They don't appear to be claiming that they have a biological process that can change the half-life of a Plutonium atom by eating it in a clever way, though the headline-writer may have thought that.
The headline writer did think that, and by failing to correct that(probably obvious) misconception these researchers are effectively claiming just that.
This might sound unfair, but it's really very simple. If a reporter comes to ask you about your research, and comes away printing something totally inaccurate or just completely wrong then that is your fault. You invited them in, you gave them the rope, showed them how to knot it. Why should you complain when they inevitably hang themselves and you in the process.
Researchers should either write their own press releases or else not bother talking to the press at all. In fact, I recommend the latter. Most research is too technical to have a hope of garnering media attention with "embellishing" it, and once you start doing that you've stopped doing honest research and have moved on to dishonest peddling. You've stopped dealing in the facts and have moved on to anti-facts.
Once, once again, this is all in Feynman's Cargo Cult Science speech. Here's the passage relevant to our discussion
I'm talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you are maybe wrong, that you ought to have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen.
For example, I was a little surprised when I was talking to a friend who was going to go on the radio. He does work on cosmology and astronomy, and he wondered how he would explain what the applications of this work were. "Well," I said, "there aren't any." He said, "Yes, but then we won't get support for more research of this kind." I think that's kind of dishonest. If you're representing yourself as a scientist, then you should explain to the layman what you're doing--and if they don't want to support you under those circumstances, then that's their decision.
This speech is 35 years old. When are people going to start paying attention to it?
Banks in Ireland usually troll university campuses in Ireland during the first weeks of the term, looking to reel in a good few first year students. They typically offer all kinds of sweeteners to go with their account; mobile phone credit, tickets, often cold hard cash. Ulster Bank are particularly keen to attract students, as they're looking to expand their position relative to the larger banks; Bank of Ireland and Allied Irish Bank.
People may think Ireland is a conservative country, but the Celtic Tiger years have changed the culture enough that Ulster Bank/Student's Union were probably pretty confident in pulling this off. Student culture here is fairly permissive in Ireland (people can drink at 18), due in combination to old Irish attitude to craic and also significantly to the influence of English red tops and their "Lad/Ladette culture".
I would be confident of two things. 1) This stunt was conceived and delivered by someone in the DIT Student's union looking to get re-elected. 2) Someone in Ulster Bank management was well aware of the nature of the scheme.
Guard: What was that noise!? Guard walks over to investigate box. A large floating question mark appears over his head. Guard: Just a box... Guard walks off, resuming former patrol.
Recently upgraded my motherboard to a new Gigabyte model which had on board HDMI and other audio for HDCP viewing. Needless to say, the standard ALSA packages for Ubuntu failed rather miserably to work. After several days of fighting with connectors, config files, reboots, re-installations and silent refusal to work, I only managed to get sound working by compiling ALSA from source. Of course, this now means that ALSA must be recompiled every time I upgrade the kernel. And I honestly can't hear any difference between the older OSS drivers and the ALSA ones.
Having to compile from source constitutes a major failure of any general purpose FOSS software.
OK, I'm appreciative of the fact that hardware manufacturers are a major problem in this area, as they have refused utterly to either release drivers or specs. However, the same concerns applied to monitors, network cards and graphics cards only a few years ago, yet these problems are largely behind us. There is one remaining important question here; Would these problems still exist if we had stuck with OSS? If the answer is no, then the move to ALSA has been a dreadful mistake.
Uhhh, no. These people are terrorists. If the government intercepts their plans for unleashing terroristic terror, then I think it's a fair conclusion that those intercepted plans are valid reason to grant a warrant to search for the plans. I mean if you know they're planning, then why shouldn't you be able prove it?!!?
I mean, how else would you know they were planning anything? You can't just walk up and ask them. They'd lie about it!! And now because of all those whiny liberals, you can't even so much pour water over their head while holding a towel over their mouth to make them stop lying. It's insane. Sooner or later, somebody is going to argue that these guys should have the same rights as the rest of us. I mean, God, they're terrorists people!
Who care about nonsense like human rights when freedom is on the line!?
The PS2 ultimately went on to produce titles like Final Fantasy X and Metal Gear Solid 3 which, while not of Toy Story graphical quality, did nonetheless show a significant improvement in graphical capability when compared to Dreamcast titles like Shenmue. Having said that, Dreamcast titles seem to have aged well graphically compared to other consoles.
In my opinion, what ultimately sunk the Dreamcast was a lack of system selling titles. While titles like Sonic Adventure, Shenmue, Soul Calibur and Phastasy Star Online were groundbreaking and excellent games, none had the neccessary combination of wide appeal, depth of gameplay and longevity seen in system sellers like Super Mario World, Metal Gear Solid, or the Halo and Gears of War franchises. The Dreamcast never found its way out of its niche and into a wider audience. You need system sellers to sell systems, which attracts developers to make games for your console, which in turn attracts a wider audience, and so on. The SNES and PS2 epitomise this method, but these consoles had system selling games like Super Mario World, A Link to the Past, Metal Gear Solid 2 and Final Fantasy X. Moreover, these consoles kept bringing out such titles well into their runs, e.g. Super Metroid or God of War 2.
The Dreamcasts best titles were good, don't get me wrong. Very good. Some of them were groundbreaking, unique and timeless titles. But they were all ultimately too narrow in their, albeit ambitious, scope to attract the number of players needed to bring the console out ahead. The Dreamcast's ultimate downfall was its great ambition. In trying to fulfil all it promised, the console and its developers often overreached their aim and failed to land a knockout punch.
I touch type and always have. I reckon going over 40wpm is extremely doable with just "hunt-and-pecking". Up to 80? Perhaps not, but you can still type pretty fast.
However, I think it's worth noting that I never really, ever have call to type at that speed. Writing is not something that people should simply allow to pour out of their heads onto paper or anything else. Writing, good writing, is a slow and considered process, where every word and syllable should be carefully scrutinised and assessed before being set down. You won't be able to do that at 80wpm. That speed is reserved for people copying text or typing dictation.
No, for concentration. He was able to keep his mind off the distraction for 29 years. Sure, it probably played havoc with his social development, but danm, that was impressive.
Cultural imperialism sounds really impressive. But you want to know what it's really about? Change. It's one group choosing to merge with another group in order to achieve some benefit.
Spoken like a true American! Pity about that last clause though, you've given the game away it seems.
I live in a western country that is not America, or anywhere near it. Specifically Ireland. It is really quite shocking just how much of the media, culture and politics here revolves around what America value, not what Irish people value. Probably three quarters of all television here is directly, directly syndicated from the US. Those that aren't are virtually direct copies. American advertisers don't even bother to so much a dub over their US ads anymore.
All pop music, retro music, niche, fucking music in general either is made in the US, or is a direct imitation fo what comes out of it. Radio DJs actually put on American accents. At this point, so do many Irish people. They call it a "Mid Atlantic accent". It used to grate on me, back in the 90s, but by now I find it hard to notice. People have changed the way they speak.
When a bus turns over in the middle of Nowhere, Nebraska, thanks to the AP feeds, it's on the Irish 6 O'Clock news. I'm not joking. This actually happened. That's just the flagrant stuff. Half our news time is spent on happenings in the states, and how many babies President Obama kissed today. If there's a whiteout in New York, it's getting first billing whether or not the Irish government is about to fall.
Our laws and customs are not unaffected. Any inanity or insanity in US laws and law enforcement brought about on by American attitudes towards commerce, regulation sex, drugs and "immorality" of all kinds, will eventually get implemented in Ireland as art of a "modernisation" of the Irish legal system. There's a buffer on this on in the form of England, as Ireland usually follows the English tack. But even the English are creaking under the cultural weight of millions of hours of US TV, and radio, and CDs and films, and town hall shouting matches. The backwards laws and systems being imported from the US are frankly what bothers me the most about US cultural imperialism. Even most Americans see the need for reform in these, so why the hell are we importing them?
There are not a few Irish people would not, object to the act of, as you put it, "choosing to merge with another group", i.e. the US. The thought of this terrifies me. Not just the the thought of being made a part of a country that, from an outside perspective, looks like a complete madhouse. No. It's the thought that a lot of people here would either not mind too much or would actually embrace the move. They would consider it "cool" for Ireland to be the 51st US state.
Carefully consider the magnitude of this. The US is to be fair, not even trying to implement cultural imperialism. Yet still the influences of its economic, commercial and cultural institutions is powerful enough to literally win over the minds of citizens of other countries. I don't mean to suggest that all Irish people are queuing up to be US citizens, but many of them do view the concept of "American" as synonymous with "modernisation" and "progress", and consequently, "non-American" with "backwardness". Many Dubliners an other Irish urbanites look on old Irish traditions and culture with disdain, yet will happily listen to rock and roll or jazz music, treat or treat on Halloween, or watch Hollywood films made over 60 years ago. Did you know that one of the wealthiest new social classes to rise in Ireland during the last boom were landlords. Landlords!?! Sometimes I think the last 15 years have transported me through a porthole into some parallel dimension.
Cultural Imperialism doesn't just sound impressive. It is impressive. I've seen its power first hand. America doesn't even have an equivalent to the British Council, and yet it can achieve all this, not only in English speaking countri
This study is completely bogus. Take a look at the Call of Duty video. They begin counting the frames when the first of the trigger LEDs lights, but the third trigger does not light until their frame count reaches 3. The gun fires at the 7^th frame. Is this a valid test? Are you telling me that the Call of Duty will fire your gun the second the trigger button is even slightly depressed? Moreover, by their own admission, the study did not take into account the delay induced by the monitor itself, which they haven't even bother to measure. What's the real delay here? 7 frames? 5 frames? 3 Frames?
I play both PC and console games and I have never once in my life ever been affected by this supposedly "crippling" lag. This is coming from someone who has passed the "Final Exam" in Bionic Commando: Rearmed, twice, with one of these supposedly slow controllers. If you've got a better test of twitch, I'd like to see it. I notice latency problems on every PC game I have ever owned. They occur when the system begins crunching and I lack the $2000 neccessary to speed things up. That's the only input lag I know of. However, never in either console or PC games have I ever had complaint with the latency between button press and resulting action in a smoothly running game. Ever.
As it stands, this study has absolutely no controls. Are there any games at all that suffer from noticeably less lag than the ones presented? I for one would be delighted, absolutely delighted, to see a comparable study carried out with PC games. The study would be best run by comparing input methods of PS/2 and USB keyboards, as well as with USB controllers, and indeed blue-tooth controllers. I think it would be a very educational experience for all involved.
The last time I checked History was considered an Arts and Humanities subject.
A lot of Historians might well agree with you. But I disagree on this point.
Modern history is a science. Or at least, it is more a science than an art. Historians may have hypotheses, but they must search for sources, categoring them according to primary and secondary, etc, in order to provide "evidence" for their theories. History is backed up by archaeological evidence, and archaeologists are most definitely scientific in their methods. For falsifiability fetishists, any historical theory can be disproved with the right evidence. While that may be hard to find, everything in history is in principle falsifiable.
As technology has improved, it has found its way more and more into historical studies. Things like X-ray scans, etc, used to find erased documents in old parchments. Things like putting the index of soldiers in the hundred years war in a database.
History is a science, or at least, it is scientific in its methods. It's a worthwhile inclusion into an education.
The subjects I was speaking of; things like art studies, poetry, philosophy, music, civics, etc, may all be worthwhile subjects, but they don't constitute an education. They constitute a pastime.
Who do you think is going to be a better engineer someday?
Child B. Child B without a shadow of a doubt.
I'm sorry to burst the bubbles of all the school reformists around here, but the simple fact is learning anything, and learning it well, requires a certain amount of effort, work and indeed hard slogging. While I agree that school should not be a monotonous, pointless drudge, at some point in education student are going to be required to sit down at their desks and drill something difficult into their heads.
Do you know what happens when you let children run around, be inquisitive, ask questions, appreciate concepts, and open doors of wonderment in every topic? You get Arts students. Arts and Humanities students who know how to appreciate everything and know how to do absolutely nothing. People who can master the art of appearing intelligent whilst remaining shockingly ignorant. People whose ideas and tastes and practices are simply imitations of something that was actually original.
When you sit a child down, get them to learn their times tables; learn how to spell and write; learn how to add, subtract, multiply and divide; learn how to solve algebraic equations; learn the periodic table; learn the organs of the body; learn the continents and countries of the world; learn the history of their own country; learn the planets of the solar system; and nowadays learn the principles and usage of computers, you will have given that child the tools they need to build a life worth living. A life that they spend bettering themselves and their society.
I was as bored as anyone in school. Sleepy too. But, reluctant as I was, I learned my lessons and I know full well that if I had been left to sit at home with entire library of books and no one to watch me I would probably have spent the whole day playing video games. Maybe my education could have been faster, better and more comprehensive, but only if my society wanted to spend more on it. But no matter how magnificent my experience could have been, I could not know all that I do today without those mind-numbingly painful drills and lessons and test and reviews.
Learning is fun. But it's also pretty hard. And a wide curriculum means a better chance of everyone finding something they are good at. Combined, this means that most children will be bored at some stage during the school day. But it also means there's a good chance they'll learn something each day too, or learn how to do it better.
It's interesting in the context of this discussion that Tolkien's Palentir were more than just viewing devices. They could also be used to communicate with other stones, and I think for other purposes. Anyway, when one of the stones fell into evil hands, the Dark Lord was able to use his power over it to control anyone foolish enough to try and use one of the remaining stones.
circletimessquare's original post is perhaps one of the most insightful posts in this thread. It is in fact, and insightful comment on magnetic monopoles in general. The post reveals a true understanding of the magnetic monopole "problem", and a much firmer grasp of the topic than that displayed by the authors of these papers.
Magnetic dipoles are not like electric charges. They do not result from particles of non zero charge separating from one another. The difference is best understood by examination of the electron; an elementary particle.
Electrons have static charge. They are electrostatic monopoles in every sense of the word. But they also possess magnetic moment. A magnetic dipole moment, a vector quantity with both magnitude and direction. It is from this direction that designations like north and south pole come from, not from some imaged pair of opposite magnetic charges that reside somehow displaced from one another, within the point particle of the electron.
circletimessquare is correct. There is no such thing as a magnetic monopole, just as there is no such thing as a unit vector without a direction. A pity some moderators around here cannot take their heads off sensational headlines and summaries or out of their pulp science fiction novels long enough to recognise good sense when they see it.
All together, the evidence for magnetic monopoles "is now overwhelming", says Steve Bramwell, a materials scientist at University College London and author on one of the Science papers and one of the arXiv papers....
Even without directly seeing one, Bramwell says that he is certain that the monopoles are there. "I don't think anybody could question it after this flurry of papers," he says.
This mentality is a good example of what Joel Spolsky calls fire and motion. You just keep moving, keep publishing, keep innovating, and your opponent is so busy trying to catch up or deal with your earlier work that you gain huge momentum. Sometimes unstoppable momentum. People just can't deal with the information overload.
When the crystals are chilled to near absolute zero, they seem to fill with tiny single points of north and south. The points are less than a nanometre apart, and cannot be measured directly. Nevertheless, Morris and other physicists believe they are there.
For 30 years, physicists have believed that the universe is made up of tiny vibrating dimensional strings which only they are clever enough to understand. A fine idea, except it turns out not even they are clever enough after all. Nevertheless, they persist in this belief because the mathematics is beautiful. Likewise, many physicists persist in their belief in magnetic monopoles because the concept is beautiful, or some other such rubbish. Look! It even makes Maxwell's equations symmetric. So what? What's so important about having symmetric equations. Unsymmetrical ones are so much more interesting!
There's only one arbiter in physics, and science in general. It isn't a "flurry of papers". It isn't "beauty" or "symmetry" or "elegance" or "coolness". It isn't how many people agree with your viewpoint. It isn't how many journalists you can get to print words like "overwhealming evidence" in headlines. It isn't how much "supporting (online) material" you can find to back you.
The one, only, and final arbiter is the experiment. An honest to gods experiment. It finds things. It separates truth from fiction. You can try to twist the meaning of the result this way and that, throw back the grenade and carry on with your fire and motion, but in the end the results of all those experiments will finally weigh down your dishonesty and halt your advance.
There are no magnetic monopoles. You can try to separate north and south pole. You can even construct models of "magnetic charge" and dipoles if you like. But in the end, you can't get a north pole without having a corresponding south pole, very, very close by.
Modern science, and worst of all physics, is in a deplorable state. Cargo cult scientists,frauds, charlatans, fakes, and deluded true believers(Yes I'm serious about that last link) have saturated certainly the media circuit, but I fear many physics departments as well. Sensationalism and media attention are now as never before, deciding what the "consensus"* in science should be. It's disheartening to see the world lose its faith in the method of observation, hypothesis, experiment and above all skepticism that has served it so well for so many centuries.
P.S. *Before the cranks jump in; No, I do not in fact, doubt the reality of anthropogenic climate change.
Yes it does!! Hate speech is spoken by racists, and sexists, and homophobes, and bigots, and all those other people I don't like.
They are nasty people. Everybody knows it. They say such mean things and hurt people's feelings and make people upset, and they just want to make more people nasty like them! People are vulnerable to what they say; they could be brainwashed!! People need protection from these kinds of bad influences!
It's just like child molesters. You wouldn't let them speak freely would you?! Nobody would! These people are wrong, just so wrong. No one has the right to be so wrong! So they shouldn't be allowed to speak or enjoy the freedoms the rest of us do.
What ever happened to quality? What ever happened to people, and companies, recognising that lower cost came at the expense of higher quality? What ever happened to production and purchasing being an optimisation problem with price, quality, speed and other factors thrown into the mix?
All I see nowadays is price, price, price. Price is everything. All encompassing, all considering and the sole and only consideration in nigh every walk of life. Companies are gouging their businesses in order to save pennies whilst their products stagnate or regress. Consumers care not for long term value or even short term utility as price is the first and last arbiter in their purchase decisions.
ISPs in the US seek to redefine broadband because they want their packages to be treated like commodities; like wheat and coffee beans. You don't care where the bean comes from, they're all the same. So you buy the cheapest one. If all internet connection packages are "broadband", can you guess what people are going to do? ISPs aren't the only industry that wants to do this, or indeed that is doing it.
Is anyone nowadays interesting in something more than getting, or providing, the cheapest deal. Is there room left nowadays for an ISP that seeks to provide the fastest and widest piplines for people that are willing to pay that much extra. I know I would be. But is that how our society works anymore? Did it ever work like that? Is there simply no room for companies that don't cater to misers? Should we really be blaming the ISPs here, or should we be blaming ourselves?
If Google or Apple but their tabs in a rotating circular drum surrounding the window, you can be certain that Open Source developers would follow swiftly behind. It's disappointing to see it confirmed that Open source will never, ever have the confidence to put forth its own designs, paradigms or new innovations directly in front of users unless a glitz and glamour company has broken the mould first. The worst part is how eagerly FOSS developers ape the latest trend. A little dignity would be a lot more digestible.
By contrast, Microsoft would simply wait to see what Apple did in their next revision before implementing what was kept.
To the topic at hand, Tabs on top are an atrocious development, unfit for human consumption. They are the product of people who spend too much of their time using flashy, UI paradigm-less monstrosities like Winamp skins, Flash site and those awful OSX floating widget things, not to mention that ridiculous top bar. Inclusing that was the worst decision GNOME has ever made. Most normal people on the other hand expect applications and button that stay within their window box, that don't warp or distort when your mouse draws near, and that don't look like they just had a full body wax job done. There was very little wrong with the 1997-era user interface.
I curse the Cult of Mac and what it has wrought on my UI's over the last 10 years. I'm hoping the Order of Google will not cast its baleful eye towards what little sanity remains in modern day GUIs.
....And the horse you rode in on. I have a widescreen monitor an in a few years so will everyone else. My three rows of 100+ tabs are, frankly, optimally placed in Firefox 3.0
Punishment prior to conviction has become all too common, it's only one tactic in an unscroupulous prosecutor's bag of tricks.
That's what you get when state prosecutes are chosen at the whim of the vindictive masses instead of by careful selection based on merit and principle.
Slashdot Mirror
The headline writer did think that, and by failing to correct that(probably obvious) misconception these researchers are effectively claiming just that.
This might sound unfair, but it's really very simple. If a reporter comes to ask you about your research, and comes away printing something totally inaccurate or just completely wrong then that is your fault. You invited them in, you gave them the rope, showed them how to knot it. Why should you complain when they inevitably hang themselves and you in the process.
Researchers should either write their own press releases or else not bother talking to the press at all. In fact, I recommend the latter. Most research is too technical to have a hope of garnering media attention with "embellishing" it, and once you start doing that you've stopped doing honest research and have moved on to dishonest peddling. You've stopped dealing in the facts and have moved on to anti-facts.
Once, once again, this is all in Feynman's Cargo Cult Science speech. Here's the passage relevant to our discussion
This speech is 35 years old. When are people going to start paying attention to it?
Banks in Ireland usually troll university campuses in Ireland during the first weeks of the term, looking to reel in a good few first year students. They typically offer all kinds of sweeteners to go with their account; mobile phone credit, tickets, often cold hard cash. Ulster Bank are particularly keen to attract students, as they're looking to expand their position relative to the larger banks; Bank of Ireland and Allied Irish Bank.
People may think Ireland is a conservative country, but the Celtic Tiger years have changed the culture enough that Ulster Bank/Student's Union were probably pretty confident in pulling this off. Student culture here is fairly permissive in Ireland (people can drink at 18), due in combination to old Irish attitude to craic and also significantly to the influence of English red tops and their "Lad/Ladette culture".
I would be confident of two things. 1) This stunt was conceived and delivered by someone in the DIT Student's union looking to get re-elected.
2) Someone in Ulster Bank management was well aware of the nature of the scheme.
Guard: What was that noise!?
Guard walks over to investigate box. A large floating question mark appears over his head.
Guard: Just a box...
Guard walks off, resuming former patrol.
Direct2D? Hmmmm... sounds interesting. ...google.....google....
Ahh Geez, not this shit again.
Recently upgraded my motherboard to a new Gigabyte model which had on board HDMI and other audio for HDCP viewing. Needless to say, the standard ALSA packages for Ubuntu failed rather miserably to work. After several days of fighting with connectors, config files, reboots, re-installations and silent refusal to work, I only managed to get sound working by compiling ALSA from source. Of course, this now means that ALSA must be recompiled every time I upgrade the kernel. And I honestly can't hear any difference between the older OSS drivers and the ALSA ones.
Having to compile from source constitutes a major failure of any general purpose FOSS software.
OK, I'm appreciative of the fact that hardware manufacturers are a major problem in this area, as they have refused utterly to either release drivers or specs. However, the same concerns applied to monitors, network cards and graphics cards only a few years ago, yet these problems are largely behind us. There is one remaining important question here; Would these problems still exist if we had stuck with OSS? If the answer is no, then the move to ALSA has been a dreadful mistake.
Uhhh, no. These people are terrorists. If the government intercepts their plans for unleashing terroristic terror, then I think it's a fair conclusion that those intercepted plans are valid reason to grant a warrant to search for the plans. I mean if you know they're planning, then why shouldn't you be able prove it?!!?
I mean, how else would you know they were planning anything? You can't just walk up and ask them. They'd lie about it!! And now because of all those whiny liberals, you can't even so much pour water over their head while holding a towel over their mouth to make them stop lying. It's insane. Sooner or later, somebody is going to argue that these guys should have the same rights as the rest of us. I mean, God, they're terrorists people!
Who care about nonsense like human rights when freedom is on the line!?
The PS2 ultimately went on to produce titles like Final Fantasy X and Metal Gear Solid 3 which, while not of Toy Story graphical quality, did nonetheless show a significant improvement in graphical capability when compared to Dreamcast titles like Shenmue. Having said that, Dreamcast titles seem to have aged well graphically compared to other consoles.
In my opinion, what ultimately sunk the Dreamcast was a lack of system selling titles. While titles like Sonic Adventure, Shenmue, Soul Calibur and Phastasy Star Online were groundbreaking and excellent games, none had the neccessary combination of wide appeal, depth of gameplay and longevity seen in system sellers like Super Mario World, Metal Gear Solid, or the Halo and Gears of War franchises. The Dreamcast never found its way out of its niche and into a wider audience. You need system sellers to sell systems, which attracts developers to make games for your console, which in turn attracts a wider audience, and so on. The SNES and PS2 epitomise this method, but these consoles had system selling games like Super Mario World, A Link to the Past, Metal Gear Solid 2 and Final Fantasy X. Moreover, these consoles kept bringing out such titles well into their runs, e.g. Super Metroid or God of War 2.
The Dreamcasts best titles were good, don't get me wrong. Very good. Some of them were groundbreaking, unique and timeless titles. But they were all ultimately too narrow in their, albeit ambitious, scope to attract the number of players needed to bring the console out ahead. The Dreamcast's ultimate downfall was its great ambition. In trying to fulfil all it promised, the console and its developers often overreached their aim and failed to land a knockout punch.
I touch type and always have. I reckon going over 40wpm is extremely doable with just "hunt-and-pecking". Up to 80? Perhaps not, but you can still type pretty fast.
However, I think it's worth noting that I never really, ever have call to type at that speed. Writing is not something that people should simply allow to pour out of their heads onto paper or anything else. Writing, good writing, is a slow and considered process, where every word and syllable should be carefully scrutinised and assessed before being set down. You won't be able to do that at 80wpm. That speed is reserved for people copying text or typing dictation.
No, for concentration. He was able to keep his mind off the distraction for 29 years. Sure, it probably played havoc with his social development, but danm, that was impressive.
Spoken like a true American! Pity about that last clause though, you've given the game away it seems.
I live in a western country that is not America, or anywhere near it. Specifically Ireland. It is really quite shocking just how much of the media, culture and politics here revolves around what America value, not what Irish people value. Probably three quarters of all television here is directly, directly syndicated from the US. Those that aren't are virtually direct copies. American advertisers don't even bother to so much a dub over their US ads anymore.
All pop music, retro music, niche, fucking music in general either is made in the US, or is a direct imitation fo what comes out of it. Radio DJs actually put on American accents. At this point, so do many Irish people. They call it a "Mid Atlantic accent". It used to grate on me, back in the 90s, but by now I find it hard to notice. People have changed the way they speak.
When a bus turns over in the middle of Nowhere, Nebraska, thanks to the AP feeds, it's on the Irish 6 O'Clock news. I'm not joking. This actually happened. That's just the flagrant stuff. Half our news time is spent on happenings in the states, and how many babies President Obama kissed today. If there's a whiteout in New York, it's getting first billing whether or not the Irish government is about to fall.
Our laws and customs are not unaffected. Any inanity or insanity in US laws and law enforcement brought about on by American attitudes towards commerce, regulation sex, drugs and "immorality" of all kinds, will eventually get implemented in Ireland as art of a "modernisation" of the Irish legal system. There's a buffer on this on in the form of England, as Ireland usually follows the English tack. But even the English are creaking under the cultural weight of millions of hours of US TV, and radio, and CDs and films, and town hall shouting matches. The backwards laws and systems being imported from the US are frankly what bothers me the most about US cultural imperialism. Even most Americans see the need for reform in these, so why the hell are we importing them?
There are not a few Irish people would not, object to the act of, as you put it, "choosing to merge with another group", i.e. the US. The thought of this terrifies me. Not just the the thought of being made a part of a country that, from an outside perspective, looks like a complete madhouse. No. It's the thought that a lot of people here would either not mind too much or would actually embrace the move. They would consider it "cool" for Ireland to be the 51st US state.
Carefully consider the magnitude of this. The US is to be fair, not even trying to implement cultural imperialism. Yet still the influences of its economic, commercial and cultural institutions is powerful enough to literally win over the minds of citizens of other countries. I don't mean to suggest that all Irish people are queuing up to be US citizens, but many of them do view the concept of "American" as synonymous with "modernisation" and "progress", and consequently, "non-American" with "backwardness". Many Dubliners an other Irish urbanites look on old Irish traditions and culture with disdain, yet will happily listen to rock and roll or jazz music, treat or treat on Halloween, or watch Hollywood films made over 60 years ago. Did you know that one of the wealthiest new social classes to rise in Ireland during the last boom were landlords. Landlords!?! Sometimes I think the last 15 years have transported me through a porthole into some parallel dimension.
Cultural Imperialism doesn't just sound impressive. It is impressive. I've seen its power first hand. America doesn't even have an equivalent to the British Council, and yet it can achieve all this, not only in English speaking countri
Indeed. The GGP measured in at over 80 deci-snarks!
This study is completely bogus. Take a look at the Call of Duty video. They begin counting the frames when the first of the trigger LEDs lights, but the third trigger does not light until their frame count reaches 3. The gun fires at the 7^th frame. Is this a valid test? Are you telling me that the Call of Duty will fire your gun the second the trigger button is even slightly depressed? Moreover, by their own admission, the study did not take into account the delay induced by the monitor itself, which they haven't even bother to measure. What's the real delay here? 7 frames? 5 frames? 3 Frames?
I play both PC and console games and I have never once in my life ever been affected by this supposedly "crippling" lag. This is coming from someone who has passed the "Final Exam" in Bionic Commando: Rearmed, twice, with one of these supposedly slow controllers. If you've got a better test of twitch, I'd like to see it. I notice latency problems on every PC game I have ever owned. They occur when the system begins crunching and I lack the $2000 neccessary to speed things up. That's the only input lag I know of. However, never in either console or PC games have I ever had complaint with the latency between button press and resulting action in a smoothly running game. Ever.
As it stands, this study has absolutely no controls. Are there any games at all that suffer from noticeably less lag than the ones presented? I for one would be delighted, absolutely delighted, to see a comparable study carried out with PC games. The study would be best run by comparing input methods of PS/2 and USB keyboards, as well as with USB controllers, and indeed blue-tooth controllers. I think it would be a very educational experience for all involved.
A lot of Historians might well agree with you. But I disagree on this point.
Modern history is a science. Or at least, it is more a science than an art. Historians may have hypotheses, but they must search for sources, categoring them according to primary and secondary, etc, in order to provide "evidence" for their theories. History is backed up by archaeological evidence, and archaeologists are most definitely scientific in their methods. For falsifiability fetishists, any historical theory can be disproved with the right evidence. While that may be hard to find, everything in history is in principle falsifiable.
As technology has improved, it has found its way more and more into historical studies. Things like X-ray scans, etc, used to find erased documents in old parchments. Things like putting the index of soldiers in the hundred years war in a database.
History is a science, or at least, it is scientific in its methods. It's a worthwhile inclusion into an education.
The subjects I was speaking of; things like art studies, poetry, philosophy, music, civics, etc, may all be worthwhile subjects, but they don't constitute an education. They constitute a pastime.
Child B. Child B without a shadow of a doubt.
I'm sorry to burst the bubbles of all the school reformists around here, but the simple fact is learning anything, and learning it well, requires a certain amount of effort, work and indeed hard slogging. While I agree that school should not be a monotonous, pointless drudge, at some point in education student are going to be required to sit down at their desks and drill something difficult into their heads.
Do you know what happens when you let children run around, be inquisitive, ask questions, appreciate concepts, and open doors of wonderment in every topic? You get Arts students. Arts and Humanities students who know how to appreciate everything and know how to do absolutely nothing. People who can master the art of appearing intelligent whilst remaining shockingly ignorant. People whose ideas and tastes and practices are simply imitations of something that was actually original.
When you sit a child down, get them to learn their times tables; learn how to spell and write; learn how to add, subtract, multiply and divide; learn how to solve algebraic equations; learn the periodic table; learn the organs of the body; learn the continents and countries of the world; learn the history of their own country; learn the planets of the solar system; and nowadays learn the principles and usage of computers, you will have given that child the tools they need to build a life worth living. A life that they spend bettering themselves and their society.
I was as bored as anyone in school. Sleepy too. But, reluctant as I was, I learned my lessons and I know full well that if I had been left to sit at home with entire library of books and no one to watch me I would probably have spent the whole day playing video games. Maybe my education could have been faster, better and more comprehensive, but only if my society wanted to spend more on it. But no matter how magnificent my experience could have been, I could not know all that I do today without those mind-numbingly painful drills and lessons and test and reviews.
Learning is fun. But it's also pretty hard. And a wide curriculum means a better chance of everyone finding something they are good at. Combined, this means that most children will be bored at some stage during the school day. But it also means there's a good chance they'll learn something each day too, or learn how to do it better.
It's interesting in the context of this discussion that Tolkien's Palentir were more than just viewing devices. They could also be used to communicate with other stones, and I think for other purposes. Anyway, when one of the stones fell into evil hands, the Dark Lord was able to use his power over it to control anyone foolish enough to try and use one of the remaining stones.
There's a lesson here I think.
circletimessquare's original post is perhaps one of the most insightful posts in this thread. It is in fact, and insightful comment on magnetic monopoles in general. The post reveals a true understanding of the magnetic monopole "problem", and a much firmer grasp of the topic than that displayed by the authors of these papers.
Magnetic dipoles are not like electric charges. They do not result from particles of non zero charge separating from one another. The difference is best understood by examination of the electron; an elementary particle.
Electrons have static charge. They are electrostatic monopoles in every sense of the word. But they also possess magnetic moment. A magnetic dipole moment, a vector quantity with both magnitude and direction. It is from this direction that designations like north and south pole come from, not from some imaged pair of opposite magnetic charges that reside somehow displaced from one another, within the point particle of the electron.
circletimessquare is correct. There is no such thing as a magnetic monopole, just as there is no such thing as a unit vector without a direction. A pity some moderators around here cannot take their heads off sensational headlines and summaries or out of their pulp science fiction novels long enough to recognise good sense when they see it.
This mentality is a good example of what Joel Spolsky calls fire and motion. You just keep moving, keep publishing, keep innovating, and your opponent is so busy trying to catch up or deal with your earlier work that you gain huge momentum. Sometimes unstoppable momentum. People just can't deal with the information overload.
For 30 years, physicists have believed that the universe is made up of tiny vibrating dimensional strings which only they are clever enough to understand. A fine idea, except it turns out not even they are clever enough after all. Nevertheless, they persist in this belief because the mathematics is beautiful. Likewise, many physicists persist in their belief in magnetic monopoles because the concept is beautiful, or some other such rubbish. Look! It even makes Maxwell's equations symmetric. So what? What's so important about having symmetric equations. Unsymmetrical ones are so much more interesting!
There's only one arbiter in physics, and science in general. It isn't a "flurry of papers". It isn't "beauty" or "symmetry" or "elegance" or "coolness". It isn't how many people agree with your viewpoint. It isn't how many journalists you can get to print words like "overwhealming evidence" in headlines. It isn't how much "supporting (online) material" you can find to back you.
The one, only, and final arbiter is the experiment. An honest to gods experiment. It finds things. It separates truth from fiction. You can try to twist the meaning of the result this way and that, throw back the grenade and carry on with your fire and motion, but in the end the results of all those experiments will finally weigh down your dishonesty and halt your advance.
There are no magnetic monopoles. You can try to separate north and south pole. You can even construct models of "magnetic charge" and dipoles if you like. But in the end, you can't get a north pole without having a corresponding south pole, very, very close by.
Modern science, and worst of all physics, is in a deplorable state. Cargo cult scientists,frauds, charlatans, fakes, and deluded true believers(Yes I'm serious about that last link) have saturated certainly the media circuit, but I fear many physics departments as well. Sensationalism and media attention are now as never before, deciding what the "consensus"* in science should be. It's disheartening to see the world lose its faith in the method of observation, hypothesis, experiment and above all skepticism that has served it so well for so many centuries.
P.S.
*Before the cranks jump in; No, I do not in fact, doubt the reality of anthropogenic climate change.
Yes it does!! Hate speech is spoken by racists, and sexists, and homophobes, and bigots, and all those other people I don't like.
They are nasty people. Everybody knows it. They say such mean things and hurt people's feelings and make people upset, and they just want to make more people nasty like them! People are vulnerable to what they say; they could be brainwashed!! People need protection from these kinds of bad influences!
It's just like child molesters. You wouldn't let them speak freely would you?! Nobody would! These people are wrong, just so wrong. No one has the right to be so wrong! So they shouldn't be allowed to speak or enjoy the freedoms the rest of us do.
It's only fair.
And that is why you only have a basic grasp of statistical sampling as it is practised in the modern world.
You could probably build a thousand very fine mountain observatories for a hundredth the cost.
What ever happened to quality? What ever happened to people, and companies, recognising that lower cost came at the expense of higher quality? What ever happened to production and purchasing being an optimisation problem with price, quality, speed and other factors thrown into the mix?
All I see nowadays is price, price, price. Price is everything. All encompassing, all considering and the sole and only consideration in nigh every walk of life. Companies are gouging their businesses in order to save pennies whilst their products stagnate or regress. Consumers care not for long term value or even short term utility as price is the first and last arbiter in their purchase decisions.
ISPs in the US seek to redefine broadband because they want their packages to be treated like commodities; like wheat and coffee beans. You don't care where the bean comes from, they're all the same. So you buy the cheapest one. If all internet connection packages are "broadband", can you guess what people are going to do? ISPs aren't the only industry that wants to do this, or indeed that is doing it.
Is anyone nowadays interesting in something more than getting, or providing, the cheapest deal. Is there room left nowadays for an ISP that seeks to provide the fastest and widest piplines for people that are willing to pay that much extra. I know I would be. But is that how our society works anymore? Did it ever work like that? Is there simply no room for companies that don't cater to misers? Should we really be blaming the ISPs here, or should we be blaming ourselves?
If Google or Apple but their tabs in a rotating circular drum surrounding the window, you can be certain that Open Source developers would follow swiftly behind. It's disappointing to see it confirmed that Open source will never, ever have the confidence to put forth its own designs, paradigms or new innovations directly in front of users unless a glitz and glamour company has broken the mould first. The worst part is how eagerly FOSS developers ape the latest trend. A little dignity would be a lot more digestible.
By contrast, Microsoft would simply wait to see what Apple did in their next revision before implementing what was kept.
To the topic at hand, Tabs on top are an atrocious development, unfit for human consumption. They are the product of people who spend too much of their time using flashy, UI paradigm-less monstrosities like Winamp skins, Flash site and those awful OSX floating widget things, not to mention that ridiculous top bar. Inclusing that was the worst decision GNOME has ever made. Most normal people on the other hand expect applications and button that stay within their window box, that don't warp or distort when your mouse draws near, and that don't look like they just had a full body wax job done. There was very little wrong with the 1997-era user interface.
I curse the Cult of Mac and what it has wrought on my UI's over the last 10 years. I'm hoping the Order of Google will not cast its baleful eye towards what little sanity remains in modern day GUIs.
....And the horse you rode in on. I have a widescreen monitor an in a few years so will everyone else. My three rows of 100+ tabs are, frankly, optimally placed in Firefox 3.0
Not a chance. "The IQ of a mob is equal to that of its lowest member....divided by the size of the mob."
That's what you get when state prosecutes are chosen at the whim of the vindictive masses instead of by careful selection based on merit and principle.