I really enjoyed Shakespeare at school. After a while I found it incredibly easy to slip into the mode of understanding language of Elizabethan England instinctively. In fact the word meanings seemed obvious after a while. And the stories as usual contained subtletly, complexity and plain good old 'sex and violence'. They really need to be seen as a play. Funny thing is in school you are made to read them as if they weren't meant for performance... I mean everyone knows a novel is bound to be butchered if made into a movie but a play is designed to be (allowing for the fact that live theatre beats movies).
Start without an IDE to show how it actually works. Once they can write stuff without an IDE. Show them the advantages, and disadvantages of an IDE.
If you learn without the IDE then using the IDE is easy. If you only learn via an IDE, say Brand X IDE, and the IDE changes or has a bug or your employer uses, and insists, on another then you have a problem.
IDEs are useful but if you 'need' one then you don't really know how to program. OK that might be flamebait, but it's true.
Seems a very drastic first step. I am reminded of an article by Lewis Thomas in his book "Lives of a Cell". The essay "Warts and All", I think, reports on experiments done to subjects with multiple warts to hypnotize them away. But only on one side of the body.
I don't remember the success rate but it was fairly high. The thing that struck Thomas was that sometimes the subjects made mistakes and instead of removing warts from the left side of their body would remove them from their right, say. To Thomas the big issue here was not warts but how a verbal suggestion could possibly translate into cellular commands to kill cells. He suggested there had to be a deep "super intelligence" at work in us to do this kind of thing. Hmm seems I have digressed.
Anyway, I'd suggest hypnosis first. If no effect then proceed up the chain. Nitric Acid: I think the patient would be willing to wait a while.
Off the top of my head so this is total groundless speculation, but it shows how "useless" things may have a use.
Humans great 'skill' is their intelligence. So how do you display your intelligence to a mate or peers, so they you earn prestige (which we hope translates to mating success). Why you gather interesting bits of clever stuff to demonstrate. You could work it out yourself, but that is very hard. So what you do is give some prestige to those who have some skills in these things so you can borrow their ideas. So someone who is good at art is well regarded because they can make you interesting items or give you interesting ideas. Personally, I also think art has deeper value... I suspect it is a concise way for the mind to represent something about the known world that is easily understood and remembered. Anyway when you get these bits of ideas and items you then are consdered quite cool. Just look around at modern society and tell me this isn't going on right now. Today we give it various names: fashion, being cultured etc. Thing is we do value it and therefore we value people who do it.
Actually I liked the Doom movie quite a lot. I took my sons to see it because "yeah it'll probably be bad but I juast have to see it". We were all very pleasantly surprised, thought it was great I recently hired the movie out as an over-nighter and it was still pretty good. Don't know why people complain about it.
As for "Resident Evil". Puke. I couldn't watch it for more than 5 minutes. Super Mario I liked, but mostly because it was just so pleasantly bizarre... hilarious weirdness.
Sometime back I happened on this article by Gregory Benford about how we can communicate across tens of thousands of years to our descendants in the form of a warning... as in don't open this up.
I particularly like the suggestion near the end about making the site scary so that it would become a place that was taboo just because it was so creepy. His suggestion was shaped stone monoliths that would wail in the wind. Anyway worth reading.
Seems like most of the posts here are anti-NGE. OK. That's their opinion, personally I'm not surprised it takes effort and repeats to see exactly what is going on. I actually like stories that mess with my head and require careful thought to untangle. NGE to me is almost perfect. So much happening that you aren't aware of. It was my intro to modern anime. Well not quite I saw Akira first, thought it looked nice but was pretty shallow. I guess I should compare NGE to Ghost in the Shell. Ghost has depth and nuance but it isnt very demanding. NGE is very demanding.
As for Shinji. Yeah I didn't like his reaction. But was it a realistic reaction? I think it was. He was called by his father to be used as cannon fodder... ok yeah that's real motivational. He is to pilot a machine he's never seen before to fight an enemy he knows nothing about in a battle where he is almost certainly going to get killed... yeah works for me. That's what dads are for. When it seems that your father is using you this way and that it is likely you will get killed I can't see kids of this age holding up very well, Gendo is all of his family. He wants acceptance but all he gets is treatment as if he is an expendable object of no worth. Only Misato is affirming to Shinji... but she is working for his father to send him into battle so how pure are her motives?
And all the sub-plots are so delicious. The most enigmatic figure of all is Gendo Ikari. Is he a Christ figure or an anti-christ. He is trying to save humanity, but he deliberately triggers 2nd Impact and kills half of humanity. He plots to overthrow the manipulative Seele but gloats when he activates the Dummy Plug in Unit One that makes Shinji witness his Eva go into a killing rampage against one of his friends. And finally you realise that Shinji's mother is probably the mastermind of the whole thing, even her "death" in Unit One.
You need to watch the series at least three times.
You might be interested in D. radiodurans which can survive 1.5 million rads whereas 500 - 1,000 rads can kill a human. However this item explains the repair mechanism.
If you've never read any of Fort I'd recommend it. He was actually a skeptical person but loved to tease the reader by suggesting multiple wild contradictory ideas each with supporting evidence (note particularly "The Book of the Damned"). His attitude was that researchers are often led too much by theory and prejudice and not enough by evidence, so he liked to dismantle scientific prejudices. Clever guy. However, back to the topic. Fort scoured various newspaper and journal reports and often found reports of falls not just of 'blood' but 'rotting meat'. The reports are not new. Whether they are actually blood etc is another matter. But the correct approach should be: gather the evidence properly and test it... not jump to wild-assed conclusions one way or the other.
Sure Word has more features etc. But I don't find it an issue since I never ever ever use them.
10 years behind? The last time I used Word very intensively was when I wrote up my end of degree project in 1996. I thought Word was wonderful, successive versions have seemed less wonderful (read: crap). By that metric that means OOo is equal to Word at its peak. I personally think it is better than that.
John was a smart but intransigent guy... especially in the face of evidence.
He would of course argue against any sea level rise due to global warming but he would probably dismiss any scientific evidence for uplift in the area or any other evidence. Not very objective John was.
Sad to hear of his death though. I had many enjoyable arguments with him, not just about GW but about intelligent design (although not a fundie he believed in it) and other stuff.
Program requirements weren't exactly high back then, so finishing a program in a day or two was quite common.
Yeah I remember. Many of the programs were relatively simple, the kind of things we today would do in Python. But the major factor that complicated coding was the GUI and event based programming (they go together). No GUI back then, if you programmed something and you actually had visual fields etc you thought you were so cutting edge. Programming was challenge / response with no looking for events etc. People entering programming today shouldn't start with anything GUI. If they succeed with something in VB they get a false idea of the complexities and think: I wrote a GUI app in a day why can't those programmers write a new enterprise app in a month?
I think at the moment the governments know the risk, but are hoping (foolishly) that it will all be ok. The biggest issue is that while "we" (meaning the guvmints) are jockeying for position in the slowly developing "resource riot" they want to keep us happy, calm and pig-ignorant. Wouldn't want the proles getting excited would we. But the current happy situation can't last. I deeply fear for my children, family, city, nation and civilisation. We missed the bullet from a Cold War going hot only to find out the greater threat would come from us just doing nothing.
I'm not depressed, but it sure doesn't feel too good either. I attended a meeting of concerned people late last year about preparing our city for peak oil. The discussion ranged over public transport, greening the city with permaculture... all good ideas. Don't know if it will be enough even if anyone is listening.
When I first saw a summary of Meadows it seemed to be on the money. Not all of it of course, predicting the future is very dicey but basically the trends were pretty much reasonable. Never understood why it seemed unreasonable to so many. His timeline looks like it is going to be reasonably accurate too. [ about here someone starts talking about copper or something... gees copper never entered my head when I read it or now, never understood why copper was an issue, its not like oil... miniaturisation etc doesn't reduce the mass of people or change thermodynamics ]
Debunked? Where? And by who? Crap I'm old enough to remember all the arguments the right put out against all "this environmental silliness". And the arguments look increasingly hollow. Heh heh... I remember Khan predicting a global utopia of 30+ billion or so. Amazing how people can dupe themselves like that... irrational optimism.
I don't think it is inhumane. I used to have a water pistol loaded with Dettol and when I squirted them they didn't even hop away just stayed there looking at me. Then slowly closed their eyes and toppled over to die. Beats an axe or putting them in the freezer (yuck!).
Physical force isn't very effective I have found. If you don't impale them to the ground with a sharp object then usually the next day they have gone. Almost indestructible.
Oh yeah? I've seen a toad in Queensland the size of small cat, not kitten. I quite like toads, but their effect on the environment is horrendous. Bad days when they hit Kakadu... like now.
This is welcome news. My experience with Swing has led me to tell people that "Java is good, Swing is a dog". Which means I have avoided it for a couple of years.
It does seem that the extreme of either end is a dictatorship... and the dictatorships resemble each other it seems. Probably the reason is that the real spectrum is about human mindsets. I recently saw a documentary series on the origins of the 3 religions of Abraham: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. And the thing that struck me, and the narrator, was that in all the people who were interviewed the major difference was not between the religions but between the tolerant and the intolerant in the same religion. The fundies, of each group, sounded just the same "blah blah blah [insert religion here] blah blah". People who have a locked down mentality are I suspect attracted to extremes such as fundamentalism whether it is religion or politics.
I once argued with some JWs who arrived on my doorstep. I argued evolution until they looked at their watches. Then when they tried to leave, I brought up another issue and argued some more... and more... and more....
They never came back. Pity, I was just getting started.
the vietnam era hippies (beatles etc.) were a politically-motivated group, rebelling against the establishment. that's why they actually accomplished something. Even so, most hippies were in it for the free love and the cannabis.
And when the war ended so did the energy for the ideas. Which were still just as valid, well some of them were. Lesson to be learned: sadly many people are lazy until something forces everyone to get on a bandwagon. The hippies etc happened because of a unique confluence of events: souring of post war optimism, post war prosperity, threat of conscription/draft, improved communications, baby boom and the introduction of new psychotropic drugs which were not immediately illegal (LSD was for some time quite legal).
It is an interesting question about what geometry we perceive the world in. When I learned about Projective Geometry I thought "well we must see ourselves in a non-euclidean universe". But to live in the real universe we must make calculations based on an almost Euclidean reality,ie throw rock at animal, track moving prey etc. So our brain must convert from non-Euclidean to Euclidean for our survival.
We must somehow perceive both because I don't think the boundary between both experiences is seemless. Hey, humans can't even get distance right: vertical distance is perceived differently to horizontal distance.
Slashdot Mirror
I really enjoyed Shakespeare at school. After a while I found it incredibly easy to slip into the mode of understanding language of Elizabethan England instinctively. In fact the word meanings seemed obvious after a while. And the stories as usual contained subtletly, complexity and plain good old 'sex and violence'. They really need to be seen as a play. Funny thing is in school you are made to read them as if they weren't meant for performance ... I mean everyone knows a novel is bound to be butchered if made into a movie but a play is designed to be (allowing for the fact that live theatre beats movies).
My 3 cents worth.
Start without an IDE to show how it actually works. Once they can write stuff without an IDE. Show them the advantages, and disadvantages of an IDE.
If you learn without the IDE then using the IDE is easy. If you only learn via an IDE, say Brand X IDE, and the IDE changes or has a bug or your employer uses, and insists, on another then you have a problem.
IDEs are useful but if you 'need' one then you don't really know how to program. OK that might be flamebait, but it's true.
It all went downhill after that fault was found in the AE-35 unit.
Hmmmm. Check this. Not sure if I'm more impressed or saddened.
Seems a very drastic first step. I am reminded of an article by Lewis Thomas in his book "Lives of a Cell". The essay "Warts and All", I think, reports on experiments done to subjects with multiple warts to hypnotize them away. But only on one side of the body.
I don't remember the success rate but it was fairly high. The thing that struck Thomas was that sometimes the subjects made mistakes and instead of removing warts from the left side of their body would remove them from their right, say. To Thomas the big issue here was not warts but how a verbal suggestion could possibly translate into cellular commands to kill cells. He suggested there had to be a deep "super intelligence" at work in us to do this kind of thing. Hmm seems I have digressed.
Anyway, I'd suggest hypnosis first. If no effect then proceed up the chain. Nitric Acid: I think the patient would be willing to wait a while.
Off the top of my head so this is total groundless speculation, but it shows how "useless" things may have a use.
Humans great 'skill' is their intelligence. So how do you display your intelligence to a mate or peers, so they you earn prestige (which we hope translates to mating success). Why you gather interesting bits of clever stuff to demonstrate. You could work it out yourself, but that is very hard. So what you do is give some prestige to those who have some skills in these things so you can borrow their ideas. So someone who is good at art is well regarded because they can make you interesting items or give you interesting ideas. Personally, I also think art has deeper value ... I suspect it is a concise way for the mind to represent something about the known world that is easily understood and remembered. Anyway when you get these bits of ideas and items you then are consdered quite cool. Just look around at modern society and tell me this isn't going on right now. Today we give it various names: fashion, being cultured etc. Thing is we do value it and therefore we value people who do it.
Actually I liked the Doom movie quite a lot. I took my sons to see it because "yeah it'll probably be bad but I juast have to see it". We were all very pleasantly surprised, thought it was great I recently hired the movie out as an over-nighter and it was still pretty good. Don't know why people complain about it.
As for "Resident Evil". Puke. I couldn't watch it for more than 5 minutes. Super Mario I liked, but mostly because it was just so pleasantly bizarre ... hilarious weirdness.
Sometime back I happened on this article by Gregory Benford about how we can communicate across tens of thousands of years to our descendants in the form of a warning ... as in don't open this up.
I particularly like the suggestion near the end about making the site scary so that it would become a place that was taboo just because it was so creepy. His suggestion was shaped stone monoliths that would wail in the wind. Anyway worth reading.
Seems like most of the posts here are anti-NGE. OK. That's their opinion, personally I'm not surprised it takes effort and repeats to see exactly what is going on. I actually like stories that mess with my head and require careful thought to untangle. NGE to me is almost perfect. So much happening that you aren't aware of. It was my intro to modern anime. Well not quite I saw Akira first, thought it looked nice but was pretty shallow. I guess I should compare NGE to Ghost in the Shell. Ghost has depth and nuance but it isnt very demanding. NGE is very demanding.
As for Shinji. Yeah I didn't like his reaction. But was it a realistic reaction? I think it was. He was called by his father to be used as cannon fodder ... ok yeah that's real motivational. He is to pilot a machine he's never seen before to fight an enemy he knows nothing about in a battle where he is almost certainly going to get killed ... yeah works for me. That's what dads are for. When it seems that your father is using you this way and that it is likely you will get killed I can't see kids of this age holding up very well, Gendo is all of his family. He wants acceptance but all he gets is treatment as if he is an expendable object of no worth. Only Misato is affirming to Shinji ... but she is working for his father to send him into battle so how pure are her motives?
And all the sub-plots are so delicious. The most enigmatic figure of all is Gendo Ikari. Is he a Christ figure or an anti-christ. He is trying to save humanity, but he deliberately triggers 2nd Impact and kills half of humanity. He plots to overthrow the manipulative Seele but gloats when he activates the Dummy Plug in Unit One that makes Shinji witness his Eva go into a killing rampage against one of his friends. And finally you realise that Shinji's mother is probably the mastermind of the whole thing, even her "death" in Unit One.
You need to watch the series at least three times.
You might be interested in D. radiodurans which can survive 1.5 million rads whereas 500 - 1,000 rads can kill a human. However this item explains the repair mechanism.
If you've never read any of Fort I'd recommend it. He was actually a skeptical person but loved to tease the reader by suggesting multiple wild contradictory ideas each with supporting evidence (note particularly "The Book of the Damned"). His attitude was that researchers are often led too much by theory and prejudice and not enough by evidence, so he liked to dismantle scientific prejudices. Clever guy. However, back to the topic. Fort scoured various newspaper and journal reports and often found reports of falls not just of 'blood' but 'rotting meat'. The reports are not new. Whether they are actually blood etc is another matter. But the correct approach should be: gather the evidence properly and test it ... not jump to wild-assed conclusions one way or the other.
Visual Basic 2005 Jumpship
I think they mean "internet years".
Sure Word has more features etc. But I don't find it an issue since I never ever ever use them.
10 years behind? The last time I used Word very intensively was when I wrote up my end of degree project in 1996. I thought Word was wonderful, successive versions have seemed less wonderful (read: crap). By that metric that means OOo is equal to Word at its peak. I personally think it is better than that.
John was a smart but intransigent guy ... especially in the face of evidence.
He would of course argue against any sea level rise due to global warming but he would probably dismiss any scientific evidence for uplift in the area or any other evidence. Not very objective John was.
Sad to hear of his death though. I had many enjoyable arguments with him, not just about GW but about intelligent design (although not a fundie he believed in it) and other stuff.
Program requirements weren't exactly high back then, so finishing a program in a day or two was quite common.
Yeah I remember. Many of the programs were relatively simple, the kind of things we today would do in Python. But the major factor that complicated coding was the GUI and event based programming (they go together). No GUI back then, if you programmed something and you actually had visual fields etc you thought you were so cutting edge. Programming was challenge / response with no looking for events etc. People entering programming today shouldn't start with anything GUI. If they succeed with something in VB they get a false idea of the complexities and think: I wrote a GUI app in a day why can't those programmers write a new enterprise app in a month?
I think at the moment the governments know the risk, but are hoping (foolishly) that it will all be ok. The biggest issue is that while "we" (meaning the guvmints) are jockeying for position in the slowly developing "resource riot" they want to keep us happy, calm and pig-ignorant. Wouldn't want the proles getting excited would we. But the current happy situation can't last. I deeply fear for my children, family, city, nation and civilisation. We missed the bullet from a Cold War going hot only to find out the greater threat would come from us just doing nothing.
I'm not depressed, but it sure doesn't feel too good either. I attended a meeting of concerned people late last year about preparing our city for peak oil. The discussion ranged over public transport, greening the city with permaculture ... all good ideas. Don't know if it will be enough even if anyone is listening.
When I first saw a summary of Meadows it seemed to be on the money. Not all of it of course, predicting the future is very dicey but basically the trends were pretty much reasonable. Never understood why it seemed unreasonable to so many. His timeline looks like it is going to be reasonably accurate too. [ about here someone starts talking about copper or something ... gees copper never entered my head when I read it or now, never understood why copper was an issue, its not like oil ... miniaturisation etc doesn't reduce the mass of people or change thermodynamics ]
Debunked? Where? And by who? Crap I'm old enough to remember all the arguments the right put out against all "this environmental silliness". And the arguments look increasingly hollow. Heh heh ... I remember Khan predicting a global utopia of 30+ billion or so. Amazing how people can dupe themselves like that ... irrational optimism.
I don't think it is inhumane. I used to have a water pistol loaded with Dettol and when I squirted them they didn't even hop away just stayed there looking at me. Then slowly closed their eyes and toppled over to die. Beats an axe or putting them in the freezer (yuck!).
Physical force isn't very effective I have found. If you don't impale them to the ground with a sharp object then usually the next day they have gone. Almost indestructible.
no abudant resources to lead to monsterous toads
Oh yeah? I've seen a toad in Queensland the size of small cat, not kitten. I quite like toads, but their effect on the environment is horrendous. Bad days when they hit Kakadu ... like now.
In fact we even have the phrase "to fall on one's sword" to suggest suicide to save the honour of whatever.
The Romans certainly believed in this. They really liked "opening the veins" etc. Perhaps its something about warrior cultures.
This is welcome news. My experience with Swing has led me to tell people that "Java is good, Swing is a dog". Which means I have avoided it for a couple of years.
It does seem that the extreme of either end is a dictatorship ... and the dictatorships resemble each other it seems. Probably the reason is that the real spectrum is about human mindsets. I recently saw a documentary series on the origins of the 3 religions of Abraham: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. And the thing that struck me, and the narrator, was that in all the people who were interviewed the major difference was not between the religions but between the tolerant and the intolerant in the same religion. The fundies, of each group, sounded just the same "blah blah blah [insert religion here] blah blah". People who have a locked down mentality are I suspect attracted to extremes such as fundamentalism whether it is religion or politics.
My $0.02 anyway.
I once argued with some JWs who arrived on my doorstep. I argued evolution until they looked at their watches. Then when they tried to leave, I brought up another issue and argued some more ... and more ... and more....
They never came back. Pity, I was just getting started.
the vietnam era hippies (beatles etc.) were a politically-motivated group, rebelling against the establishment. that's why they actually accomplished something. Even so, most hippies were in it for the free love and the cannabis.
And when the war ended so did the energy for the ideas. Which were still just as valid, well some of them were. Lesson to be learned: sadly many people are lazy until something forces everyone to get on a bandwagon. The hippies etc happened because of a unique confluence of events: souring of post war optimism, post war prosperity, threat of conscription/draft, improved communications, baby boom and the introduction of new psychotropic drugs which were not immediately illegal (LSD was for some time quite legal).
And no I was not a hippy.
Too right. Should be required reading in schools or at least on the recommended reading list for slashdotters. No, no sarcasm intended. Honestly.
It is an interesting question about what geometry we perceive the world in. When I learned about Projective Geometry I thought "well we must see ourselves in a non-euclidean universe". But to live in the real universe we must make calculations based on an almost Euclidean reality,ie throw rock at animal, track moving prey etc. So our brain must convert from non-Euclidean to Euclidean for our survival.
We must somehow perceive both because I don't think the boundary between both experiences is seemless. Hey, humans can't even get distance right: vertical distance is perceived differently to horizontal distance.