I took the thesis option for my Masters', but I was in the minority, most preferred to take extra classes and just get the paper.
If you select your institution, courses and professors carefully, I bet you can get a degree with mostly multiple choice testing determining the grades.
True, I'm comparing today's "median" or perhaps "average" University student with the same "average" student from 50 to 80 years ago.
We've got a lot more population, and probably more great thinkers alive today than in the entirety of the 1800-1950 timespan, more people with opportunity, means, etc.
It's just the everyday UniGrad you meet that I'm lamenting.
The problem is that peoples' attention spans are rapidly approaching that of a water-flea.
Up until the past 50 or so years, people who learned about Standard Deviation would do so in environments with far less stimulation and distraction. Their lives weren't so filled with extra-curricular activities and entertainments that they never sat for a moment from waking until sleep without some form of stimulus based pastime. When they "understood" the concept, there was time for it to ruminate and gel into a meaningful set of connections with how it is calculated and commonly applied. Today, if you can guess the right answer from a set of 4 choices often enough, you are certified expert and given a high level degree in the subject.
Not bashing modern life, it's great, but it isn't making many "great thinkers" in the mold of the 19th century mathematicians. We do more, with less understanding of how, or why.
Actually, meaningful and readily understood labels are a considered a good thing, and beneficial to those who work in the field they apply to.
Except programming, there, based on my experience, you should use whatever label happens to be laying around - never change it, even if it means the opposite of what it does.
Nah, I think the calculation they do is: average lifetime before negative pressure draws in sufficient oxygen past the (carefully engineered to be) imperfect base seal to cause filament flameout. while ( t > 2 years ) reduce pressure.
If the transmitter is on the ISS, the signal will go much more than that distance, and receiver sensitivity is not the big trick - discrimination from other signals and noise is.
It (the tinfoil) is supposed to go around your head too... the bit that most people fail to do is close the faraday cage - it needs to be a complete enclosure to work.
If they were really careful, it was packaged with an acid capsule, corrodes beyond analysis when opened, and can be remotely triggered to open the capsule with a hot-wire - obscuring the nefarious bits while preserving the expected functions. Might look like water damage or poor cleaning at the factory if it were ever opened.
One better, I have a 1TB self powered drive connected to the WiFi / Router - it shares over Samba, but, alas, no DLNA.
I played the whole DLNA game with PS3 and a mini-linux-media-server-thing. PS3 was picky as hell about encodings, mini-server-thing fried its power supply and had formatted the internal HD in non-standard (PITA to recover) format.
I'll only build collections on external HD from now on, they're just too cheap and universally compatible to go with anything more proprietary.
I've gotten a lot of feedback about the vacuum, and of course it was primarily a joke response... however, I think there's a mix on today's market, mostly the heated filament lamps seem to be filled with inert, or halogen gases, but I know I have broken a bulb or two in the past decade that imploded upon impact with concrete, probably not total vacuum, but some pressure differential - especially in some of the smaller bulbs. Maybe that's just my imagination and the thicker glass wall relative to globe size shattered with such force that it seemed like implosion. In any event, Edison started (or, rather, finished) with vacuum bulbs... and the technology is certainly still possible today, even if it is overall cheaper to fill with argon.
You can say that something that emits more heat than light is "optimized" within the range of devices that produce light by thermal action, but that doesn't make them "optimized" within the range of devices that convert electricity to light.
True, and that is what I mean about optimized. Quantum dots offer more efficient conversion than phosphors, but they carry other costs that are quite high at the moment.
I'm all for heat pumps, too. You can save a lot more electricity on heating/cooling than on lighting. But heat pumps have certain optimal operating conditions. When temperatures go outside that range, you have to fall back onto other means.
Well, while we're banning incandescent bulbs, maybe we might put some kind of disincentive tax on cheap to buy inefficient to run heat sources - there are many people who get cold, go to the corner store, buy a $20 heater, and run up $100 in power bills with it in the first month... The tax could be made revenue neutral, providing incentive credit on expensive to buy / install, cheap to run heat sources.
I bought a mix of CFLs, some of the "subsidized" 6 packs for $24, a couple of brighter ones that were more like $12 each, and a few "color balanced" ones that were somewhere in-between on price. All of these were bought in the 2006->2009 timeframe. By 2013, over half of all the CFLs I purchased had failed, and it was a pretty random distribution, not just the cheap ones.
Three of the early ones I bought are all still going "strong" - they're the ones that came in an enclosing glass sphere, I think it was about $25 for the set of 3, and they take about 2 seconds before they flicker on dimly, and don't really hit "full 40W equivalent" brightness for over a minute - I use them in combination with one 40W incandescent so the room doesn't stay dark when the switch is thrown. I think they're like the Edison bulbs, so low performing and overbuilt they'll run forever.
There are all types of CFLs, and watt for watt, CFLs are brighter than incandescents - always. What they sell as 60W "equivalent" is just sales puffery. If you really want to replace a 75W bulb, get a 100W "equivalent" and you won't be too disappointed.
But, I can't make a lightbulb post without hammering the points: CFLs are evil, expensive, toxic, and they don't last anywhere near as long as the packaging claims. I only see them as an effort by the lightbulb industry to get consumers to inflate the value of bulbs in their mind, because the 10 pack of 60W bulbs for $2.50 were obviously not making anyone much money.
Why don't we have 95% of the population exploring one branch of science or another?
Do you remember high school - 95% of the population does not express the aptitude or interest in science to explore new scientific territory.
Why can't more books be written?
Again, did you read any of your classmate's writing? Here, again, maybe 5% might find interesting employment writing books, but if 5% of society writes books, and probably less than 25% of society reads them, there's going to be a saturation problem...
More movies be done? More people help those who need help?
Now you're hitting the mainstream - and society is moving in this direction, but it's slow, and it meets resistance from "people who remember what hard work is."
Would it be so bad to live in a world where there is 0% NEED to work and everyone just decides whether they want to be a medic, or an astrophysicist, or a script writer, or...
Absolutely not! Though, it's not a terribly fulfilling life to be an artist when nobody appreciates your art (can't get publicly shown, and in today's world maybe you get publicly shown but nobody buys....) There would be new classes of depression and social malaise to treat, but it beats working for fear of homelessness, or running across the savanna in search of food hoping you don't become food in the process.
Only amazingly lazy people believe everyone would stop "working" if it was voluntary.
Here, I disagree. I see the conservatives (do what I say, not what I do types) being absolutely terrified of idle hands, devil's workshop and all that. I believe many of these people would, themselves, have caused society a lot of trouble if they weren't forced to work such long and hard hours under supervision and control that they didn't have the energy or resources to make any serious mayhem in their youth. There's a kernel of truth in this fear, but nothing that couldn't be addressed with a little police supervision (think: young James. T. Kirk in the opening to Star Trek 11...)
Even if the only payment was respect by the society, joy, or simply to fight boredom, most people would do something.
And, if/when they don't, that's their loss. I think it was Cory Doctrow's future where there were giant underground condominiums / dormitories free to anyone who wanted to live there, free food, free clothing, education, etc. From my perspective, the major issue at hand in a workless society would be procreation - raising children (who are not a detriment to society) is work, and the "basic human right" to have as many children as you want is a thorny problem in a free society that provides all your basic needs.
I can't express how disillusioned I was when GT5 Prologue killed their (lame, stuttery) online racing servers. For me, $60 is a damn investment, and I didn't expect to be losing features a couple of years after making that investment.
>Ever lived in a house with a built-in intercom? Find yourself using it?
I did, I never would have installed it myself, but since it was there, yeah, we used it, and would have used it more if it had decent sound quality.
That was a uniquely laid out house, 2800sf in a sort of U shape - intercom went from one tip of the U to the other - beat the hell out of waving your arms frantically in the window to get attention followed up by charades / sign language, which we also did sometimes when the intercom was on the fritz.
I bought a spool of siamese coax, thinking just what you are thinking, 3 houses ago. I ran the cat5, I ran the 4 conductor speaker wire, I ran plenty of new 220V romex, but I never had the reason to run coax. I generally end up with a single modem (DSL, later cable) that hits a router wherever, then cat5 / 5e / 6 / whatever to the various router / hubs / wifi access points.
And, since you might RTFA and I am certainly too lazy, are they proposing differing cosmological constants for these various regions, or more or less identical universes just starting with a different energy soup?
Start a movement, but for this to work it would really need to happen at least at a state level, preferably federal. The first hurdle is that you will find >50% of the lawmakers voting on the proposal will be lawyers, sons of lawyers, etc. You'll need to get some kind of explosive viral adoption of the campaign that will shock and awe the change into being before the lawyers have a chance to launch a counter-appeal for public opinion. You'll need people who are far more talented and experienced than I am to pull that off, and who also are not self-interested in keeping lawyers lives posh - the list of qualified individuals will be short, and you'll have to be careful when building it lest you tip-off the other side and give them a head start.
Best of luck, and if you fail, maybe you could re-direct your efforts toward saving the planet:
That concept, too, could be better expressed and promoted, it lacks mass appeal - but addresses a problem that is inevitable as long as positive population and economic growth continues.
Slashdot Mirror
So, Ollie North would have hung in the U.K. ?
Honestly, I don't know how they could coerce me into remembering the password on my USB stick, I've completely forgotten what it was.
The audiences for most papers understand very clearly about STDs, and the probability of contracting one is reduced by using a condom.
I took the thesis option for my Masters', but I was in the minority, most preferred to take extra classes and just get the paper.
If you select your institution, courses and professors carefully, I bet you can get a degree with mostly multiple choice testing determining the grades.
True, I'm comparing today's "median" or perhaps "average" University student with the same "average" student from 50 to 80 years ago.
We've got a lot more population, and probably more great thinkers alive today than in the entirety of the 1800-1950 timespan, more people with opportunity, means, etc.
It's just the everyday UniGrad you meet that I'm lamenting.
The problem is that peoples' attention spans are rapidly approaching that of a water-flea.
Up until the past 50 or so years, people who learned about Standard Deviation would do so in environments with far less stimulation and distraction. Their lives weren't so filled with extra-curricular activities and entertainments that they never sat for a moment from waking until sleep without some form of stimulus based pastime. When they "understood" the concept, there was time for it to ruminate and gel into a meaningful set of connections with how it is calculated and commonly applied. Today, if you can guess the right answer from a set of 4 choices often enough, you are certified expert and given a high level degree in the subject.
Not bashing modern life, it's great, but it isn't making many "great thinkers" in the mold of the 19th century mathematicians. We do more, with less understanding of how, or why.
Actually, meaningful and readily understood labels are a considered a good thing, and beneficial to those who work in the field they apply to.
Except programming, there, based on my experience, you should use whatever label happens to be laying around - never change it, even if it means the opposite of what it does.
Nah, I think the calculation they do is: average lifetime before negative pressure draws in sufficient oxygen past the (carefully engineered to be) imperfect base seal to cause filament flameout. while ( t > 2 years ) reduce pressure.
If the transmitter is on the ISS, the signal will go much more than that distance, and receiver sensitivity is not the big trick - discrimination from other signals and noise is.
8 miles over the air would set off any self-respecting bug sweeper in the building.
I wonder if this was more of an operational spec, 8 miles total, but with relays between computer and data extraction point...
It (the tinfoil) is supposed to go around your head too... the bit that most people fail to do is close the faraday cage - it needs to be a complete enclosure to work.
If they were really careful, it was packaged with an acid capsule, corrodes beyond analysis when opened, and can be remotely triggered to open the capsule with a hot-wire - obscuring the nefarious bits while preserving the expected functions. Might look like water damage or poor cleaning at the factory if it were ever opened.
One better, I have a 1TB self powered drive connected to the WiFi / Router - it shares over Samba, but, alas, no DLNA.
I played the whole DLNA game with PS3 and a mini-linux-media-server-thing. PS3 was picky as hell about encodings, mini-server-thing fried its power supply and had formatted the internal HD in non-standard (PITA to recover) format.
I'll only build collections on external HD from now on, they're just too cheap and universally compatible to go with anything more proprietary.
I've gotten a lot of feedback about the vacuum, and of course it was primarily a joke response... however, I think there's a mix on today's market, mostly the heated filament lamps seem to be filled with inert, or halogen gases, but I know I have broken a bulb or two in the past decade that imploded upon impact with concrete, probably not total vacuum, but some pressure differential - especially in some of the smaller bulbs. Maybe that's just my imagination and the thicker glass wall relative to globe size shattered with such force that it seemed like implosion. In any event, Edison started (or, rather, finished) with vacuum bulbs... and the technology is certainly still possible today, even if it is overall cheaper to fill with argon.
You can say that something that emits more heat than light is "optimized" within the range of devices that produce light by thermal action, but that doesn't make them "optimized" within the range of devices that convert electricity to light.
True, and that is what I mean about optimized. Quantum dots offer more efficient conversion than phosphors, but they carry other costs that are quite high at the moment.
I'm all for heat pumps, too. You can save a lot more electricity on heating/cooling than on lighting. But heat pumps have certain optimal operating conditions. When temperatures go outside that range, you have to fall back onto other means.
Well, while we're banning incandescent bulbs, maybe we might put some kind of disincentive tax on cheap to buy inefficient to run heat sources - there are many people who get cold, go to the corner store, buy a $20 heater, and run up $100 in power bills with it in the first month... The tax could be made revenue neutral, providing incentive credit on expensive to buy / install, cheap to run heat sources.
I bought a mix of CFLs, some of the "subsidized" 6 packs for $24, a couple of brighter ones that were more like $12 each, and a few "color balanced" ones that were somewhere in-between on price. All of these were bought in the 2006->2009 timeframe. By 2013, over half of all the CFLs I purchased had failed, and it was a pretty random distribution, not just the cheap ones.
Three of the early ones I bought are all still going "strong" - they're the ones that came in an enclosing glass sphere, I think it was about $25 for the set of 3, and they take about 2 seconds before they flicker on dimly, and don't really hit "full 40W equivalent" brightness for over a minute - I use them in combination with one 40W incandescent so the room doesn't stay dark when the switch is thrown. I think they're like the Edison bulbs, so low performing and overbuilt they'll run forever.
There are all types of CFLs, and watt for watt, CFLs are brighter than incandescents - always. What they sell as 60W "equivalent" is just sales puffery. If you really want to replace a 75W bulb, get a 100W "equivalent" and you won't be too disappointed.
But, I can't make a lightbulb post without hammering the points: CFLs are evil, expensive, toxic, and they don't last anywhere near as long as the packaging claims. I only see them as an effort by the lightbulb industry to get consumers to inflate the value of bulbs in their mind, because the 10 pack of 60W bulbs for $2.50 were obviously not making anyone much money.
Incandescent bulbs suck because of the vacuum required to keep the filament from roasting.
Otherwise, they're a mature, well optimized technology with a huge infrastructure built around them - cheap as hell to make and extremely versatile.
Personally, I think we should be hammering heat pumps instead of worrying about light bulbs.
Why don't we have 95% of the population exploring one branch of science or another?
Do you remember high school - 95% of the population does not express the aptitude or interest in science to explore new scientific territory.
Why can't more books be written?
Again, did you read any of your classmate's writing? Here, again, maybe 5% might find interesting employment writing books, but if 5% of society writes books, and probably less than 25% of society reads them, there's going to be a saturation problem...
More movies be done? More people help those who need help?
Now you're hitting the mainstream - and society is moving in this direction, but it's slow, and it meets resistance from "people who remember what hard work is."
Would it be so bad to live in a world where there is 0% NEED to work and everyone just decides whether they want to be a medic, or an astrophysicist, or a script writer, or...
Absolutely not! Though, it's not a terribly fulfilling life to be an artist when nobody appreciates your art (can't get publicly shown, and in today's world maybe you get publicly shown but nobody buys....) There would be new classes of depression and social malaise to treat, but it beats working for fear of homelessness, or running across the savanna in search of food hoping you don't become food in the process.
Only amazingly lazy people believe everyone would stop "working" if it was voluntary.
Here, I disagree. I see the conservatives (do what I say, not what I do types) being absolutely terrified of idle hands, devil's workshop and all that. I believe many of these people would, themselves, have caused society a lot of trouble if they weren't forced to work such long and hard hours under supervision and control that they didn't have the energy or resources to make any serious mayhem in their youth. There's a kernel of truth in this fear, but nothing that couldn't be addressed with a little police supervision (think: young James. T. Kirk in the opening to Star Trek 11...)
Even if the only payment was respect by the society, joy, or simply to fight boredom, most people would do something.
And, if/when they don't, that's their loss. I think it was Cory Doctrow's future where there were giant underground condominiums / dormitories free to anyone who wanted to live there, free food, free clothing, education, etc. From my perspective, the major issue at hand in a workless society would be procreation - raising children (who are not a detriment to society) is work, and the "basic human right" to have as many children as you want is a thorny problem in a free society that provides all your basic needs.
I can't express how disillusioned I was when GT5 Prologue killed their (lame, stuttery) online racing servers. For me, $60 is a damn investment, and I didn't expect to be losing features a couple of years after making that investment.
It's never too late to start doing the right thing.
If the new SimCity adds an offline mode, and you're a SimCity gamer, you should support it, and shun other games that are needlessly connected.
>Ever lived in a house with a built-in intercom? Find yourself using it?
I did, I never would have installed it myself, but since it was there, yeah, we used it, and would have used it more if it had decent sound quality.
That was a uniquely laid out house, 2800sf in a sort of U shape - intercom went from one tip of the U to the other - beat the hell out of waving your arms frantically in the window to get attention followed up by charades / sign language, which we also did sometimes when the intercom was on the fritz.
The central room probably wants a wiring rack - is it too late to put a closet in for it?
I bought a spool of siamese coax, thinking just what you are thinking, 3 houses ago. I ran the cat5, I ran the 4 conductor speaker wire, I ran plenty of new 220V romex, but I never had the reason to run coax. I generally end up with a single modem (DSL, later cable) that hits a router wherever, then cat5 / 5e / 6 / whatever to the various router / hubs / wifi access points.
And, since you might RTFA and I am certainly too lazy, are they proposing differing cosmological constants for these various regions, or more or less identical universes just starting with a different energy soup?
Start a movement, but for this to work it would really need to happen at least at a state level, preferably federal. The first hurdle is that you will find >50% of the lawmakers voting on the proposal will be lawyers, sons of lawyers, etc. You'll need to get some kind of explosive viral adoption of the campaign that will shock and awe the change into being before the lawyers have a chance to launch a counter-appeal for public opinion. You'll need people who are far more talented and experienced than I am to pull that off, and who also are not self-interested in keeping lawyers lives posh - the list of qualified individuals will be short, and you'll have to be careful when building it lest you tip-off the other side and give them a head start.
Best of luck, and if you fail, maybe you could re-direct your efforts toward saving the planet:
http://5050by2150.wordpress.com/
That concept, too, could be better expressed and promoted, it lacks mass appeal - but addresses a problem that is inevitable as long as positive population and economic growth continues.