>I, for one, would very much prefer a man-made diamond.
You're not alone in that, but jewelers are still resisting like mad. My fiance went around trying to get a Gemesis stone locally a while ago -- jewelers actually SCREAMED at him. We eventually decided to go with a sapphire anyway. (But I see those Gemesis blues coming out... so tempting!)
BTW, it starts at D. The apparent level of colour depends quite a lot on the cut, as well, as a very good cut will return a lot of light, making the stone look whiter. (This is why sapphires and fancy coloured diamonds tend to be cut differently; the cutter wants to emphesize the colour.)
Not all diamonds are yellow-tinted, either. There are some that are grey/blue-tinted (which makes the colour less apparent), and some that are peach-tinted and so on. I've seen a really stunning old mine cut peach P stone. The colour was just the right shade to look stunning in a platinun setting... very subtle, but very pretty.
And I bought an engagement ring last year, as well. (Sapphire, though)
As you're a geek jeweler, I'm curious as to whether you're keeping an eye on the synthetic diamonds that are coming out. When my fiance and I were looking for an engagement ring, he was actually, literally screamed at for looking for a gemesis stone. (We think they're really cool, and a hell of a lot more desirable than the kind that come out of the ground.) We ended up not getting one because he wanted to deal with someone local and because both yellow and orange do/not/ go with my skin tone.
All of this is a rambly way of asking whether you've seen synthetic blue diamonds coming out yet... We weren't able to get any before, despite quite a lot of trying, which was a real shame.
If this decision makes anything at all different for you (e.g., permits shipping of wine from out of state), then shipping of wine from inside the state was already allowed.
>I think that with many "teetotalers" they can not imagine the concept of moderation or the possibility that people can drink moderately and safely. It's an all or nothing proposition and there is really no arguing with them as it seems to be (and many instances prompted by) religous fervor.
I don't drink. My grandmother was an alcoholic, but I certainly believe that people can drink moderately and safely. I just also think that drink containing alcohol taste like crap, and that they tend to give me migraines.
While I'm on the subject, I'd like to point out that I don't say anything to people who drink (neither does my fiance, who would love to drink, but can't), but we take a LOT of shit from people. Point being, don't assume that being a teetotaler means someone's uptight or religious: they may have a very bad reaction to alcohol, or a very good sense of smell (which makes alcohol-containing drinks tend to smell like scrubbing the inside of your nasal cavity out with a wire brush).
>cocaine can be considered an anesthetic. An outdated, unused anesthetic, but it gets the job done.
Actually, it's still used, or so I'm told. Soak cotton in cocaine solution, stick it up someone's nose, and it's a great anesthetic for setting a broken nose (especially if it's the kind where they have to break it again).
San Diego has UCSD, which is quite active in all kinds of biomedical research. They get a crapload of research funding for it, as well. Obviously they can't take this money from the state, but there may well be quite a few biotech firms that popped up around UCSD.
>And materialistic explanations of the origin of the universe are not testable and therefore not falsifiable.
Excuse me? Scientific theories about the origins of the universe make predictions. These predictions are testable, and in fact have been tested, over and over and over. They are falsifiable, just not falsified, as evidence has been seen to accord with the predictions.
Creationism isn't testable. It's like string theory was, except with a rather odder way of coming up with the idea. How the idea was formed, however, is irrelevent -- we just have to ask "does it make testable predictions?". If not, then it's not a scientific theory. (BTW, string theory is/was considered mathematics, not science, unless/until it makes some actually testable predictions (which people have worked very hard on), and gets them tested.)
> There were even free tampons in the ladies bathroom.
I read a book (can't remember which one, sorry), in which it was claimed that some female exec used this as a way to decide which companies to buy from -- if they didn't have sanitary supplies, they were probably going to go down the tubes fast and leave her company in the lurch.
I can see her point on this one. Having, at least, emergency supplies of sanitary suppies isn't that expensive (especially as techie companies lean heavily towards men, and most women will prefer to use their own brand). If there isn't an emergency supply, every once in a while you will lose someone for at least half a day, as she'll have to go home and change. It seems a bad tradeoff, something that would be made by a desperate company.
>Note to both the women that read this site: This is true. Why? Because we're attracted to curves.
I believe that, while individual tastes vary, global tastes seem to be focused largely on a.6 waist-to-hip ratio. That can be had when you're thin or more padded, but intereststingly enough, seems to be correlated to health and fertility. There is a growing voice for replacing the use of BMI with a waist-measurement metric for determining overweight/obesity. I'm not sure you could effectively determine whether one was underweight that way, however.
That's also a gross generalization. I'm not an ectomorph, but 10-20 hours of high-intensity karate (+ another 10 hours a week of walking) per week made me both: a) quite in shape, b) quite muscular for my body type, c) a lot heavier. I still hit, at my highest weight point, the midpoint between "underweight" and "overweight". I frankly don't know what I could personally do to hit "overweight", except get pregnant with twins.
How is a crappy grammar checker an advantage over not having such a `feature'? I've never seen that thing give me a useful suggestion: everything it's marked wrong was correct, and every grammatical issue in my writing was not marked. Giving people a crutch, such as a spell-checker, has its advantages and disadvantages. (Personally, I spell rather badly, but a spell-checker seems to be helping that a bit.) Giving people a crutch which is largely incorrect simply encourages them to conform to its bizzare standards, which are far from correct usage.
If you want a good grammar checker, send some money to faculty doing research in language parsing; don't ask for something that's worse than useless, in most situations.
Most classes have the policy that the grader will finish grading the papers by a certain time, return them, and post solutions. (Not only that, they often do not set class policy.) It/does/ take more of their time to return a paper and then regrade it (grading a group of papers together is much more efficient, and dealing with a paper twice is taking up far more time than grading it once). Often, there simply isn't time to do the extra cycle by the time the solutions must be posted.
I do not give negative points when I set grading policy (other than on multiple-choice exams). When I recieve homework that is completely unreadable (I am quite good at reading messy handwriting, and I do get a second opinion), I do my best to grade it, and put a note that this is unreadable, and that in the future they will have to type their homework (and I will happily help them with LaTeX), or write it more clearly. Only when this is disregarded do I start removing points. If I can't tell what you wrote, I can't give you points for it. It's that simple.
>I did not pay for a math class for the professor or TA to give me their opinions on my handwriting.
You did pay for the professor or TA to give you an opinion, n'est-ce pas? I cannot emphasize enough how difficult it is to give correct feedback on a paper or problem if your TA has to guess what you wrote down. It's actually even a process of: (1) guess, (2) work through the problem with the guess, (3) find contradiction with legible work, (4) return to step 1. After a few iterations of this, the TAs advisor is going to point out that their time is more valuable than that, both for working with students and doing research (which is the real reason your TAs are there, if you have grad students!). The poor grader is simply trying to encourage you to give them something reasonable to grade, so that it is NOT subjective, and does NOT involve guesswork. Students often disregard requests that do not come with grade consequences, and a point off is almost certainly not going to affect your final grade.
I ended up with one of those as an undergrad. I also ended up with the job of integrating each paper into a coherent report. (Our group ended up doing multiple research projects; one was published in a decent conference, one was not.) I was sent, a week late, a paper which did not appear to be in English in any way, shape, or form. The student in question was born and raised in the U.S., with English-speaking parents, so I was somewhat surprised. This paper did not have conjugated verbs, subjects, or appropriate objects. It was simply a mess of words stirred together. Since I've become a grad student, I've reviewed quite a few papers written by people who obviously do not speak English coherently. The paper written by this native English-speaker was far worse.
I very much agree with the philosophy of my doctoral program: you must write and speak coherently before you graduate, because even the best research/thinking is useless unless you can convey it clearly to others.
>I don't know where you've been, but this is a fact. I've seen women take a class and only show up once then recieve an A, while I actually worked hard for the same grade.
Are you just trying to say that there are women in your classes who are smarter than you? You seem somewhat hostile in your post. I'm sure you understand that college grades are not supposed to be effort-based. I have to admit, here I'm speaking as that another one of those low-attendance students you seem to be annoyed at. In my case it was simply a matter of time management, juggling classwork and lectures so as to take more classes and participate in research work. I didn't and don't see it as a problem. When I teach, I also don't see it as a problem.
> In other classes the female in question had to attend and turned out to be dumber than a box of rocks. Pretty, willing and stupid can equate to a good grade with some Profs.
Stupid women are certainly not ideal, from my point of view. However, I've noticed an interesting behavior where women will sometiems pretend to be dumb. I'm not sure why, but it seems to happen. Grade adjustment based on gender or attractiveness in academic courses is of course beyond the pale.
Perhaps I'm biased, but I'd have to rank Berkeley higher than those other schools. In CS, it's certainly ranked higher, though UW is reasonably close and Georgia Tech has been hiring well recently. In addition, Berkeley has hundreds of top-10 departments; virtually any discipline you can think of has a top-level department.
But hey, I went there as an undergrad and loved it, so I may well be biased.
> Thus, I have great concern that when "unthinkable" things happen (finger cut... card stolen, whatever it may be) I can still cancel/login to my accounts per some other method.
I broke my writing hand in a ski accident. My hand was cast in such a way that I couldn't even HOLD a pen to sign my name. Health care facilities were rather sympathetic to the problem, but I did have a few problems when using credit cards in other places. Some places wouldn't accept it, and some places requested I sign with my "real" (right) hand. As I write left-handed, this isn't going to be particularly identifiable with my normal signature. If I needed a fingerprint, I would have been in much bigger trouble.
>Just a quick note: in a lot of places it illegal to operate a motor vehicle of any kind with both ears covered, including by headphones.
Take out the word "motor" there. The laws also vary by state. In NY, you can have one headphone/earbud (from reading the laws online IANAL), but in PA you can't have any for listening to music but one for a mobile phone or some sort of "information" service, I believe.
It doesn't stop a fair number of people I know from riding around with one earbud in, but they're still alive at least. I've never seen anyone pulled over for that one. (Though they should be pulling more people over for blowing stop lights/signs!)
You might want to reread my post. I was not implying you would possibly ever want to use a PK cryptosystem to construct a block cipher. I was responding to the parent who was talking about using ECC for block ciphers. As I'm not aware of any such work, I asked for a reference. I do in fact understand what eliptic curves are, and how people use them in the realm of cryptography.
I've only seen the suggestion that elliptics will win in terms of keysize for public-key crypto. Has anyone done interesting work on block ciphers with elliptics?
Hmm... two summers ago. I worked in the modular robotics lab for a few years a bit before that.
On-board power is definitely not easy, both because it takes a lot of power to move that much robot around and because batteries make the robot heavier (and larger), which makes the problem even worse.
I'm assuming your housemate was working on the plastic polybot modules, which were run off of an offboard processing board, or one of the cubic or rhombic models. The G2 hardware had a CAN bus and onboard processing quite a bit before that.
About distributed processing, Mark, a visiting professor, and I developed an algorithm for distributed computation of inverse kinematics for high-dof robots like polybot, specifically for splitting across modules.
I will certainly agree that PARC is a great place to work:)
I've put together more of those segments than I can count (note that this is Mark Yim's design, from PARC, borrowed by CMU). They're using a/very/ old hardware design, using weak motors and weak parts. (The motors + the weight of the segments certainly have enough leverage to break the frames, but that's another issue.) The modular robotics group at PARC had much, much better hardware years ago, and were working on G3 when I left.
A short overview of polybot hardware: http://www2.parc.com/spl/projects/modro bots/chain/ polybot/index.html
Slashdot Mirror
>I, for one, would very much prefer a man-made diamond.
You're not alone in that, but jewelers are still resisting like mad. My fiance went around trying to get a Gemesis stone locally a while ago -- jewelers actually SCREAMED at him. We eventually decided to go with a sapphire anyway. (But I see those Gemesis blues coming out... so tempting!)
Lea
BTW, it starts at D. The apparent level of colour depends quite a lot on the cut, as well, as a very good cut will return a lot of light, making the stone look whiter. (This is why sapphires and fancy coloured diamonds tend to be cut differently; the cutter wants to emphesize the colour.)
Not all diamonds are yellow-tinted, either. There are some that are grey/blue-tinted (which makes the colour less apparent), and some that are peach-tinted and so on. I've seen a really stunning old mine cut peach P stone. The colour was just the right shade to look stunning in a platinun setting... very subtle, but very pretty.
And I bought an engagement ring last year, as well. (Sapphire, though)
Lea
As you're a geek jeweler, I'm curious as to whether you're keeping an eye on the synthetic diamonds that are coming out. When my fiance and I were looking for an engagement ring, he was actually, literally screamed at for looking for a gemesis stone. (We think they're really cool, and a hell of a lot more desirable than the kind that come out of the ground.) We ended up not getting one because he wanted to deal with someone local and because both yellow and orange do /not/ go with my skin tone.
All of this is a rambly way of asking whether you've seen synthetic blue diamonds coming out yet... We weren't able to get any before, despite quite a lot of trying, which was a real shame.
Lea
If this decision makes anything at all different for you (e.g., permits shipping of wine from out of state), then shipping of wine from inside the state was already allowed.
I don't see where the bitching comes in.
Lea
>I think that with many "teetotalers" they can not imagine the concept of moderation or the possibility that people can drink moderately and safely. It's an all or nothing proposition and there is really no arguing with them as it seems to be (and many instances prompted by) religous fervor.
I don't drink. My grandmother was an alcoholic, but I certainly believe that people can drink moderately and safely. I just also think that drink containing alcohol taste like crap, and that they tend to give me migraines.
While I'm on the subject, I'd like to point out that I don't say anything to people who drink (neither does my fiance, who would love to drink, but can't), but we take a LOT of shit from people. Point being, don't assume that being a teetotaler means someone's uptight or religious: they may have a very bad reaction to alcohol, or a very good sense of smell (which makes alcohol-containing drinks tend to smell like scrubbing the inside of your nasal cavity out with a wire brush).
Lea
>cocaine can be considered an anesthetic. An outdated, unused anesthetic, but it gets the job done.
Actually, it's still used, or so I'm told. Soak cotton in cocaine solution, stick it up someone's nose, and it's a great anesthetic for setting a broken nose (especially if it's the kind where they have to break it again).
I'm not a doctor, that's just what I'm told.
Lea
San Diego has UCSD, which is quite active in all kinds of biomedical research. They get a crapload of research funding for it, as well. Obviously they can't take this money from the state, but there may well be quite a few biotech firms that popped up around UCSD.
That doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
Lea
>And materialistic explanations of the origin of the universe are not testable and therefore not falsifiable.
Excuse me? Scientific theories about the origins of the universe make predictions. These predictions are testable, and in fact have been tested, over and over and over. They are falsifiable, just not falsified, as evidence has been seen to accord with the predictions.
Creationism isn't testable. It's like string theory was, except with a rather odder way of coming up with the idea. How the idea was formed, however, is irrelevent -- we just have to ask "does it make testable predictions?". If not, then it's not a scientific theory. (BTW, string theory is/was considered mathematics, not science, unless/until it makes some actually testable predictions (which people have worked very hard on), and gets them tested.)
Lea
> There were even free tampons in the ladies bathroom.
I read a book (can't remember which one, sorry), in which it was claimed that some female exec used this as a way to decide which companies to buy from -- if they didn't have sanitary supplies, they were probably going to go down the tubes fast and leave her company in the lurch.
I can see her point on this one. Having, at least, emergency supplies of sanitary suppies isn't that expensive (especially as techie companies lean heavily towards men, and most women will prefer to use their own brand). If there isn't an emergency supply, every once in a while you will lose someone for at least half a day, as she'll have to go home and change. It seems a bad tradeoff, something that would be made by a desperate company.
Lea
>Note to both the women that read this site: This is true. Why? Because we're attracted to curves.
.6 waist-to-hip ratio. That can be had when you're thin or more padded, but intereststingly enough, seems to be correlated to health and fertility. There is a growing voice for replacing the use of BMI with a waist-measurement metric for determining overweight/obesity. I'm not sure you could effectively determine whether one was underweight that way, however.
I believe that, while individual tastes vary, global tastes seem to be focused largely on a
Lea
> Any healthy person will show up as overweight.
That's also a gross generalization. I'm not an ectomorph, but 10-20 hours of high-intensity karate (+ another 10 hours a week of walking) per week made me both: a) quite in shape, b) quite muscular for my body type, c) a lot heavier. I still hit, at my highest weight point, the midpoint between "underweight" and "overweight". I frankly don't know what I could personally do to hit "overweight", except get pregnant with twins.
Lea
How is a crappy grammar checker an advantage over not having such a `feature'? I've never seen that thing give me a useful suggestion: everything it's marked wrong was correct, and every grammatical issue in my writing was not marked. Giving people a crutch, such as a spell-checker, has its advantages and disadvantages. (Personally, I spell rather badly, but a spell-checker seems to be helping that a bit.) Giving people a crutch which is largely incorrect simply encourages them to conform to its bizzare standards, which are far from correct usage.
If you want a good grammar checker, send some money to faculty doing research in language parsing; don't ask for something that's worse than useless, in most situations.
Lea
Most classes have the policy that the grader will finish grading the papers by a certain time, return them, and post solutions. (Not only that, they often do not set class policy.) It /does/ take more of their time to return a paper and then regrade it (grading a group of papers together is much more efficient, and dealing with a paper twice is taking up far more time than grading it once). Often, there simply isn't time to do the extra cycle by the time the solutions must be posted.
I do not give negative points when I set grading policy (other than on multiple-choice exams). When I recieve homework that is completely unreadable (I am quite good at reading messy handwriting, and I do get a second opinion), I do my best to grade it, and put a note that this is unreadable, and that in the future they will have to type their homework (and I will happily help them with LaTeX), or write it more clearly. Only when this is disregarded do I start removing points. If I can't tell what you wrote, I can't give you points for it. It's that simple.
Lea
>I did not pay for a math class for the professor or TA to give me their opinions on my handwriting.
You did pay for the professor or TA to give you an opinion, n'est-ce pas? I cannot emphasize enough how difficult it is to give correct feedback on a paper or problem if your TA has to guess what you wrote down. It's actually even a process of: (1) guess, (2) work through the problem with the guess, (3) find contradiction with legible work, (4) return to step 1. After a few iterations of this, the TAs advisor is going to point out that their time is more valuable than that, both for working with students and doing research (which is the real reason your TAs are there, if you have grad students!). The poor grader is simply trying to encourage you to give them something reasonable to grade, so that it is NOT subjective, and does NOT involve guesswork. Students often disregard requests that do not come with grade consequences, and a point off is almost certainly not going to affect your final grade.
Lea
I ended up with one of those as an undergrad. I also ended up with the job of integrating each paper into a coherent report. (Our group ended up doing multiple research projects; one was published in a decent conference, one was not.) I was sent, a week late, a paper which did not appear to be in English in any way, shape, or form. The student in question was born and raised in the U.S., with English-speaking parents, so I was somewhat surprised. This paper did not have conjugated verbs, subjects, or appropriate objects. It was simply a mess of words stirred together. Since I've become a grad student, I've reviewed quite a few papers written by people who obviously do not speak English coherently. The paper written by this native English-speaker was far worse.
I very much agree with the philosophy of my doctoral program: you must write and speak coherently before you graduate, because even the best research/thinking is useless unless you can convey it clearly to others.
Lea
>I don't know where you've been, but this is a fact. I've seen women take a class and only show up once then recieve an A, while I actually worked hard for the same grade.
Are you just trying to say that there are women in your classes who are smarter than you? You seem somewhat hostile in your post. I'm sure you understand that college grades are not supposed to be effort-based. I have to admit, here I'm speaking as that another one of those low-attendance students you seem to be annoyed at. In my case it was simply a matter of time management, juggling classwork and lectures so as to take more classes and participate in research work. I didn't and don't see it as a problem. When I teach, I also don't see it as a problem.
> In other classes the female in question had to attend and turned out to be dumber than a box of rocks. Pretty, willing and stupid can equate to a good grade with some Profs.
Stupid women are certainly not ideal, from my point of view. However, I've noticed an interesting behavior where women will sometiems pretend to be dumb. I'm not sure why, but it seems to happen. Grade adjustment based on gender or attractiveness in academic courses is of course beyond the pale.
Lea
Perhaps I'm biased, but I'd have to rank Berkeley higher than those other schools. In CS, it's certainly ranked higher, though UW is reasonably close and Georgia Tech has been hiring well recently. In addition, Berkeley has hundreds of top-10 departments; virtually any discipline you can think of has a top-level department.
But hey, I went there as an undergrad and loved it, so I may well be biased.
Lea
> Thus, I have great concern that when "unthinkable" things happen (finger cut... card stolen, whatever it may be) I can still cancel/login to my accounts per some other method.
I broke my writing hand in a ski accident. My hand was cast in such a way that I couldn't even HOLD a pen to sign my name. Health care facilities were rather sympathetic to the problem, but I did have a few problems when using credit cards in other places. Some places wouldn't accept it, and some places requested I sign with my "real" (right) hand. As I write left-handed, this isn't going to be particularly identifiable with my normal signature. If I needed a fingerprint, I would have been in much bigger trouble.
Lea
This isn't a joke, there's an old slashdot story about a study. I can't find a link on the internet at large, but here's the old story:
9 /0 2/1336238&tid=14
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/0
Lea
>Just a quick note: in a lot of places it illegal to operate a motor vehicle of any kind with both ears covered, including by headphones.
Take out the word "motor" there. The laws also vary by state. In NY, you can have one headphone/earbud (from reading the laws online IANAL), but in PA you can't have any for listening to music but one for a mobile phone or some sort of "information" service, I believe.
It doesn't stop a fair number of people I know from riding around with one earbud in, but they're still alive at least. I've never seen anyone pulled over for that one. (Though they should be pulling more people over for blowing stop lights/signs!)
Lea
*cough*
You might want to reread my post. I was not implying you would possibly ever want to use a PK cryptosystem to construct a block cipher. I was responding to the parent who was talking about using ECC for block ciphers. As I'm not aware of any such work, I asked for a reference. I do in fact understand what eliptic curves are, and how people use them in the realm of cryptography.
Lea
I've only seen the suggestion that elliptics will win in terms of keysize for public-key crypto. Has anyone done interesting work on block ciphers with elliptics?
Lea
Hmm... two summers ago. I worked in the modular robotics lab for a few years a bit before that.
:)
On-board power is definitely not easy, both because it takes a lot of power to move that much robot around and because batteries make the robot heavier (and larger), which makes the problem even worse.
I'm assuming your housemate was working on the plastic polybot modules, which were run off of an offboard processing board, or one of the cubic or rhombic models. The G2 hardware had a CAN bus and onboard processing quite a bit before that.
About distributed processing, Mark, a visiting professor, and I developed an algorithm for distributed computation of inverse kinematics for high-dof robots like polybot, specifically for splitting across modules.
I will certainly agree that PARC is a great place to work
Lea
I've put together more of those segments than I can count (note that this is Mark Yim's design, from PARC, borrowed by CMU). They're using a /very/ old hardware design, using weak motors and weak parts. (The motors + the weight of the segments certainly have enough leverage to break the frames, but that's another issue.) The modular robotics group at PARC had much, much better hardware years ago, and were working on G3 when I left.
o bots/chain/ polybot/index.html
A short overview of polybot hardware:
http://www2.parc.com/spl/projects/modr
Lea
Rhombic dodecahedrons are another good option. They're closer to spheres, but still stack densely, like cubes.
Lea