the popular narrative, and "good" and "bad" are all mixed up. First, the major culprit here is not European guns -- though they effected terrible things later in history -- but European germs, for which Europeans themselves are not responsible per-se, so "good" and "bad" are complicated here. Second, we usually think of reforestation and CO2 sequestration as a "good" thing, yet here it caused too much cooling (for human populations in Europe). And finally, we usually think of Native Americans as being stewards of forests, and Europeans as being their destroyers, yet here, inadvertently, it was Europeans who caused the forests. You see how none of this matches the popular narrative?
I did a little digging on this subject, because the picture painted by the article you cited contained some confusing conclusions, which seem to stem from misunderstanding the sources they cite (see the footnotes at the bottom of the salem-news article). At the end of this digging, I shared some of the article's concerns, but for different reasons.
Yes, it does appear that a company called Epicyte is producing a variety of corn that contains antibodies that latch onto sperm. The leap was the conclusion that people would become infertile by eating the corn. That seems not to be the case. Rather, the corn is used to produce a topical spermicide. The motivation is presumably that a gel containing antibodies that specifically and only target sperm will cause fewer problems than today's more toxic chemical spermicides, which cause irritation of the skin and mucous membranes. The corn here is grown not as a food crop, but as a pharmaceutical crop that is processed to produce the spermicide.
I do understand that there are two causes for concern here. The first is that, unless the modified corn is grown under extremely strict conditions, there is the probability that it will cross-pollinate with other corn, and the gene will escape into the wild. In that way, it could find its way into food crops. The second is the concern raised by the Slashdot article here that food rNA can enter the bloodstream. Put together, these do raise the possibility that these genes could accidentally get into women's bloodstreams, where it seems conceivable that it could cause them to produce some of these antibodies. The causal chain is not nearly so direct as is implied by the salem-news article (one gets the feeling that any degree of truth to it got there by accident), but it is enough to cause some legitimate concern.
If the rNA responsible for producing these antibodies did enter women's bloodstreams in this way, one wonders what the effect would be. Presumably, if it does cause infertility, the effect would be short-lived, because rNA in the blood doesn't last long (or, this is my understanding, at any rate). If this is the case, if the infertility effect is strong enough, and if this rNA can be produced in a way that doesn't cause it to accdentally enter food crops, then this would actually be a wonderful thing, because we need good alternatives to hormonal birth control; it can be pretty hard on women's bodies. But those are a lot of "if"s.
The second leap in the article was the confusion of that genetically-modified corn with other strains of genetically-modified corn, which are intended to be higher-yield (e.g., pesticide-resistant, etc), that are being pushed in Africa. I do believe that there is something sinister about this, but it is not some plot to quietly sterilize Africans. Rather, because this corn does not produce viable seeds, farmers are made dependent on Monsanto et al for seeds each year. I also view the overuse of pesticide encouraged by these crops to be bad thing. But they're not feeding contraceptive corn to people.
I wish there were more critical articles by real experts on issues like this. Too often, it feels like everyone is either a well-intentioned but ignorant hippy, or a willfully-blind corporate shill, and we're left to sort through the half-truths.
That's what I thought too. Have they heard of Ivan Pavlov?
Plus, forget about mistreating animals; there's already enough porn in which women are degraded and abused.
Having now read TFA (always a good policy), it looks like a Flash exploit was involved. Maybe the Flash applet was embedded using OLE?
How do you own someone with an XLS file nowadays?!
(I'm assuming, "How dangerous can it be? It's not an executable!" is exactly what the hapless employee who opened it was thinking too...)
Do you have a specific example? It's nice to learn from others' mistakes...
That word does not mean what you think it means.
The summary uses the phrase, "Perusing through the documents." First off, you don't "peruse through" a document; you simply "peruse" it. Secondly, the use of "through" implies that the author has used "peruse" as a substitute for "skim" -- because you can "skim through" documents -- and this is doubly wrong, because "peruse" has exactly the opposite meaning from "skim;" it means "to read through with thoroughness or care." You'd peruse a legal document. You probably wouldn't peruse a magazine.
It also may sound like I'm being a dirty proscriptivist here, but that's not the point. "Improper" grammar can be ok so long as it communicates unambiguously. The problem with "peruse" is that, if half the population thinks it means one thing, and the other half thinks it means exactly the opposite, then the word is useless. It's so commonly misused that I avoid it altogether; even if I use it correctly, about half my readers will misunderstand me.
Earlier GNOMES and KDEs imitated Windows. One thing Windows did right was the Taskbar. It is, in all seriousness, an extremely good metaphor. It separates the acts of launching programs from managing which ones are running, because, dammit, those are different things.
OSX, with its Dock, conflates launching a program with looking at a window that it has opened. The implicit metaphor is that all programs are always "running," and that the messy details of actually starting a process should be wrapped up by the operating system so that we don't need to think about it. Then, multitasking within a program falls to the program itself. Everybody ends up implementing their own tabs.
Android does the same thing as OSX. All "apps" are always "running," more-or-less, from a GUI point of view. Under-the-hood, they obviously are not; they have to restore themselves from saved state. But this varies from program to program, and is one of the reasons Android has an inconsistent user experience. Given an unfamiliar program, you don't know at first when you're quitting it, and when you're leaving it running in the background.
Now, Gnome3 appears also to falling into the OSX camp.
What Torvalds seems to prefer, in KDE3.5, Gnome2, and now XFCE, is a more Windows-like metaphor for multitasking. I'm with him. I think that's one thing Windows did right.
Personally, I think KDE 3.5 was the height of full-featured Linux desktop environments, and it's degraded into so much juvenile bullshit ever since. Now, just give me something lightweight that uses a reasonable multitasking paradigm and gets out of the way. XFCE fits the bill.
Indeed, the summary makes it sounds like "SLAM" is the name of a piece of software developed by NASA, when really it's a generic acronym describing an entire field of research. Terrible summary.
(And the Kalman filter is so overhyped and misunderstood, it has begun to get on my nerves. It's Bayes Rule for the special case of a linear system and Gaussian probability densities, applied over and over. That's it. People get so wrapped up in its "optimality" that they forget what it actually is. I wonder, how many people even bother to actually use empirically-measured noise covariances in their Kalman filters (in which case, what is its optimality worth?)).
I think it'd just be a motor with a feedback loop to keep the back-emf (and hence the speed) constant, used to drive the hands. Or an analog oscillator with a "tick" circuit, though now you almost have a digital watch (is the LM555 an analog or a digital IC? A little of both...). But then, true mechanical watches, with their escapement mechanisms, seem almost "digital" in this respect as well. And if you're going to go through that trouble, why not use a quartz crystal (at which point you've arrived at a Timex). I imagine there are thousands of amusing ways to build a (probably not very precise) watch.
This really isn't much of a surprise. The Steam-punk genre is quite popular with the 20-40 crowd.
Nah, steampunk is a faux-Victorian genre loved almost exclusively by the irredeemably nerdy. This, like the straight-razor comeback, is more "Mad Men" '60s (or even '40s) nostalgia; it's people borrowing symbols from a time when "men were men" -- a way for men to assert their masculinity in a way that they see as intelligent and sophisticated, rather than uncultured or brutish. Since, for a while in the 90s, the latter seemed to be the only conception of masculinity being promulgated, I appreciate the trend, albeit with reservations.
More like, a GPU is a freight train moving at 15 MPH, a CPU is a Ferarri doing 120MPH, and you need to transport a warehouse of boxes across country.
your options pretty much break down into "javascript" or "assorted architecturally superior; but single-platform and/or deeply fucked in the code quality plugins".
You'd think Java would be filling this role, but it isn't.
On Windows, Sumatra is the fastest, and by far the best for use with pdflatex. Its printing is poor, so on those occasions when you actually want to print a PDF you probably want Foxit.
...and 1947 turns the dial on its rotary phone to call both '92 and '84:
From here:
It is worth noting that the Greek word for governor is k u ße r n a n . In 1947, Norbert Wiener at MIT was searching for a name for his new discipline of automata theory- control and communication in man and machine. In investigating the flyball governor of Watt, he investigated also the etymology of the word k u ße r n a n and came across the Greek word for steersman, k u ße r n t V . Thus, he selected the name cybernetics for his fledgling field.
In other words...
(Cyber = steering/adjustment/feedback) + (net = networks/interconnection) + (ics = study of)
Yeah, SG:U, Atlantis, and Caprica are supposed to be examples of good sci-fi? Sure, they're better than Sharktopus or Ghost Hunters, but stellar they are not... The only reason anybody watched any of them is that they got hooked by their predecessors. I've begun to think, each time I hear an outcry from sci-fi fans when a show is canceled, that it's really just familiarity they're missing -- that these are sad, novelty-avoiding people, who desperately cling to whatever escape from reality is given them no matter how mediocre...
nurses giving blow jobs to ED patients
Citation needed.
No, really. Has this actually happened?
The size of and number of computer monitors you have is an indicator of your prestige. People don't demand extra monitors because it'll make them more productive. Sure, they'll make excuses -- "This way I can have my email AND Excel open at the same time" -- but really it's just the tech variant of wanting the corner office. I don't think the politics of workstations are as dramatic as those of monitors -- Monitors are showier -- but deep down I'm sure it's pretty similar.