This sounds analagous to the toroidal convection currents you get in heated fluids. In a small heated vessel, the hot middle goes up, and since the fluid on top cools and has to go somewhere, it goes down the sides to be heated again. In larger vessels, and depending on the characteristics of the fluid, you can get multiple toroidal cells.
In beer, it's fueled by bubbles, and bursting bubbles are the dumping of energy at the surface. Some small bubbles will get carried along down the sides by these currents.
You demonstrate convection this by pouring the cream into the middle of your coffee very carefully and slowly. Then if you wait, you can watch the cream come up to the top and spread out to the sides.
Also fun: Put a piece of ice into well-mixed coffee with cream, and watch the string of clear water that works its way down from the ice into the opaque coffee as the cold ice melts.
What kind of simpleton thinks that more and faster neurons is better, or makes for smarter children? You get those for free with cancer and epilepsy.
Just give your kids meth if you want to boost their IQs. That'll bring the scores up, but do you think that makes them smarter in any meaningful way?
In my rash youth, I tried a number of different drugs, (here are examples of my own stupidity) including drinking a over liter of whiskey one evening, an unknown pill given to me by a guy in a superhero costume at a SF-Con, and a few things that can either enlighten or precipitate psychosis, depending on your personal biology, and whether you believe that any significant insight comes in chemical form.
However stupid I was, I would _never_ have given significant quantities of neurotransmitter precursors in a fetus or a child.Neurons have to communicate to be useful, and there are good indications that a neuron's rate of fire is actually related to information content. Or do you think we can determine intelligence by weighing people's brains?
The brain is marvelously subtle, and incredibly malleable in youth.
You want your kids to be smarter? Teach them. Play with them. Stimulate their senses. Show them the world that rewards you for paying attention to it and thinking about it. If this isn't enough for you, then you can make them smarter by having somebody else raise them.
Anybody who tries this on a human child should be sterilized, preferably with a shotgun.
On the rare occasion I needed to go to Tijuana, I found that sunglasses were indispensable. Not so much for protecting my glazzies (important because UV is very destructive) but for controlling social interaction. I would never walk around that city with headphones on, but sunglasses are a neccessity.
Intelligence is memory. Intelligence != memory.
on
The Memory Masters
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· Score: 2, Insightful
"Nope, intelligence is memory." You've made a false tautology from a valid description of the brain. Intelligence is memory, just as mind is brain. Biologically, I agree with you but I'll continue to use those words differently, because they have different meanings. You might just as well claim all our experience is memory, because we only percive things after they are mediated by our sensory organs and conveyed to our mind, brain, and memory. The argument is valid in a descriptive sense, but not definitive.
Since you mention declarative and implicit memory, the wikipedia article on memory contains this illustration of types of memory from which I will draw a further analogy:
"For example, some patients are repeatedly trained in a task and remember previous training, but don't improve in a task (functioning declarative memory, damaged procedural memory.) Other patients put through the same training can't recall having been through the experiment, but their performance in the task improves over time (functioning procedural memory, damaged declarative memory). "
Within that context, intelligence could be described as the ability to spontaneously simplify, streamline, or improve the task.
You can change the definition of memory, but then you'll need a new word for what everyone but you (including Eric Kandel ) calls memory.
I made it enough rounds of layoffs that I lost count, and I knew my time would come.
Know why you're there. If it's only terror of being out of work, you're in trouble. Find a good reason to stick around.
One good reason is to help your remaining coworkers out, even if you expect to be in the next round. This includes those who are doomed. This will also help you out when it's time to start looking for work.
Don't encourage the whiners, but don't treat them badly. It does suck, and some people will be hit harder by it than others. You just don't want to get dragged down.
Figure out how to have a good attitude, otherwise you'll hate and or lose you job. Don't whine, don't pass idle rumors, and don't read Fucked Company (maybe a very little bit) but keep your ear to the ground. Pay attention!
Work hard, but don't kill yourself. You've still got to have limits, and if your company is the least bit competent, they'll be willing to treat you with some respect.
Keep the negative attitude BS to a minimum, but don't be a cheerleader. You won't earn anybody's respect by pretending that nothing is wrong.
Find out who could be a reference for you if you get the axe, or who might be doing something interesting. You can talk with people about it, once it's publically acknowledged.
This sucks for everyone. Think of it like death. Unavoidable, and horrible, but inevitable. There's no point in dwelling on it, although being prepared is helpful. Act well, and be remembered well.
Think about a career change. Even if you don't change careers, you may be freelancing soon, like it or not.
If the company was _____ it could be avoided, but it ain't so. So now you've got to deal with it. So does everybody else. If they're not bastards, you're in it together.
Elegance is a kind of beauty, so call it art if you like. I prefer the word craft. Before you take offense at this, I also think that the term craft has been devalued by assuming that the distinction is only one of skill. Artists study technique to improve their craft, but there is fine art with poor craft.
And there is great craft that isn't art, Paul Revere, or any comparable silversmith would likely been called a craftsman rather than an artist, although he made beautiful unique objects that reside in fine art museums today. Not everyone who made such things was regarded as a craftsman, only one dedicated enough to do it well. Beautiful craft can be so compelling that it gets called art, but I'd submit that is largely because true craft has become rare when everything is mass produced.
Mass production and devaluing craft has also lowered tolerance for trivial imperfections. Why try to make something when it won't be machine perfect? It is easy to forget other values than surface polish. Since I like to make things myself, I decided to try making my own wedding ring, forging it from silver. It could have been perfectly smooth, but my wife asked that I leave planishing marks on it so that it still had the marks of being hand made.
Craft is a worthy pursuit in itself. Music is good example, since not everyone who plays a musical instrument is an artist. Today, relatively few play instruments, but as recently as my great-granparents generation, in order to have music one had to be with people who played it, or play music oneself. In this age of recorded music, many fewer people make music, and their expectations are distorted by popular music and its production values. A singer's voice is corrected, tracks are played until they are perfect and then overlaid with other pieces developed similarly. The result is spectacular, but hearing a friend sing and play the guitar means much to me.
I'm not sure I can define the distinction between art and craft, but I think it may be a matter of intention and limitations. For example, commercial art (which I would describe as a craft) has very specific and narrow intentions from the outset. If there is ambiguity, it is within very safe boundaries. Craft is typically engaged in with a particular purpose from the outset.
Ultimately, the distinction is nearly meaningless. I may find a work of art less compelling than craft. I like to make this distinction to call attention to the values of craftsmanship, but call it art if you like.
answer at linux modem compatibility knowledge base
on
Micro ATX and Linux?
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· Score: 4, Informative
at http://start.at/modem lists severak Taicom low profile PCI modems as "Winmodem chipset with Linux driver that must be purchased. "
There are lots of real PCMCIA modems too, so the PCMCIA adapter would work too.
SafeDee looks like a subset of PortaBase (free)
on
Great Zaurus Apps Review
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· Score: 2, Interesting
SafeDee is neat, but I copied the functionality and appearance of SafeDee closely in about five minutes with Portabase . They're so close that I wonder if SafeDee isn't actually made from PortaBase, which includes Blowfish encryption, and even has the desktop ports that the reviewer wanted.
My favorite add-on app for a PDA is a quick and dirty database. Having data at my fingertips all the time makes a PDA a work tool for me. If I need an inventory database, reference chart or somesuch, I've got it in a few minutes.
The heads should never touch the platters while the drive is spinning at full speed, (very bad, but it happens, and will cause damage) but the heads rest on the platters when the disk is stopped. The spinning platters drag enough air to lift the heads as they approach full speed. When stopping, the heads are carefully put into the landing zone to park so that there is no danger to the data.
There are exceptions. IBM started parking the heads up and away from the platters on some laptop drives around 1998, so Hitachi inherited the technology. Fujitsu now uses something they call rampload that is probably similar.
This still looks far from universal, unless the drive manufacturers are trying to keep it a secret. These same manufacturers silently redefined a megabyte to boost their capacity numbers by less than 5%. They'd brag about it.
If take apart a disk drive carefully enough, you'll see how the heads rest. Fun way to dispose of a broken HDD too.
I've had good luck with stiction (drives that wouldn't spin up.) Fire up the machine with the hard drive held in your hand but connected. Then hit it gently on the side with the handle of a screwdriver a few times or until it starts spinning. This gets the heads sliding across the platters to overcome the static friction, and then the platters can spin up. The drive may only attempt to spin the platters for the first few seconds of startup, so if it doesn't work fairly quickly, power down and start again. Use increasing amounts of force until it works or you destroy the drive. Either way, you'll feel better.
Embedding the heads in the platters has a good name. If the heads are cutting furrows in the platters, they've "gone farming."
The first time I heard of the Planck distance and Planck time, cellular automata became much more interesting. That's why I'm interested in ANKOS. Besides, maybe I can get some good cites for the source material.
The idea that even space and time are discrete (composed of tiny parts) instead of continuous, could have some very interesting implications. Lots of systems that are discrete appear continuous, but atomic theory made a lot of difference in physics and chemistry.
I don't disagree that Wolfram is a crank, but he's a bright crank who is stealing from interesting people and talking about interesting things. I've met those people before, and they can be worth talking to as long as you keep your perspective. Like a paranoiac who's lead an interesting life. Listen, just don't get too close.
I'll be looking over ANKOS online if the terms aren't too onerous. If they are, I'll buy a used copy of the book. Since he sued to prevent a presentation at a mathematical conference, I'll never buy a new copy. That's just wrong.
I have noticed something surprising happening when I look at my analog watch.
I'm worried about a scheduled event, so I look at my watch and decide I have time, without even thinking about the number of minutes or the time. Then moments later, if I wonder what time it is, I have to look again because I never actually read the time as such. Sometimes I can recall an image of the position of the hands, but usually not.
This is why analog dials are so useful. I can look at my speedometer, and see my proximity to the speed limit instantaneously, and even estimate the rate of accel or decelleration.
Besides, you can use an analog watch as a rough compass, if you can see the direction of the sun. Point the hour hand at the sun, and South is midway between noon, (in the closest direction) and the hour hand. Substitute North for South above if you're in the southern hemisphere.
Immersion heater smallest cheapest. Micro-water
on
Which Instant Coffee?
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· Score: 1
For the single cup coffeemaker, try an immersion heater. It's just an electric cord with a heating coil in an aluminum tube, designed to heat a single cup of liquid. Simple, cheap, and fast. Think wall current going into a short in your cup.
People microwave water because electric kettles are not ubiquitous in the US.
Microwaves are perceived as safer than appliances with heating coils too, although I worked with a thieving dumbass who got the fire department out when he put one PopTart in for five minutes and started a fire. Some people need to be in a sheltered environment, and this guy will be, but in his case it's prison.
Aren't electric kettle commonplace in Europe? They're fairly unusual in the US. So, for people who have a microwave and have learned its timing, (not exactly hard, since they're usually close to 1K watt) using the microwave makes more sense than a pot on the stove, since the microwave goes off automatically.
An electric kettle wouldn't even occur to most people in this country. It's just an extra $50+ single use appliance. I also suspect they're considerably cheaper in Europe, since for consumer products, more demand means more supply. If they were cheaper, I'd have one.
One reason drip coffeemakers can be so bad is that people run water through them from a dirty carafe, sometimes with old coffee as well. This just puts crap into the system where you can never really clean it out.
Percolators are beautiful, but why would you want to boil your coffee?
A game without rules or consistency is called play or perhaps art. Computers don't do this, although they can facilitate it.
Children make up games that are pretty illogical and inconsistent when playing. I'm remembering playing Dune/spaceship in the disconnected console room of a water treatment plant. It had multiple stations, lots of levers, dials, knobs and guages.
There are some Calvin & Hobbes cartoons that describe this sort of play beautifully. Google calvinball for examples. Watterson gets it.
Otherwise, games are defined by rules. Even in games whose rules change as you play, the rules are the game.
In the childrens play, it's about fantasy and exploring different roles, or just doing stuff. Convenience and other considerations facilitate this, so the dead spring back to life, roles are reversed, time is turned back as needed, and events are replayed until a satisfactory conclusion is reached, or boredom is achieved. Really, even these games have more rules than it appears, it's just that those rules are inconsistent over time, because they change quickly, and without any acknowledgement.
Art is similar. In art, each piece can have its own dynamic rules. Those rules can be photorealism, or a coloring book page filled in by someone enjoying the color and texture of a red crayon, and ignoring the lines completely. Much art is play.
This is also why playing games with children can be so exhausting for adults. It can be difficult switching gears so quickly. For kids, each one is in his own fantasy world, and any part of the game that is convenient is ignored, until that becomes impossible.
If you've worked in telephony much, you've probably seen masses of crossconnects (the same function as a cat5 patch panel, but on the analog side of things, and cheaper.) Look closer, and you'll see that the telco guys organise this stuff with plastic cable runs, but also use scraps of crosconnect (fine solid core) wire as twist ties.
If you do your own cabling, this makes sense. You just take a scrap of cat5 (if you had crossconnect wire, you'd probably already be clued to this) strip and cut to an appropriate length. Untwist if you're feeling extra neat. Patch cables won't work for this, because they are usually stranded wire, not solid core.
Because of this, whenever I'm doing cabling, I always have a limitless supply of cable organizers.
I'm no fan of neatness for its own sake. Neatness can be counterproductive. Ever look at a few hundred really tight and neat cat5 patch cables? Then did you ever try to replace the one that failed? All that tight velcro, and identical cables of exactly the same length are no fun to work with when you have to move or redo something in there. Hey, it looks tidy though.
PVC is X-ray transparent. Hard to find in your flesh.
PVC shatters like glass, and is almost as sharp. I cut myself on a shard of broken PVC from a homemade tool a couple of weeks ago. It was so sharp I didn't notice until I saw the blood on my work, wondering where it came from.
In case of failure, think multiple exploratory surgeries. Often people trying to make noisemakers (pipe bombs or destructive devices to the FBI) end up with bits of glass sharp PVC as permanent companions.
Also don't forget about cumulative stresses and invisible damage. Typically this sort of device is wrapped in tape & wire, or even enclosed, in addition to being very overbuilt. Imagine if your PVC had been abused at the hardware store, and you didn't know it.
You don't have to be in the same room while this is fired. I wouldn't the first time.
"Who would honestly let an out of the box Windows machine be open to the rest of the internet with no NAT? "
MIT gives all machines a public IP address. When my company was working with them, it took awhile for our people to even believe it. I remember trying to explain to the programmers that this is actually how the internet was designed to work.
It's odd hearing people complain that without NAT, machines are insecure. While you get stateful firewalling for free with NAT, stateful firewalling without NAT is even simpler, so dumping NAT isn't exactly a security risk.
Maybe MIT feels guilty for hogging a whole fscking class A, so they do their damndest to use as much of it as possible.
The half-life of caffeine is around four hours. That's a more useful metric than "It takes two weeks for caffeine to completely leave your body."
Sure the named side effects have been observed, in some individuals, at certain dosages.
>stress, burning sensatiion
What does that mean? "I'm too tense, and I'm on fire!"
Just by combining those two items you demonstrate you aren't actually thinking about this.
You forgot to mention that performance on IQ tests is enhanced in most people by caffeine.
Aside from your misleading use of side effect literature and your poor understanding of caffeine's mechanism, (adrenal stimulation is only part of the picture, and tends to wear off more quickly than other effects.) I think your observation about anger is skewed.
You're pissing me off with your sanctimonious attitude, and I haven't had caffeine in ages.
It's popular here to whine about groupthink, but the fact is that these are the ones who can't stand to be disagreed with.
You're still able to participate in the discussion, hindered only by the fact that a lot of people disagree with you. How unjust! Your freedom of speech is being infringed. Whiner.
Sacred cows? Hello dumbass! People are lynched for killing a sacred cow. Maybe you regard disagreement or moderation as comparable with lynching, but that just demonstrates that you truly don't get what actual oppression is, nor value real freedom of speech properly. People will hassle you if you speak out for what you believe. Deal with it, coward. There's a difference between argument and oppression.
You claim slashdot has sacred cows, but the fact is that you're the one that can't tolerate disagreement.
Yeah, I'll get modded into oblivion for this, but I believe it's worth saying so I'll burn some karma. BFD.
I can't use IM. I guess I haven't learned to use it well.
I don't know how allocate appropriate resources to IM while trying to get something done. It also seems like it results in endless small talk. I'm just really bad at that in text. Does this happen to other people too?
Result: alienated friend or stupid mistake at work or both.
This is similar to what used to happen when I'd try to write a letter. I'd either convey approximately nothing, or get so caught up in details that I was suddenly on my way to writing a novella. It's a personal problem, I guess.
The same thing can happen when I'm on the phone, but I've learned to multitask better there, and my friends can recognize my tone of voice even if I don't realize it's time to hang up.
I'd really like to learn to use this tool better. I guess it's just practice. Any other suggestions? (Don't be a dumbass doesn't count.)
I'm a little wary of some of these social network tools, because social network information is incredibly valuable & sensitive. Putting my info onto Friendster seems like yielding too much of my privacy, and I guess I also don't see the payoff. In direct personal relationships, my liability is limited both in scope and in time. If I meet a vicious sociopath, there's only so much he can do, he can pretty much only get me without a lot more work, and I'm mostly vulnerable to him only when I'm nearby.
Now let's say some bad guy gets the Friendster data. How hard can that be, considering how poor data protection in general is? The marvelous thing about data security is that once the data is loose, it could go anywhere. After all information wants to be distributed on SPAM CDs.
The bad guy could be a blackmailer, or perhaps just a law & order type who believes in guilt by association, or a politician and suddenly one of my friends is on an enemies list.
It was horrifying when we heard that the Colombian cartels were getting telco records, and murdering people based on them. This is similarly sensitive information.
One friend suggested that I join up anonymously if I was uncomfortable with the privacy issues of Friendster. Unfortunately, I've still compromised the privacy of everyone else on my list, and anyone who was interested could fairly easily interpolate my identity based on all the other data that is valid. That's a side effect of one of the coolest things about Friendster. People can fake accounts, but it has little effect, because the fakes won't go anywhere much.
Sure, probably nobody will come looking for me, but I lock my doors at night anyway.
I do know people who wouldn't have gotten certain jobs if their network of friends was known.
I never meant to suggest a toally distributed mind, and that's why I mentioned Brocka & Wernicke's areas specifically, although not by name. I certainly don't think advertising and religion are more powerful than science and medicine, but perhaps my attempt at humor wasn't as funny as I thought.
I would argue with the point: "1) The brain uses both local and distributed processing, and we don't understand the nature and extent of either"
Understand? Sure, but your statement could be applied to the whole brain. On the other hand, talk to a neurobiologist. They know quite a bit about both localization & distribution of processing. I provided examples of the things known for over a hundred years. There have been great strides more recently in neurobiology as well, although I haven't followed much in the last decade. These things we do know:
1. The localization which has been found in the brain is almost all functional.
2. Manipulation of the brain, for example traumatic events or drugs, typically have global or functional effects. That is, nobody forgets a single bullet point on their resume after a car accident or a stroke. They lose abilities, or their personality changes.
To your second point, manipulating something without understanding it tends to lead to unintended consequences, as with the example of the peculiar anaesthetic that's used as a date-rape drug. Hence my humorous point about manipulating the mind with advertising. Psychology is a better tool for manipulating the mind than physical intrusion. You were similarly humorous suggesting that doctors don't take science seriously. Any doctor who truly doesn't take science seriously is the sort of quack who writes long monographs with lots of CAPITAL LETTERS, homespun neologisms, and stories of persecution by the corrupt scientific conspiracy.
I agree with almost everything you said, including attitudes of doctors & scientists. However, I think your maybe is a no, at least right now. Maybe we could get there someday. I think the odds of erasing a single memory are proportional to the degree of collateral damage one is willing to incur. The extreme example of the cheapest solution is the traditional concrete overshoes. That form of memory erasure is know effective.
I don't believe anyone in neurobiology believes in the grandmother cell. It's still used to describe how memory might work, but everything we know about the brain indicates distributed storage.
There are cells dedicated to specific purposes more general than grandmother recognition. These functional areas are dedicated to things like speaking or understanding speech (seperate areas of the brain.) For another example, everything you see is pretty much projected onto the neurons on the surface your occipital lobe.
A person with brain injury can lose specific skills or abilities. My grandmother lost the ability to speak after a stroke. She relearned to speak.
They can lose types of memory. People with Korsakoff's syndrome live with no intermediate or long term memory. Loss of short term memory preceding a traumatic event is more common. After an accident it is common for the injured party to not remember the moments leading up to the accident, because that information essentially never got written to intermediate or long term memory.
But the current view is that memory is highly distributed. If you use a neural net as a trivial model of how the brain might work, you will realize that for a large and complex neural net with diverse purposes, there isn't a single cell devoted to anything. All the information is contained in the strength connections between cells.
Karl Pribram used the phrase "holographic brain." The image on a hologram is distributed, so if you break it in two, you have two complete images, although each is less detailed. If you scratch a hologram, you don't lose part of the image, you lose detail overall.
There are drugs that prevent short term memory from being retained. Those drugs also keep you from being very alert or useful for anything, and the only people who use them to that purpose are rapists.
So, to answer the poster's question: No way.
Crude manipulation of the mind is hard. Hypnosis can't make you do something you'd be unwilling to do otherwise. Truth serums ain't. Lie detectors don't. I'd suggest that truth serums & lie detectors are far simpler tasks than erasing human memory based on content.
The brain is just too vast & complex for such a trivial approach. You need to use something subtle and powerful to manipulate the mind, like advertising or religion.
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This sounds analagous to the toroidal convection currents you get in heated fluids. In a small heated vessel, the hot middle goes up, and since the fluid on top cools and has to go somewhere, it goes down the sides to be heated again. In larger vessels, and depending on the characteristics of the fluid, you can get multiple toroidal cells.
In beer, it's fueled by bubbles, and bursting bubbles are the dumping of energy at the surface. Some small bubbles will get carried along down the sides by these currents.
You demonstrate convection this by pouring the cream into the middle of your coffee very carefully and slowly. Then if you wait, you can watch the cream come up to the top and spread out to the sides.
Also fun: Put a piece of ice into well-mixed coffee with cream, and watch the string of clear water that works its way down from the ice into the opaque coffee as the cold ice melts.
I guess beer is for the evening demo.
What kind of simpleton thinks that more and faster neurons is better, or makes for smarter children? You get those for free with cancer and epilepsy.
Just give your kids meth if you want to boost their IQs. That'll bring the scores up, but do you think that makes them smarter in any meaningful way?
In my rash youth, I tried a number of different drugs, (here are examples of my own stupidity) including drinking a over liter of whiskey one evening, an unknown pill given to me by a guy in a superhero costume at a SF-Con, and a few things that can either enlighten or precipitate psychosis, depending on your personal biology, and whether you believe that any significant insight comes in chemical form.
However stupid I was, I would _never_ have given significant quantities of neurotransmitter precursors in a fetus or a child.Neurons have to communicate to be useful, and there are good indications that a neuron's rate of fire is actually related to information content. Or do you think we can determine intelligence by weighing people's brains?
The brain is marvelously subtle, and incredibly malleable in youth.
You want your kids to be smarter? Teach them. Play with them. Stimulate their senses. Show them the world that rewards you for paying attention to it and thinking about it. If this isn't enough for you, then you can make them smarter by having somebody else raise them.
Anybody who tries this on a human child should be sterilized, preferably with a shotgun.
On the rare occasion I needed to go to Tijuana, I found that sunglasses were indispensable. Not so much for protecting my glazzies (important because UV is very destructive) but for controlling social interaction. I would never walk around that city with headphones on, but sunglasses are a neccessity.
"Nope, intelligence is memory." You've made a false tautology from a valid description of the brain. Intelligence is memory, just as mind is brain. Biologically, I agree with you but I'll continue to use those words differently, because they have different meanings. You might just as well claim all our experience is memory, because we only percive things after they are mediated by our sensory organs and conveyed to our mind, brain, and memory. The argument is valid in a descriptive sense, but not definitive.
Since you mention declarative and implicit memory, the wikipedia article on memory contains this illustration of types of memory from which I will draw a further analogy:
"For example, some patients are repeatedly trained in a task and remember previous training, but don't improve in a task (functioning declarative memory, damaged procedural memory.) Other patients put through the same training can't recall having been through the experiment, but their performance in the task improves over time (functioning procedural memory, damaged declarative memory). "
Within that context, intelligence could be described as the ability to spontaneously simplify, streamline, or improve the task.
You can change the definition of memory, but then you'll need a new word for what everyone but you (including Eric Kandel ) calls memory.
I always put it this way, when I hear a story about someone pissing around with the police:
Don't hassle men with sticks and guns.
Seems obvious.
I made it enough rounds of layoffs that I lost count, and I knew my time would come.
Know why you're there. If it's only terror of being out of work, you're in trouble. Find a good reason to stick around.
One good reason is to help your remaining coworkers out, even if you expect to be in the next round. This includes those who are doomed. This will also help you out when it's time to start looking for work.
Don't encourage the whiners, but don't treat them badly. It does suck, and some people will be hit harder by it than others. You just don't want to get dragged down.
Figure out how to have a good attitude, otherwise you'll hate and or lose you job. Don't whine, don't pass idle rumors, and don't read Fucked Company (maybe a very little bit) but keep your ear to the ground. Pay attention!
Work hard, but don't kill yourself. You've still got to have limits, and if your company is the least bit competent, they'll be willing to treat you with some respect.
Keep the negative attitude BS to a minimum, but don't be a cheerleader. You won't earn anybody's respect by pretending that nothing is wrong.
Find out who could be a reference for you if you get the axe, or who might be doing something interesting. You can talk with people about it, once it's publically acknowledged.
This sucks for everyone. Think of it like death. Unavoidable, and horrible, but inevitable. There's no point in dwelling on it, although being prepared is helpful. Act well, and be remembered well.
Think about a career change. Even if you don't change careers, you may be freelancing soon, like it or not.
If the company was _____ it could be avoided, but it ain't so. So now you've got to deal with it. So does everybody else. If they're not bastards, you're in it together.
Elegance is a kind of beauty, so call it art if you like. I prefer the word craft. Before you take offense at this, I also think that the term craft has been devalued by assuming that the distinction is only one of skill. Artists study technique to improve their craft, but there is fine art with poor craft.
And there is great craft that isn't art, Paul Revere, or any comparable silversmith would likely been called a craftsman rather than an artist, although he made beautiful unique objects that reside in fine art museums today. Not everyone who made such things was regarded as a craftsman, only one dedicated enough to do it well. Beautiful craft can be so compelling that it gets called art, but I'd submit that is largely because true craft has become rare when everything is mass produced.
Mass production and devaluing craft has also lowered tolerance for trivial imperfections. Why try to make something when it won't be machine perfect? It is easy to forget other values than surface polish. Since I like to make things myself, I decided to try making my own wedding ring, forging it from silver. It could have been perfectly smooth, but my wife asked that I leave planishing marks on it so that it still had the marks of being hand made.
Craft is a worthy pursuit in itself. Music is good example, since not everyone who plays a musical instrument is an artist. Today, relatively few play instruments, but as recently as my great-granparents generation, in order to have music one had to be with people who played it, or play music oneself. In this age of recorded music, many fewer people make music, and their expectations are distorted by popular music and its production values. A singer's voice is corrected, tracks are played until they are perfect and then overlaid with other pieces developed similarly. The result is spectacular, but hearing a friend sing and play the guitar means much to me.
I'm not sure I can define the distinction between art and craft, but I think it may be a matter of intention and limitations. For example, commercial art (which I would describe as a craft) has very specific and narrow intentions from the outset. If there is ambiguity, it is within very safe boundaries. Craft is typically engaged in with a particular purpose from the outset.
Ultimately, the distinction is nearly meaningless. I may find a work of art less compelling than craft. I like to make this distinction to call attention to the values of craftsmanship, but call it art if you like.
at http://start.at/modem lists severak Taicom low profile PCI modems as "Winmodem chipset with Linux driver that must be purchased. "
There are lots of real PCMCIA modems too, so the PCMCIA adapter would work too.
SafeDee is neat, but I copied the functionality and appearance of SafeDee closely in about five minutes with Portabase . They're so close that I wonder if SafeDee isn't actually made from PortaBase, which includes Blowfish encryption, and even has the desktop ports that the reviewer wanted.
My favorite add-on app for a PDA is a quick and dirty database. Having data at my fingertips all the time makes a PDA a work tool for me. If I need an inventory database, reference chart or somesuch, I've got it in a few minutes.
While manufacturers are moving away from heads that touch platters, it is recent and not universal.
Learn about HDDs here
The heads should never touch the platters while the drive is spinning at full speed, (very bad, but it happens, and will cause damage) but the heads rest on the platters when the disk is stopped. The spinning platters drag enough air to lift the heads as they approach full speed. When stopping, the heads are carefully put into the landing zone to park so that there is no danger to the data.
There are exceptions. IBM started parking the heads up and away from the platters on some laptop drives around 1998, so Hitachi inherited the technology. Fujitsu now uses something they call rampload that is probably similar.
This still looks far from universal, unless the drive manufacturers are trying to keep it a secret. These same manufacturers silently redefined a megabyte to boost their capacity numbers by less than 5%. They'd brag about it.
If take apart a disk drive carefully enough, you'll see how the heads rest. Fun way to dispose of a broken HDD too.
I've had good luck with stiction (drives that wouldn't spin up.) Fire up the machine with the hard drive held in your hand but connected. Then hit it gently on the side with the handle of a screwdriver a few times or until it starts spinning. This gets the heads sliding across the platters to overcome the static friction, and then the platters can spin up. The drive may only attempt to spin the platters for the first few seconds of startup, so if it doesn't work fairly quickly, power down and start again. Use increasing amounts of force until it works or you destroy the drive. Either way, you'll feel better.
Embedding the heads in the platters has a good name. If the heads are cutting furrows in the platters, they've "gone farming."
Republican DOJ take action against a corporate entity? I like your sense of humor.
The first time I heard of the Planck distance and Planck time, cellular automata became much more interesting. That's why I'm interested in ANKOS. Besides, maybe I can get some good cites for the source material.
The idea that even space and time are discrete (composed of tiny parts) instead of continuous, could have some very interesting implications. Lots of systems that are discrete appear continuous, but atomic theory made a lot of difference in physics and chemistry.
I don't disagree that Wolfram is a crank, but he's a bright crank who is stealing from interesting people and talking about interesting things. I've met those people before, and they can be worth talking to as long as you keep your perspective. Like a paranoiac who's lead an interesting life. Listen, just don't get too close.
I'll be looking over ANKOS online if the terms aren't too onerous. If they are, I'll buy a used copy of the book. Since he sued to prevent a presentation at a mathematical conference, I'll never buy a new copy. That's just wrong.
I have noticed something surprising happening when I look at my analog watch.
I'm worried about a scheduled event, so I look at my watch and decide I have time, without even thinking about the number of minutes or the time. Then moments later, if I wonder what time it is, I have to look again because I never actually read the time as such. Sometimes I can recall an image of the position of the hands, but usually not.
This is why analog dials are so useful. I can look at my speedometer, and see my proximity to the speed limit instantaneously, and even estimate the rate of accel or decelleration.
Besides, you can use an analog watch as a rough compass, if you can see the direction of the sun. Point the hour hand at the sun, and South is midway between noon, (in the closest direction) and the hour hand. Substitute North for South above if you're in the southern hemisphere.
For the single cup coffeemaker, try an immersion heater. It's just an electric cord with a heating coil in an aluminum tube, designed to heat a single cup of liquid. Simple, cheap, and fast. Think wall current going into a short in your cup.
People microwave water because electric kettles are not ubiquitous in the US.
Microwaves are perceived as safer than appliances with heating coils too, although I worked with a thieving dumbass who got the fire department out when he put one PopTart in for five minutes and started a fire. Some people need to be in a sheltered environment, and this guy will be, but in his case it's prison.
Aren't electric kettle commonplace in Europe? They're fairly unusual in the US. So, for people who have a microwave and have learned its timing, (not exactly hard, since they're usually close to 1K watt) using the microwave makes more sense than a pot on the stove, since the microwave goes off automatically.
An electric kettle wouldn't even occur to most people in this country. It's just an extra $50+ single use appliance. I also suspect they're considerably cheaper in Europe, since for consumer products, more demand means more supply. If they were cheaper, I'd have one.
One reason drip coffeemakers can be so bad is that people run water through them from a dirty carafe, sometimes with old coffee as well. This just puts crap into the system where you can never really clean it out.
Percolators are beautiful, but why would you want to boil your coffee?
A game without rules or consistency is called play or perhaps art. Computers don't do this, although they can facilitate it.
Children make up games that are pretty illogical and inconsistent when playing. I'm remembering playing Dune/spaceship in the disconnected console room of a water treatment plant. It had multiple stations, lots of levers, dials, knobs and guages.
There are some Calvin & Hobbes cartoons that describe this sort of play beautifully. Google calvinball for examples. Watterson gets it.
Otherwise, games are defined by rules. Even in games whose rules change as you play, the rules are the game.
In the childrens play, it's about fantasy and exploring different roles, or just doing stuff. Convenience and other considerations facilitate this, so the dead spring back to life, roles are reversed, time is turned back as needed, and events are replayed until a satisfactory conclusion is reached, or boredom is achieved. Really, even these games have more rules than it appears, it's just that those rules are inconsistent over time, because they change quickly, and without any acknowledgement.
Art is similar. In art, each piece can have its own dynamic rules. Those rules can be photorealism, or a coloring book page filled in by someone enjoying the color and texture of a red crayon, and ignoring the lines completely. Much art is play.
This is also why playing games with children can be so exhausting for adults. It can be difficult switching gears so quickly. For kids, each one is in his own fantasy world, and any part of the game that is convenient is ignored, until that becomes impossible.
"No, I don't want to die. It's your turn to die."
If you've worked in telephony much, you've probably seen masses of crossconnects (the same function as a cat5 patch panel, but on the analog side of things, and cheaper.) Look closer, and you'll see that the telco guys organise this stuff with plastic cable runs, but also use scraps of crosconnect (fine solid core) wire as twist ties.
If you do your own cabling, this makes sense. You just take a scrap of cat5 (if you had crossconnect wire, you'd probably already be clued to this) strip and cut to an appropriate length. Untwist if you're feeling extra neat. Patch cables won't work for this, because they are usually stranded wire, not solid core.
Because of this, whenever I'm doing cabling, I always have a limitless supply of cable organizers.
I'm no fan of neatness for its own sake. Neatness can be counterproductive. Ever look at a few hundred really tight and neat cat5 patch cables? Then did you ever try to replace the one that failed? All that tight velcro, and identical cables of exactly the same length are no fun to work with when you have to move or redo something in there. Hey, it looks tidy though.
PVC is X-ray transparent. Hard to find in your flesh.
PVC shatters like glass, and is almost as sharp. I cut myself on a shard of broken PVC from a homemade tool a couple of weeks ago. It was so sharp I didn't notice until I saw the blood on my work, wondering where it came from.
In case of failure, think multiple exploratory surgeries. Often people trying to make noisemakers (pipe bombs or destructive devices to the FBI) end up with bits of glass sharp PVC as permanent companions.
Also don't forget about cumulative stresses and invisible damage. Typically this sort of device is wrapped in tape & wire, or even enclosed, in addition to being very overbuilt. Imagine if your PVC had been abused at the hardware store, and you didn't know it.
You don't have to be in the same room while this is fired. I wouldn't the first time.
"Who would honestly let an out of the box Windows machine be open to the rest of the internet with no NAT? "
MIT gives all machines a public IP address. When my company was working with them, it took awhile for our people to even believe it. I remember trying to explain to the programmers that this is actually how the internet was designed to work.
It's odd hearing people complain that without NAT, machines are insecure. While you get stateful firewalling for free with NAT, stateful firewalling without NAT is even simpler, so dumping NAT isn't exactly a security risk.
Maybe MIT feels guilty for hogging a whole fscking class A, so they do their damndest to use as much of it as possible.
The half-life of caffeine is around four hours. That's a more useful metric than "It takes two weeks for caffeine to completely leave your body."
Sure the named side effects have been observed, in some individuals, at certain dosages.
>stress, burning sensatiion
What does that mean?
"I'm too tense, and I'm on fire!"
Just by combining those two items you demonstrate you aren't actually thinking about this.
You forgot to mention that performance on IQ tests is enhanced in most people by caffeine.
Aside from your misleading use of side effect literature and your poor understanding of caffeine's mechanism, (adrenal stimulation is only part of the picture, and tends to wear off more quickly than other effects.) I think your observation about anger is skewed.
You're pissing me off with your sanctimonious attitude, and I haven't had caffeine in ages.
It's popular here to whine about groupthink, but the fact is that these are the ones who can't stand to be disagreed with.
You're still able to participate in the discussion, hindered only by the fact that a lot of people disagree with you. How unjust! Your freedom of speech is being infringed. Whiner.
Sacred cows? Hello dumbass! People are lynched for killing a sacred cow. Maybe you regard disagreement or moderation as comparable with lynching, but that just demonstrates that you truly don't get what actual oppression is, nor value real freedom of speech properly.
People will hassle you if you speak out for what you believe. Deal with it, coward. There's a difference between argument and oppression.
You claim slashdot has sacred cows, but the fact is that you're the one that can't tolerate disagreement.
Yeah, I'll get modded into oblivion for this, but I believe it's worth saying so I'll burn some karma. BFD.
I can't use IM. I guess I haven't learned to use it well.
I don't know how allocate appropriate resources to IM while trying to get something done. It also seems like it results in endless small talk. I'm just really bad at that in text. Does this happen to other people too?
Result: alienated friend or stupid mistake at work or both.
This is similar to what used to happen when I'd try to write a letter. I'd either convey approximately nothing, or get so caught up in details that I was suddenly on my way to writing a novella. It's a personal problem, I guess.
The same thing can happen when I'm on the phone, but I've learned to multitask better there, and my friends can recognize my tone of voice even if I don't realize it's time to hang up.
I'd really like to learn to use this tool better. I guess it's just practice. Any other suggestions? (Don't be a dumbass doesn't count.)
I'm a little wary of some of these social network tools, because social network information is incredibly valuable & sensitive. Putting my info onto Friendster seems like yielding too much of my privacy, and I guess I also don't see the payoff. In direct personal relationships, my liability is limited both in scope and in time. If I meet a vicious sociopath, there's only so much he can do, he can pretty much only get me without a lot more work, and I'm mostly vulnerable to him only when I'm nearby.
Now let's say some bad guy gets the Friendster data. How hard can that be, considering how poor data protection in general is? The marvelous thing about data security is that once the data is loose, it could go anywhere. After all information wants to be distributed on SPAM CDs.
The bad guy could be a blackmailer, or perhaps just a law & order type who believes in guilt by association, or a politician and suddenly one of my friends is on an enemies list.
It was horrifying when we heard that the Colombian cartels were getting telco records, and murdering people based on them. This is similarly sensitive information.
One friend suggested that I join up anonymously if I was uncomfortable with the privacy issues of Friendster. Unfortunately, I've still compromised the privacy of everyone else on my list, and anyone who was interested could fairly easily interpolate my identity based on all the other data that is valid. That's a side effect of one of the coolest things about Friendster. People can fake accounts, but it has little effect, because the fakes won't go anywhere much.
Sure, probably nobody will come looking for me, but I lock my doors at night anyway.
I do know people who wouldn't have gotten certain jobs if their network of friends was known.
I never meant to suggest a toally distributed mind, and that's why I mentioned Brocka & Wernicke's areas specifically, although not by name. I certainly don't think advertising and religion are more powerful than science and medicine, but perhaps my attempt at humor wasn't as funny as I thought.
I would argue with the point:
"1) The brain uses both local and distributed processing, and we don't understand the nature and extent of either"
Understand? Sure, but your statement could be applied to the whole brain. On the other hand, talk to a neurobiologist. They know quite a bit about both localization & distribution of processing. I provided examples of the things known for over a hundred years. There have been great strides more recently in neurobiology as well, although I haven't followed much in the last decade. These things we do know:
1. The localization which has been found in the brain is almost all functional.
2. Manipulation of the brain, for example traumatic events or drugs, typically have global or functional effects. That is, nobody forgets a single bullet point on their resume after a car accident or a stroke. They lose abilities, or their personality changes.
To your second point, manipulating something without understanding it tends to lead to unintended consequences, as with the example of the peculiar anaesthetic that's used as a date-rape drug. Hence my humorous point about manipulating the mind with advertising. Psychology is a better tool for manipulating the mind than physical intrusion. You were similarly humorous suggesting that doctors don't take science seriously. Any doctor who truly doesn't take science seriously is the sort of quack who writes long monographs with lots of CAPITAL LETTERS, homespun neologisms, and stories of persecution by the corrupt scientific conspiracy.
I agree with almost everything you said, including attitudes of doctors & scientists. However, I think your maybe is a no, at least right now. Maybe we could get there someday. I think the odds of erasing a single memory are proportional to the degree of collateral damage one is willing to incur. The extreme example of the cheapest solution is the traditional concrete overshoes. That form of memory erasure is know effective.
I don't believe anyone in neurobiology believes in the grandmother cell. It's still used to describe how memory might work, but everything we know about the brain indicates distributed storage.
There are cells dedicated to specific purposes more general than grandmother recognition. These functional areas are dedicated to things like speaking or understanding speech (seperate areas of the brain.) For another example, everything you see is pretty much projected onto the neurons on the surface your occipital lobe.
A person with brain injury can lose specific skills or abilities. My grandmother lost the ability to speak after a stroke. She relearned to speak.
They can lose types of memory. People with Korsakoff's syndrome live with no intermediate or long term memory. Loss of short term memory preceding a traumatic event is more common. After an accident it is common for the injured party to not remember the moments leading up to the accident, because that information essentially never got written to intermediate or long term memory.
But the current view is that memory is highly distributed. If you use a neural net as a trivial model of how the brain might work, you will realize that for a large and complex neural net with diverse purposes, there isn't a single cell devoted to anything. All the information is contained in the strength connections between cells.
Karl Pribram used the phrase "holographic brain." The image on a hologram is distributed, so if you break it in two, you have two complete images, although each is less detailed. If you scratch a hologram, you don't lose part of the image, you lose detail overall.
There are drugs that prevent short term memory from being retained. Those drugs also keep you from being very alert or useful for anything, and the only people who use them to that purpose are rapists.
So, to answer the poster's question: No way.
Crude manipulation of the mind is hard. Hypnosis can't make you do something you'd be unwilling to do otherwise. Truth serums ain't. Lie detectors don't. I'd suggest that truth serums & lie detectors are far simpler tasks than erasing human memory based on content.
The brain is just too vast & complex for such a trivial approach. You need to use something subtle and powerful to manipulate the mind, like advertising or religion.