Dust can mean death, but the real enemy is complacency. If you get a few dives in you and you start to skip steps, that's where the dust (silt/clay, actually. Sandy bottoms aren't as big of a danger) cloud (blowout) can cause problems. or if you start doing it without the proper training (i.e. learning from everyone else's mistakes instead of repeating them. It's critical to learn from others' mistakes when a small mistake can be fatal.) you can achieve similar results.
Just stirring up silt shouldn't do anything worse than just end your dive (or in a popular cave, piss off other divers who will also have to end their dives early....) - you follow the line you'd been laying back out of the cave. A lot of the training is training yourself to be comfortable in disorienting black-out conditions, so you make the right choices.
The problem is that familiarity breeds contempt. It starts out with you not drilling out-of-air emergencies on the surface before every dive, and before you know it you're tying your cave line further and further in instead of starting it in open water every time. You're swimming across gaps without laying line because you didn't bring enough gap reels and you think you're familiar with this part of the cave.
Then you start using gear that has no business being in a cave: scooters and rebreathers. Both of which can get you further into the cave than have any business being, when complacency causes you to fail to lay the groundwork for your escape in the event of an equipment failure.
Anyway, my point is that you don't have to be that crazy to dive caves, especially if you don't go that far in, and stick to well-explored areas. but you do have to be vigilant about maintaining both your gear and proficiency. And the reward? You'll have to try it and find out.
Re:Thank God for standardized testing
on
The Creativity Crisis
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Third grade? Yeah, there ought to be a lot of memorization going on in third grade. You need to have built a foundation of facts before you can be lead to conclusions connecting them. Third grade is your solid rock of foundation, of course you're going to need to memorize a lot of things. That's not the only thing that should be going on, but I doubt that even in your daughter's school that it is the case that that's all they're doing.
I can almost guarantee, however, that there is nothing in the testing criterion or curriculum guidelines that suggests simply memorizing the things that are going to be on the test. That's a conclusion come to by some of the teachers, or some group that ostensibly represents and aids the teachers in performing their duties. I can think of no other reason to sabotage both the test itself and the children's education at the same time.
I was in florida during the first few years after they instituted the FCATs. There were a lot of complaints that teachers would be "teaching to the test." and whatnot, but after the results came in it was clear than in some whole counties, they weren't even teaching to the test. How do you propose to discover and correct that?
I dunno, maybe you put a bunch of different kinds of open-ended puzzles in front of the subjects and count the number of solutions? (multiple solutions for one puzzle instead of a single solution for every puzzle shouldn't be just ignored if you're trying to test "creativity")
Or you could just let them play half-life games and count how many times they look up the solutions on the internet. But that's kind a domain-limited "creativity", there.
It's pretty easy to demand other people change their ways ways. Almost teenager-like, in fact. What has he done to change his ways to behave the way he should with respect to climate change?
Population density is only a good estimate of the typical distance between people if the density is homogenous. How are the people distributed in Kansas compared to Finland? If you're a telecom company, you want the number of subscribers per foot of earth dug to be as big as possible. Fiber doesn't cost anywhere near as much as easements.
Further, it's not fair to compare max available broadband in one country to typical available broadband in another country.
Yes, but the price is the result of the regulations and standards. Both are barriers to entry preventing newcomers from competing. That, and the fact that with those prices (35£ sounds like a lot to me for a radio, looking at the exchange rate, btw) they're still able to capture nearly a quarter of the market.
If they charged a fifth that, and got 100% of the market, they'd be making less money and have to manufacture four times as many units. Obviously, they're going to choose the optimum that seems like it works. Especially if it's actually working.
The solution (if you consider it to be an actual problem*), of course, is to open the standard. Assuming that the government either was involved in its development, or is inclined to get involved in the mess of eminent domain'ing the relevant patents and whatnot.
*I'm not sure digital radio is such a great idea anyway. Some kind of simple radio service that is ubiquitous is pretty beneficial for a nation to have, from a public safety point of view. If your citizens can rectify a signal with the simplest of equipment (in the extreme case of a powerful AM signal, you can do it with a long wire, a diode, and an 8-ohm earpiece), you're going to have that many more options for delivering information in the event of even the most extreme emergencies.
Geocities were for the people with half-vast passion. If you had real passion back in the day, you paid for hosting. It wasn't that expensive unless you wanted a domain, and even they weren't that expensive for the truly passionate.
Geocities had basically the same model as Facebook, except that facebook requires you to use their page-generator, which is linked to their account database instead of letting you put whatever the hell you wanted to up and appending an annoying javascript widget for banner ads.
Quit making me nostalgic for freakin' Geocities of all things.
Ironically, not too long ago Pepsi started selling "throwback," a sugar-sweetened version taking its flavoring cues from older incarnations of Pepsi, and you still didn't buy it.
That's actually a good point. Getting a page-flip animation to work in an eInk device like Nook would be impressive and I think maybe even novel enough for a patent. Getting it to work as described (flip follows finger) on Kindle would be even MORE impressive, as Kindle doesn't have the requisite touch screen....
Um.. actually you *can* shout "fire" in a crowded theater. Even if there's no fire, and you're not part of the show, etc.
The government is not allowed to make or enforce any laws to the contrary.
However, free speech does not absolve you of responsibility for the consequences of your actions. If you yell "fire" and everyone exits orderly and there are no injuries, you may be civilly liable for the price of their tickets, and if someone was injured or killed, you might have some criminal liability for that.
There aren't any secret hidden loopholes for government to assume authority over free speech under some kind of nebulous "but they obviously didn't mean x, where the speech could result in harm." The theater example is itself an example of things that can be and have been abused.
I didn't know it would be optional. I may have to revise my plans down from "never flying again" back up to "probably going to stop flying soon."
I'd still prefer to fly when I need to get somewhere in a hurry, but I can't afford to fly charter, netjets, or privately, and they keep pushing the the threshold of "flying gets you there faster" to greater and greater distances, with their mandatory "inconvenience stops" and random pre-gate delays.
Find a spot relatively far from sources of groundwater that people need and put it all in a pile there. Maybe cover it with some dirt to deal with the jaggies and keep it from oxidizing quickly.
To be fair, you can't do a full life-span study of *anything* in a time period shorter than a typical life-span, which means you'll forgo the benefits of things with few short-term side-effects for generations before releasing them to the general public if you demand to know all the long-term effects first.
There are other reasons people might prefer not to buy GM foods, specifically Monsanto's, than just health reasons. For instance, suppose you wanted to boycott monsanto over their aggressive IP enforcement of cross-polinated neighboring farms, how would you go about doing that?
Yes, well flying a hydrogen blimp full of people through a thunderstorm, and landing on a flat plane while dropping wet, electrolyte laden ropes probably isn't a good idea. We should consider not allowing that in the regulations.
Although an electrically conductive skin might not be a bad idea (to prevent building up a charge), it would be nice not to make it out of a material that can only aggravate any combustion.
The spectacular conflagration of Hindenberg merely highlights the design problems that would need to be solved in undertaking any future hydrogen airships. But just as a similar fiery spectacle in Souix City Iowa didn't mark the end of the age of airliners, neither should we be quick to reject airships over a single spectacular tragedy.
More importantly, however, there are more than just manned airships. In fact, most inflatable craft, even the manned ones, carry very few people at all.
We won't see the cost of all the venting of helium until it runs out, but then there will be a real human cost: helium is a critical component in medical imaging technologies, and its depletion will mean that people will have to go without lifesaving diagnoses and treatment.
If you can't make a safe airship with hydrogen, and you can't make it with the other elements that are more conservative, then the answer isn't to make a helium airship. The answer is to make no airship.
The real killer, though, is buckling. The only way you could have a vacuum airship is if you could manufacture a perfect sphere, didn't attach anything to it, and protected it from breezes and all other small forces that could trigger buckling.
But keep in mind, vacuum only has about 7% more lift by volume than STP hydrogen, so it's really not that big of an improvement for the design problems you have to solve.
This was another case where the industrial designers beat the engineers. The engineers wanted a proximity sensor that responded to faces. The industrial designers wanted a proximity detector that responded to beautiful, serene, or uncharacteristically creative faces... No problems were encountered during testing.
What the f is an "industrial designer"? and how is that different from any other kind of product designer?
Slashdot Mirror
The PDFs look an awful lot like they were made using a2ps....
Imperial is not quite the same as Standard. One difference, for instance, is that the gallons are bigger...
I've done it.
Dust can mean death, but the real enemy is complacency. If you get a few dives in you and you start to skip steps, that's where the dust (silt/clay, actually. Sandy bottoms aren't as big of a danger) cloud (blowout) can cause problems. or if you start doing it without the proper training (i.e. learning from everyone else's mistakes instead of repeating them. It's critical to learn from others' mistakes when a small mistake can be fatal.) you can achieve similar results.
Just stirring up silt shouldn't do anything worse than just end your dive (or in a popular cave, piss off other divers who will also have to end their dives early....) - you follow the line you'd been laying back out of the cave. A lot of the training is training yourself to be comfortable in disorienting black-out conditions, so you make the right choices.
The problem is that familiarity breeds contempt. It starts out with you not drilling out-of-air emergencies on the surface before every dive, and before you know it you're tying your cave line further and further in instead of starting it in open water every time. You're swimming across gaps without laying line because you didn't bring enough gap reels and you think you're familiar with this part of the cave.
Then you start using gear that has no business being in a cave: scooters and rebreathers. Both of which can get you further into the cave than have any business being, when complacency causes you to fail to lay the groundwork for your escape in the event of an equipment failure.
Anyway, my point is that you don't have to be that crazy to dive caves, especially if you don't go that far in, and stick to well-explored areas. but you do have to be vigilant about maintaining both your gear and proficiency. And the reward? You'll have to try it and find out.
Third grade? Yeah, there ought to be a lot of memorization going on in third grade. You need to have built a foundation of facts before you can be lead to conclusions connecting them. Third grade is your solid rock of foundation, of course you're going to need to memorize a lot of things. That's not the only thing that should be going on, but I doubt that even in your daughter's school that it is the case that that's all they're doing.
I can almost guarantee, however, that there is nothing in the testing criterion or curriculum guidelines that suggests simply memorizing the things that are going to be on the test. That's a conclusion come to by some of the teachers, or some group that ostensibly represents and aids the teachers in performing their duties. I can think of no other reason to sabotage both the test itself and the children's education at the same time.
I was in florida during the first few years after they instituted the FCATs. There were a lot of complaints that teachers would be "teaching to the test." and whatnot, but after the results came in it was clear than in some whole counties, they weren't even teaching to the test. How do you propose to discover and correct that?
I dunno, maybe you put a bunch of different kinds of open-ended puzzles in front of the subjects and count the number of solutions? (multiple solutions for one puzzle instead of a single solution for every puzzle shouldn't be just ignored if you're trying to test "creativity")
Or you could just let them play half-life games and count how many times they look up the solutions on the internet. But that's kind a domain-limited "creativity", there.
It's pretty easy to demand other people change their ways ways. Almost teenager-like, in fact. What has he done to change his ways to behave the way he should with respect to climate change?
**double-hint: Nyquist had some things to say about your "hint."
Population density is only a good estimate of the typical distance between people if the density is homogenous. How are the people distributed in Kansas compared to Finland? If you're a telecom company, you want the number of subscribers per foot of earth dug to be as big as possible. Fiber doesn't cost anywhere near as much as easements.
Further, it's not fair to compare max available broadband in one country to typical available broadband in another country.
GSM was, in nearly every way, inferior to CDMA, so I'm not sure you're making the point you intended to make there.
Yes, but the price is the result of the regulations and standards. Both are barriers to entry preventing newcomers from competing. That, and the fact that with those prices (35£ sounds like a lot to me for a radio, looking at the exchange rate, btw) they're still able to capture nearly a quarter of the market.
If they charged a fifth that, and got 100% of the market, they'd be making less money and have to manufacture four times as many units. Obviously, they're going to choose the optimum that seems like it works. Especially if it's actually working.
The solution (if you consider it to be an actual problem*), of course, is to open the standard. Assuming that the government either was involved in its development, or is inclined to get involved in the mess of eminent domain'ing the relevant patents and whatnot.
*I'm not sure digital radio is such a great idea anyway. Some kind of simple radio service that is ubiquitous is pretty beneficial for a nation to have, from a public safety point of view. If your citizens can rectify a signal with the simplest of equipment (in the extreme case of a powerful AM signal, you can do it with a long wire, a diode, and an 8-ohm earpiece), you're going to have that many more options for delivering information in the event of even the most extreme emergencies.
Geocities were for the people with half-vast passion. If you had real passion back in the day, you paid for hosting. It wasn't that expensive unless you wanted a domain, and even they weren't that expensive for the truly passionate.
Geocities had basically the same model as Facebook, except that facebook requires you to use their page-generator, which is linked to their account database instead of letting you put whatever the hell you wanted to up and appending an annoying javascript widget for banner ads.
Quit making me nostalgic for freakin' Geocities of all things.
Ironically, not too long ago Pepsi started selling "throwback," a sugar-sweetened version taking its flavoring cues from older incarnations of Pepsi, and you still didn't buy it.
That's actually a good point. Getting a page-flip animation to work in an eInk device like Nook would be impressive and I think maybe even novel enough for a patent. Getting it to work as described (flip follows finger) on Kindle would be even MORE impressive, as Kindle doesn't have the requisite touch screen....
Won't somebody think of the postman!
C'mon, I watched Waterworld. Isn't that enough?
Um.. actually you *can* shout "fire" in a crowded theater. Even if there's no fire, and you're not part of the show, etc.
The government is not allowed to make or enforce any laws to the contrary.
However, free speech does not absolve you of responsibility for the consequences of your actions. If you yell "fire" and everyone exits orderly and there are no injuries, you may be civilly liable for the price of their tickets, and if someone was injured or killed, you might have some criminal liability for that.
There aren't any secret hidden loopholes for government to assume authority over free speech under some kind of nebulous "but they obviously didn't mean x, where the speech could result in harm." The theater example is itself an example of things that can be and have been abused.
It's optional?
I didn't know it would be optional. I may have to revise my plans down from "never flying again" back up to "probably going to stop flying soon."
I'd still prefer to fly when I need to get somewhere in a hurry, but I can't afford to fly charter, netjets, or privately, and they keep pushing the the threshold of "flying gets you there faster" to greater and greater distances, with their mandatory "inconvenience stops" and random pre-gate delays.
Perhaps Cisco's purchase of linksys was more like HP's "purchase" of compaq...
Find a spot relatively far from sources of groundwater that people need and put it all in a pile there. Maybe cover it with some dirt to deal with the jaggies and keep it from oxidizing quickly.
I'm sure that there's a name for this.
To be fair, you can't do a full life-span study of *anything* in a time period shorter than a typical life-span, which means you'll forgo the benefits of things with few short-term side-effects for generations before releasing them to the general public if you demand to know all the long-term effects first.
I saw a product labeled "carb free pasta" at the market the other day, and couldn't help but wonder, what's in it?!
People will eat anything if you call it a {thing x}-free version of something they like.
There are other reasons people might prefer not to buy GM foods, specifically Monsanto's, than just health reasons. For instance, suppose you wanted to boycott monsanto over their aggressive IP enforcement of cross-polinated neighboring farms, how would you go about doing that?
Yes, well flying a hydrogen blimp full of people through a thunderstorm, and landing on a flat plane while dropping wet, electrolyte laden ropes probably isn't a good idea. We should consider not allowing that in the regulations.
Although an electrically conductive skin might not be a bad idea (to prevent building up a charge), it would be nice not to make it out of a material that can only aggravate any combustion.
The spectacular conflagration of Hindenberg merely highlights the design problems that would need to be solved in undertaking any future hydrogen airships. But just as a similar fiery spectacle in Souix City Iowa didn't mark the end of the age of airliners, neither should we be quick to reject airships over a single spectacular tragedy.
More importantly, however, there are more than just manned airships. In fact, most inflatable craft, even the manned ones, carry very few people at all.
We won't see the cost of all the venting of helium until it runs out, but then there will be a real human cost: helium is a critical component in medical imaging technologies, and its depletion will mean that people will have to go without lifesaving diagnoses and treatment.
If you can't make a safe airship with hydrogen, and you can't make it with the other elements that are more conservative, then the answer isn't to make a helium airship. The answer is to make no airship.
Two words my friend: Hoop stress.
The real killer, though, is buckling. The only way you could have a vacuum airship is if you could manufacture a perfect sphere, didn't attach anything to it, and protected it from breezes and all other small forces that could trigger buckling.
But keep in mind, vacuum only has about 7% more lift by volume than STP hydrogen, so it's really not that big of an improvement for the design problems you have to solve.
The odds are 1:166.
Actually, they're better than that, because you can rule out 0000, 9999, and a bunch of other patterns that the banks will reject in your pin choice.
Presuming you've got a back that still uses four-digit PINs....
This was another case where the industrial designers beat the engineers. The engineers wanted a proximity sensor that responded to faces. The industrial designers wanted a proximity detector that responded to beautiful, serene, or uncharacteristically creative faces... No problems were encountered during testing.
What the f is an "industrial designer"? and how is that different from any other kind of product designer?